since I've been missing from my blog here for a number of weeks, I thought i should clear out the drafts folder, where I find this scan of a drawing by the young Hans Holbein, left over form a series of four posts I wrote on the subject of Holbein's marginal additions to The Praise of Folly by Erasmus of Rotterdam (1515)


There's a superb overview of Holbein's most important graphic works, his three treatments of the Dance of Death. But it's much more than that. It traces all the editions and copies, showing complete versions of each. This is a truly remarkable resource which can absorb the historian of graphic art for hours. For example here's an sample woodcut from each of four series out of the seventeen collected in their entirety. I've picked the fighting soldier panel in case some of my younger readers might get bored. Pretend it's a zombie wars flip-book or something:

1.Holbein, 1525:
2. Hollar, 1651:
3. Deuchar, 1788:
4: Bechstein, 1831:
A note to any of those younger readers still hanging about after the pictures finished. We're not looking at cases of artists 'ripping off' another artist. there was a time, long ago, before you were born, when if you wanted a copy of something, you couldn't just scan it. Pictures in books were printed from engraved woodblocks, which would wear out after much use. Thus fifty years later, if a reprint of the book was required, it would be necessary to hire another artist to hand-copy the whole job. And each successive artist copying the same images would be likely to add his own touches. He may also not have had access to the earliest version and have worked from an intermediary copy. It was akin to a shakespearean play, which would have to be restaged and performed anew for each generation. The linked site gives a scholarly assessment of the likely sources of each version. Regarding the panel of the soldier: "Variations: Birckmann has equipped Death with a gigantic arrow instead of a bone; Death doesn't have a shield, but grabs the soldier; Death has placed the hourglass on one of the fallen soldiers. These changes are copied by Valvasor, Hollar and Deuchar. Rubens finishes the drawing of the bone; Death raises his arm, so one can see the face; Death has a nose. These changes are copied by Mechel." The set by Rubens, one of his earliest works, I have never seen before, and in fact it was only discovered in a sketchbook in Amsterdam in the 1970s. These were discovered to be the main source-artwork for the version of the book already known to have been engraved by Mechel.
another note: the process of copying involved pencilling the image onto a woodblock which would then be engraved. In its simplest form, ie not getting into complications by using a mirror, this would leave the image reversed after printing from the block. Thus, one of the images above had to be flipped in photoshop to make it face the same way as the others.

The Holbein section is part of a bigger project of which this is the site map, Lubeck's Dance of Death, dealing with just about all the known information on the subject, of which the Holbein book is but one example. Martin Hagstrøm appears to be the author of the project, which really is colossal, and of inestimable value to anyone curious about the tradition of the Danse macabre.

Watch out for Eddie Campbell's The Dance of Lifey Death, contained in Alec: "The Years have Pants".


And click the 'alec2' label below for many more posts on the subject and excerpts from the big book. When you get to the end of that selection you'll find an 'alec1' label. Click that for more.

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Would you pledge your soul as loan collateral?
RIGA (Reuters) – Ready to give your soul for a loan in these difficult economic times? In Latvia, where the crisis has raged more than in the rest of the European Union, you can. Such a deal is being offered by the Kontora loan company, whose public face is Viktor Mirosiichenko, 34. Clients have to sign a contract, with the words "Agreement" in bold letters at the top. The client agrees to the collateral, "that is, my immortal soul." "If they don't give it back, what can you do? They won't have a soul, that's all," he told Reuters in a basement office, with one desk, a computer and three chairs.

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following upon my subject of yesterday, i was curious as to the originators of the fascinating woodcuts of the Davy Crockett Almanacks ( 1835-1856). I have an insatiable longing for information about obscure artists from long ago. Mostly the woodcuts are unsigned, but a handful of names is recoverable from the material upon scrutiny, and various scholars have tabulated the information (condensed here):
" In the 1839 Crockett Almanac Alonzo Hartwell engraved at least three images after designs by Croome. Hartwell also engraved the title page and six other full-page cuts for the Crockett Almanac for 1842. The title cut was after a design by William Croome." Hartwell had a reputation as a portrait painter in Boston in the 1850s. Croome is the artist on a book titled The Golden Sand of Mexico, completely viewable online, and sampled at left above.

