Notes on writing and drawing

OTTO SOGLOW AND THE LITTLE KING

Sunday, November 11, 2007

As Eddie Campbell pointed out, the new Comics Journal #286 features a 5-page essay and 37 color Sundays of Otto Soglow’s strip, “The Ambassador”, which first began life as “The Little King” in the pages of the New Yorker:

In the middle of 1930, Soglow introduced a new character that would launch the next stage of his career, an unnamed and silent King who trudges through his daily offices in a daze, longing for any excuse to step away from it all, even if just to pick up the milk at the castle door. By 1931, the “Little King,” as he came to be known, was a regular feature in the magazine’s pages, caught up in absurd rituals and ceremonies and longing to break away to the open road. The joke, for those who cared to look for it, depended primarily on Soglow’s long-running theme: In a society in which individuals are imprisoned by social categories like class, gender and sexuality, everyone is wearing costumes that fit as poorly as the King’s crown. Our little king no more belongs on the throne than Bill’s unnamed colleague belonged in the sewer. The King always jumped at any excuse to join the staff in the kitchen, to slide down the banister, even, in the last Little King cartoon for the New Yorker in 1934, to join the people in rioting against his monarchy.

But the King would not escape his crown so easily. Soglow’s Little King cartoons had attracted the attention of William Randolph Hearst, who determined to have Soglow and his King for his own empire. Hearst had become increasingly interested in silent comics, having acquired Milt Gross, author of the pioneering silent graphic novel, He Done Her Wrong (1930), and launching Carl Anderson’s largely silent Henry in 1932. The resurgence of pantomime comics in the early 1930s is an interesting phenomenon in its own right, especially given that it coincided with the rise of sound film. Just as the movies learned to talk, comics began to experiment with what they could accomplish without words….

…the New Yorker had another year on its contract for the character. And so Soglow was asked to create another title as a kind of placeholder until Little King could at last complete his move from magazine to newspaper. Appropriately, Soglow created his forerunner for the King’s arrival in the form of an Ambassador, and he used his first newspaper strip much as a diplomat might utilize a fact-finding mission to lay the groundwork for a royal visit. Soglow had worked almost exclusively in magazines up to this point, and the newspaper format was both exciting and somewhat overwhelming, as the early, somewhat stiff pages suggest. The Little King had appeared only occasionally in his years at the New Yorker, and now he would be expected to appear weekly. And so the Ambassador — a barely disguised version of the King himself — served as a stand-in, a place for Soglow to develop the character and his potential and to explore the possibilities (color, movement, scale) of the new medium.

I really, really love Soglow’s work, so I thought I would share a few of the original Little King strips that ran in the New Yorker.

The Little King sliding down a banister:

The Little King running away with gypsies:

The Little King losing a golf ball:

Otto Soglow's The Little King

It’s worth noting that several of the strips were broken up and presented across a two-page spread:

And that several of them can be quite tender. Here, The Little King sheds a tear after being snubbed by a janitor:

And here, he contemplates the moon while the queen sleeps (I can relate):

Much of the development of Soglow’s style is explicitly attributed to his association with the New Yorker:

Harold Ross had founded his magazine in 1925, and Soglow began contributing the very next year. Ross wanted the comics in his new magazine to have a very different look than those of its illustrated predecessors: magazines like Puck and the original Life, with their Victorian crosshatchings and labored captions. He wanted the art in the New Yorker to serve as a visual representation of the modernist style he wished to capture, and he encouraged his cartoonists to reduce their work to the absolute minimal number of strokes and words.

The match was a good one for Soglow, who was at this time experimenting with “eliminating lines that I felt weren’t necessary.” Soglow’s earliest work for the New Yorker showed the influence of his fine-arts training and a rather conventional approach to the magazine comic, but quickly, under the influence of Ross and the artists at the magazine, Soglow began to develop what became his signature style: sequential comics, single-line drawing and minimal text.

In the very last Little King strip that ran in the New Yorker, the monarch riots along with the people:

And whether you noticed or not, if you’re a regular New Yorker reader, you get a dose of Soglow’s drawings every week: while Soglow was with the New Yorker, he drew every one of the small drawings that appeared at the beginning of each Talk of the Town article, and the magazine has been reusing the drawings ever since his death (over 25 years).

Soglow’s obituary from 1975:

Further reading:

The Comics Journal – Otto Soglow and The Ambassador (excerpt)

We All Go Soglow: a bunch of good scans of Soglow’s work

OLD ADVENTURES WITH THE TARQUIN ENGINE

Sunday, November 11, 2007

Cleaning up some files on my computer today, and came across these 3 aborted “infinite canvas” experiments in Flash with the tarquin engine. They’re a few years old, not all that exciting…gosh, I’m not really even sure why I’m posting them?

The first try was called “To The Ocean“:

The second was called “Mowing“:

The third was called “Birdseed,” and I actually still like it:

None of these reached for or achieved anything like what the Tarquin engine was designed to do. For that, check out this comic.

