Copious Free Time

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Now that they've proven they can get it right when making a movie with super-heroes and top-secret agents, I think it's time to start a T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents franchise. Set it in 1966.

Be sure and light NoMan from above so his eyes are pools of dark. For Dynamo, strong blue gel from one side with a smaller yellow gel on the other for the highlight.
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Many of you know I'm a big fan of the late Jess Collins (aka Jess), whose meticulous cut-and-paste jobs on Chester Gould's "Dick Tracy" comic strip resulted in some seriously crazed images. Jess was a pop-art pioneer who doesn't get enough credit. There should be a book of his Tricky Cad masterpieces (a gallery owner told me that the fragile newsprint originals won't last forever, and at least one is no longer viewable!). Until there is, there's my flickr page, where I've collected every example I could find of these masterpieces.



And here we have a sort-of new one. I have a shot of one of the notebooks (this one resides in the Odyssia Gallery in NYC, and I hope one day I'll get to see it directly), and the second page is at an angle and not easy to see. Well, now it's easier to see.
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MARK TRAIL’s 22 PANELS THAT ALWAYS WORK

1. Giant bird(s)
2. Talking cabin
3. Giant squirrel on a branch
4. Huge close-up of Kelly Welly
5. People standing around talking
6. IT IS RUSTY!
7. Distant shot of Dinkyburg
8. Giant… gopher!
9. Huge close-up of Mark
10. Pancakes
11. Fist o’ Justice!
12. Huge close-up of Kelly Welly again
13. Giant quail
14. Cephalopod doing anything
15. Marmaduke on the couch again!
16. Driving the station wagon
17. Somebody listening to another person talking
18. People standing around not talking
19. Walking through the forest
20. Giant squirrel on the ground
21. Elrodball
22. Rusty… in danger!
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Comics Curmudgeon reader "Shrug" today dropped a bombshell:

I’ve got to say that I too was skeptical about the world ending in 2012 because the Mayan calendar didn’t contain data for any subsequent years, but I just looked closely at the new “California Scenery” calendar we got for Christmas and have now hung up on the bulletin board, and to my horror I find that IT ALSO STOPS AT THE END OF 2012!!!!

Horrified, I ran down to my local Barnes and Noble and checked out the large calendar selection there, and so far as I can see all of them also fail to contain any significant data for a year subsequent to 2012!!! IT’S NOT JUST THE MAYANS!!!

I suggest we all make peace with our loved ones and put our affairs in order. Oh, and happy new year, everybody!
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Disney Corp fails in bid to trademark "Navy SEALS" one week after bin Laden mission.

And what does Tom the Dancing Bug think about this? I'm glad you asked!

[thanks to "Rocky Stoneaxe" at The Comics Curmudgeon]
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MARK TRAIL

I was a confident, take-charge guy,
Savvy to the ways of nature, a two-fisted he-man,
And a family man with a loving wife and a spunky kid
Waiting for me at home after each adventure
With a stack of pancakes to make it all perfect.
Yet I threw myself into peril
Over and over, risking it all on each toss,
Miraculously carried through by brute strength
And my abiding hatred of facial hair.
It was all too easy. I couldn't lose.
I started taking more risks, and more.
I even let myself get shot in the head,
And escaped with nothing but an inch-long dab of medical tape.
It was then that I understood I wanted to die.
My life, I realized, was a sustained falsehood.
And nobody would end it for me. I was too strong.
Well, I finally stopped relying on proxies and did the deed myself,
With organic, sustainable hemp rope.
I left no note. What would I have said?
"I'm sorry, Cherry, but I have been living a lie.
The man you thought you knew was a fraud,
And you may as well know this:
I was only pretending to love pancakes."
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also published at the Comics Curmudgeon and the New Pals Club Web-Log

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ANNIE WARBUCKS

"Daddy" made me feel loved and welcome.
He even got rid of that wife of his
Who acted like I was some sort of trophy;
A proof of her virtue. She was soon gone.
In her place, the lethal Asp and towering Punjab,
And Sandy. Always loyal, wonderful Sandy.
I would see "Daddy" mostly when he came in,
Guns blazing, fists flying, to save me
From the enemies of our country,
As well as from callous orphanages and cruel caretakers,
Just in time to sever them from success
And to protect this nation, and me, and Sandy,
And his own financial interests as well.
As days accreted into years, I wondered
Why my loving "Daddy" always ended up placing me
Back into those dark places where I had no protector
Save the good-hearted weak ones who folded like leaves
And sometimes a sympathetic gangster or mystic,
And I began to notice how my salvation and their demise
Solved at once some pressing business problem of "Daddy"'s
Until, at last, I resolved to contrive a test for him;
A setting of peril for me without any hope of profit for him.
And lo! here I am, beneath this stone forever
As Sandy, faithful Sandy, watches over me
Crying helplessly at the cold white eye of the moon.

from Toon River Anthology (part 3)

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This was my week last week. I was waiting for a job that seemed pretty likely to be coming in (still waiting, but hope springs eternal). I was watching the days go by, leading up to colonoscopy on the 26th.