The one that has particularly caught my attention though is: "John H. Manning (born c.1820), an engraver and designer in Boston, was one of the artists for Gleason’s (later published as Ballou’s) Pictorial Drawing Room Companion. Among his other illustration credits are Turner’s Comic Almanac (1845), Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition (1845), and Boy’s Own Book of Fun (1847). Manning’s work for the Crockett Almanacs included three illustrations in the 1840 edition, and in the 1841 edition Manning designed four cuts that were then engraved by Hartwell.."

Manning was far above all of the other artists whose unsigned work filled up the pages of the Crockett almanacks. This one is unsigned but i feel confident, based on three other signatures by him that I have identified his hand in it and besides, I find it to be the single most striking image of all that I have seen from these booklets. The unusual word-balloon is particularly exciting.


There is another book I'm reading at present, titled The Flash Press: Sporting male weeklies of 1840s New York (published 2008). Nicholson Baker wrote a great review of it for the NY Times. The Flash Press, a clutch of naughty papers published for a short spell between 1841 and 1843, did not tend to attract signed illustrations, but it occurred to me to dash ahead to the index and see if any of my artists were about to turn up in its pages. To my delight, Manning is present, and in fact was the only artist to sign his work in those papers. Here is one of five examples reproduced:


The large heads are atypical of the artist's work, but all of it is recognizable by a vitality, the spark of the true cartoonist. It's worth noting that the monumental British Punch magazine only started in 1841, and that Manning's work as we see it in these samples is as good as anything in the earliest Punches.

Other items of interest in the Flash Press include a completely reproduced account of Charles Dickens' visit to 'the Five Points.' Dickens of course wrote his own, but it's interesting to see the same event written up by another, a Flash Press journalist who was in the entourage. Another character who turns up as a publisher of the naughty stuff is George Washington Dixon, whom I know from accounts of blackface minstrelsy, where we find him the composer of Old Zip Coon, an early landmark of American popular music, later stripped of its racist text and rerwritten as Turkey in the straw. William J Snelling, a writer well regarded by posterity, also plays a part in the story, though his doings in these years have fallen outside the scrutiny of his online biographical summaries. The authors of the Flash Press have done a service to nuts like me who like to fill in all the details (or as my wife would say, 'who need to know the ins and outs of a chook's bum.')

i have been reacquainting myself with the old Davy Crockett Almanacks, by way of this 1986 book published by Jim Crutchfield of Franklin, Tennessee, a copy of which i have just tracked down. His title has another one of those unwelcome apostrophes, not present on the original publications of the 1840s, and the cover leads one to expect the first nine issues when in fact we only get the first seven, up to and including 1841. That makes sense as these seven form a stylistically united group, usually identified as 'the Nashville' series, distinct from the later issues published by Taylor and Fisher. In fact there were apparently 55 issues in all from as many as five different publishers, published between 1835 and 1856. You can see a great display of twenty-one different covers described here and illustrated here that comprised a set offered at auction a couple of years ago. "Collection of 21 Crockett almanacs, all in original pictorial wraps and profusely illustrated with humorous wood-engraved illustrations (many full-page). 21 vols., 8vo, each approximately 20.3 x 13 cm.,"
The stories are excellent antecedents of the modern comic book, with their wildly exaggerated heroics.


Even the wimmen are impossibly tough in these tall tales, told in rough backwoods-speak, as in this brief excerpt from 1847:

"One day when Oak Wing's sister was going to a baptizing, and had her feed in a bag under her arm, she seed a big bear that had come out from a holler tree, and he looked first at her, and then the feed, as if he didn't know which to eat fust. He kinder poked out his nose and smelt the dinner which war sassengers maid of bear's meat and crocodile's liver.

Academia has decided that the earlier Nashville issues are superior, in part because the naive design of their woodcuts appeals to modernist artistic taste (the snake drawing above is a good example), and in part because unpleasant racist elements creep into the later offerings. But i would enjoy the chance to look at the subject more closely under my own cognizance. Here's a later cover, from the 1850 Fisher issue, which is not far from the exaggerated perspective and dynamics of comic books.



(more thoughts to come)

larry Latham has posted all thirty three of Ernest Griset's illustrations from Vikram and the Vampire, or Tales of Hindu Devilry. adapted by Captain Sir Richard Burton, 1870.


If they take your fancy you can read this entire antique book online at burtonia.org in a pdf of a scanned copy of the original printing. Found via the wikipedia page on Burton. Sent looking by my pal dr jon. Here's the cover.
More on Griset here, with a great colour piece:

'an admirable and apparently inexhaustible draughtsman who possessed much satirical power and produced countless drawings in grotesque of animals and human savages, which wise collectors obtained for trivial sums at an untidy little shop near Leicester Square'. This shop was in Suffolk Street, and he had produced and sold sketches there from the mid 1860s.
He contributed to the magazine Fun (which was similar in style to Punch) for some years, and the editor, Tom Hood, wrote verses for his drawings in Griset's grotesques, published in 1867. Mark Lemon, the editor of Punch invited him to join the staff in 1867, but he left after disagreements in 1869.

for those who enjoyed David Apatoff's recent post on illustrator William Aylward (1875-1956), here's another sample of his art, from Jack London's The Sea Wolf, from Tales of the North, a 1979 compendium of the author's 'complete novels plus 15 short stories', from my own shelves:

john Cale was a founding member of the band the Velvet Underground among other claims to musical significance. His autobiography, What's Welsh for Zen? (1999) is one of the great illustrated books of our time. it was Neil Gaiman who brought Cale and Dave McKean together for the project, as Neil explained in his blog last year. Mckean did something more than just set the type on almost every page of the 270 page volume. He even found ways to use his familiar comics approach in a few places. It doesn’t tend to turn up in lists of McKean's work; Wikipedia doesn’t mention it while having a list of all his comic books and DVD covers ( “We’ll fix that when we get home, Bart”).

Here are a few random example spreads:




While revisiting the book recently I became fascinated by Cale's brief account of the oddly famous September 9 1963 performance of Erik Satie's Vexations. This musical composition has its own 3,000 word Wikipedia entry. It was organised by American 'avant garde' composer John Cage, described on the Wiki page as being "doubtless instrumental in creating some misconceptions about Erik Satie's work in general". The instructions on the score indicate that it is to be repeated 840 times. It was played the requisite number of times in a public performance by a relay team of players including the 21 year old John Cale. An interesting follow up to the event occurred on the tv show ‘I've got a secret” which teams Cale with Karl Schenzer, the only person in the audience who sat through the whole thing. That sequence from the program is of course is easy to find on Youtube:

artist John Glashan (1927-1999) drew a complicated and unique weekly cartoon in the UK’s Observer magazine titled Genius between 1978 and ’83. In the introduction to the collection John Glashan's World published in 1991 he wrote “It occurred to me that the cartoon form had the potential for something wider-ranging than the three patterns in current usage: the political cartoon, the single joke, the strip cartoon.” I like this because he apparently saw the American comic book and its ambition to become the 'graphic novel' as a separate and unrelated event, a different medium even (as I do). Alternatively it had not impinged on his consciousness at all, which would be difficult to imagine of a cartoonist in the UK in 1991 as the newspapers were full of it, but I prefer to think that he simply wasn't impressed.

The problem with this book is that it doesn't do his higher concept justice, arranged as it is in the manner of conventional cartoon books under thematic headings such as 'money,' 'guilt,' 'love,' fame.' Any reader attuned to the bigger idea would have preferred the pages run in the order the artist made them, and with the goddamn dates attached. But book publishers have never been good at understanding bigger ideas, at least in relation to cartoons, and they still (with few exceptions) do not get them, as I have found in my recent forays into the book world.

