“Iconic stuff little boys think are awesome”

The webcomic Axe Cop continues to work on two levels: as an over-the-top superhero adventure not unlike the stories of the early 1990s, and as a peek into the psyche of its six-year-old coauthor. Newsarama just ran an interview with brothers Ethan and Malachai Nicolle about their upcoming Axe Cop miniseries:

Ethan: Well, without giving away too much... Bad Guy Earth is the story of two evil Psychic Brothers who create a bad guy machine and want to turn the entire earth into Bad Guy Earth. They have a gun that shoots portals to other times, dimensions and planets too, so they are able to basically make anything they want into a bad guy, including the US military.

Axe Cop is earth's only hope and it is the toughest fight he has ever fought. This is the first story where Malachai has written bad guys from the perspective of a bad guy, so the Bad Guys are about as indestructible as Axe Cop is.

Nrama: Could you tell us about some of the new characters/creatures we'll meet in Bad Guy Earth?

Ethan: There are so many... but most of it is iconic stuff little boys think are awesome. Wrestlers, lions, army men, ghosts, dinosaurs, time travel, trucks, aliens...it's all there. . . .

Nrama: Do you worry your brother will become corrupted by venturing into the psyches of the dark and twisted?

Ethan: Nah, if he delves into dangerous territory I will talk to him about the concepts just as any good big brother should. I won't let him just start gutting an imaginary nun without saying something about it.

He generally has to pretend the bad guys are under a curse and that is why they are doing evil things. He doesn't get why people would want to do evil, so he has to make up reasons. It ends up being a lot less about the reasons and more about whose team he is on. If he is on Team Good, he kills Team Bad and vice versa.

Much more about the brothers’ working methods in the interview. The student-film adaptation of Axe Cop mentioned in the interview seems to be this one. Malachai’s verdict: too much realistic blood.

Is That Crazy or What?

I was planning to return to the saga of the third Robin when Colleen Coover posted this sketch on her blog. It shows the original Boy Wonder and Mary Marvel, World’s Mightiest Maid.

My favorite detail is the font for the caption, evoking New Yorker cartoons. It fits with the two characters, both created in the 1940s, and their retrospective styling. (Dick has grown up in DC’s current continuity, but Mary grew evil.)

The caption also shows how a one-panel cartoon works differently from the comics form that rests on multiple images. The first line evokes moments in time slightly before this instant, while the rest invite us to imagine what will follow.

Bill Walko’s Hero Business webcomic also addressed the Robin mythos this week. (Hat tip to Titans Tower.)

Behind the Illusioniste

Last night I saw The Illusionist, Sylvain Chomet’s animated adaptation of an unproduced Jacques Tati screenplay. It’s visually gorgeous. I was blown away by how well the movie rendered Edinburgh, and even the train ride north to that city. (It turns out a lot of the movie was made in Edinburgh.)

But the rest of the movie didn’t work for me at all. In several sequences I felt Tati would have come up with funnier and longer visual gags on the set. Even worse, the story suffered from gaping holes in the characters’ motivations. I didn’t dislike this Illusionist as much as The New Yorker, which complained about “cloying sentimentality”; many movies have cloyed more. But this one has nothing but sentiment to drive it because the characters’ emotions and desires don’t add up.

The Illusionist shows a French stage magician going to London to find work, then to a village in northern Scotland. A teen-aged chambermaid attaches herself to him, and they travel together to the Scottish capital, where he finds work in a music hall. They share rooms in a theatrical rooming-house for a while—all in a strictly father-daughter way. [SPOILER DEAD AHEAD] At the end of the movie, she becomes interested in a handsome young lug, and the older man sadly slips back to France.

It’s never really clear why the magician, scraping for cash, decides to keep buying clothes for the girl. As for her, she’s obviously more interested in the glamor of Edinburgh than in mopping floors in her little village—perhaps too obviously. Some summaries I’ve read say that she believes he’s a real magician, but she keeps pointing out clothes in shop windows, so she knows darn well where they come from.

There are moments in the middle of the movie where it looks like the girl is making the denizens of the theatrical boarding-house into one big happy artificial family—one possible dénouement. But that falls apart, shown particularly in the fate of a ventriloquist. Then the young lug comes along, with no link to anything else, and everyone goes their separate ways, even the magician’s rabbit.

I kept feeling like the scenario was dancing around a relationship that would make the main characters’ actions make sense. I could think of two possibilities:

• The magician has somehow lost a daughter of his own. Taking care of the poor chambermaid fills that hole in him, but, like other fathers, he eventually has to let her go.
• The magician and the girl are actually a sexual couple, but when the magician realizes they’re just using each other, he moves on. That scenario would bring a frisson of illicit sex, but it’s a French movie, after all.

I came home to Google for some story-behind-the-story, and discovered what the movie was missing. And, yes, there was illicit sex involved.

Apparently Chomet received Tati’s script from the trust that controls his copyrights, having had some brief correspondence with the comedian’s daughter Sophie Tatischeff before she died. He interpreted the script as Tati’s expression of love for Sophie, and also felt it expressed his love for his own daughter. Believing that Tati planned to play the lead, Chomet patterned his protagonist after the comedian, and dedicated the movie to Sophie Tatischeff.

However, it turned out (and Chomet probably learned of this while he had already started making the film he envisioned) that Tati also had an older daughter. He got her mother pregnant during WW2, then paid her off and ignored the child as she grew up. That mother came from Prague; Tati set his script in Czechoslovakia. If the comedian wasn’t imagining reconnecting with his abandoned daughter as he wrote this script in the 1950s, he could only have been in very deep denial.

The Telegraph revealed that backstory, and the Guardian filled out details. (By coincidence, that daughter settled in the north of England, rather close to Edinburgh.) Roger Ebert published a lengthy letter from one of the oldest daughter’s sons in his Chicago Sun-Times blog. However, I don’t recall seeing anything about that history in the New York Times or other periodicals I read before seeing The Illusionist.

The grandson also described elements of the script that aren’t in the version I saw:

…the young girl attracts the attention of a handsome young man who exposes the conjurer's magic as fraudulent, nothing more than cheap tricks, illusions created to entertain an audience. Unable to hold onto her affections once his charade has been exposed the script concludes with the conjurer disappearing off into the sunset free of his deceit having as he always known he would lost the affections of the young girl to youth and the vibrancy of the city once she was able to see beyond his theatrics.

If the original screenplay contained a scene about the young lug exposing the magician’s tricks, that was dropped from this production. It would have tied the fellow into the plot, though also made him less sympathetic (and thus interfered with the story’s sentiment).

I suspect Tati stopped working on this film, near the peak of his career, because what he’d put into it wasn’t coming together, and what he’d left out were the secrets he couldn’t afford to dig up.

Behind the Scenes at Walden

One of my biggest holiday presents last year, measured by weight, was the forty-year collection of Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury strips.

I grew up on that daily comic in the Boston Globe. I thumbed through the first anthology, The Doonesbury Chronicles, so often in high school that I could annoy my college roommate by reciting the punchline to a strip as soon as he read the first panel. But I didn’t keep up so closely after that.

I had completely forgotten, for example, Mike Doonesbury’s younger brother Sal, who peddled safer-sex products in the 1980s. And that Sal’s original name was Benjy, which explains Mike’s brother at Widow Doonesbury’s funeral this month.

The giant anthology contains loads of strips, but only about six pages of additional matter. I like reading behind-the-scenes stories, and they’re not in that book. But I found them in Doonesbury and the Art of G. B. Trudeau, compiled by Brian Walker and published by Yale University Press.

This volume discusses Trudeau’s down-to-the-wire working method and his collaborators, including long-time inker Don Carlton, designer and colorist George Corsillo, and others. Such teamwork is common in daily comics, but the Wall Street Journal tried to make political hay of the fact that Trudeau didn’t handle final inking in 1991. This book contains plenty of Trudeau’s pencil sketches and strip drawings to refute the notion that he doesn’t do the basic artistic work.

Still, the most visually striking item in the book is an 1841 portrait of James de Berty Trudeau by a son of Audubon. It shows an astonishing resemblance to his descendant as a young cartoonist and grad student.

Doonesbury and the Art of G. B. Trudeau left a few of my questions unanswered. Was it more than coincidence that Jim Andrews, late cofounder of the United Press Syndicate and Andrews and McMeel publishing company, shares a name and physical appearance with Jim Andrews, the strip’s plutocratic oil executive? Wikipedia says Trudeau named the character in honor of his editor, though I can’t tell whether that’s more than convincing supposition.

Is the author of this book, Brian Walker, a son of Beetle Bailey cartoonist Mort Walker? Yes, he is, and he’s also taken over his father’s Hi & Lois strip with his brother Greg. Mort Walker’s Backstage at the Strips is one of the best portrayals of how newspaper comic strips were created through the 1980s, and father and son ran the International Museum of Cartoon Art, a collection now at Ohio State University.

Yet More Oz Comics to Collect

The latest installment of Bill Willingham’s comic serial Fables, issue #101, offers yet another approach to creating Oz comics from Eric Shanower.

Shanower started out writing and illustrating his own comics stories, published in Adventures in Oz. He adapted Walt Spouse’s 1930s newspaper strip into a more modern format, published by Hungry Tiger Press. He’s now scripting Marvel’s ongoing series of L. Frank Baum adaptations for Skottie Young to draw, an effort that’s already won the team two Eisner Awards.

In this magazine Shanower’s creating art from someone else’s Oz-related script. Bufkin, the bibulous Winged Monkey who works for the Fabletown government, gets some spotlight time. Other Oz characters have appeared in Fables, and Shanower has illustrated a previous page, but I think this is the first time those beams have crossed.

In addition, I see that Willingham’s version of Ozma plays a prominent role in the next five-issue arc.

Worth the Waiting?

The good news was that the second collection of Linda Medley’s Castle Waiting was published last fall.

The bad news was that it breaks off in the middle of a storyline, and that Medley asked to have her name omitted from the exterior of the book, hinting at estrangement from the publisher or her own work. (The image at left is a preliminary cover design.) She has put the series on hold, so the wait for volume 3 might be even longer.

The possibly good news is that among Medley’s other projects is an adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s Oz stories, focusing on “underused characters.” In a January 2008 interview with du9 she explained:

I rewrote a bunch of Wizard of Oz stories, and I did kind of the same thing I did with Castle Waiting and fairy tales. There’s a lot of things in Baum’s story that are kind of open-ended, and during the three years that I was away from Castle Waiting, I thought: “okay, what if this and that new things happened?” So I actually laid out about nine volumes and started drawing. But I don’t know if I’m actually going to do them because I want to do them in color, and that’s really hard to get, as far as I’m concerned. Maybe I’ll do it on the web or something like that, I don’t know.

By “really hard to get, as far as I’m concerned,” Medley probably meant that her sales record didn’t justify the expense of printing many pages in color.

As of 2006, Comic Book Resources reported, Medley had created “300 odd pages of as yet unpublished ‘Oz’ material,” but put that aside to focus on Castle Waiting. I’ve found no announcement of publication plans.

Whatever work Medley is doing now, I hope that she’s enjoying it.

P. L. Travers and the Paris Review

Back when The Paris Review put its entire stash of author interviews online, I skimmed the list for favorite children’s fantasy writers, and didn’t see any.

But I missed the conversation with P. L. Travers, whence this anecdote comes:

The other day two little boys accosted me in the street and said to me, “You are the lady who wrote Mary Poppins, aren’t you?”

And I admitted it, and said, “How do you know?” And they said, “Because we sing in the choir, and the vicar told us.”

So, clearly, they had thrown off their surplices and rushed after me to catch me. So I said, “Well, do you like her?” And they both nodded vigorously. I then said, “What is it you like about her?”

And one of them said, “Well, she’s so ordinary and then…” and having said “and then” he looked around for the proper word, and couldn’t find it.

And I said, “You don’t have to say any more. That ‘and then’ says everything.”

And the other little boy said, “Yes, and I’m going to marry her when I grow up.”

And I saw the first one clench his fists and look very belligerent. I felt there might be trouble and so I said, “Well, we’ll just have to see what she thinks about it, won’t we? And in the meantime, my house is just there—come in and have a lemonade.” So they did.

Further discussion covers whether Mary Poppins stories reflect the Mother Goddess or Zen parables.

This Never Happened. Neither Did This.

This is one of the most commonly Photoshopped panels from Batman comics. Its combination of startling subject and blank background invites people to compose their own word balloons. Which, frankly, can’t be any less realistic than those paragraphs Batman and Robin appear to spew out in one violent instant.

DC Comics has now reprinted the story that contains this panel, so you can have a copy of the original for your very own. What’s more, the same volume will also bring you this popular panel. And as a bonus, for absolutely free, this panel of Bruce Wayne and Lois Lane water-skiing. The way they do. Actually, they don’t. These panels are all from DC’s Greatest Imaginary Stories: Vol. 2, Batman and Robin. So the events in those panels never happen in the DC Universe or any accepted variation on it (e.g., Earth-Two). They’re officially non-events. We don’t have to worry about them.

Just as we don’t have to worry about the old man next door whose green hair is turning white.

Boston Comics Roundtable on the Fewcha

Today’s issue of the Boston Phoenix is devoted to the future of Boston. Among other features it includes a page of single-panel comics from the Boston Comics Roundtable. The print version shows nine in black and white, but the online gallery starting here includes sixteen in color, including a modest contribution from me.

The BCR’s introduction to the gallery explains:

We approached this future-Boston project as a sort of moderated "jam comic," an improvised group effort in which one cartoonist draws a panel, then passes it off to another who adds a panel of their own, and so on, usually resulting in a weird, amusing Frankenstein's-monster of a story. In this case, each cartoonist went off on their own and came up with a scene from the coming century, which we then fit together into a sequence.

It was fun to watch this project take shape on a very tight deadline. On the evening of 6 January, Phoenix editors met with everyone who had dropped by the BCR meeting. The group hammered out a basic approach. Dan Mazur was drafted to coordinate everything, Cathy Leamy provided a visual template, and Roho set up an email list.

That weekend a couple of writers broadcast a bunch of picture/caption ideas, and artists began posting their sketches to the email list. The delivery deadline was the 12th, giving time for selection, sequencing, final captioning, and coloring by Dan and Braden D. Lamb.

In thinking about panel ideas and watching the selection grow, two things occurred to me:

• The urge to find a joke that works in a single panel for a broad audience meant steering away from some provocative aspects of futurism, such as demographic changes and politics, and toward some Boston stand-up stand-bys: parking, sports, Dunkies.
• As we know, the comics form can be used to tell any type of story or discuss nearly any topic. The BCR itself has published anthologies on the history of Boston, on food, and on other down-to-earth subjects. Nevertheless, when cartoonists get the assignment to picture the future, quite a few grab the chance to draw giant robots fighting.

Of course, it’s not too late for Boston to prepare for giant robot fights.

G-Man to Become a Middle Child

It’s no surprise that Chris Giarrusso based his G-Man and Great Man characters on his own childhood (a) superhero dreams and (b) relationship with his older brother. The interaction of those brothers is one of the details that grounds his G-Man comics in reality, and makes them delightful.

For Dave (Great Man), his little brother Mikey always needs to be told what to do, never has any good ideas, and says nothing worth listening to, even if occasionally what he says might keep the universe from falling apart. It makes perfect sense to Dave to build an aircraft with a comfy chair for himself and a milk crate for Mikey because he, after all, will be the pilot. (You don’t think Mikey would be pilot, do you? Ha!) On the other hand, if any other kids or creatures go after Mikey, Dave will be there in an instant to protect his little brother.

As for Mikey (G-Man), his doggedness is best summarized by Dan Savage in The Kid:

Younger brothers are less powerful than older brothers, so persistence and stamina are our survival/revenge strategies. Older siblings may hit harder, but younger brothers move faster, and we are relentless. . . . younger brothers everywhere [never] knew when to stop. We took jokes, wrestling matches, and “playful fights” past the point where they were fun...

Now? asks Mikey. Now? Now?

This interview with Giarrusso at Sketch Maven shows just how much his real older-brother-Dave shaped his career as a comics artist, in unmistakable older-brother way:

When I was in college, my brother Dave called me one day to inform me that I was going to be working for Marvel Comics. He explained that Marvel offered internships for college students, and that all I had to do was apply and then I'd get an internship and then get hired on staff shortly after. Realistically speaking, this was not a likely scenario, but he had this strange confidence that it would play out that way. And that ended up being exactly the way it happened.

And as for the video games on Giarrusso’s ChrisGComics.com website:

My brother Dave put those games together. He runs my whole website. One day he just calls me up and says, "I made a video game for you." And then he kept making more.

However, there will soon be a new variable in the comics’ fraternal equation. Mikey is going to have someone to lord over, too:

The next volume of G-Man will feature the arrival/introduction of G-Man's little brother. A lot of people know Great Man is based on my big brother, but there are actually three of us, and it's time to introduce the third G brother into the books.

(Thanks to Brigid Alverson for the link to this interview.)