So last Tuesday, my gut sprang a leak. Well, actually it was just diarrhea, but of a rather virulent and unremitting sort. Barfed a couple of times, too, but that was a mere distraction. Wednesday, still at it. I complained to Cathy that it was just like doing the prep kit early. So she suggested I call the med center where I was having the procedure and tell them I was ready early. Thursday, I was still spending most of the day lying down, though I felt well enough to venture out for some Immodium.

I kept referring back to the literature they sent me about the prep, because every couple of days, there was something else I couldn't take or eat. Cumulative jollity. On Friday I felt well enough to go out for lunch with Sarah, who was home from school all day because of teacher's conferences or something. We went to Simply Crepes, and I had another Reuben. No time for dessert, but she had ice cream that night.

On Saturday, she went to her Chinese class, attending about half of it. She's pretty tired of those classes and will probably make a clean getaway from them before too much longer. I was feeling more or less normal by Sunday, so we went bowling. I rolled a double in the first game (without hitting the bumpers), but that was as good as it got. By the end of the second game, I was getting bitter. We left without the customary round of Dance Dance Revolution; I was that dejected. We grabbed Subway sandwiches (they've stopped doing wraps, alas) and took them home to share with Cathy.

Sunday night was the big event for me: the long-postponed lecture by Art Spiegelman (or art spiegelman), which had originally been scheduled back in October or thereabouts. The venue was moved to RIT, so I Googled the location to be sure I could find it.

I would like to curse Google Maps for about five minutes now. They moved RIT to a location in downtown Rochester, many miles from the actual campus, and gave me a convoluted path to use in getting there. Once I found out (by frantically phoning Cathy) that all I'd needed to do was go out Jefferson, I couldn't even get back on 490 until I crept -- more accurately, I drove behind a car that crept -- through a series of detours and blocked-off on-ramps. I opted to take South Street down to Jefferson, and that worked fairly well, apart from the traffic lights and slow speed limits. RIT itself had obligingly posted signs that led me to a parking lot, after which a locator map showed me about where the auditorium would be. The likeliest-looking door, however, was some sort of religious center, so I apologetically hailed a student who confessed that he didn't remember where the auditorium was. I found it anyway, by going in the direction he'd come from.

I was only five or ten minutes late. He gave a terrific talk -- witty and understated, and full of love for the comic medium. After it was over, I stood in line for about an hour to get his autograph on MAUS and MAUS II. The time passed agreeably as I chatted away with the college guys in line ahead of me. It was the social high point of my week, if not my month. One guy in line runs a book store. I should have asked him which one, but things like that don't occur to me until much later. The reason for the delay turned out to be that Spiegelman was not just signing, but sketching as well, so now my books have spiegelmice in them. My copy of MAUS already had my name on the signature page, because when we got it (as soon as it came out), I had no idea I'd one day be getting it signed. He obligingly drew a thought balloon around my handwriting and had it coming out of the Maus's head.

During the seconds when he was efficiently inscribing my books, I was able to ask him how his brother's name had been pronounced. "Ri-shoe," he said, more or less. "I actually changed the spelling in the book so it would be pronounceable. In Polish, it's something completely different." I also told him how pleased I'd been to see Old Man Muffaroo in a crowd scene of old comic strip characters in one of his drawings.

It was good and dark by then, and I hurried out to my car and drove on home. Sarah was asleep in the downstairs comfy chair, as is her habit these days. I carried her up to bed and kissed her goodnight.
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ALAN THE ARTIST
Talent only takes you so far.
Praised in school, successful at first,
I saw my path to fame, to glory,
To all the good things in life.
But ideas were few, and I went
To the pool of creativity, which I found
In a glass pipe Jones gave me
Along with my first taste of the stuff
And I painted, painted, until I thirsted,
Went back to the pool, then painted some more.
But before long, the thirst was more important
And the next trip to the pool, and the next,
And my curtains grew tattered, and I began
To leave my shirt unbuttoned at the top,
And I even forgot to brush my teeth some times.
And then I sought out Ray, who was looking for me,
And things went bad from there, and I perished.
Students of art, always try to find yourselves
A cheaper form of creativity than mine,
And lay in abundant supplies
Before you prime your canvas.