But most of my readers are probably not familiar with Glashan and his work. His wikipedia entry will bring you up to scratch, and since i am not being paid to write this blog, I will simply steal it without paraphrase: " Scottish cartoonist, illustrator, and playwright, creator of "Genius". Glashan's cartoons typically included small pen-and-ink figures drawn over a fabulous backdrop often featuring fantastic (Gothic/imaginary) architecture, surreal landscapes, or gloriously impractical ingenious-looking machines. Born in Glasgow and the son of a portrait painter, McGlashan studied painting at the Glasgow School of Art after national service in the army. He moved to London with the intention of making a living from painting portraits, but was unable to do so. Switching to cartooning and illustrating, he curtailed his name to "Glashan". Glashan's cartoons appeared in Lilliput, Harpers & Queen, Private Eye, Punch, and various London newspapers, as well as Holiday and the New Yorker. A series of humorous guidebooks created with Jonathan Routh in the late 1960s allowed extensive expression of Glashan's graffiti-like style, combining small figures (often bearded men) with scrawled text -- but even here, often with elaborate backdrops. In 1978 he took over Jules Feiffer's spot on The Observer magazine and began his strip cartoon Genius featuring Anode Enzyme (IQ 12,794) and his patron Lord Doberman, the richest man in the world. 'Genius' won him the Glen Grant Strip Cartoon award in 1981. This ran until 1983 when he returned to landscape and portrait painting, and from 1988 to 1998 he also contributed weekly cartoons to The Spectator."

Here are a couple of examples of the weekly series, featuring the aforementioned characters Anode Enzyme and Lord Doberman (dates as I said irritably, are unknown to me, though I imagine there must be somebody who collected the stuff as it came out). Another problem with the book is that the things are printed too damn small, two to a page. As I recall, the Observer didn't do them any favours either. They clearly come from the tradition of the gag a day strip cartoon; once the set-up had been established, with a minimum of narrative introduction, the work was an ongoing series of self-contained variations and elaborations. Glashan's sense of a bigger kind of strip cartoon was all about scale. Each of his pieces wants at the very least a full magazine sized page. There's one place in the book where a single painted gag cartoon, not involving any regular characters, is given a double page spread and the watercolours are a joyful ocular experience. Why couldn't it all have been thus? It's no wonder he got out of the business and made a living from his painting. The larger end of his scalar contrast was usually a baronial hall or some baroque improbability:


But in this one he switches it around and an easel painting of a fish is dwarfing his cast of characters:


There is much aesthetic pleasure to be had in looking at the contrast of the typical big painterly image with the sensitive tiny pen drawings. here's a zoom on one of the latter:


The grand scale was also reflected in the characters and the relationships between them. "Anode Enzyme is a genius with an IQ of 12,794. Master of all trades, Jack of none; his impeccable psychic architecture is marred by a single flaw- he has no money." He becomes employed by Lord Doberman, richest man in the world. In a sequence running over several weeks, the first task that is given to the genius is to invent a machine that will fire portable television sets into the sea. "What rate of fire?" asks the genius without hesitation. "Twenty sets per minute," responds Doberman, equally without hesitation.

there's a website

another item retrieved from my parents attic on my recent visit. I picked up this paperback second hand around thirty years ago. I loved the cover which deliberately evoked an earlier time and illustrational style. It was painted by Alan Manham, of whom I know nothing. Then I was knocked out to find the sequel, and the craftsmanlike diligence with which he had painted the same character a second time. It just so happened that I loved Bergman's writing too. He's probably best known for his script credit in Blazing Saddles and some other movies. IT was marvellous to lose my whole plane trip back to Australia to a rereading of these great detective novels. Hollywood and Levine rushes to a conclusion in which Humphrey Bogart plays an unexpected part:

"It'll take a while, mister. Like I said, she's wedged in."
A sense of futility and anguish possessed me like sick fever. There I stood, my car fenced in by the Rolls-Royces and Bentleys of Hollywood royalty, while a woman I had grown to love was being driven away, to her death, by a lunatic FBI man.
I didn't have any choice, I had to steal a car.
I sprinted away.
"If you're going to put the arm on one." he called out, "bring it back before midnight."
As I turned the corner and ran toward the front of the house, a blue Cadillac was coming up the driveway.
Panting, I reached the car and leaned in through the front window. The driver, who had dipped his head to light a cigarette, turned to face me.
"What do you want?" asked Humphrey Bogart.
"Your car." It wasn't what I had planned to say, not at all, but confronted with Bogart, the truth rushed to my head like a snort of cocaine.
"What?" He was friendly, calm, a bit loaded.
"Why do you want the car?' asked his companion. She was thin and tawny, with sleek brown hair, large intelligent eyes, and a mouth you could have used for collateral. She was, I realized, Lauren Bacall.
"To prevent a murder," I said.
Bogart's mouth tightened. "You serious?" he asked.
"Very serious. Walter Adrian's widow is in terrible danger."
"Jesus Christ," said Bogart. He turned to Bacall. "Go inside, Betty, tell them I'll be late.
"I can't come?" she asked.
"No, no," Bogart grumbled. "C'mon, let this guy in the car. Helen Adrian. Christ almighty."
Bacall got out and I got in, thanking her profusely. She put her hands on the window, her eyes worried.
"Bogey, don't be a hero. Take care," she told him.
Bogart said not to worry, but we had to go; then he floored the gas pedal and sent us smoking out the driveway. He executed an impossible U-turn and went roaring up St. Cloud, which ran into Bel Air Road, and down a series of hair raising curves to Sunset Boulevard. Bogart stopped at Sunset and turned to me.
"Which way and what's your name?"

The above were published in 1974 and 1975. Bergman revived his Jewish shamus, Jack LeVIne in 2001 in Tender is Levine, which I haven't read. Reviewer J Kingston Pierce retreads an anecdote:
"As the story goes, Bergman hadn't intended to revisit Jack LeVine. After penning the script for the movie Blazing Saddles (1974), he'd settled into a prosperous career of moviemaking, turning out comedic films such as Honeymoon in Vegas and Striptease (the latter based on Carl Hiaasen's 1993 novel). But a devoted and discriminating crime fiction fan -- former U.S. President Bill Clinton -- coaxed him to revive his wisecracking shamus. "Clinton was a big fan of Honeymoon in Vegas," Bergman was quoted as telling a New Jersey newspaper recently, "so I sent him a flying Elvis [Presley] hat and an album from the film. He writes back, 'Thanks, but I wished you'd written a dozen more LeVine books.'"

age 53 and still retrieving books from my parents attic. This is one of the great transformative works in the development of the concept that great books might be written using the simple elements of the strip cartoon (an idea that is not to be confused with the corrupted and now irretrievable idea of 'the graphic novel'.) Walt Kelly's intro is dated Feb 1970, so presumably the material comes from 1969 (Jan -Aug, reading from data in the strips...) But such nitpicking seems to me to belittle Kelly's achievement here; continuity strips wouldn't normally expect readers to keep track of narrative ideas for eight weeks let alone months. Of all the books collecting the Pogo daily strip, this work stands out for being through-composed and cunningly structured. With the chapter titles in place it is difficult to think other than that the author saw the book in his head while he was turning out these dailies, though there are presumably many tangents and stops, restarts and nods to topical occurences that have been pruned out of the 1969 catalogue to boil it down to such essential perfection.
And what chapter titles: Looking ahead behind by a nose; A Head in a hole and vice versa; The drive-in self service mortuary; Justice is blind, deaf and stoned; All's well that ends.(the last has long been my favourite Kelly-ism)


"One of the great stumbling blocks in history is that one day follows another".
It starts with the New Year's Day gathering of the intimate cast of characters who in their inventive and sprightly conversation arrive at a plan to rearrange the calendar.
"I don't want no month with a thirteenth day in it." says Churchy la Femme, the turtle.
"What folks gonna do from the 12th to the 14th, hold their breath?"
"When you suggests people stops breathin' for one day a month you little recks with innocent pleasures."
"But it would help fight pollution."
And by this simple means we arrive at the theme of the book.
If everybody holds their breath we can reduce pollution. The logic proceeds apace as only in Walt Kelly...
"You take a fella what's a fish, he don't breathe."
"But he do... for centuries he's been breathin' water what's contaminated with old ruubber boots, tin cans, old bedsprings, garbage delicacies an' unfrocked umbrellas."

Inevitably the business of non-breathing leads us to the cemetery:
"The way I figger it, if we get all the non-breathers to endorse not breathin' on our seance tv show..."


The look of the thing starts getting elaborate, with the specially lettered typefaces for the dialogue of Deacon Muskrat and Sarcophagus MacAbre. The villainy of this pair starts to look ineffectual after the introduction of Kelly's caricature of Spiro Agnew as a hyena (pictured on the book's cover, above), who finds it easier to try and convict Churchy after putting a long haired wig on his bald pate. Kelly's grasp of the political situation has proven to be spot-on at a time when so many other cartoonists of his generation were embarrassingly out of step, such as Al Capp and Milt Caniff. If memory serves, I had only just read this book when Kelly died in 1973, aged sixty.

The book ends after 128 pages where it started with our beloved cast back around the table, and with Kelly's greatest catchphrase of all:


I feel an enormous warmth in being reunited with this masterpiece after twenty five years of separation. I'm also curious about the atmospherics of my parents' attic, which have preserved this and other artefacts in completely perfect condition.

from the Introduction:

Of the work of Australia's greatest traditional painter, Yirawala, Pablo Picasso said, 'That is what I have been trying to achieve all my life.'
In Yirawala's lifetime his ceremonial paintings were eagerly sought by museums and collectors all over the world. He was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire for services to Aboriginal art, and also received the Interntaional Art Co-operation Award naming him the best artist in Australia for 1971. Despite all the honours and praise, he was disappointed that his paintings were regarded only as art.

While picking a book off my shelf in response to a comment from a few days back, (On Humour by Simon Critchley) I noticed a couple of other books up there that I haven't thought about in a long time, items I picked up while researching 'the History of Humour'. There's Naughty Shakespeare by Michael Macrone (1998) for instance, (subtitled 'the lascivious lines, offensive oaths, and politically incorrect notions of the baddest bard of all.') and Tailwinds ('The lore and language of fizzles, farts and toots') by Peter Furze (also 1998). Here's an excerpt:

"A married couple had lived together for nearly forty years. The only thing that threatened to come between them in all that time was the husband's habit of breaking wind every morning immediately after waking. The noise would wake up his wife and the smell would make her eyes water. On countless occasions she pleaded with him to do something about his morning flatulations. He told her that there was nothing he could do about a natural bodily function and that she would just have to put up with it. His wife said there was nothing natural about it at all, and if he didn't stop there would come a day when he would fart all his guts out. The husband merely laughed.
Years went by. The wife continued to suffer and the husband continued to dismiss her warnings about farting his guts out. Then, one thanksgiving morning, the wife rose very early and went downstairs to prepare the family feast. It was while she was taking out the turkey's innards that the wife had an idea. Smiling to herself, she put the turkey guts into a bowl and quietly went upstairs to the bedroom. Her flatulent husband was still fast asleep. Gently she pulled back the bed covers, then spread the turkey guts over the sheet, near her husband's posterior. She then replaced the bedclothes and tip-toed back downstairs to finish preparing the family meal.
Some time later the sound of flatulent explosions from upstairs told her that her husband had woken up. Moments later she heard a terrible scream, then the sound of frantic footsteps as her husband ran to the bathroom. The wife laughed aloud. After years of putting up with her husband's morning bombshells she had finally gotten her revenge. But she controlled her amusemant and went upstairs, calling to her husband to ask what was the matter. Muffled cries of 'Nothing, it's all right,' came from behind the bathroom door. Five minutes later, her husband emerged, a look of horrror in his eyes. The wife began to feel rather sorry for him, and again asked him what was wrong.
"I didn't listen to you," said the hiusband. "All those years you warned me and I didn't listen to you." "What do you mean?" said the wife, innocently. "Well you always told me that I would end up farting my guts out, and today it finally happened." The wife was about to put him out of his misery and admit to her prank, but her husband continued: "But by the grace of God and these two fingers, I think I got'em all back in."

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Coincidentally, my two most regular suppliers of links have sent me stories about toilets today.
Olympics crisis over squat loos

BBC NEWS- 19 Mar- China is rushing to install sit-down loos for its 500,000 foreign Olympics visitors, after complaints that venues had only Asian-style squat toilets. (via wee hayley campbell)

Noir Thriller Plays in Public Bathrooms

NEW YORK (AP) -19 Mar- For most visitors to Central Park, the public bathrooms are a facility of last resort, visited only in desperation after consuming one too many cups of coffee. They're dark and creepy, filled with spiders, foul odors and puddles of questionable origin.
But for Irish director and playwright Paul Walker, the damp, the chill and even the smell are all part of the experience - the theatergoing experience.
His prize-winning play, "Ladies & Gents," is a noir thriller performed entirely in the covered men's and women's bathrooms in Central Park's Bethesda Terrace.
The space is intimate, unpretentious and uncomfortable. Walker's previous site-specific plays involved busing bewildered patrons to an abandoned warehouse, and a play that meandered through all the rooms of Dublin's Sick and Indigent Roomkeepers Home... (via Bob Morales)

parenthood, oh joy!

I'm waiting for the call to go and get Wee Cal from the hospital. He has been in there since he broke his arm (third time) three days ago. At least he's in better shape than the laddie in the next bed, who took a notion to jump off the roof into the swimming pool but slipped.


That's me and Wee Cal as drawn by Holbein in the Praise of Folly. We are depicted at precisely the moment when the lad asked me to buy him his first skateboard. Note the artist's masterful stroke in showing the son standing firm, with legs apart while the father is caught somewhat off-balance with his feet misaligned. Notice also how Holbein depicts the father's hand going instinctively to protect his wallet.

A few more of the Holbein images from In Praise of Folly. The third one is on the subject of drunkenness. Someone, presumably not Holbein himself, has inscribed the artist's name above the drunken lout.




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Bavarian-born restaurant manager Reinhard Wurtz, who recently became an Australian citizen, broke the record for carrying one-litre steins of beer, when he carried 20 for 40 metres last night. (with photo)
(Thanks, Marcus Moore)

I'm one of the invited guests at the San Diego comic con in 2008. We hope to release The Amazing Remarkable Mr. Leotard at the event. We're still doing the final clean up on the book and arriving at a satisfactory cover. I personally was happy with the one before the one before the one we're on now.
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I should have said this in my glossary the other day:

Sequential art: Saying that "all sequential art is comics" is like saying the world is a suburb of Brooklyn; and saying it with a Brooklyn accent.

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Weekly gibberish dept.
pair these:
review: "The Fate of the Artist isn’t exactly autobiography... and it’s also not a graphic novel."

"Those graphic novelists are an argumentative lot. They can't agree what their books should be called. According to Eddie Campbell...

take that!
(That's another marginal drawing from yesterday's In Praise of Folly)
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And in case you think we've been getting too hafultin' here at campbell.blogspot:


(via Comics Comics, who have a College post-grad reading level)

In Praise of Folly

W hen the From Hell movie became a reality I treated myself to a couple of rare books. One is a facsimile of the Encomium Moriae (In Praise of Folly) of Erasmus of Rotterdam, a limited edition of 750 copies made in 1931 (mine is 546). It is of course a reproduction of the copy of the 1515 edition preserved in Basel in which the 18 year old Hans Holbein, later royal portrait painter to Henry VIII, was put to work by his scool master in filling the margins with tiny facetious drawings. The original text is a great work of humour, though I wouldn't recommend it to dim folks who imagine that humour must make the effort to come to them rather than the other way around, and can be found in translation (from the Latin) around the net. This one is perhaps a little too American in its phraseology, "I don't think much of those wiseacres..." but there are others.

It starts off with a satirical learned encomium after the manner of the Greek satirist Lucian, whose work Erasmus and Sir Thomas More had recently translated into Latin, a piece of virtuoso foolery; it then takes a darker tone in a series of orations, as Folly praises self-deception and madness and moves to a satirical examination of pious but superstitious abuses of Catholic doctrine and corrupt practices in parts of the Roman Catholic Church--to which Erasmus was ever faithful--and the folly of pedants (including Erasmus himself)...(wikipedia)

In Victorian times there was an edition of the book for which woodcuts were made after the Holbein marginals, but these have always looked ugly to my eyes. here are a couple of scans from the facsimile:
Folly mounts the pulpit.


In my favourite illustration from the book, his guy has been distracted by a pretty lady and steps in an old woman vendor's basket of bread loaves:



(note. step carefully. Wikipedia wrongly attributes the marginal illustrations to Holbein the Elder instead of the Younger)

‘Why doesn’t somebody take this goddam thing away from me?”

Continuing the Thurber theme here at Campbell blogspot, I’ve been reading Burton Bernstein‘s 1975 biography of the great man. There’s alway that dreary part at the beginning of the ‘life’ where you have to wade knee deep through a swamp of forebears. I find with this book that I’m not doing my usual speedy dash through the first chapter but relishing every detail:

Aunt Kate’s benign conventionality marked her as the odd one in the family, for her myriad Matheny and Taylor relatives wee a cast of certifiables. As Thurber read the roster, there were, for example: “Aunt Lou, who wrote poetry and believed that everything was for the best; Aunt Melissa, who knew the bible by heart and was convinced that Man’s day was done… Aunt fanny, plagued in her old age by recurring dreams in which she gave birth to Indian, Mexican, Chinese, and African twins…” and one of Thurber’s favorite Ohio creatures- “Aunt Florence, who once tried to fix a broken cream separator on her farm near Sugar Grove and suddenly cried, ‘Why doesn’t somebody take this goddam thing away from me?” then, too, there were the likes of Aunt Clemmens, a loony mystic who smelled dire conspiracy in such disparate phenomena as the sinking of the Titanic and the invention of electricity, and perhaps the queerest of the lot, Aunt Mary Van York, a wisp of a woman who survived till ninety-three mainly on a diet of an estimated two hundred thousand pipefuls of vicious Star plug chewing tobacco.

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I'm reminded of the song, Family Tree by Jake Thackray (seven verses with guitar tab):
Up my, my family tree
There hangs my curious pedigree,
My long, my lurid ancestry -
The prancing phantoms and ghosts
Of my rude forefathers.
Nevertheless, despite their sins,
Bless my kiths and bless my kins.
There they all perch to see
Up my, up my family tree.

Up my, my family tree,
No blue blood, no nobility;
No trace of aristocracy -
Except for Uncle Sebastian
Who once raped a duchess.
Nevertheless, despite their sins,
Bless my kiths and bless my kins.
There they perch for all to see
Up my, up my family tree.

whole website devoted to the late singer/songwriter

"the caboose was last seen heading onto the siding with the rest of the fond hopes."

The only 'comics' I have found worth reading in the last two or three weeks is the selection of Otto Soglow in the November Comics Journal #286. There are 37 colour sundays from 1933/34 with 5 pages of text intro. This is Otto Soglow's The Ambassador, a title and character used for contractual reasons until the much more famous Little King could be freed from The New Yorker's lease. I'm working through it a page or two at a time, rationing it. Every page gives me a laugh out loud, and it's good to have a couple to look forward to tomorrow. The Ambassador is a man of humble pleasures. After being shown around his lavish new estate he sneaks out to the back garden to paddle in the birdbath:


Update, to add. After I posted the above, my pal mr j sent me a couple of jpegs, being the cover and a page (on the subject of London fog- click to enlarge) from Soglow's 1939 book, Confidential History of Modern England


coincidentally, Allan Holtz just posted a photo with Soglow in it, nov 7
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In the same issue of the Comics Journal, R. Fiore: "Back in the '80s, when I was working for Fantagraphics, the great dream was that if comics could only break into the mainstream bookstores they would find themselves on a level playing field where the tastes of the CBG's ('Comic book guys' in his thesis, what I've been calling 'comic book culture') would not hold sway. While the front end of the dream came true, the caboose was last seen heading onto the siding with the rest of the fond hopes."

It's foolish of me to be wasting my time on the likes of the following, but it has become a morbid fascination. Comic books get literary treatment at library By MATT CASEY -- Evening Sun - 11/08/2007

Whether you call them comic books or graphic novels, it's not all about men in spandex. So the Dillsburg Area Public Library's winter session of lectures will teach you just that. Library director Jean Pelletiere said she's running this lecture series so she can find out what graphic novels are "all about." "I've just discovered that it's called a format, not a genre," she said.

Keep feeding that to the media, you idiots; comics still have much to contribute to the great dumbing down of culture.