Book Review: Desegregating Comics: Debating Blackness in the Golden Age of American Comics, edited by Qiana Whitted

Reviewed by Michael Kobre

Desegregating Comics: Debating Blackness in the Golden Age of American Comics, edited by Qiana Whitted. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2023. 358 pp. ISBN: 9781978825017. U.S. $34.95. https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/desegregating-comics/9781978825017

 

            Taken together, the critical essays in Desgregating Comics: Debating Blackness in the Golden Age of American Comics tell a history of American comics that many of us don’t know or, at best, only know in part. As the collection’s editor Qiana Whitted points out in her introduction, “the earliest and most prolific decades of the comics industry also correspond with the Jim Crow era” (6). Consequently, like pretty much everything else in American life, comics pages too were places where borders (both literal and figurative) were regularly policed and sometimes subverted, where equal opportunity was constricted and mostly denied, and where struggles were fought all the time over representation and images of blackness. As Whitted goes on to say, our understanding of this convergence between comics history and Jim Crow America raises important questions “about access, ideology, and the politics of interracial contact, both in the panels and in the production of comics” (6).

            In exploring this history and taking on these questions, Desegregating Comics ranges widely. Some chapters examine the work of well-known creators like George Herriman, Will Eisner, and Matt Baker. Some discuss the early comics work of Black painters and muralists like Romare Bearden and Al Hollingsworth, whose achievements in the visual arts were, as the authors here argue, shaped at least in part by their work as cartoonists at the beginning of their careers. Many chapters highlight the importance of the Black press, notably the comics section of The Pittsburgh Courier and the paper’s vibrant print culture. Other chapters examine characters who are obscure to us now, such as Neil Knight, a Buck Rogers-like space adventurer fighting colonialism on other planets in The Courier’s comics section; Lobo, a Black cowboy in a typically short-lived series (for titles with Black characters, that is) published by Dell in 1965; and The Voodoo Man, a Fox Feature Syndicate series in which the villainous title character was invested with a rare sense of agency for Black characters in the 1940s in stories created by whites. Whitted’s chapter details both the rare achievement of All-Negro Comics #1, published in 1947, “the first comic book to be to be written, illustrated, and published by and about African Americans in the United States” (182), and the all-too-familiar disappointment of its lost second issue, in the face of resistance to the title from white vendors, distributors, and retailers —a fate reprised in another chapter on the truncated run of Fawcett’s Negro Romance comic in 1950, which lasted for only three issues of original content. Still other chapters focus on Black readers, trying to imagine their responses to comics and their reading habits, in one instance detailing how a group of students from Harlem went to the offices of Fawcett Comics to protest Captain Marvel’s minstrel show sidekick, Steamboat. “This is not the Negro race, but your one-and-a-half million readers will think it so,” they told Fawcett’s executive editor (214).

            That issue of representation opens some of the first chapters of Desegregating Comics. Ian Gordon and Andrew Kunka respectively look at the use of racist stereotypes in the cartoons of Rosie O’Neil, one of the first women cartoonists whose work was published regularly in the humor magazine Puck from 1897-1905, and in Will Eisner’s character Ebony White, the minstrel show sidekick to the title character in The Spirit. Gordon’s chapter, which describes O’Neil’s use of “the sort of typographies found in minstrelsy, the bumpkins Tambo and Bones, the dandy Zip Coon, and so on” (27), effectively begins the collection by pointing to the long history of the kind of stereotypes that would routinely appear later in works of white cartoonists like Eisner, who, at the height of his acclaim, would struggle again and again to explain or justify his creation of Ebony. Kunka’s essay scours Eisner’s varied and often defensive responses to criticism of Ebony. Of Eisner’s claim that he was just following the popular conventions of his time—a defense repeated by many other white creators—Kunka argues that “such defenses stand in curious contrast to Eisner’s claim to an important historical role as an innovator and experimenter in the comics form: on the one hand, he actively pushes against many comics traditions and connections; on the other hand, he stands helpless in the face of another” (63).

            Yet most of Desegregating Comics focuses on the work of Black creators pushing back against these stereotypes and the racist power structure of American life that they helped to sustain and justify. In Nicholas Sammond’s chapter on Krazy Kat and in Chris Gavaler and Monalisa Earle’s formal analysis of Matt Baker’s art on Fox Feature Syndicate’s Phantom Lady, for instance, the authors examine ways that Black cartoonists slyly challenged and subverted that power structure. As Sammond suggests, Herriman in Krazy Kat—particularly in the strip’s “playful, polysemous, and allusive” language (45)—appropriates tropes and techniques from the tradition of minstrelsy. Yet like such Black minstrel show performers as Bert Williams who used their blackface masks for their own subversive art, Herriman, a Black man passing as white for most of his life, “borrowed freely from, and reimagined, white fantasies of Black speech to deform and destabilize language and meaning in Coconino County” (48). In so doing, Sammond argues, Herriman also used the unstable landscape of Coconino County and Krazy’s ever-shifting gender formations as “a useful metaphor for a life lived in passing,” creating in his pages a world that rejected the rigid racial binary his society was built around (41). In a comparable fashion, Gavaler and Earle suggest that Matt Baker, “the most successful Black artist in midcentury U.S. Comics” (95), used what Joseph Witek has called a “high baroque” layout style with complicated designs that disrupt the reader’s movement across the page to subtly express Baker’s own “protest against his racial relationship to the midcentury comics industry” (98). In particular, they note the subversive quality of the way Baker’s layouts routinely broke panel borders in order to extend a character’s body—notably the long legs of The Phantom Lady—into another panel. These page designs would offer the white boys or young men reading the comic an opportunity to let their eyes linger over the legs or torso of The Phantom Lady in a way that would be dangerous for a Black man like Baker, hiding behind the pseudonym of the strip’s supposed creator Gregory Page and complicating the operation of the male gaze even more by his own sexuality as a gay man. As Gavaler and Earle note, the very act of seeming to look at a white woman with desire was enough to get Emmett Till murdered in the very same year that Baker’s “good girl” art was condemned on the Senate floor during a hearing on comics and juvenile delinquency.

