{"id":466,"date":"2006-08-10T21:55:15","date_gmt":"2006-08-11T02:55:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/?p=466"},"modified":"2006-08-10T22:01:55","modified_gmt":"2006-08-11T03:01:55","slug":"masters-of-comic-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/?p=466","title":{"rendered":"Masters of Comic Art!"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

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<\/a>. 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. <\/p>\n

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<\/em>) and Harvey Kurtzman (E.C. Comics, MAD<\/em>, 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 .*<\/sup>) <\/p>\n

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:<\/p>\n

One, I’m betting that at some point it came down to deciding whether to include Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy<\/em> or instead include Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie<\/em> 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<\/em> and is also one a’ them tharr commie pinko liberals who certainly finds the anti-New Deal underpinnings of Little Orphan Annie<\/em> detestable… so I can definitely envision a scenario where this decision might have been less than objective.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> than Crane did with Wash Tubbs<\/em>.<\/p>\n

But, enough of that; here’re some random thoughts I had about what I saw, in no particular order:<\/p>\n