"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.

Lat- been and gone.

Now here's a lovely story we almost missed because we were wrapped up in our own head:
Lat, The Kampung Boy, A Hit In Washington DC - BERNAMA- Maylaysian National News Agency.- Oct 24. - By Salmy Hashim

Lat, Malaysia's famous cartoonist, drew a crowd of Malaysian and American fans here Tuesday who could not get enough of his depiction of the simple life of a kampung boy in Kampung Lalang in Kota Baru, Perak. Datuk Mohammed Nor Khalid, better known as Lat, who is here to promote his Kampung Boy and Town Boy books published in English by the First Second, a publishing company in New York, talked about his simple childhood.
He talked about his "fierce" cane-wielding teacher at the "English Language" school, and how he thought that there were nine days of the week in English (including Yesterday and Everyday), his contributions on "Keluarga Si-Mamat" to Berita Minggu and his first cartoon book at age 13.
Lat earned as much as a clerk from his contributions to Berita Minggu, a huge amount then for a young boy, and did not forget to give his parents ten ringgit each every month. His father, who also loved to draw and play musical instruments, encouraged him to pursue his passion more than 40 years ago.

There's more at the link, but I particularly like the fact that "...his trip here was sponsored by Malaysia Airlines, Petronas and the Malaysian government.". I have always admired the way Lat is considered an important ambassador for his country and has often been enabled to travel widely. The first cartoons I ever saw of his were his reflections upon London and Paris. "I'm still drawing for (air)tickets," the cartoonist quipped.
He heads for Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York from Wednesday before returning to Malaysia on October 29.
The image is the cover of his 1989 album which wee hayley campbell found in London and sent over.

Kampung Boy and Town Boy both available from First Second in their first US editions and highly recommended by Campbell.
Our own interview with Lat is still here. It's in three parts, bottom up.

There's a more recent one here, sept 30, from the Malaysian Star, with a good photo of the cartoonist:

We hear The Simpsons’ creator Matt Groening is a fan.
When I was in LA working on The Kampung Boy, somebody told me that Matt Groening liked my cartoons. So I got in touch with him. He liked my work even before he did The Simpsons.

Lat is refering to an animated series of the Kampung Boy that was made in the States for distribution in Malaysia. Maybe someone will make it more widely available, though I cannot vouch for the quality of it.

And now that the chap is on his way home today, maybe I'll be able to get hold of our mutual editor, Mark Siegel, more readily.
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Five Positive Stories About Comics - Tom Spurgeon shames us into being a bit more cheerful.

When did you last see your tutor?

A couple of different things recently brought this book to mind, apart from reading that great interview with Posy Simmonds this week. Firstly, Bryan Talbot in what was very much his own version of the history of 'comics' recently in the Guardian, credited himself along with Raymond Briggs with introducing the 'graphic novel' to Britain in 1982. Even allowing for the existence of such a thing, that would of course be complete bollocks. Posy's True Love came out in 1981. I'm not putting up a different candidate for primacy, because you know I have no time for that race-to-the-patents-office mentality, but we can't let faulty facts end up in Wikipedia (Hell, it's already been in the Weekend Australian, and THEY gave him a four-year start).


The other thing that reminded me of this book was my argument over the last few days about the need to step outside of comicbook culture to view our subject ('that thing of ours'). You see, Posy is a good example of an artist who has worked entirely outside of that all her life (the reason indeed perhaps why she might be overlooked by Mr T, whose artistic ideas exist entirely within it). Her cartooning career started in 1969 (she'd have been twenty four) when she drew a regular panel cartoon titled Bear in the British newspaper The Sun. I can't find a single example of it online, but I think I just scored a copy of the 1969 book of the series (there was a second in 1975). More on that when it arrives. She went on to illustrate for the Guardian and started her series The Silent Three of St. Botolph's there in 1979. Later she did some great childrens books; her Lulu and The Flying Babies was a favourite around this house, and also the Famous Fred animated film, based on her book Fred, with Lenny Henry doing the voice. I had a lady friend in 1981, just before the book under discussion appeared, who followed Posy in the Guardian (as she checked in on Feiffer in the Observer Sunday magazine and Claire Bretecher in the Times Sunday magazine whenever those other papers fell within reach) who had no idea what the hell I was talking about when I showed her the cartoon novel I was working upon. She saw no possible connect between what Posy was doing and what I intended. I mention this to show how far outside of comic book culture Posy is and was. I thought my own thing (The King Canute Crowd) had no whiff of it whatsoever and I was anxious that it shouldn't. But there you go.


True Love, as I understand, was drawn specially as a story-book, as opposed to using material from the Guardian as her other two or three books around the time did, though it still used characters from the Silent Three. You can see the density of the work in the spread above, and also that it was printed in black, with one colour. The sequence you can glimpse that is predominantly pink is taking place in the memory of one of the characters.


The story is a satirical little piece about office girl Janice Brady who thinks the boss has an eye for her. Posy could, and still can, compose kinetic sequences as well as anybody in the strip biz.


I like the way she references other idioms, such as the boldly designed graphics of the soap opera strips. Sometimes the pseudo-heroine in these sequences looks deliberately badly drawn, somewhat crosseyed under a weight of mascara, as though Posy wants us to know that she is alluding to the idiom in its most ordinary generalisations rather than to the best it can offer;


Here she evokes a pastoral mood with delicate traceries of flexible pen:


A couple of pages where we lose sight of the characters:


And a pastiche of the painting by William Yeames, 'When did you last see your Father,' which was a subject of much hilarity with a certain generation in Britain, so that I was amused to find, quite late in the day, that my late and much missed Auntie Ella thought the original painting was intended as a joke.