THE TWELVE DEVICES OF PEANUTS

Monday, October 29, 2007

So-called creative people understand better than most that there is nothing new under the sun. Working with boulders of granite, with empty stages, with blank paper, they are credited with making something out of nothing, but that isn’t exactly what they do. All art is derived from what is in actuality a remarkably finite human experience. Whatever the medium, the creative person’s task is to interpret an essentially unchanging reality, a dog-eared reality pondered by Homer and Mel Brooks and everyone in between. The artist succeeds if he or she can present something familiar from an unfamiliar angle.”

— Rheta Grimsley Johnson

While everyone else is reading David Michaelis’s new biography, Schulz and Peanuts, I’ve decided to wait and ask for it for Christmas. Instead, I’m reading Rheta Grimsley Johnson’s underrated and unfortunately out-of-print 1989 “authorized” biography, Good Grief: The Story of Charles M. Schulz. People have called the book “innocuous” and “flattering”, but I think it deals with Schulz’s depression in a very straightforward and explicit manner, and the writing is really great. Worth tracking down.

Chapter 6 of the book is dedicated to Schulz’s “12 devices”—the twelve ideas that Schulz considered essential to the success of Peanuts:

1. The Kite-eating tree.

2. Schroeder’s music

I was looking through this book on music, and it showed a portion of Beethoven’s Ninth in it, so I drew a cartoon of Charlie Brown singing this. I thought it looked kind of neat, showing these complicated notes coming out of the mouth of this comic-strip character, and I thought about it some more, and then I thought, ‘Why not have one of the little kids play a toy piano?’

—Schulz

charlie brown and schroeder whistling

3. Linus’s blanket

4. Lucy’s psychiatry booth

5. Snoopy’s doghouse

In the beginning, Snoopy actually slept in his doghouse, and a three-quarter view that worked in perspective was the readers’ most familiar angle….The emergence of Snoopy’s doghouse as Grand Device centered not on actual depictions of the humble abode but on allusions to its fantastic contents…the only view the reader is ever given is a left side view. Yet as its graphic depiction became severely restricted, its function became limitless.

—R.G.J.

6. Snoopy himself

7. The Red Baron

8. Woodstock

9. The baseball games

10. The football episodes

Besides losing, the running (and falling) gag is a pure example of another element that has worked so well for Schulz: repetition…Nothing else in Peanuts is so mechanically repetitious as the football joke….One newspaper editor canceled Peanuts, complaining that the author did the same things over and over. He was forced to reinstate the comic strip, with an apology, when his readers set up a postal howl.

—R.G.J.

11. The Great Pumpkin

12. The little red-haired girl

Hank Williams’s plaintive ballad “I Can’t Help It If I’m Still In Love With You” spurred the inclusion of the little red-haired girl in Peanuts. After listening to the song over and over again, Schulz was inspired to include in his cast of characters the unrequiting lover….The littler red-haired girl has never been depicted…and he believes she never will be.

—R.G.J.

LELAND MYRICK ON TURNING POETRY INTO COMICS

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Leland Myrick’s MISSOURI BOY started out as a batch of poems that he put together and made into a graphic novel. He has a wonderful post about the process over at the First-Second blog:

…the poems that eventually became MISSOURI BOY were written over a span of almost ten years and were quite different in form, ranging from blank verse to haiku. When the idea finally gelled that I would take all these disparate poems and meld them into one coherent graphic novel, I began to think about the process of turning poetry into comics, and in thinking about the process, I began to feel my way toward the kind of book I wanted MISSOURI BOY to be when it was finished. What I did NOT want was a book of illustrated poems. What I wanted was a graphic novel that moved through time and in the end told one large story through a bunch of little moments strung together, the little moments fairly clear in themselves, but the larger story more indistinct as seen through the scattered lenses of the individual chapters.

One of the most important things that happened in the transformation from poem to comic was the loss of words. My editor, Mark Siegel used what became an important phrase for me in the early stages of the book when I was still struggling with keeping the language of the original poems intact—Let the words fall away. And so I did. In my head I saw the words falling away, floating leaves settling on the floor around my drawing table.

LYNDA BARRY’S GIRLS + BOYS & EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD

Sunday, October 21, 2007

We’ll have to wait a little while until Drawn and Quarterly publishes the five-volume set of the complete run of Lynda Barry’s Ernie Pook’s Comeek, but in the meantime, there are a bunch of out-of-print collections out there…if you can find them. I’d like to start the week off by showing off a couple scans from two, GIRLS AND BOYS (1981), and EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD (1986).

* * *

BOYS + GIRLS was Lynda’s first book. Most of it is drawn in a scrawled, punky pen style — a crazy contrast to the fluid brushwork of something like ONE! HUNDRED! DEMONS! The strip was reformatted into a horizontal format, something that Chris Oliveros has emphasized will NOT be the case in the D + Q reissues.

Here I’ve restored her strip, “How To Draw Cartoons,” to its original square format:

Here’s a wacky clip of Lynda reading from the book in the the film COMIC BOOK CONFIDENTIAL:

And here’s a really cool photo of a poster advertising the book from around 1980.

* * *

EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD is a little more refined — it was Lynda’s fourth collection, and the drawings get better and better, but the content is still nutty and hilarious. The gems from this book are these little maps that serve as chapter dividers: