Sunday, May 8, 2011
I'm Back at The Hooded Utilitarian
Since my impediment was removed, I'm back at The Hooded Utilitarian. I hope to post at The Crib also though. The last time that I said the above I didn't comply. I hope to post at least once every two weeks or so this time. Not a great rhythm, I know, but it's better than nothing, I suppose.
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Jackie Cooper & Bill Blackbeard - a sort of coda
Jackie Cooper, who played Skippy on the silver screen in 1931, died last May 3. Cooper was nominated for an Oscar at the age of nine.
Bill Blackbeard, without whom my Crosby & Schulz post wouldn't be possible, died last March 10. A big thank you to you, gentlemen!
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Crosby & Schulz
Charles Schulz worked single-handedly, or legend has it, in his newspaper comics series Peanuts for almost half a century. This means that Schulz produced an impressive number of Peanuts dailies and Sundays (18.020, if I'm not mistaken). Such a huge amount of work needed a creative method. This means that Charles Schulz had recurrent narrative formulas: the football gag, Linus and the great pumpkin, Snoopy against the Red Baron, and many others... These formulas, repeated over and over again, are one of the explanations for the series' success: as Umberto Eco noted (The Role of the Reader: 160):
Charles Schulz didn't repeat his formulas ipsis verbis and ipsis imagines though: the former functioned as themes to his variations effectively approaching Peanuts to traditional jazz music. What amazes me is how often Schulz borrowed (mostly) visual themes from Percy L. Crosby.
July 1, 1925.
November 4, 1954.
As we can see above Charles Schulz swiped his baseball and rain theme from Percy Crosby, but things are a bit more complicated than that. Let's see what's different first... Percy Crosby did basically a daily that's really a single panel cartoon: it's funny because the answer to Skippy's question is quite obvious. Charles Schulz did a Sunday page in which the plot is different from the above mentioned strip: Charlie Brown tries to retain his players repeating like a mantra, "It's going to clear up." (Skippy and Charlie Brown are quite different characters being the former a lot more feisty than the latter.) Charlie Brown is also more neurotic than Skippy: whenever his team is in question he gets quite anxious, that's why he wants to stay in the field in spite of being raining cats and dogs. What's the same in the two examples above (hence the swipe) is the last panel. Percy Crosby was a great visual thinker: he used the huge empty space around Skippy to convey loneliness. Schulz did the same thing. Percy Crosby did one panel comic strips frequently. What's amazing is that each time he did it the space meant something different. For instance: in the image below the empty space helps to characterize Skippy as someone who's always restless (other times it's just a gag or a beautiful landscape).
January 20, 1928.
The genesis of the rain gag can be found in Life magazine (as seen below).
Image as published in Life Presents Skippy, 1924.
A few years later Charles Schulz did (sort of) swipe the text, as seen below.
April 2, 1962.
The little red-haired girl is another recurrent theme ripped-off by Charles Schulz from Percy Crosby.
August 12, 1925.
May 17, 1968.
Again, as we can see by their reactions Skippy Skinner and Charlie Brown are very different from one another, but there are two swipes, in the above and in many other strips: one is verbal, the other one is visual. The former is the name of the nameless characters: the girl in the reddish pink dress for Crosby and the little red-haired girl for Schulz. The latter is only visual because we can't see it: the two girls are alluded to but they're never shown.
In the strip below we can see both the losing baseball team (also used and abused by Schulz) and the girl in the reddish pink dress themes.
August 14, 1925.
Swipe or no swipe, inspiration or not, I don't care. I find the below page one of the best of the Peanuts series and one of the best Sunday pages ever created, period.
November 19, 1961.
There are a couple more visual solutions that Schulz picked up from Crosby. The most important one is the "kids' talking heads behind the stone wall." It's just that Percy Crosby put his characters talking behind fences.
May 30, 1931.
March 7, 1982.
(I miss the Sunday pages' colors in the Fantagraphics reprints!)
Finally here's another baseball swipe (or "inspiration" if you, sacred cow worshippers, prefer).
April 27, 1926.
August 8, 1954.
As seen above Skippy is absent minded and jealous while he's in the outfield. He gets beaned by a baseball. Charles Schulz put Lucy in Skippy's place in one of his most confusing and weak Sunday pages. Truth be told she would come to the mound to talk to Charlie Brown a lot more often than she stayed in the outfield being inept.
If this post aroused your curiosity re. Skippy buy this beautiful book. You won't regret it, I can assure you:
Under the guise of a machine that produces information the criminal novel produces redundancy; pretending to rouse the reader, it in fact reconfirms him in a sort of imaginative laziness and creates escape by narrating, not the Unknown, but the Already Known.And yet, Umberto Eco also said in "The World of Charlie Brown" (Apocalypse Postponed: 39):
[...] [some] artists, working within the system, performed a critical and liberating function. As usual, it is a matter of individual genius: to be able to develop a language so incisive, clear and effective as to dominate all the conditions within which the language must operate.I agree with Umberto Eco, but I fail to see why the double standard? Aren't newspaper comics series as formulaic and redundant as crime novels? If, as Eco also wrote (44) "[Charles Schulz showed] us, in the face of Charlie Brown, with two strokes of his pencil, his version of the human condition[,]" how often did he do so in his 50 year run on the strip? How many of his 18.000 plus comic strips and Sunday pages convey new relevant information, go beyond innocuous gags or avoid escapist fantasies like lots of Snoopy strips and pages? Not many I suspect...
Charles Schulz didn't repeat his formulas ipsis verbis and ipsis imagines though: the former functioned as themes to his variations effectively approaching Peanuts to traditional jazz music. What amazes me is how often Schulz borrowed (mostly) visual themes from Percy L. Crosby.
July 1, 1925.
November 4, 1954.
As we can see above Charles Schulz swiped his baseball and rain theme from Percy Crosby, but things are a bit more complicated than that. Let's see what's different first... Percy Crosby did basically a daily that's really a single panel cartoon: it's funny because the answer to Skippy's question is quite obvious. Charles Schulz did a Sunday page in which the plot is different from the above mentioned strip: Charlie Brown tries to retain his players repeating like a mantra, "It's going to clear up." (Skippy and Charlie Brown are quite different characters being the former a lot more feisty than the latter.) Charlie Brown is also more neurotic than Skippy: whenever his team is in question he gets quite anxious, that's why he wants to stay in the field in spite of being raining cats and dogs. What's the same in the two examples above (hence the swipe) is the last panel. Percy Crosby was a great visual thinker: he used the huge empty space around Skippy to convey loneliness. Schulz did the same thing. Percy Crosby did one panel comic strips frequently. What's amazing is that each time he did it the space meant something different. For instance: in the image below the empty space helps to characterize Skippy as someone who's always restless (other times it's just a gag or a beautiful landscape).
January 20, 1928.
The genesis of the rain gag can be found in Life magazine (as seen below).
Image as published in Life Presents Skippy, 1924.
A few years later Charles Schulz did (sort of) swipe the text, as seen below.
April 2, 1962.
The little red-haired girl is another recurrent theme ripped-off by Charles Schulz from Percy Crosby.
August 12, 1925.
May 17, 1968.
Again, as we can see by their reactions Skippy Skinner and Charlie Brown are very different from one another, but there are two swipes, in the above and in many other strips: one is verbal, the other one is visual. The former is the name of the nameless characters: the girl in the reddish pink dress for Crosby and the little red-haired girl for Schulz. The latter is only visual because we can't see it: the two girls are alluded to but they're never shown.
In the strip below we can see both the losing baseball team (also used and abused by Schulz) and the girl in the reddish pink dress themes.
August 14, 1925.
Swipe or no swipe, inspiration or not, I don't care. I find the below page one of the best of the Peanuts series and one of the best Sunday pages ever created, period.
November 19, 1961.
There are a couple more visual solutions that Schulz picked up from Crosby. The most important one is the "kids' talking heads behind the stone wall." It's just that Percy Crosby put his characters talking behind fences.
May 30, 1931.
March 7, 1982.
(I miss the Sunday pages' colors in the Fantagraphics reprints!)
Finally here's another baseball swipe (or "inspiration" if you, sacred cow worshippers, prefer).
April 27, 1926.
August 8, 1954.
As seen above Skippy is absent minded and jealous while he's in the outfield. He gets beaned by a baseball. Charles Schulz put Lucy in Skippy's place in one of his most confusing and weak Sunday pages. Truth be told she would come to the mound to talk to Charlie Brown a lot more often than she stayed in the outfield being inept.
If this post aroused your curiosity re. Skippy buy this beautiful book. You won't regret it, I can assure you:
Monday, April 18, 2011
Rutu Modan's Mixed Emotions
For a brief time The Crib's favorite Rutu Modan wrote and drew a blog at The New York Times site. I'm so glad that women saved this childish and adolescent art form (I'm exaggerating again, sorry!, but an exaggeration is part true, right?). Here I give you Mixed Emotions.
Saturday, April 16, 2011
Shannon Gerard's Unspent Love
My personal canon has a new star: Shannon Gerard. Check her out online at Top Shelf (I hate the stupid backgrounds).
Manuel Caldas: Um Editor Independente - Coda
1. 
2. 
3. Imagens:
2. No Atelier de Aurélia de Sousa (s/d). Cena de género tardo-romântica em que a pintora se retrata desalentada num ambiente soturno e quase monocromático. O que é colorido é a fantasia colorida da arte. De notar que a pintora, uma das maiores figuras do naturalismo português, criou um jogo complexo entre a feia realidade que o quadro mostra e a fantasia balofa que o quadro dentro do quadro nos dá. Pode ler-se tanto uma crítica ao impressionismo (desde um ponto de vista realista, ou seja, desde um ponto de vista político) como uma desistência decadentista.
3. Terceira edição (muito alterada) de Foster e Val com o subtítulo: "Os Trabalhos e os Dias do Criador de 'Prince Valiant'" (Dezembro de 2006). A inversão cromática das duas primeiras edições é aqui corrigida. A prancha de "Prince Valiant" (a número 117, de 7 de Maio de 1939, em vez da número 19, de 19 de Junho de 1937) apresenta-se ligeiramente torcida no seu eixo. Questão de dinamismo da composição, sem dúvida, mas também sinal, talvez, de que a série mudou a vida do autor do livro. A troca de pranchas também não é inocente: a 19 representa o maravilhamento do jovem Val ao chegar a Camelot, a 117 representa um Val mais adulto atormentado com a ideia do envelhecimento.
Friday, April 15, 2011
I'm Back
After posting at The Hooded Utilitarian I'm back at The Crib. It was fun while it lasted and I thank Noah and Suat and Caro and Derik and Matthias and Robert. I left because I can't be in the same room with a fanboy (or is it a babyman?).
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