My records show the book was published in hardback in Oct 1981, soft cover in '83 and has been gone since then. Worth noting is Posy's date on the pastiche, '1979', which appears quite late in the piece, so that we might assume she started it in '78 and it may even have preceded the start of the Silent Three in the Guardian. In other words, was she thinking of a book-length story before the self-contained, once-a -week version? Somebody should ask her about that one day.

In a better world, you'd read my affectionate recollection and immediately go out and buy a copy.

"But let me caution experimenters and would-be shitheads"

This is a passage from the second page. it's probably worth noting that the book was released in 1971.

We started everything young in the hills of southern New Mexico: smoking at ten, hunting at eleven, driving at twelve, drinking at fourteen, and if you were a virgin at sixteen you didn't admit it. As for me, I started inhaling at ten, but in every other respects pretty well followed the norm, including being a virgin at sixteen and denying it. We even had pot. A coarse grade of it proliferated as a local weed, along with skunk cabbage, morning glories and stinging nettle. personally, I shied away from marijuana, having been convinced by the Reader's Digest and other medical authorities that the stuff wa saddictive and would lead straight to hard drugs such as heroin, which was not indigenous and would cost money- a rare item among farm and ranch kids in the eraly thirties. (Once I concocted a sort of reefer, using coffee grounds, dried horse manure, and it gave intersting sensations: lightheadedness, nausea and a touch of magalomania. But let me caution experimenters and would-be shit-heads- there is no other possible word for it- that our horses ate mostly alfalfa hay and that thier offerings lay baking for weeks under a dry Southwestern sun. Satisfaction is likely to be less than complete in other climates.

© Bill Mauldin. 1971

SKIPPY

A bhay Khosla writes a Short Historical Piece about the cartoonist Percy Crosby and his creation, Skippy.- Monday, October 01, 2007. he gives links to online samples of Crosby's artwork, and he finishes: You can find out more about Skippy at the Skippy website. You can also read about the never-ending legal battle between Crosby and the owners of Skippy peanut butter at that website; Crosby's daughter has fought it for more than three decades. You might also enjoy the Filboid Studge blog entry on the topic as it includes examples of Crosby's work (which I would say is quite nice). Of course, Don Markstein's Toonopedia is an invaluable resource. And there's a book out there supposedly-- Jerry Robinson's Skippy and Percy Crosby.
I immediately take down from the shelf my copy of the Robinson book, published by Holt, Rhinehart and Winston in 1978, which I found only recently through excellent book trader Stuart Ng, and find this passage that left me stunned when I first read it:

"I was all alone here on Christmas Eve in 1949-- my first Christmas of confinement, and the hideous aspect of it all is too terrible to relate." Crosby wrote in a memoir. His sudden and stunning ruin left him bewildered and almost smothered his spirit. "I began to take myself apart wondering how everything had gone wrong." But within months he was writing Carolyn of plans for the future. He was eager to resume his career, and most of all to finish several novels. He clearly anticipated a complete recovery and an early release. Soon he found to his dismay that a mental institution was much like communism: "It was easy to get into the place, but getting out was similar to running a race through a briared garden maze." This time the maze had no exit.
Percy Crosby was diagnosed "paranoid schizophrenic." A later report described him as being forever litigious and expressing delusional trends involving high government officials. Crosby's litany of persecutors included President Franklin D Roosevelt, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and J Edgar Hoover, The Internal Revenue Service, Al Capone and other racketeers, and Skippy peanut butter, among others. ("The steal of Skippy peanut butter," as Crosby termed it, became one of his most obsessive complaints. For years he had been in litigation with the manufacturer, claiming infringement of the Skippy trademark, registered by Crosby on march 15, 1923.) Such seemingly wild and bizarre postulations, coupled with his suicide attempt, led to the diagnosis.
Tragic questions remain unanswered about Crosby's years at King's Park. There is reason to believe that today Crosby would either not be committed, or at least would not be confined for sixteen years. In retrospect, there is a question about the correctness of his diagnosis. This involves, in part, a judgment as to the extent that his 'delusions' correspond to reality. An investigation would have established that some of his fears-- surveillance by the FBI, the IRS campaign, Skippy peanut butter, had some substance. In the light of what is known in the 1970s about actions taken by J Edgar Hoover and the FBI in the surveillance, ilegal wiretapping, violation of postal laws, and other measures directed toward what they percieved as 'enemies of the state,' it is not unreasonable to speculate that Crosby's "threats" in the Washington papers might have earned such attention from Hoover. certainly, Crosby's fears would not now be so readily described as paranoia as they were then.

"For pieces of silver I dressed her sweet confidences in the frills of folly and made them dance in the marketplace."(Fate 4)

H ere's a final look at the black and white version of Fate of the Artist. My adaptation of the O. Henry story, The Confessions of a Humorist (Ainslee's magazine, Oct 1903), that concludes the book was in place in the original submission.

The wife of my bosom likes to quote lines from that story. If she catches me listening intently to somebody telling me an anecdote she'll say: "Watch out, he's a literary Judas. He'll kiss you and betray you." The world remembers O.Henry for the twist endings to his short stories. It tends to forget how polished and memorable his prose was. I became particularly fond of the author during the early days of my Bacchus when I named a story "The Rubaiyat of a cheap plonk', a title far too close in form to Henry's 'The Rubaiyat of a scotch highball'. The similarity ended there, but I was smitten by the man's way of putting things:

This document is intended to strike somewhere between a temperance lecture and the 'Bartender's Guide." Relative to the latter, drink shall swell the theme and be set forth in abundance. Agreeably to the former, not an elbow shall be crooked.
Bob Babbit was "off the stuff." Which means- as you will discover by referring to the unabridged dictionary of Bohemia- that he had "cut out the booze," that he was "on the water wagon." The reason for Bob's sudden attitude of hostility toward the "demon rum"- as the white ribboners miscall whiskey (see the "Bartender's Guide") should be of interest to reformers and saloon keepers. (NY World, Feb 25 1906)

Naturally I had to own a 'complete' O. Henry, with all the details about where each and every story was published. That's it up there sporting the well known John Sloan 1912 painting of McSorley's bar in NY, which if I remember correctly still looks a lot like the painting. (Chris Staros and Judith Hansen perhaps had their minds more on practical matters than I did that day) (or any day for that matter).
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I awoke the smorning with the hint of a bad case of eyestrain building up, and then I read this telling me that we will never have time to read all the books we want to read:
Read the introduction to How To Read a Novel: A User's Guide by John Sutherland-August 07-Guardian.

I would wager that, for English Language readers, 2006-7 was also the richest-ever year for fiction. And, for a certainty, 2008 will be even richer. This is not merely a function of ever more new novels as the fact that - unlike other products - old novels do not disappear once consumed. Like old soldiers, they never fade away. The must-read archive gets bigger and bigger. Bestseller lists used to contain ten titles. Now it's up to a hundred. It's like a mountain which grows faster than any reader can climb. How to be well-read in the 21st century? Can one be well-read?
As the sad witness of lottery winners testifies, vast wealth seldom makes life easier. We are, as regards the range, quality, and sheer number of novels available to us in 2007, better off than all generations before us. "Embarrassment" is inadequate to describe the dilemmas this unprecedented richness poses. It is not (as it was in my youth) disposable cash which defines the dilemma as available time. We live longer than they did but even if we lasted as long as Swift's Struldbrugs the reader's eye would never catch up with the writer's hand.

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'Watchmen' Cast's Watchwoman Revealed: Carla Gugino To Play Silk Spectre: Zack Snyder's adaptation of classic graphic novel begins filming in the fall for March release.-Aug 8
Gugino will play Sally during all her varying ages throughout the film, as Snyder has indicated in the past that he will be using "aging" and "de-aging" technology rather than casting different actors.
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Interesting story for people who collect stuff
(thanks, dan)

"That's what I call a whoppin' big rabbit!"

F or some time we thought we had lost this, but I came across it yesterday while looking for something else. Bill Peet was a an author of twenty-eight Kids' books whom I had never heard of until I had kids of my own. He was Disney's top story man for many years and the Jungle Book (1967) was the last thing he worked on there (greatest Disney movie ever in my humble. They're still discussing it as of yesterday at imdb). Peet is another one of those people who has died since i last went looking for him, in 2002. There's a website dedicated to him and on it you'll find a bunch of interesting things including his drawing of himself as a young chap presenting a storyboard to Disney himself. There are a couple of good photos on that page too.
Huge Harold was first published in 1964. Harold is a rabbit who grows too big to be a rabbit and has to leave home and find his way in the world. Like many of Peet's books it's written in this rhyming couplet thing he had going:

Harold was spotted by Orville B. Croft,
Who heard some loud snoring way up in his loft.
"Well now," he said, "Doggone and dagnabit!
That's what I call a whoppin' big rabbit!"
Then all at once he heard someone shout
And he opened a window and poked his head out.

Peet's style was jaunty and loose. There's a page on the right with Harold hiding in a tree;
Harold ends up pulling buggies in those races they have in the US.

They looked up the rules but they couldn't find one
That said, "It's not fair for a rabbit to run."
So he ran in the race and won going away
And became a champion trotter that day.

Here is a page about the book including Peet's comments and preparatory sketches.

We have a couple of Peet's other books here but our money was always on the rabbit.
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I don't think this article tells us anything we can't figure out for ourselves, but it's covering ground I have occasionally trod upon here (see 'new books' in the sidebar):
Young writers with alternative storytelling techniques are quickly becoming today's literary . . . Transformers-By Brandon Griggs -The Salt lake Tribune- 07/09/2007
Such experimentation in content and form is showing up increasingly in recent fiction by authors in their 20s and 30s. This new breed of writers, looking for fresh ways to construct narratives, think nothing of breaking up prose with graphics, maps and comic strips. They vary their font sizes, add extensive footnotes, format their text into strange shapes on the page. Sometimes they even run the text upside down.
(link via Tom Spurgeon)

"...like hippopotamuses in a beer vat."

T here was a time when I used the State Reference Library, a non-lending facility, a great deal, before they closed it for refurbishment and I came to depend on the internet for my research. They probably just wanted to increase their internet access and add a few dozen extra monitors anyway. I would always arrive there without notepaper, and the solution to that difficulty was simply to pull discarded photocopies from the wastebasket and use the backs of them. Occasionally I would like what was on the front and take them home and file them. In this way I came across a small stack of papers on the front of which I scribbled 'Boxing' and filed it on my bookshelf as a placeholder until the actual book from which the pages were photocopied should one day come into my possession. That was around twelve years ago and the pages are now quite yellowed around the edges and have become in themselves a kind of book in my imagination, or at least a bookish object. They are from A.J. Liebling's The Sweet Science
A. J. Liebling (1904–63) was a longtime contributor and columnist for the New Yorker. He wrote The Sweet Science and nineteen other books of nonfiction, including Mollie and Other War Pieces... (frrom book description at Amazon.com)
It's not a hard-to-find book by any means, and I know I'll one day sit down with it. There's something about the best of old-time sports writing that has always appealed to me. As one of the customer reviewers at that Amazon link writes:
...this book is a window into an different world, the age just before television took hold, when many people still took their amusement outside their homes.
In the same location, reviewer John Y. Liu writes:
Sportswriting is generally shlock. But A.J. Liebling was no sportswriter. Perhaps the finest reporter ever, certainly one of The New Yorker's shining lights, Liebling wrote with equal grace on the swaggering cons of Broadway, his misspent youth in pre-war Paris, blood pooled in a landing craft off Omaha Beach, just about anything that caught his sharp eye and florid pen. And because Liebling wrote what he loved, he also wrote boxing. Whether he was at an obscure club fight or a marquee bout, Liebling never saw his subjects as muscled automata. His boxers were people, every fight a story, and the stories collected in the Sweet Science form a classic work of sport that no cigar-chewing sports hack ever tossed on a wire.
Another reviewer, artanis65:
The whimsical quality of some of his writing is apparent in the following excerpt, when he's describing how putting sparring partners on the preliminary card makes for bad fights: "Sparring partners are endowed with habitual consideration and forbearance, and they find it hard to change character. A kind of guild fellowship holds them together, and they pepper each other's elbows with merry abandon, grunting with pleasure like hippopotamuses in a beer vat." That's great writing.
In The Sweet Science Liebling saw himself extending Pierce Egan's Boxiana, that monument to the sport in its early days. Egan was an early 19th century writer whose madcap prose I celebrated here on 28th March
There follows a passage from those yellowing pages on my shelf, being from the introduction to the book:
Egan's pageant scenes of trulls and lushes, toffs and toddlers, all setting off for some great public, illegal prizefight, are written Rowlandson, just as Rowlandson's print of the great second fight between Cribb and Molineaux is graphic Egan. In the foreground of the picture there is a whore sitting on her gentleman's shoulders the better to see the fight, while a pickpocket lifts the gentleman's reader (watch). Cribb has just hit Molineaux the floorer, and Molineaux is falling, as he has continued to do for a hundred and forty-five years since. He hasn't hit the floor yet, but every time I look at the picture I expect to see him land. On the horizon are the delicate green hills and the pale blue English sky, hand-tinted by old drunks recruited in kip-shops (flophouses). The prints cost a shilling colored. When I look at my copy I can smell the crowd and the wildflowers.
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JUST RELEASED THIS WEEK!
Playboy's Silverstein Around the World by Shel Silverstein.
Displaying the wit and marvelous drawings that made Shel Silverstein one of the most beloved artists of the century, Playboy's Silverstein Around the World collects and reproduces the twenty-three travel pieces Silverstein created for Playboy between 1957 and 1968.
While children and adults alike know Shel Silverstein for his classic books The Giving Tree, A Light in the Attic, and Where the Sidewalk Ends, they may be less aware that Silverstein also created a dazzling series of illustrated comic travelogues published by Hugh M. Hefner in Playboy.
Thanks for link to mr j, who also mentions: "Shel of course is also the writer of such songs as-
Unicorn- performed by the Irish Rovers
Cover of the Rolling Stone- performed by dr hook
A Boy Named Sue- performed by Johnny Cash"

Update. mr j off work. Spends day finding Silverstein on youtube
Meryl Streep singing "i'm checking out" from postcards from the edge.
Marianne Faihfull singing "ballad of lucy jordan"

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THAT DAMN BLOGGER! Every time they improve the system, something that I've taken for granted for the last six months now doesn't work any more. For almost a week now I cannot preview these posts. The first I see of it that isn't HTML gobbledygook is when I publish it. Then I have to pull it down a half dozen times until it's fixed. It's something that's affecting Safari and mac. So if You're seeing this in a syndicated feed, it probably still needs fixin'. You should just link straight here. You're missing a whole lot of sidebar jollies and god knows what else.
Bloody internet.
Better still, give me a call and meet me up the pub.
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My Rudolph Toeppfer books from the Blithering Idiots were shipped on 9th April and still haven't got here. I ordered another lot from Amazon on 19 may and they got here today. Beautiful books. You'll be hearing more from me.
*****
In other news:
In an experiment to see what people will take if it is offered at no charge, a free computer virus was put up for grabs and so far 409 people have clicked on it. Helsinki (Reuters)

"... proud-pied April dre∫∫'d in all hi∫ trim."*

O ld Books department again. The Folio Society of London's 1971 edition of Sebastian Brant's immortal Ship of Foolsof 1494. Translation from the German by William Gillis. Not an expensive object by any means (I googled it and this site has it for 32 bucks and shows the same page that I do. I'd have picked another if I'd known). 115 woodcuts , some eighty of them by a young journeyman Albrecht Durer, but not the one shown here. That one is a picture of me.

1. Of useless books

That I'm the first one to embark,
It means I've made a special mark.
The reason is, as one discovers,
My wisdom's bound in leather covers;
Though I can barely read a word,
I have of books amassed a horde;
Revering them each day I just
Keep volumes free of flies and dust.
When talk of erudition falls,
I say, 'my learning lines the walls.
For my delight it's quite enough
that I own heaps of printed stuff!'



(*heading is from the Bard's sonnet 98.)

"Oh, to be a movie star!"

Jules Feiffer's Passionella, 1959, is the book above all others that put the idea in my head that the longform comic strip should become the art of our times. The fact that others chose models of lesser distinction explains why it did not become so.
"The story "Passionella" first appeared in Pageant, but was completely revised and redrawn for this book."
So it says in the indicia. It's fifty pages long. The other stories are "Munro", about a four year old boy who is accidentally drafted. It's about the same length, then there's "George's Moon" and "Boom."

I first came across Feiffer in Time-Life's book of the century in the public library, the volume for the fifties, where he was aligned with Mort Sahl, Shelly Berman, Elaine May, Mike Nichols, and Bob Newhart as part of 'the new humor'. I may have been fourteen or fifteen at the time ('69-70). I hand-copied the two Feiffer half-page strips in there. Not in order to learn something, just so I could keep them. I didn't know about photcopiers yet. From a few yards away you'd swear they actually were photocopies. I still have those drawings, but can't lay my hand on them. I'll reintroduce the subject when they turn up.
Passionella had an interesting history outside of the book itself, finding itself adapted to the Broadway musical stage:
"The Apple Tree is a series of three musical playlets with music by Jerry Bock, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, ( who together also wrote Fiddler on the Roof). Each act has its own storyline, but all three are tied together by common musical themes and references, such as references to the color brown.
The first act is based on Mark Twain's The Diary of Adam and Eve; the second act is based on Frank R. Stockton's The Lady or the Tiger? (and has the same ambiguous ending). The third act, based on Jules Feiffer's Passionella, arguably has the most entertaining songs, notably “Oh, to Be a Movie Star.”
The musical opened on October 18, 1966, at the Shubert Theatre in New York, and ran for 463 performances, closing on November 25, 1967. It was produced by Stuart Ostrow, directed by Mike Nichols, and starred Barbara Harris, Alan Alda, and Larry Blyden. Harris won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical." (lifted from Wikipedia, under The Apple Tree)



The Passionella story itself is currently available in Fantagraphics' fourth volume of their projected complete Feiffer where it apppears alongside assorted other stories which i do not have but i have no doubt will be worth having.

"BOB got a stinker, and poor I received a chancery-suit upon the nob."

While I'm waiting for an advance copy of my new book to arrive (two weeks in the mail from New York already- methinks it is lost), here's a look inside the oldest book I possess, Pierce Egan's Life in London, printed in 1822.
Any attraction for the modern reader is usually considered to lie in the thirty-six aquatints by the Cruickshank brothers, George and Robert, all hand watercolored from a model sheet, as was the custom in the trade, by a shopful of women. But I also have a fondness for Egan's prose, and I'll quote a bunch of it in a minute. The story concerns the characters Jerry Hawthorne and Corinthian Tom, with their pal Bob Logic. I think this is the first pairing of the names 'Tom and Jerry'. I came across them in a later era as the name of a cocktail in a Damon Runyon story (*see below), and in that instance it may have been named for these characters as they were very popular for a spell. The text appears to have been 'wrtten up' to the pictures, which was either standard for the time, or became so afterwards, so that Dickens had to go to some trouble to change the pattern. Egan's prose is full of sporting slang, indeed that seems to be its entire purpose. And at that time 'sporting ' had more to do with 'swells' slumming in a low-life milieu than with feats of athleticism. Egan had previously put out BOXIANA, a valuable history of the sport in those days. There's an excerpt from it here: BOXING MATCH - 1801 (from Pierce Egan's Boxiana, published in 1812)
Here then, one of the Cruikshank prints (with a zoom further down) and the text that accompanied it. I've gone to some effort to keep the peculiarities of Egan's madcap typesetting (a real pain in the arse in HTML). Whether it was peculiar to him, or to sports coverage, or a range of assorted printed texts I do not know.


**(LIFE IN LONDON page 276)
A large kettle, boiling at the spout, was speedily introduced, but instead of water, read boiling Daffy. The assumed gravity of BOB’s mug, upon playing off this trick, was quite a treat; but I am happy to say Crooky booked it. “Come, gents,” said BOB, “please yourselves, here is plenty of water, now mix away.” It had the desired effect. The glass was pushed about so quickly that the “First of the Month” was soon forgotten, and we kept it up till very long after the REGULARS had been tucked up in their dabs, and only the Roosters and the “Peep o’ Day Boys” were out on the prowl for a spree. At length a move was made, but not a rattler was to be had. Bob and the party, chaffing, proposed to see the Author safe to his sky-parlour. The boys were primed for any thing. Upon turning the corner of Sydney’s Alley, into Leicester–Fields, we were assailed by some troublesome customers, and a turn up was the result, (as the Plate most accurately represents.) BOB got a stinker, and poor I received a chancery-suit upon the nob.

(note. That's Tom Hawthorne in the zoom, the author, Egan off to the left in the full view-eddie)
How I reached the upper story, I know not; but, on waking, late in the day, I found my pocket book was absent--without leave. I was in great grief at this loss, not on account of the blunt it contained,--much worse-- the notes in it were dearer than gold to me. The account of JERRY'S introduction to the Marchioness of Diamonds, the Duchess of Hearts, Lady Wanton, Dick Trifle, Bill Dash, &c. &c. on his first appearance in Rotten Row with the CORINTHIAN, booked on the spot. I was in a complete funk. I immediately went to sartain persons, and communicated my loss; how, where and when; and I was consoled, that, if it were safe, PIERCE EGAN should have it. Day after day passed, and no account of it:-- I gave it up for lost, and scratched my moppery, again, and again, but could not recollect, accurately, the substance of my notes. I was sorry for myself;-- I was sorry for the public. However, on Friday morning last, taking a turn into Paternoster Row, my friend JONES, smiling, said he had got the BOOK; --as he is fond of a bit of a gig, I thought he was in fun,-- but, on handing it over to me, with the following letter, my peepers twinkled again with delight.

To the care of Mr Jones, for P. EGAN
Sir,-- You see as how I have sent that are Litter Pocket Book, which so much row has been kicked up about amongst us. Vy it ain’t vorth a single tonic. Whose to understand it? Vy its full of pot-hooks and hangers- and not a screen in it. You are determined nobody shall nose your idears. If your name had not been chaunted in it, it would have been dinged into the dunagan. But remember, no conking.
From Yours, &c
TIM HUSTLE.

APOLOGY
In consequence of BOB LOGIC’S Daffy, only one sheet of Letter Press accompanies the Plates of No. 5; but to make up for this unavoidable deficiency, THREE SHEETS of Letter Press will be given with No 6.
**

(A footnote, not shown, helps us to grasp that Egan's notebook was written in shorthand- 'hooks and hangers')
The last part is interesting from the point of view of figuring out how this stuff was originally serialized. The only notes I've seen on the original running order of the prints are difficult to correlate with the order in the book. The fact that it was left in the collected edition does suggest that the book consists of the parts simply bound to gether, but I've looked at it every which way and I can't get it to work.

(* the cocktail. before publishing this i did a quick google check--amazing what you can get hold of in an instant these days.)
Dancing Dan's Christmas by Damon Runyan (1931?)
"Naturally we start boosting hot Tom and Jerry to Dancing Dan, and he says he will take a crack at it with us, and after one crack, Dancing Dan says he will have another crack, and Merry Christmas to us with it, and the first thing anybody knows it is a couple of hours later and we still are still having cracks at the hot Tom and Jerry with Dancing Dan, and Dan says he never drinks anything so soothing in his life. In fact, Dancing Dan says he will recommend Tom and Jerry to everybody he knows, only he does not know anybody good enough for Tom and Jerry, except maybe Miss Muriel O'Neill, and she does not drink anything with drugstore rye in it."

Wikipedia entry says Egan devised the cocktail as a publicity spin-off.

And obviously, the cartoon cat and mouse are named after the cocktail. Voila! (theirs is the richest Wikipdeia entry I've seen for anything so far).

That leaves one other matter to account for. The linguistic pitting of Tommy (the British soldier) against Gerry (the German) in World War 1 is coincidental and comes by a different route altogether, which is no less curious and interesting.

*****

in other news, Dog-sized toad found in Australia
By Phil Mercer --BBC News, Sydney
"Toadzilla is the biggest cane toad ever found in Australia's Northern Territory and weighs just under two pounds, according to an environmental group. Environmentalists have been trying to stop the spread of the poisonous creatures across the country's tropics..."

"Just these insipid portraits of clowns, all signed very large, "Bob Kane."*

*Mark Evanier recounts great anecdote about Bob Kane's paintings as told by the late Arnold Drake
*****
Campbell is resting his brain. Here is another passage from Walter James, one of my favourite writers:
"Often enough in my adventures among wines I have found myself with a mouth full of thoroughly unpalatable liquor, and often too in company where there was nothing to be done but swallow it. But these little worries have been quite unsought; they have rarely been embraced in the cause of Science or of its mother Curiosity; I cannot claim a place at the same table with such men as, for instance, Mr Wyld and Mr Greatorex who went into St Paul's after the great fire of London and came across the broken lead coffin of a famous dean who had died a century and a half before. They found the coffin in the shape of a pie and filled with 'a liquor which conserved the body.' This the two gentlemen blandly sampled, finding it somewhat insipid, with a slight taste of iron. The body itself felt, 'to the probe of a stick which they thrust into a chinke, like boyld brawne.'
Yes, they were hardy in those days, there's no doubt of that. Thomas Willis, a doctor who practised in London about the same time as the curious visitors to St paul's, is remembered as the first physician to observe sugar in the urine of diabetics. And, it is on record, the test which he used to detect sugar was the test of the palate. With what 'eclat would he have performed the function of wine-taster at certain Australian vineyards.
It is on a not dissimilar note that one more Londoner, Mr S F Hallgarten, in the course of a recent treatise on German hocks, describes a certain defect in the wine. "Mauseln, or the smell of mouse urine," he says, "is a recognisable smell and taste, which remains suspended on the palate." Now, just what does Mr Hallgarten mean by that "recognisable" smell and taste? Has he really laboured in the cause of drinkers with the same devotion as Dr. Willis in the cause of diabetics? Or is he drawing upon other men's records, as he is earlier in his book when he makes the startling assertion that "Asparagus, the recognised king of all vegetables, was cultivated thousands of years ago by the Egyptians and has lost none of its flavour in the course of time."

That's from The Gadding Vine, 1955. James prefaces the book with this:
"The Portugese Ferdinand Mendez Pinto when in 1558 he settled down after many years of wandering, wrote an account of his life and observations which he called the Perigrinacam. but nowhere could he find a publisher. Wishing that at least a few souls might be improved by his story, he bequeathed the manuscript to the governor of an institution for fallen women, stipulating that it should be read to the inmates."

*******
have a good Sunday.

"The sap's got hot pants for that judy."

Talking of reading the other day reminded me of one of my favourite all-time authors, a man long out of print and probably unknown to all my readers here. I picked him up in the first place when I was writing Doing the Islands with Bacchus, and the work is so saturated with his influence that I can't reread my own book now with exprienceing a warm recall of the time spent reading Walter James (biog details hard to come by. guessing ca 1907-ca 1980). He was an Australian wine maker who wrote several volumes of diaristic thoughts on just about everything, but mostly about winemaking and his enthusiasm for reading. They were published between 1949 (Barrel and Book,) and 1957 (Antipasto) and amounted to six volumes, of which I've managed to find four. The first passage here refers to what I was writing about on march 10; there isn't enough time to read all I want to read.

“HOW SHAMEFULLY DULLWITTED other men’s memoirs make me feel. Quiller-Couch says in Memories and Opinions that at seven or eight years he was reading Greek, but in old age he regrets that “real scholarship” he “had never reached, but chased after with envy.” And here I am over forty and my sons both over “seven or eight” and none of us has a word of Greek beyond, in my own case, the names of one or two resin-flavoured liqueurs. I know most of the Greek authors in translation and I know the best of the translations, and that is as far as it is likely to go with me. However, learning is mostly a matter of relativity: few of the folk hereabouts have even heard of the translations. This reflection gives me a pleasant feeling of warmth in the pit of the stomach. I experience that voluptuous complacency which tickles us with the idea that we know something.”

Oh to have written a sentence like that last one. Some time later we find him sitting up reading a cheap crime thriller. This is apposite bacause I have just heard that the first printed copies of my new book, The Black Diamond Detective Agency have arrived at the publisher's office, and I will want to talk about crime fiction before it gets out into the stores in a couple of months from now.

“SOME TALK IN PARLIAMENT of banning the film version of “No Orchids for Miss Blandish” so I made a call on the circulating library; threatened books are usually worth reading and this one certainly is. It kept me awake till two o’clock this morning and that is more than the English poets could do. It is the usual stuff about the kidnapping of the meat king’s lovely daughter by rude gangsters one of whom falls for her. Everyone is rodded-up (armed with revolvers) and there is a lot of slaughter. The gunmen are rubbed out by the feds and the lovely daughter takes a rocker from a hotel window because she feels too soiled to go home. It is all very moral.
The joy of the book is its English. The sap’s got hot pants for that judy (the ingenuous gentleman is in love with that young lady;) I gave the Tribune the bum’s rush (I gave up my employment with the Tribune); you’re strung for a sucker (you are a simpleton); the guy’s taken a run-out powder on ya girlie (the gentleman has transferred his affections); I’m getting ya outta a jam (assisting you from a contretemps); Aw nerts! (You are talking nonsense); we’ll be fried (electrocuted) for this; ya gotta snap outta it girlie (you must cease idling, young woman). The people who used these phrases before the feds rodded them were not altogether scamps; they had some nice ways. For instance, whenever the arch-villain wanted a smoke “He gave himself a cigarette.”

One last then I must get back to the drawing board:

"A pretty woman who came to dinner last night gave me two packets of seeds—one of angelica and one of lovage. 'I don’t expect they’ll grow,' she remarked; 'I bought them purely for the sake of their names.' How pleasant it is to meet people as feckless as oneself!”

The hyphen in Antarctic

Here is a passage from a precious artifact on the Campbell bookshelf, Ten Ever Lovin' Blue eyed Years with Pogo. I believe it's a reprint circa 1970 of the 1959 book. Whenever I take it down for a browse I always want to kick my own arse for letting it get damaged along the page edges while in my suitcase a few years back, but then I start reading and forget all about that. Life is too short.
Walt Kelly telling an anecdote as only Walt Kelly could:
"I recall one time having trouble with the hyphen in “Antarctic.” I was bucking a deadline with a political cartoon that had a lot of snow in it. (It’s easy to draw snow fast as long as it is not falling snow. Always draw snow already fallen and leave it lay there. Don’t mess around with it. Beautiful white space in a drawing is a joy to the eye and saves time.) the drawing needed the word “Antarctic.” Now, “Arctic” and “Antarctic are two target words, so to speak. You remember that there is a “c” after the “r” and you sort of spell around the “c.” It’s like firing at the fence and drawing the target around the bullet hole. Well, on this day I made the “c” all right, but as I worked outward from that point, my thoughts on the drawing, on the deadline, on lunch, I discovered that I was putting a hyphen between the first “t” and the following “a.”
A cartoonist gets preoccupied and loses track. Spelling and drawing all at once are like marriage, like tap dancing while playing the piano, like Dr Johnson’s dog that walked on its hind legs. The job is not done well, but it is a miracle that it is done at all. There might be justification for this hyphen. Off I went to the dictionary- sure enough, no hyphen. Back to the drawing board. Erase the whole thing. Carefully reletter it, by now so upset that I go right past the target “c” like a hot-rod past a red light."
**********

What made me think of the above was a mistake I made a couple of days back in referring to Thomas Hampson as a 'tenor' instead of a 'baritone'. My mind was clearly on the larger issue of coming in at the end of my post with a satisfying punchline. Obviously such a detail would only be of real significance to folk who were looking for a singer to take a part or play a role, and for the rest of us one term or the other suffices to indicate the musical idiom that is being referred to. Hampson thinks a great deal about the subject of the artist and his position in both the world and the continuum of art and culture and I enjoyed this archived 1991 interview.

labels

I did some house cleaning and filing in the middle of the night on account of I got up to relieve a cramp in my foot and all the jumping up and down thoroughly woke me up. So should you wish to do some backtracking and find out, say, where the hell 'thanks for roning' comes from, here at Campbell blogspot we now have LABELS, including but not limited to these:

Judging a book by another book's cover.

I have three pieces of Shakespeare that have accumulated in a file on my desktop. They are not by the bard himself, but humorous cover versions if you like, as written by the slangmeisters of 80/90 years ago. I'm not making any connection between them or placing them in a larger context. They are simply here. First is a rendition of Romeo and Juliet in an excerpt from The Sentimental Bloke by C J Dennis, the Australian versifier. The 1916 publication of The Sentimental Bloke sold 65,000 copies in its first year, and by 1917 Dennis was 'the most prosperous poet in Australian history'. Prosperous poet!!? That was another age altogether, what? Long narrative ballad poems were once the rage, in the days when Casey first struck out. In this sequence the Bloke is describing a performance of Romeo nad Juliet to his girl friend, Doreen. The copy I have has a 1950s style cover that is not unattractive, but this needs a period feel, so I'm illustrating this with a cover from a different book, Edward Dyson's Fact'ry 'Ands from 1920, which is much more in tune with the proceedings, with a cover by his brother the great cartoonist Will Dyson.

"Then Romeo, ‘e dunno wot to do,
The cops gits busy, like they alwiz do,
An’ nose around until ‘e gets blue funk
An’ does a bunk.
They want ‘is tart to wed some other guy.
Ah, strike! She sez. ‘I wish that I could die!’

Now, this ‘ere gorspil bloke’s a fair shrewd ‘ead.
Sez ‘e ‘I’ll dope yeh, so they’ll think yer dead.
(I tips ‘e was a cunnin’ sort, wot knoo
A thing or two.)
She takes ‘is knock-out drops, up in ‘er room:
They think she’s snuffed, an’ plant ‘er in ‘er tomb.

Then things gits mixed a treat an’ starts to whirl
‘Ere’s Romeo comes back an’ find ‘is girl
Tucked in ‘er little coffing, cold an’ stiff.
An’ in a jiff.
‘E swallows lysol, throws a fancy fit,
‘Ead over turkey, an’ ‘is soul ‘as flit.

Then Juli-et wakes up an’ sees ‘im there,
Turns on the water-works an’ tears ‘er ‘air,
‘Dear love,’ she sez, “I cannot live alone!’
An wiv a moan. She grabs ‘is pockit knife. An ends ‘er cares…
’Peanuts or lollies!’ sez a boy upstairs."

* * * *
"archy and mehitabel," By Don Marquis, first appeared 1916 in the New York Evening Sun. pete the parrot and shakespeare, whence comes my excerpt, is a later entry in the series, I believe from 1927. I have a Faber edition from 1967 with no illustrations or picture on the cover, so I'm scanning this other edition's cover with illo by the great George Herriman from the booklet of a Herriman exhibition in Angouleme in 1997 (very nice if you can find a copy). archie, as you know, is a cockroach who jumps around on the typewriter but can't get to the shift key. bill is Wm Shakespeare

"well says frankie beaumont
why don t you cut it bill
i can t says bill
i need the money i ve got
a family to support down in
the country well says frankie
anyhow you write pretty good
plays bill any mutt can write
plays for this london public
says bill if he puts enough
murder in them what they want
is kings talking like kings
never had sense enough to talk
and stabbings and stranglings
and fat men making love
and clowns basting each
other with clubs and cheap puns
and off color allusions to all
the smut of the day oh i know
what the low brows want
and i give it to them"

* * * *
Finally, an excerpt from Julius Ceasar according to Milt Gross. His schtick, when he wasn't drawing sunday funnies, 'was to retell familiar stories in the Yiddish-influenced dialect of first- and second-generation urban Jews'. I don't know from where this comes, as I found it here thanks to David Kathman, so I'm illustrating it with the cover of another of Milt's books, Dunt Esk!!, from 1927, which I am very pleasd to own thanks to my pal mr j.

How It Got Bomped Huff Julius Sizzer
Pot Two
-------
Sootsayer: "Bewerr from de Hides from Motch, Sizzer!!"

Sizzer: "Why I should bewerr from de Hides from Motch??"

Sootsayer: "It stends in de Crystal Ball signs you should bewerr from de Hides from Motch!"

Sizzer: "Noo, it stends ulso in de sobway signs I should dreenk Cula-Cola!! Is dees a criterion?? Hm -- geeve a look a whole mob -- Hey wot you teenk diss is, boyiss? De Kenel Stritt sobway station? Should I know why it lays a cheeken haggs?? Boyiss -- put away de deggers -- Deedn't I told you guys -- neex on de mommbly-pag beezness -- Whoooooy -- Hay -- I tink wot dey trying to essessinate me!!"

Kraut: "Hm -- You ketch right hon, dunt you?" Wot dey gafe heem witt de deggers so -- wot it looked gradually de gomment like it came beck jost from a wat-wash lundry.

So dees was de cocklusion from Julius Sizzer.

Old Books, and rare.

When we did well with the release of the complete From Hell a few years ago, I indulged myself by purchasing a couple of very expensive books, including a very lovely copy of Apperley's LIfe of Mytton of 1837 with numerous aquatints by Henry Alken, a book I had dearly wanted to possess for many years.
"The nineteenth century equivalent of a boy racer, John Mytton's life has been described as simply "a series of suicide attempts", such was the reckless disregard he displayed for his own life and well being. Although it is worth remembering that since 'Mad Jack' was in the habit of drinking eight bottles of port a day, he was most likely in a permanent state of intoxication, which may well have had a bearing on his behaviour."
As a result, illustrious rare book dealers still send me their annual catalogues. This purple arsed baboon, by Charles Catton, is the earliest use of aquatint in a book of natural history (1788). You can have it, and the book it comes in, for 8,000 quid, apparently.



* * * *

After mentioning William Gaunt's 1942 book The Pre-Raphaelite Tragedy yesterday (which is kicking around here in a 1965 edition), I recalled that it was dramatized as a BBC 6-parter in 1975 with a very young Ben Kingsley (or King Bensley as he is called in our house) playing Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It was distributed variously as The Love School, The Brotherhood and Beata Beatrix
"The Love School (is an) examination of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, wherein Kingsley starred as a wild and wilder-haired Dante Gabriel Rossetti (yes, he did once have hair) with Peter Egan, once a fellow minor back in The Cherry Orchard at Chichester, as Millais."
I remember also an excellent portrayal of Jane Morris by Kika Markham. This chap would like to see it released in some viewable form almost as much as I would.
If you see it out there and don't tell me, I'll be very cross.

* * * *

A touch of bathos for my tailpiece.
Before I started this blog, Hayley Campbell emailed me this photo taken in a big London bookstore, I think Foyle's. That's my Fate of the Artist and other 'graphic novels' filed as 'Low-brow Art'.



Hayley says my pal Gaiman took the photie... "while giggling uncontrollably."