Masters of Comic Art!

I’ve just returned from spending about five hours taking in the Masters of Comic Art exhibit at the Milwaukee Art Museum and I thought I’d post a few thoughts while they’re fresh in my mind:

First off, I can’t imagine that there’s ever been a more jaw-dropping collection of original American comics art collected in one place at one time for public exhibition. For a summary of the artists involved, click here. It was really too much to digest in a single pass-through, albeit an afternoon/evening long one. I now almost wish I had another day to wander through and just enjoy the work on a less analytical, more aesthetic level.

While everyone included in the exhibit is pretty much a badass in some respect, the quantity of ants in my pants to see this show increased markedly when I noted that it included both E.C Segar (Thimble Theater/Popeye) and Harvey Kurtzman (E.C. Comics, MAD, etc.), who are my two favorite cartoonists of all time. (Rounding out my “best of” list would be Jacques Tardi, but he’s French, and so not really eligible for inclusion, and Roy Crane, mentioned below .^*)

I’ve seen a fair amount of discussion and second guessing about who was included as a “Master of Comic Art” and who wasn’t, and I’ll avoid that whole topic other than the following two items:

One, I’m betting that at some point it came down to deciding whether to include Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy or instead include Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie and I really hope that this decision was made on the basis of the artistic merits of the works themselves, not the personal opinions of Art Spiegelman, who was involved in the show in some capacity aparently. He’s lately had a bee in his bonnet about the virtues of Dick Tracy and is also one a’ them tharr commie pinko liberals who certainly finds the anti-New Deal underpinnings of Little Orphan Annie detestable… so I can definitely envision a scenario where this decision might have been less than objective.

Two, I think one could make the argument, based on the exhibits goal of showing artists whose work changed the medium and affected all that came after it, that Roy Crane—who really established the “adventure” genre newspaper strip—would have been a better choice than Milt Caniff, even though Caniff is a much better draftsman and made more of a cultural footprint with Terry and the Pirates than Crane did with Wash Tubbs.

But, enough of that; here’re some random thoughts I had about what I saw, in no particular order:

• Original, uncolored, inked Windsor McCay Little Nemo stips have a striking resemblence style-wise to Bob Burden’s (Flaming Carrot) work. I’ve never noticed this when looking at the color Nemo pages, but Burden maybe copped McCay’s practice of using a thin, fairly uniform line throughout, but then outlining figures with a thicker line?
• There was a curious lack of Lionel Feininger originals. There were maybe two originals by him: an original Wee Willie Winkie page and a couple of character designs for the Kin-der-kids strip. What’s become of all his original art from this period?
• Generally throughout, I really wanted to see the final printed pages beside the originals. Even the term “original,” as applied to comics art, is really a bit dubious…
• I know this’ll get me run out of Art Comics Town on a rail, but… There was way too much Herriman/Krazy Kat. Some day I’ll write an essay on Herriman vs. Segar, but for the time being, I’ll just say that proportionally-speaking (and obviously, just in my opinion) I thought there could have been a few fewer pieces, perhaps then including a few more by some of the less-represented artists.
• These guys weren’t afraid to really dig into the bristol board with a razor to scrape off ink! This seems to be the preferred method for getting “drawn” effects in white, with gouache being used mainly to correct mistakes. Some of the larger white lettering on the Krazy Kat pages looked like it was gouged out at least an eighth of an inch.
• What’s with the blue “wash” on some of the early newspaper strips? This maybe was some way for getting a gray screen tone?
• McCay uses really, really, really thin ink lines—and on enormous original pages. I’m really surprized that they reproduce so well reduced. A testament, perhaps, to the superior printing process use for color comics back in the day?
• All of Segar’s “white on black” lines (usually in black clothing) are just white paper left showing–not white ink/gouache. Same with McCay’s stars on a black sky.
• Herriman’s watercolored sunday pages have clearly been emulated by Patrick McDonald (Mutts), who publishes his beautiful watercolor versions of his Sunday strips to his website—and is the owner of several of the McCay originals in the show.
• I wish there was some explanation of why there were watercolored Sunday pages. The only Sunday page that was there both as a watercolored original and as a printed Sunday was a single Gasoline Alley, and the two seemed to bear only a passing corelation to one another.
• On a few strips, the 1/20/46 strip in particular, Milt Caniff seems to be using a brush with a split point delberately to get an particular inking texture—seen for example in an army helmet and a feather hat in the strip cited. If so, wow…
• Milt Caniff’s “vocabulary” of inking techniques and textures is absolutely amazing. I need to read more Terry and the Pirates, at the very least to check out the craft involved.
• For newspaper strips, the size of the originals seems to remain pretty constant even as the actual printed size of the strips shrunk—the artists just lettered bigger.
• There were a few Dick Tracy strips from the mid-to-late 60s and early 70s included, and they were CRAZY. Where can I see more of this era of Dick Tracy?!
• Charles Schulz’s Peanuts strips are really, really beautiful seen at full drawn original size. Have I mentioned lately that one of the many reasons I’m not buying the Fantagraphics Peanuts series is the the strips are printed SMALLER than they were originally printed?
• Seen big, it looks like Schulz’s line began getting a bit wobbly in the early 70s. I hadn’t really noticed this until later in the printed strips.
• “Ebony,” the balloon-lipped black sidekick from Eisner’s The Spirit seems to have been fully expunged from this exhibit.
• The inkers on Jack Kirby’s work were rarely credited on the exhibition labels. Weird, given the distinctive visual contribution of an inker like, say, Sinnot. And there were plenty of prime FF pages there from the issues 80-105 era.
• The 70s era Kirby two-page spreads (like, from Devil Dinosaur, Kamandi and the like) are amazing in black and white. Has this stuff ever been collected in just B&W?
• A lot of the Kurtzman stuff seems to be drawn on bristol board that’s been lined horizontally in non-photo blue lines, every quarter of an inch or so. Was this maybe “official” E.C. company bristol? And is this maybe why he did The Jungle Book on lined paper that later showed up in the final print—he was just used to using paper with horizontal lines?
• Kurtzmans roughs for Little Annie Fanny are way cooler than the finished strips.
• There was an unpublished newspaper strip by Kurtzman called Pot Shot Pete. Is there more of this floating around somewhere? If so, someone please publish it.
• I was amazed about how thick some of the line weight was on the pages throughout. In the extreme case, some of the Kurtzman stuff like in “Corpse on the Imjin” showed lines that were up to a quarter of an inch thick in places. But even the 30s newspaper strip stuff like Segar had nice thick linework, presumably done with some sort of magical nib from the depression-era that makes a line like ten times thicker than a modern Hunts 102 nib.
• People often slag off on Robert Crumb’s brush—as opposed to pen—work. Have these people seen “Patton,” his bio of musician Charlie Patton?! Fools….
• All the Spiegelman artwork was “From the collecton of the artist.” Either he doesn’t give away/sell his artwork, or he’s his own biggest fan!
• A surprising amount of Chris Ware’s artwork remains as tightly pencilled non-photo blue, presumably inked over on a physically different layer later (I’m guessing because there’re registration marks to the right on many of his pages).
• Too much Gary Panter! I’m not really a fan of Gary Panter’s work, but even if I were, I’d say “Too much Panter!” I mean, there were maybe 30 original Patner pages at least. Maybe some of that room could have been devoted to M.O.D.O.K.-related art instead?

* List may change without notice.