            Many chapters though discuss the more explicit resistance to the Jim Crow era in the comics, columns, and editorial cartoons in the Black press. As Julian Chambliss writes in his chapter on the Neil Knight comic strip, “Black newspapers offered an essential space for extending the visual language around blackness and the vision provided to African Americans about their place in the visual culture of the United States. In particular, the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the largest Black newspapers, which claimed over a million coast-to-coast readers by the 1940s, was a crucial space for offering an alternative vision of blackness” (284). So Neil Knight, introduced in the Courier’s new color comics section in 1950, evolved from the adventures of Black air ace in its first four years into a science fiction strip with Knight as a space explorer, who in one signature storyline defends a helpless planet of aliens whose skin “is presented in green and brown hues” against the colonialist aggression of another alien empire (290). This “intersection of speculative practice and liberation” (290) helps define Neil Knight, Chambliss argues, “as the earliest example of Afrofuturism in newspaper comic strips” (293). In other strips too, like the single-panel gag strip Patty Jo ‘n’ Ginger and the romance strip Torchy in Heartbeats, both by Jackie Ormes, the first Black woman cartoonist, Eli Boonin-Vail finds not only politically-tinged jokes and storylines, but “a complex and playful relationship with Black middle-class ideas of gender and respectability” that also extends into Ormes’ own early column writing and other women’s columns in the Courier (152). Examining the editorial cartoons in the Courier and other Black newspapers, Rebecca Wanzo analyzes the early work of Black artists like Romare Bearden to show how their mature styles reflect their work in comics—as Bearden’s cartoons, for instance, manifest “representational practices that gesture to the universal and an embrace of nonrealist aesthetics” in his later work (82). Delineating these connections, for Wanzo, is a way “to push against artistic silos that limit the frameworks through which we interpret Black liberatory aesthetic practice” (82). Yet the commitment of a newspaper like the Courier to promote a kind of respectability politics within the Black community could be problematic too. As Mona Beauchamp-Byrd shows in her chapter, Kandy, a romance strip created in 1955 by Al Hollingsworth, featured a protagonist whose “racially indeterminate [features and skin tone] and/or white-passing ‘Good Girl’ figure” reflected “a colorism that was actively present in African American media” (229).

            Yet many important chapters of the history that Desegregating Comics brings to life are haunted by counterstories that attempt to fill gaps in existing evidence or scholarship—as in Carol Tilley’s effort to imagine the comics reading experiences of Black youth by analyzing three photographs, including the photo of the bed with a handful of comics strewn across it that Emmett Till was taken from on the night of his murder—and by what the poet Kevin Young has called “shadow books.” In Young’s massive critical attempt at a field theory of Black culture, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness, he describes the concept of “a shadow book”: “a book that we don’t have, but know of, a book that may haunt the very book we have in our hands” (11). In The Grey Album, Young identifies three kinds of shadow books: ones that were never written or completed, like Ralph Ellison’s second novel; ones with “removed” meanings, which gesture toward unspoken ideas, “the secret book just behind the others, its meaning never to be fully revealed” (12); and a third kind, the lost shadow book, “at once the rarest and most common—written and now gone” (13), like Phillis Wheatley’s second book of poetry and, as Whitted argues in her chapter of Desegregating Comics, the unpublished second issue of All-Negro Comics.  In characterizing All-Negro Comics #2 as a lost shadow book, Whitted cites comics historian Tom Christopher’s assertion that the issue had been planned and that at least some of its art had been completed; its fate, Whitted suggests, “offers a disruptive counterhistory of the comic book industry’s Golden Age of success” (184). Though All-Negro Comics #1 was filled with promises of future issues and further installments of individual stories, its creator and publisher Orrin Cromwell Evans suddenly found that no one would sell him the newsprint he needed to publish a second issue. As Whitted writes, “its haunting absence echoes all the unrealized comic books of the era that attempted to underscore Black lives, that became ensnared in the power differentials behind comic book production, distribution, and sales” (184). For that matter, other shadow books too, representing each kind that Young conceptualizes, also haunt Desegregating Comics. There are the unwritten and undrawn comics that might have been produced if Negro Romance and Lobo hadn’t both been abruptly cancelled, and there are the “removed” meanings that Sammond finds in Krazy Kat and that Gavaler and Earle see in Matt Baker’s baroque page designs. As Young writes, in a passage quoted by Whitted too, “In some crucial ways, the lost shadow book is the book that blackness writes every day. The book that memory, time, accident, and the more active forms of oppression prevent from being read” (14).

            Ultimately, the counterhistory of American comics that Desegregating Comics presents is panoramic, with connections that abound across chapters. As previously noted, for instance, multiple chapters detail the importance of the Pittsburgh Courier and other Black newspapers. But lives and careers of important creators intersect across the book as well, like the comics artist Al Hollingsworth, whose work is the subject of two separate chapters. Hollingsworth worked alongside Matt Baker in the comic book industry and may have been one of the artists on Negro Romance; his comic strip Kandy replaced Jackie Ormes’ Torchy in Heartbeats in the Courier; and later in his life, in his career as a celebrated painter, he joined the Black art collective Spiral co-founded by Romare Bearden. Yet the most difficult and heartbreaking connections across chapters involve the murder of Emmett Till. In her effort to imagine a counterstory inspired by the photo of Till’s bed on the night of his murder, Carol Tilly cites a neighbor’s comment in a Chicago Defender article two weeks after Till’s murder that his enjoyment of comics never included “any dirty ones or nasty pictures,” a comment that was, in the context of popular condemnations of comics in the 1950s, a way of asserting Till’s fundamental innocence and good character in the midst of what Tilley calls “the precarities of both comics and Black boyhood” (172). Elsewhere in Desegregating Comics, we witness the outrage that Till’s death inspired in the Black community when Eli Boonin-Vail cites a Patty-Jo ‘n’ Ginger cartoon by Jackie Ormes that appeared “on a page where ten of the twelve letters to the editor decry the acquittal of Emmett Till’s slayers the previous week,” in which little Patty-Jo tells her sister angrily, “I don’t want to seem touchy on the subject … but that new little white tea-kettle just whistled at me!” (143). In Gavaler and Earl’s reading of Matt Baker’s art too, we’re reminded of the potentially fatal consequences of a Black man sexualizing a white woman in Jim Crow America. Citing Frederic Wertham’s and a Senate subcommittee’s condemnation of one of Baker’s Phantom Lady covers, Gavaler and Earle ask, “How would Till’s murderers respond to Baker’s cover image knowing that [in Wertham’s words] its ‘sexual stimulation by combining “headlights” with a sadist’s dream of tying up a woman’ was a Black man’s?” (115).  

            Not every chapter of Desegregating Comics is equally revelatory and powerful, and occasionally its authors get bogged down in what, to this reader at least, felt like too much plot summary—although, to be fair, such summary may be necessary to recreate a lost work like a story in Negro Romance. But the cumulative effect of the collection’s panoramic perspective forces us to reconsider what comics fans have sentimentally called the Golden Age of comics, not simply as a halcyon period when a new form burst into popular culture, but as a site of conflict—again, like so much else in American life—where the country’s racial divide was enacted, reinforced, and challenged too. And this quality makes Desegregating Comics not only an important book for any serious student of comics history, but a timely one as well. At a moment in American life when political and cultural forces are actively working to restrict what can and can’t be said about America’s racial history—like the Oklahoma school superintendent who said of the 1921 Tulsa massacre, "Let's not tie it to the skin color and say that the skin color determined that" (Qtd. in Khaled)—Desegregating Comics offers a sweeping and nuanced exploration of how the country’s troubled racial history played out on comics pages too.

  

References

Khaled, Fatma. “Oklahoma Superintendent Denies Race Caused Tulsa Massacre.” Newsweek, July 7, 2023, https://www.newsweek.com/oklahoma-superintendent-denies-race-caused-tulsa-massacre-1811608.

Young, Kevin. The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness. Graywolf Press, 2012.

Demystifying The U Ray, the better to rewrite the origin myth of Blake and Mortimer

 Éric Dubois

 ODDYSEY to the origins of Blake and Mortimer, Eric Dubois (curator), Brussels: Belgian Comic Strip Center / Comics Art Museum, April 7 – October 1, 2023. https://www.comicscenter.net/en/exhibitions/gallery/oddysey-to-the-origins-of-blake-and-mortimer

What does the ODYSSEY exhibition explain about the origins of Blake and Mortimer?

It shows that The U Ray (Le Rayon U) album is a missing link between comics in the English-language tradition and the Franco-Belgian one. Edgar P. Jacobs was inspired by Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon, which he had started by plagiarizing in Bravo! magazine before going on to create his own story. The way in which the artist freed himself in a few pages from an American comic strip narrative and graphic codes such as text boxes and no speech balloons, to forge his own cartooning grammar is fascinating to observe, with period tracings and original pages on display as evidence. For his first attempt at a comic story, it's a stroke of genius. At the Comics Museum in Brussels, Jacob’s talent is displayed before our eyes.

More importantly, the exhibition changes the way we look at this album. U is more than the matrix of the characters and themes of the work to come when Jacobs creates Blake and Mortimer. In 1973, for the first collected album edition, Jacobs was not content to reassemble the original 1943 story from by just rearranging the original two panels per tier to three. He “Blake-and-Mortimerized” his U Ray. The album published by the Éditions du Lombard was no longer just the matrix of the Adventures of Blake and Mortimer, but became an extension of that aesthetic. The direct comparison of pages from The U Ray album version and earlier plates from The Secret of the Swordfish, Atlantis Mystery and The Time Trap shows us the mythical character of this two-version album.

What are the most emblematic pieces of the exhibition?

The exhibition presents only original material and a majority are unpublished ones. Among the top pieces, the visitor can discover four panels sketched on tracing paper which are as sumptuous as they are extremely rare; two color-enhanced sketches of Flash Gordon, of which Jacobs only drew five pages in 1942; and two others of the two-panel version of The U Ray from 1943. These are the oldest documents from the story, as well as in the career of Jacobs as a cartoonist. Precious handwritten notes from this first story bear witness to the genesis of the names of places and characters. "Rayon V," "Rayon Vert," but also "Olrik," "Flying shark," and further on "Swordfish." We are struck by the premonitory character of such notes. They prove that from the start that Jacobs did not think in terms of comics, but in rather in terms of the novel, indicating "Roman d’aventure genre Gordon" at the top of his page. The exhibition also displays a small paper model of the album, bound by hand, on which Jacobs sketched all the boxes, the page connections, the strips to be redrawn, the new boxes, and so on, a further testimony to the needs of the draftsman to work out the story.

The visitor can view a selection of original pages from The U Ray. When observed carefully, it is possible to understand the full process of the reassembling of the story in an album and its second inception. Collages and overlays in white gouache and Indian ink abound, to house the speech bubbles as well as format the boxes. But above all, for six of the pages printed in sepia in the Journal Bravo! we have the complete redrawing. This is the exhibition’s key treasure.

Next to this black and white original art that has remained in the shadows for so long, the visitor has the chance to lift the veil on a series of sublime polychrome tracings. Abundantly commented on by Jacobs, a meticulous artist, these fragile sheets also testify to the care taken to document his work and constitute his archives. This is a process that will lead, in 1984, to the creation of the E.P. Jacobs Foundation, today in charge of preserving and promoting the heritage of the Belgian cartoonist.[1]

From what angle does the ODYSSEY exhibition approach the album The U Ray?

Six themes make up the exhibit: Under the Auspices of the Gods, A Modern Homer, Theater of the World, The Death Ray, Unknown Earth and The Eternal Return.

The ODYSSEY exhibition considers The U Ray’s comic strip origin, as well as its genesis from the angle of the myth and the great stories of antiquity, especially Homer's Odyssey. The exhibition explores the affiliations between the Adventures of Blake and Mortimer and American comics, in particular Flash Gordon by Alex Raymond, while going beyond the model/copy pattern in order further to suggest relationships between the two stories, whose authors, Jacobs and Raymond, drank from the same literary and cinematographic sources. Jacobs' first story as an author appears as the missing link in a history of Franco-Belgian comics under American influence, of which the superhero became the titular figure, but was not when Jacobs began working.

The mythological angle therefore invites us to see Jacobs as a storyteller. It is a bridge between two generations and two cultural shores. There is a genius for storytelling in him, which cannot be reduced to the sum of the references or the tropes used. This means that despite all the analyses, even the most scholarly, there will always be something more to say about his work. Where Jacobs is at his strongest is in his ability to appropriate the narrative codes of the great tradition of storytelling and mythical narrative. We forget their influence - conscious or not - when one reads a Blake and Mortimer comic book. Jacobs is a true storyteller and that's why his stories are timeless.

I think of Jules Verne and his Voyage to the Moon, but also in particular Arthur Conan Doyle with his novel The Lost World. Behind this fantasy story, that has the trappings of a pseudo-scientific novel, hides a sociological study on the brutality of human relations in a civilized environment. I perceive in Jacobs this same universalism in the narratives with a reflexive background. In his stories, Jacobs reconnects with the primary vocation of storytelling, which was to give food for thought by striking the imagination with edifying tales, thereby creating images capable of inspiring or transmitting a certain morality.

The exhibit layout plays a major role. How did you envision it?

My creative process played on radical changes: scale, light, and color, and is inspired by the spectacle side of amusement parks. The exhibition is initially fully lit before darkening and then returning to light, following a ritual symbolism of the return to the starting point. The design is based on large sets playing the role of thresholds. It was a question of giving the space an aura of grandeur, but also of punctuating the visit with twists -- such as acts in the theater. Right from the entrance with its giant octopus, the tone is set. These decorations evoke the fairground attractions of Coney Island in New York, the model of all modern magic and source of inspiration for Winsor McCay, the creator of Little Nemo.

Under the Auspices of the Gods is dedicated to Flash Gordon and the Journal Bravo!. It presents the tracings of the 2^nd and 4^th panels of Flash by Jacobs. Modern Homer concentrates on the characters. Attention is drawn to the "small note papers of Edgar P. Jacobs", which show to the method of reassembly for the album. The Theater of the World emphasizes spatio-temporal exoticism and the art of staging. Color is also evoked as an agent of the wonders of Jacobs’s world. The Death Ray is dedicated to the ultimate weapon which is the McGuffin of The U Ray. The Unknown Land is the famous Terra Incognita of old maps and terrestrial globes. In this part, it is about the ape-men and the perils that threaten the troop led by the Lord Calder character.

The final theme, The Eternal Return, is dedicated to the sequel to U and presents a series of original pages from The Fiery Arrow. This theme closes the time loop by highlighting the return to certain visual archetypes in this sequel, and the way in which, again in mythology, ritual (codified repetition) is the means for humanity to access the divine, and therefore immortality. From The U Ray onwards, Edgar P. Jacobs maintained a delightfully paradoxical relationship with time that was tempting to explore here, not to resolve or reduce it, but to settle in it and savor it.

How did you take into account the interior space of the building of the Comics museum, which is extremely bright?

To ensure the preservation of the works, it was essential to control the luminosity of the interior of the building, first designed by the Art Nouveau architect Victor Horta as an opulent and bourgeois fabrics store, which serves now as a showcase for the Museum. A paper ceiling was created to break the sunlight coming from the iconic glass roof. It also plays the role of the chromatic palette of the exhibition, directly inspired by that of the album. This design device is very significant visually, both for visitors who are below and for those seeing it from the mezzanine of the upper floor. As such, an exhibition addresses the mind as much as the body and create the conditions for an encounter with the work in its very essence, and not only in the materiality of the pages that made it possible.

We must not forget that the original work in comics is the printed and published story in an album. That is what is on display. So this exhibition puts itself forward even more as a true setting in this sense, because with Edgar P. Jacobs, the setting is as important as the action and the characters. I was careful to maintain a kind of sensory and chromatic unity throughout the visit, without forgetting the key contribution of sound to give the exhibition its inhabited character. Once again, my accomplice the composer Bruno Letort, knew how to create an atmosphere that gives soul to the exhibition. Letort is a fan of Jacobs who listens to Blake and Mortimer albums as much as he reads them. For the visitors we hope to have created an exhibition in which all the senses are awakened.

Éric Dubois is a design professor in Paris and has been participating with comic strip exhibitions since François Schuiten and Benoit Peeters set him on the path with their Drawing Machines in 2016 at the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris. After that, he worked with Blake and Mortimer, for which he created several exhibitions with journalists and comics experts Thierry Bellefroid and Daniel Couvreur: Scientifiction (2018), The Secret of the Swordfish (2021), MachinaXion (2022). Dubois is the sole curator of ODYSSEY exhibition on the origins of Blake and Mortimer. This is an exhibition dedicated to The “U” Ray, the first comic book by Edgar P. Jacobs.

 The Belgian Comic Strip Center

The Belgian Comic Strip Center opened its doors to the public on October 6th 1989. In no time this impressive museum became one of the main attractions of Brussels. Every year more than 250.000 visitors come here to explore 4,200 m² of permanent and temporary exhibitions, not to mention its comprehensive documentation center and rich collections. The BCSC collects anything that deals with European comics, from its prestigious beginnings to its latest developments.

Temporary and permanent exhibitions have transformed this Art Nouveau gem into a living and attractive temple. It is a dynamic and exciting place where everything is done to promote the Ninth Art (associated with the creation of the Brussels Comic Strip Route, the issue of Comic Strip stamps, etc...). The Belgian Comic Strip Center also produces, for many partners, conferences, books, creative workshops and counseling.

With more than 700 comic strip authors, Belgium has more comic strip artists per square kilometer than any other country in the world! It is here that the comic strip has grown from a popular medium into an art in its own right. Nowhere else comics are so strongly rooted in reality and in people's imagination.

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[1] Since 2018, first under the aegis of the King Baudouin Foundation which hosted the Jacobs Fund for four years, then under the impetus of a renewed E. P. Jacobs Foundation, several exhibitions and publications have been able to highlight the unique qualities of the work of Edgar P. Jacobs. The work of preserving the archives left by the creator of Blake and Mortimer continues. The E.P. Jacobs Foundation is actively involved in this, in collaboration with the King Baudouin Foundation, which now assists it in this task. Created by Edgar P. Jacobs to guarantee the heritage of his work, it is possible today to look into its archives of unsuspected richness and to discover there the stages of an extraordinary creation. 

Book Review: Comics and the Origins of Manga: A Revisionist History by Eike Exner

Comics and the Origins of Manga: A Revisionist History by Eike Exner. Rutgers, 2021. <https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/comics-and-the-origins-of-manga/9781978827226 >

Reviewed by Sam Cowing, Denison University.

1. Introduction

Chronicling the history of comics is perilously difficult. While comics (or at least some comics) now enjoy unprecedented cultural cache, their present standing does nothing to remedy previously low cultural status and intentionally ephemeral production practices. Thankfully, a number of brave souls have labored long and carefully to provide us with a useful grip on the emergence and development of comics in Western Europe and North America. Obviously, such efforts were never going to supply us with a comprehensive history of comics, but with the ascendent popularity of manga, substantial ignorance regarding manga’s history has never been more conspicuous nor have questions about the relationship between manga and other comics traditions ever been more urgent.

Eike Exner’s efforts in this book are both timely and remarkable. Exner carefully explores the development of manga and its changing status through the 1890s and up through the 1930s. At each turn, Exner looks both forward to the forms of relatively contemporary manga and backward to preceding Japanese print traditions. Taking aim at historical accounts which position contemporary manga as nothing more than the present incarnation of an isolated, centuries-long, and essentially Japanese artistic tradition, Exner forcefully argues instead that

 [C]ontemporary manga and other audiovisual comics are in fact one and the same medium and did not emerge from mutually alien traditions, as far too many histories of manga and comics would have one believe. (178)

Exner’s case against viewing manga as a hermetically sealed tradition draws on close readings of the narrative and formal elements of early Japanese cartoonists such as Imaizumi Ippyo, Kitazawa Rakuten, and Okamoto Ippei as well as a detailed examination of the adaptation and reception of George McManus’ Bringing Up Father and other foreign strips throughout the 1920s. Exner then explores the influence of the latter on the subsequent production and popularity of comics strips by Japanese cartoonists.

As Exner notes, possible motivations for positing a culturally isolated lineage between Japanese print traditions and contemporary manga are complex. Cultural prestige, public interest, and nationalist sentiment are only three of many factors that have sustained questionable manga historiography. When broaching these issues, Exner is a subtle and convincing commentator. Better still, he is capable of sifting through a complex visual record with an eye towards salient detail. The result is a watershed contribution to comics studies that is mandatory reading for scholars interested in manga and its history. In what follows, I offer a rough sketch of Exner’s efforts and then examine a striking conjecture about the nature of comics that emerges in this book: the historical dependence of contemporary comics upon the invention of the phonograph.

2. Overview

Given the limited historical scholarship on manga available in English, a separate overview of the economic context, material production, or narrative trends of manga’s emergence would be terribly useful. It is an evident strength of Exner’s book that he is attentive to each of these and many other dimensions of manga, regularly observing important narrative developments (e.g., recurrent characters, use of anthropomorphism), formal innovations (e.g., layout and ordering conventions, generic styles), and professional developments among creators. In addition to supplying a vivid sense of the manga “industry” in the periods under study, Exner’s observations should spark productive historical interest into lesser-known works and creators involved in the importation and transformation of comics in Japan. The attentive reader is sure to leave this book terribly curious about a previously unknown figure, puzzled by the specific reception of this or that American strip, or desperate for a translation of one of the many Japanese texts Exner draws upon.

Exner sets out the ambitions for the book and a summative interrogation of competing histories of manga in the introduction and epilogue, respectively. A prologue charts some of the terminological history regarding manga and serves as a crucial tool for evaluating the impact of imported American strips upon the Japanese comics tradition. Like any good historian, Exner is eager to welcome others along to dig deeper into the questions with which he is concerned. A useful appendix lists foreign comics printed in Japan between 1908-1945, and, at several points throughout the book, Exner makes clear that much more remains to be discovered regarding this fecund era in comics history.

The first of the four main chapters discusses the production and reception of Bringing up Father, beginning in 1923 and running for seventeen consecutive years in the Asahi Graph. Exner scrutinizes the varying adaptation strategies in early installments that sought to bridge the reading practices of American creators with those of Japanese audiences—most notably, with regard to panel order and speech balloon orientation. As Exner notes elsewhere, the reprinting of foreign strips while ignoring the formality of copyright was a widespread phenomenon. Questions about why Asahi Graph editor in chief Suzuki Bunshiro seized upon McManus’ work and what role printing rights played in this choice are potentially productive and usefully specific questions that one might now explore further given Exner’s pioneering work.

Chapter Two is, in some ways, a detour from the main aims of the book. It offers a theory of the narrative and formal function of speech balloons, drawing from several episodes in non-Japanese comics. I examine Exner’s theory below, but the historiographic rationale for this chapter is that the emergence of what Exner calls “audiovisual comics”—roughly, comics that feature speech balloons and other emanata—is historically specific to the Western comics idiom. The absence of audiovisual comics from the Japanese print tradition, despite the presence of sequential graphic storytelling is subsequently marshalled as evidence of the impact of American comics’ importation. In particular, the adoption of speech balloons in contemporary manga is argued to be dependent upon their deployment in strips like Bringing Up Father in the 1920s.

In Chapter Three, Exner surveys the broader landscape of imported comics strips and examines trends that follow upon the distinctive reception of audiovisual strips. The continuing challenge of translation and competing practical and formal responses are examined. Exner also takes up the material question of how exactly the adaptation and reprinting was undertaken by Japanese periodicals. Additionally, the significance of editorial choices by figures like Inui Shin’ichiro and the role of comics-oriented periodicals like Shinseinen and Manga Man are discussed, especially as sites for innovation by Japanese cartoonists.

Chapter Four supplies a partial account of “fully audiovisual” manga created by Japanese mangaka. Exner charts the path of several creators from the period preceding the importation of foreign strips to an increasingly mature manga industry, one driven by audience enthusiasm for speech balloon-laden narrative rather than pre-1920s picture stories. Touching upon the formative influence of imported strips on Osamu Tezuka, Exner sketches a rough proposal for credibly explaining the subsequent divergences regarding style and transdiegetic elements between the manga tradition and foreign comics. Notably, this sketch leaves aside any controversial claims about the availability and impact of foreign comics throughout World War II. Much like those who invariably point to Japanese Punch and the British satirical tradition in framing the history of manga, those who place undue weight on anecdotes about the discarded comics of American G.I.s will find Exner’s observations an important corrective.

3. Exner on Speech Balloons

If one hopes to provide a historical account of the emergence of contemporary or what Exner calls “audiovisual” manga, a theory of what makes manga contemporary and, in particular, what separates contemporary manga from its precursors is needed. For Exner, the principal divide between contemporary manga and preceding comic strips is the presence of transdiegetic elements—most notably, the speech balloon. And, as Exner argues, this innovation stems from the importation of foreign strips. As he puts it, “most significant change in narrative manga brought about by the translation of American comics was this shift from picture story to audiovisual comic strip.” (165) This historical argument can be mounted with fairly modest assumptions about the nature of speech balloons and their history outside of manga. But, in Chapter Two Exner departs from the history of manga, narrowly conceived, to develop a theory of the function of speech balloons as well as their historical origin. Exner builds upon previous work by Thierry Smolderen here, but the result is a distinctive proposal sure to be of interest to anyone concerned with how comics work.

Exner’s theory of speech balloons comprises a taxonomic proposal, a functional thesis, and a historical hypothesis. The taxonomic proposal distinguishes speech balloons as transdiegetic elements of the comics form. Unlike the intradiegetic text that appears on objects like signs and clothing within the narrative world of a comic, speech balloons themselves are unseeable by characters. But, unlike other unseeable extradiegetic elements (e.g., box narration, panel borders), speech balloons also impact the narrative world by conveying dialogue that characters might hear. Given their peculiar role, Exner takes them to be most aptly described as hybrid, transdiegetic elements.

