RIP John Simon

Learned, sharp, perceptive, offensive and droll with sarcastic, caustic wit: literary, theater and film critic John Simon was all these. I first became aware of him in 1978, when Fantagraphics Books publisher Gary Groth reprinted Simon's negative review of the first Star Wars film in one of the first issues of The Comics Journal I read. I then followed Simon's film and theater reviews in various magazines for decades.

For a sample, here's Simon critiquing/desecrating the writing of fellow film critic Rex Reed:

Bette Midler's eyes are "glittering green venetian blinds from which stars are shooting like emeralds," and one is forced to wonder whether green venetian blinds are in fact shutters, and whether one has ever seen an emerald shoot - and shoot in a cowardly fashion, from behind venetian blinds, painted green, no doubt, as camouflage for an emerald. Tennessee Williams is "shy, pursued by visions of hell, and blind in one eye." Curious collocation: Is it the hellish visions or the shyness that blinds you in one eye? And does one get the visions of hell in the blind or the seeing eye?

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Found in Storage: The Fantagraphics Books Ultimate Catalog #20, Summer, 2005.

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Recently Read: Young Romance 2

Anyone who disparages romance comics probably 
A. hasn't read any and is instead thinking of Roy Lichtenstein paintings and, more importantly, 
B. hasn't read any created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, the enterprising gents who created the genre in comics.

The stories compiled in Young Romance 2, originally printed from 1947-1949, are dense, compelling little dramas; they could be short films churned out by Warner Bros. in the '30s. They deal with class systems, espionage, culture clashes, small town bigotry, post WWII societal problems, gossip, poverty and prejudice. They're hard-hitting, sometimes spectacularly violent. These aren't your laughable '70s DC romances drawn by Vince Colletta. Kirby crams detail into each panel as if he's directing a 1918 silent film; the art has much more in common with his late '70s Marvel comics like Machine Man than any of the '60s comics he's most known for.

The hardbound book is beautiful. Unlike what's promised on the front and back cover, the restorations published within aren't scanned from the original comics with printing dots intact. Instead, they were exposed to a solution process which eradicated the colors, leaving the black art behind. Once digitally enhanced, the result is black and white art amazingly faithful to the original. Although I prefer editor Michael Gagne's restorations from the first volume, the new process makes for immanently readable stories, using a color palate faithful to the original comics and set against a nice light beige background.

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Recently Read: Supermen! The First Wave of Comic Book Heroes 1936-1941

For those curious about the earliest days of superhero comics, when creators had the freedom to go wherever their whims took them and the formulas for the genre hadn't yet been written in stone, Fantagraphics Books has published a handy and hefty sampler of the era.

Shot from the original comics (no computer coloring here), Supermen! covers the spectrum from very obscure (Rex Dexter of Mars, Fero, Planet Detective, Yarko the Great) to seminal early work by Jack Kirby, Basil Wolverton, Jack Cole, outsider Fletcher Hanks and more. Greg Sadowski's notes in the back of the book give great historical context; I learned a lot about the various competing and overlapping comics publishers and editors during this primordial period.

Reading Supermen! can actually become depressing because nearly every story contained in the book is more fun, and utilizes more imagination and whimsy, than any superhero comic book on sale today. Inside these pages you'll find pulp-colored dreams, crazy acts of violence (by the heroes!), hallucinogenic imagery, and the promise and fulfillment of illicit, bizarre thrills. As many in The Sex Pistols' audience went on to start their own groups, these stories must have spurred the creative imaginations of hundreds of future creators.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough; it needs to be on the shelves of anyone who reads any superhero comics, as it contains examples of the original formation of the genre. One small complaint: the credits for the book design, so essential for a finely packaged collection of graphics, is squirreled away in small print on the last page of the book. Not cool, Fantagraphics.

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The New Age of Indie Comics

New Age Comics was a 1985 joint promotional venture between fifteen indie comics publishing companies, including Fantagraphics Books Inc., Kitchen Sink and Last Gasp. Here's the front and back covers and some inside pages, plus an intro by Will Eisner.

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Recently Read: Hip Hop Family Tree, Vol. I, by Ed Pisker

Author and cartoonist Ed Pisker does an admirable and passionate job telling the complex and overlapping stories of the early days of hip hop. He uses a classic retro art style and coloring, appropriately reminiscent of comic books published in the late '70s when this music was first being developed.

Although I knew most of the stories told in the book, from much of the same sources Pisker used for his research, he puts it all together in a fun and readable form, with the skill of a master DJ honing in on the breakbeats. The book, the first of a series, covers the '70s to 1981.

The large collection is complemented by old school pinups by the likes of Tom Scioli and John (King Kat) Porcellino. I'm looking forward to Vol. II.

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Recently Read: The Superman Chronicles, Vol. 6

DC's nearly complete chronological reprinting of every Superman story chugs along in Vol. 6.

These stories are still written by co-creator Jerry Siegel, with an anger and vitality lost in later decade's renditions of Superman (in comics and film). I appreciate the wide range of antagonists and social issues dealt with here, from a spoiled heiress to a hypnotist, Lex Luther and two fascist organizations doubling as Nazis. The stories are formulaic and, frankly, can get tedious when read in bunches. On the other hand, Siegel had to write them at a prodigious rate: the book reprints fourteen stories written within the space of about five months, from May through Fall, 1941.

As mentioned in earlier reviews of the series, the art content of each volume has progressively less charm than the earliest stories drawn by Joe Shuster. The stories in Superman Chronicles Vol. 6 are largely drawn by Leo Nowak (who later also drew the Superman newspaper strip). One of Nowak's limitations as a cartoonist was a reliance on stock poses. His favorite shot is a figure shot from above, with one shoulder above the other. So, we get dozens of panels looking like this:

 

The Shuster Shop (Joe Shuster and assistants, I assume) do ink some of the stories (and reportedly, the Superman heads), keeping the look consistent. One artists' work very much stands out over the others in the book: John Sikela. In comparison to Nowak's tired, repetitious and formulaic art, Sikela used subtle body language and posture that rings truer than most superhero art of the period:

 

 

Several times in Chronicles Vol. 6, Superman is shown jumping or flying underneath cars. Nowak drew it this way:

Sikela not only portrays the scene more realistically, he goes a step further and shows Superman underneath the car, from two different angles, yet.

I have two criticisms of DC's packaging of the book. First, and most importantly, the art restoration in many places is horrendous.Over and over one can see the hand of someone going over the art with hand held (or digital) white-out, resulting in art that looks nothing like the original publication:

 

 

I guarantee even Leo Nowak never drew a tree that looked like this:

I'd prefer it if DC just shot from the original comics, or hired a restorer who has a good track record of being faithful to the original material - like Harry Mendryk, who's been doing a superlative job on recent Jack Kirby reprints from the '40s and '50s for Fantagraphics.

My second criticism is that, literally as I was writing this review, the book's pages began separating from the cover! DC needs to use a stronger glue for their binding.

Lastly, does anyone know if this series has been cancelled? The last Superman Chronicles (Vol. 10) was released in 2012.

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Noel Sickles

I'm not sure where this ('60s?) Sickles illustration first appeared (can anyone help me out?).

One thing that's clear, though, is that Sickles continued to grow both in technique and in influence as an artist.

Just as his loose, noirish, chiaroscuro-based style made its big impact on Milton Caniff in the '30s (culminating in the styles of Alex Toth, Frank Robbins, Lee Elias and so many others), so this '60s style predates and sets the stage for many of today's indie cartoonists of what could be called the Fantagraphics/New Yorker school, any one of whom could have drawn the figure at the top of Sickle's illo.

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