Donald Duck and Carl Barks

The Los Angeles Times' Hero Complex takes a look at vintage Donald Duck, Carl Barks who drew him, and Fantagraphics Comics who is eager to keep that legacy alive.

From the piece...

There are few storytellers in comics history that are more revered than Carl Barks, a titan figure who was one of the three inaugural members in the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame — the other two were Jack Kirby and Eisner himself, who once called Barks “the Hans Christian Andersen of comics.”

While Kirby filled the skies of multiple universes with superheroes, gods and aliens, Barks has a legacy that is more narrowly defined: The Oregon native was the creator of Duckburg, a place he populated with Scrooge McDuck, Gladstone Gander, the Beagle Boys and others both feathered and furry.

Fantagraphics recently announced a deal with Disney that will allow them to reprint the Barks run in a truly definitive collection. Our Geoff Boucher caught up with Fantagraphics’ Gary Groth to discuss the project’s heritage and ambition.

GB: It’s hard to talk about Carl Barks without mentioning emotion — there’s a startling depth of emotion in the characters themselves and then there’s the connection that fans and collectors feel toward his work. Can you talk a bit about that? It seems similar somehow to Charles Schulz.

GG: I think the connection — which I agree with — that you’re seeing between two cartoonists who couldn’t, in many ways, be farther apart from each other, is that they both succeeded in creating vivid characters who lived in a fully realized world, distinctly stylized but analogous to our own in all the important emotional ways so that it didn’t matter if there was a dog dreaming of being a World War I fighter pilot or a family of ducks going on an adventure looking for the source of square eggs. There is in fact an emotional truth at the center of Barks’ work; he even said that this was his primary goal, though I can’t dig up the quote at the moment, perhaps I’m thinking of when he told an interviewer that in his stories he was “telling it like it is” and “laying it on the line.” The comics critic Don Phelps once told me that it was Barks who made Donald Duck a citizen of the nation of comics characters, which I always remember as being a particularly eloquent way of saying that he invested Donald with such humanity.

Ziggy's Creator Dies at 80

Flavorwire remembers Tom Wilson, here.

Newspaper Comics 101

The AV Club gives a primer on daily comics in newspapers.

From the piece...

Post-Mutt And Jeff, gag-oriented strips largely competed with increasingly complex and gorgeously drawn adventure comics. But the tide began to turn decisively toward humor on the funny pages after World War II. Many of the new breed of cartoonists drew their inspiration from Percy Crosby’s kid-oriented Skippy, a soft, sweet strip about a young boy with an alternately mature and limited understanding of our wonderful, woeful world. When Ernie Bushmiller took over Larry Whittington’s flapper comic Fritzi Ritz, he added a niece character who became the strip’s star, and throughout the ’30s and ’40s refined Nancy into a minimalist masterpiece that both sanctified kid culture and explored the comic possibilities of simplified design. And bestselling children’s book author/illustrator Crockett Johnson set new standards in gentle whimsy with Barnaby, a strip about a kind-hearted 5-year-old boy and his cigar-chomping, trouble-stirring fairy godfather.

But all these strips about children were just laying the groundwork for Peanuts, Charles Schulz’s sensational explication of childhood angst. Peanuts began as a jokey strip about the mischievous Charlie Brown and his tiny-bodied, giant-headed friends. Then Schulz gradually began to deepen his characters, giving them distinctively adult traits: depression, insecurity, crabbiness, fear, etc. He allowed Peanuts to get weirder as well, following Charlie Brown’s arrogant dog Snoopy into wild fantasies. Schulz made jokes about the fads of the day, and like Bushmiller, he developed a style that was deceptively simple. But what’s made Peanuts resonate with so many people over the years is how astutely—and unflinchingly—Schulz described feeling unlovable. In the strip’s ’60s and ’70s heyday, life was always like eating a peanut-butter sandwich alone on an uncomfortable school playground park bench.

Charles Schulz Drawing Charlie Brown

Illustrated History

The Los Angeles Review of Books discusses books that curate comics.



From the piece...



The less the books focus on comics per se, the less useful they are. In a common annoying trope in cultural history surveys, Walker wastes pages on potted and worthless surveys of what was going on in the culture at large, of the “it was an era of flappers and video games, of flagpole sitters and Watergate, of hippies and the Space Race” variety.



And despite the joys of looking at the pictures, the actual comics history part of both books is too tight and quick to provide much insight or pleasure; the criticism is non-existent except for a random sentence here and there, some astute and some bizarre (Robinson overuses the word “quixotic” to describe strips, and never correctly); and little in the way of interesting stories or anecdotes help bring either the creators or their business alive. For that sort of detailed narrative history, the comics fan might want to check out the out of print, but available through the usual online sources, Comics Art in America by Stephen Becker (Simon and Schuster), though that book’s story stops in 1959.

The Perks of Being an English Major

The Popeye Cookbook

It's coming.



From a piece in Paste...



He’s the sailor who is synonymous with anchor tattoos, a corn-cob pipe and bulging biceps. But perhaps Popeye’s greatest legacy was making eating spinach cool again — a trait that influenced London-based publishing house SelfMadeHero to create a cookbook based on the Sailor Man’s favorite food.



The Popeye Cookbook, which comes out this fall, promises 150 recipes that are “healthy takes on some All-American classics, moreish snacks, vegetarian dinners, special smoothies and seaside suppers,” according to SelfMadeHero.



The cookbook will also feature original color illustrations and cartoon strips alongside each recipe with easy-to-follow instructions.

With Newspapers Dying Off Is the Political Cartoon That Far Behind?

The Washington Post takes a stand that political cartoons still matter.

From the article...

Stephen Hess is forever optimistic about the American editorial cartoon. He believes in the power of the pictorial commentary and speaks with a faith so unshakeable that one wonders whether he even realizes that there now seem to be more major-league baseball teams than there are major-league cartoonists working full time for a daily metropolitan newspaper. Has this scholar spent so many hours rummaging through musty archives — tracking his way back to what he calls the first American editorial cartoon, Benjamin Franklin’s “Don’t Tread on Me” rattlesnake woodcut — that he hasn’t fully grasped just how many pink-slipped political cartoonists have been trod upon?

Hess can’t help it. Even as the marketplace changes, he believes in the creative and commercial ingenuity of the American political cartoonist.

“I’m not only trying to honor our political cartoonists,” Hess tells Comic Riffs, “but also to note the problems that exist now in editorial cartooning, which has been so tied in with daily print journalism. They’re in trouble. But at the same time — with the Internet — it could be a turning point.”