PHILLIP WINSLOW
Dottie and I saw him in the window,
A small puppy, looking helplessly at us
Canting his head as if to hear something
We had just said. We brought him home
To the delight of the children. In my mind,
I had some reservations about his paws,
Which looked too large for such a small dog.
"He'll grow into them," Dottie said,
As if that was a good thing. And grow he did
Until he was bigger than any of us,
And wilfull, and selfish, and bone stupid,
Although he was clever at driving a car,
Making phone calls and operating a computer.
He was less like a dog than he was a demon,
Sucking the life out of our family,
My marriage, and our finances
Until the day I called him out to the car
And took him far away, into the mountains
And tried to lose him on a lonely road.
I got the beefsteak out of the trunk
And called to him to have a treat
But when I looked up, he was in front
And had undone the parking brake somehow
And he rolled right over me before he went
Clattering down the road, until the car stopped
Gently, the front bumper just touching a pine tree.
My last moments seemed to stretch out for me,
Seeing the quizzical expression again on that face,
With that long-ago puppy's face showing behind it
And I saw the irony as well, and had to admit
That in a way, it really was dog-gone funny.
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This came from The Comics Reporter (linked from bOINGbOING). Reading it, I was struck by how much overlap there was between the writer's tastes and my collection. At the end, the writer had the idea of making a meme of the list, bolding what one has, leaving unbolded the ones one doesn't have, italicizing the ones we don't have enough of, and underlining the ones that maybe shouldn't be on the list.

1. Something From The ACME Novelty Library
2. A Complete Run Of Arcade
3. Any Number Of Mini-Comics
4. At Least One Pogo Book From The 1950s
5. A Barnaby Collection
6. Binky Brown and the Holy Virgin Mary
7. As Many Issues of RAW as You Can Place Your Hands On
8. A Little Stack of Archie Comics
9. A Suite of Modern Literary Graphic Novels
10. Several Tintin Albums
11. A Smattering Of Treasury Editions Or Similarly Oversized Books
12. Several Significant Runs of Alternative Comic Book Series
13. A Few Early Comic Strip Collections To Your Taste
14. Several "Indy Comics" From Their Heyday
15. At Least One Comic Book From When You First Started Reading Comic Books
16. At Least One Comic That Failed to Finish The Way It Planned To
17. Some Osamu Tezuka
18. The Entire Run Of At Least One Manga Series
19. One Or Two 1970s Doonesbury Collections
20. At Least One Saul Steinberg Hardcover
21. One Run of A Comic Strip That You Yourself Have Clipped
22. A Selection of Comics That Interest You That You Can't Explain To Anyone Else
23. At Least One Woodcut Novel
24. As Much Peanuts As You Can Stand
25. Maus
26. A Significant Sample of R. Crumb's Sketchbooks
27. The original edition of Sick, Sick, Sick. (What I have is an early but not original edition paperback. I think he's just bragging.)
28. The Smithsonian Collection Of Newspaper Comics
29. Several copies of MAD
30. A stack of Jack Kirby 1970s Comic Books
31. More than a few Stan Lee/Jack Kirby 1960s Marvel Comic Books
32. A You're-Too-High-To-Tell Amount of Underground Comix
33. Some Calvin and Hobbes
34. Some Love and Rockets
35. The Marvel Benefit Issue Of Coober Skeber
36. A Few Comics Not In Your Native Tongue
37. A Nice Stack of Jack Chick Comics
38. A Stack of Comics You Can Hand To Anybody's Kid
39. At Least A Few Alan Moore Comics
40. A Comic You Made Yourself (the comics I did in junior high are all gone, but I've done more since)
41. A Few Comics About Comics
42. A Run Of Yummy Fur
43. Some Frank Miller Comics
44. Several Lee/Ditko/Romita Amazing Spider-Man Comic Books
45. A Few Great Comics Short Stories
46. A Tijuana Bible
47. Some Weirdo
48. An Array Of Comics In Various Non-Superhero Genres
49. An Editorial Cartoonist's Collection or Two
50. A Few Collections From New Yorker Cartoonists

Of course, anything I don't have doesn't belong on any serious list. Haf-kaff. He offered to let people make suggestions for things they'd put on there, as long as they take one off for each one they add. That gives me about six, except I'll say that two of them are probably my own fault and just suggest four. I'll say "anything by Harvey Kurtzman" and show Executive's Comic Book for the visual. And I'll throw in VIZ, the rude, vulgar British comic magazine which embodies the logical culmination of over a century of dysfunctional characters -- all monomaniacs who live pointless lives surmounted by unrelated puns in the last panel. And my visual example would be a "Billy the Fish" strip to be named later... or maybe "Zip O'Lightning," one of the most cruelly hilarious one-shot strips ever. T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents is a case unto itself, a self-standing series (and a couple of spinoffs) about all-too-human agents who punch a time clock and go risk their lives using devices they don't understand themselves. Collections of 1950s panel gags from magazines are full of great stuff (including many appearances by artists who would soon become legends of comic strips, like Mort Walker and Johnny Hart) -- I'd probably illustrate this with one of those collections from "True, the Man's Magazine" that brought so many great VIP cartoons to my attention. He should have had Herbie in there, too, a comic whose neatly drafted buttoned-down artwork by Ogden Whitney only made it even more dadaistic. That's five. Deal with it.

Of course, I'll think of other things I should have said, but I'm going to stop. Now.

Wait a second. Hang on.

There. Now I'm stopping.
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