There are alternative taxonomies we might adopt regarding the visual technology of comics, but it is a virtue of Exner’s account that it makes apparent the peculiarity of speech balloons. And, within this taxonomy, there is room for competing views about how exactly speech balloons serve their transdiegetic function. According to Exner, speech balloons are basically depictive entities, functioning as sound images. There is, however, reason to be cautious about assuming the sound image view or something like it.

Suppose, for example, a comic includes a speech balloon with internal text reading “I am.” Suppose that a subsequent reprint of the comic revises this text to read “Eye yam.” Such a change is a substantive (and presumably illicit) alteration to the comic precisely because speech balloons convey more than sonic information. They present us with interpreted sonic information, which discriminates between sonically equivalent events on the basis of the semantic content of speech. For this reason, speech balloons prove even weirder than Exner acknowledges: they must convey information, not only about what sounds are made, but what is meant through the production of sounds. We should, for this reason, view speech balloons as more like pictures of speech acts than as pictures of uninterpreted sonic events.

Exner’s historical hypothesis binds the history of speech balloons to the history of sound-recording technology, asserting that “audiovisual comics developed in response to new conceptions and technologies of vision and hearing… with the invention and spread of the phonograph being particular essential to the creation of audiovisual comics.” (175) Exner holds this connection to be far from accidental, claiming that speech balloons are more or less unimaginable in advance of the phonograph. This conjecture about our conceptual powers and, in turn, the emergence of modern comics warrants closer scrutiny than a review permits. Here, however, it is worth noting that the case for the historical hypothesis looks rather different if we demure from the sound image view.

In arguing for the dependence of the speech balloon upon phonographic technology, Exner suggests that, if speech balloons had developed prior to the phonograph, we ought to have observed the appearance of non-linguistic sounds as a kind of intermediary form.(58) Presumably this is because such sounds are, in some intuitive sense, less complicated and therefore likely easier to depict. Notice, however, that if speech balloons present, not “raw” sound images, but instead interpreted sonic information (e.g., sounds qua speech acts), we would actually expect the reverse.

In the case of ordinary speech balloons, we exploit standing correspondences between text and spoken language. When it comes to presenting non-linguistic sounds, we are no less required to exploit linguistic conventions—in this case, distinctive ones that introduce lexical items to pick out non-linguistic sounds. Contrary to the intuition that comics present unmediated sound images of what happens when a car speeds by or a dog vocalizes, when we deploy ‘woosh’ or ‘woof’ in comics, we rely upon baroque, culture-specific linguistic conventions for interpreting and relaying sonic events. While an account of these conventions is a job of cognitive linguistics, there is no reason to believe it would antedate the more familiar linguistic conventions that are exploited in the ordinary speech balloon. Indeed, the capricious nature of how we represent animals sounds suggests it is an especially complex affair. Rather than generating the prediction that we should see “zip” and “plop” as precursors to the speech balloon, once we recognize transdiegetic text in comics typically presents interpreted sonic information, we should suspect that “ordinary” speech balloons would be first on the scene.

Importantly, Exner’s critical intervention in the history of manga remains intact even if we reject the more tendentious theses regarding the nature of speech balloons. It is, however, a testament to the richness of this book that, alongside re-shaping how we ought to view the history of manga, it challenges some basic assumptions about the nature of the comics medium.

Goodbye, Bob (and thanks for all your words about pictures!): A Far Too Brief Appreciation of the Life and Times of Robert C. Harvey, Comics’ Premiere Pundit

Daniel F. Yezbick

 

This week, the verbal-visual clans of Comics Studies bid fond farewells to one of our most influential, persistent, and prolific pioneers.

On July 7, 2022, we lost the great Robert C. Harvey, who dedicated his professional writing and cartooning life to raising the quality of comic art and the criticism that encountered, critiqued, and conversed with it.  Even more directly, Bob Harvey brought so much joy, generosity, and knowledge to all who were fortunate to share his winning smile, hearty laughter, and earnest handshakes. Harvey’s engaging demeanor, infinite depth of interests, limitless zeal, and endless quest for the world’s driest martini, will be missed by hundreds of comics creators, critics, and companions.  Appreciative condolences, notices, and obituaries have clogged the comics-centered internet in the last few days, including my more officious send-off for The Comics Journal and Bob’s official obituary.  Still, thanks to the thoughtful Guardians of the IJOCA galaxy, I am glad to say that there is more to share, mourn, and remember about the passing of the comics’ most assiduously dedicated ace reporter, critic at large, and all-around gentleman agitator.

First, the necessaries.

Robert Harvey was an essential force in the rendering of Comics Studies, decades before it was even an inkling of a “thing.” As I have observed elsewhere, his The Art of the Funnies (1994) and The Art of the Comic-Book were pioneering University Press of Mississippi publications, among the first influential academic treatments of verbal-visual / iconotextual / imagetic narratives that would define not only the publisher’s seminal role in promoting quality comics research, but also in promoting the work and reputations of many leading scholars, past and present. Bob’s work with auteur-centered monographs like his Accidental Ambassador Gordo: The Comic Strip Art of Gus Arriola (Mississippi 2000) and The Life and Art of Murphy Anderson (TwoMorrows 2003) are also essential creator-focused explorations of important legacies. Even what will now stand as Harvey’s posthumous swan song, The Art of Popeye: A Masterwork of the Medium (Hermes Press 2022), is sure to provide us all with one final, very welcome dose of Bob’s unwavering regard for the creative influence of master cartoonists like E.C. Segar.

Aside from his criticism, Bob’s work as a comics historian is unprecedented in depth and breadth. Meanwhile, his 900+ page historical biography of Milton Caniff, testifies to the comprehensive impact one cartoonist can have on the full measure of his times. Harvey’s sweeping coverage not only details the lives of Caniff, his family, collaborators, and associates, but also encompasses how adventure strips like Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon were crucial to Depression Era and Cold War politics, aeronautics, mass media, popular fashion, and much more. Harvey’s framing of Caniff’s story speaks to the intertwining interests of disabled Americans, the expansion of the Boy Scouts, the nascent Air Force, and even Orson Welles and Gregg Toland’s conception of the Deep Focus chiaroscuro techniques of Citizen Kane. It is in some strange way rather fitting that Harvey should pass on the very week that the first volumes of Grove Press’ resplendent new archival printing of Terry and the Pirates are released into the comics ecosystem. Without Bob and his lifelong lobbying for the legitimate study, substantial recapitulation, and quality recompiling of comics in general, and Caniff’s comics in particular, I doubt we would have seen the popular and academic taste for complete runs of series like Terry, Dick Tracy, Little Orphan Annie, Pogo, Peanuts, and many more arise in quite the same way. It is no exaggeration to say that Bob’s lone hand, ebullient heart, and constant harangues in favor of the comics’ lively arts helped to change the medium’s critical and commercial landscape more than once.

Thus, epic undertakings like Meanwhile - which took Harvey the better part of three decades to compile and complete- may not serve the same historical benefit as his tireless efforts to give quality cartoonists, beloved and forgotten, current or defunct, the attention and regard he felt they deserved. Over more than half a century, Harvey developed hundreds of individual cartoonist entries for American National Biography and Cartoonist PROfiles, and produced a crucial collection of recuperated histories for the immensely rewarding U. of Mississippi title, Insider Histories of Cartooning: Rediscovering Forgotten Famous Comics and Their Creators (2014). Though his interviews, reviews, and articles sparked constant and sometimes colossal conversation across the comics continuum, it’s also important to recall that Bob was also a seasoned and celebrated cartoonist in his own right. His ongoing self-caricature with his animal companion, not-quite-named Cahoots (the rabbit’s really name is also Harvey – a sly allusion to Mary Chase’s beloved Jimmy Steward vehicle!), were essential to Happy Harv’s blustering blending of prose and pictorial personalities, especially on his obstreperously overstuffed website, RCHarvey.com.

I grew up a hopeless comics nerd, devoted to reading Harvey’s “rants and raves” across numerous fanzines and periodicals like The Comics Journal and Comic Buyer’s Guide, but I never imagined that fate would make us – for a time – the fastest of friends, confidants, and collaborators. I don’t think any other person gave me so much inspiration, insight, or enthusiasm for the many things that mutually fascinated us. Bob and I first met when I was bold enough to invite him to guest lecture about the language of comics in my Graphic Novel survey at the University of Illinois (The first of its kind at that institution, by the way!). I had always known that Bob lived in Champaign where he was an essential conference planner for the National Council for Teachers of English and I was an English/Film Studies graduate student, but the few folks I had met who knew or knew of him seemed resistant to the glimmer of his wit or intimidated by the depths of his conversation.

Still, I took a shot and invited R.C. Harvey to my course (which included in its roster the now celebrated graphic novelist, Damian Duffy – more on that connection later). Almost immediately, I received Bob's enthusiastic acceptance, and just a few days later, he delivered an even more impassioned and provocative guest lecture that had the room rollicking with learning and laughter. His parody of Scott McCloud’s famous two frame strip of a man tipping his hat made one student fall out of her seat in hysterics. In Bob’s view, we learned, McCloud’s iconic hat tipper is simply letting us know that he needs a haircut.

It’s worth noting that I always showed up about 45 minutes early to prepare for that class, and several diehard students were also in the habit of getting a good seat about 30 minutes before “Go” time to share, safely and gleefully, in some good comics chat. The day of Bob’s lecture, however, he beat us all there by almost 25 minutes and had already filled the white boards with elegant graphics, set up stacks of handouts, and compiled free samples of his work for every student. Such was his dedication to proselytizing and perfecting the many ways of appreciating cartoons, comics, and their contents. Needless to say, our pre-game debates were especially spirited thanks to Bob’s limitless love for the medium.

After class, Bob and I agreed to meet up for lunch in appreciation of his sharing his expertise with everyone. I had no inkling of what that first meeting at the broken-down White Horse Tavern in Champaign’s shabby campus town would yield. We met, fed, chatted, and shared stories of our cartooning interests and sequential preferences, then quickly agreed to mount a sequel in the not-too-distant future. That sequel led to our first early discussions of so many landmark creators and characters. Herrimann’s Krazy Kat, Swinnerton’s Mr. Jack, Caniff’s Terry, Eisner’s Spirit, Barks’ ducks, Waterson’s Hobbes, Knight’s K Chronicles, Robbins’ Wimmen’s Comix, and especially George Carlson’s Jingle Jangle tales which we both admired. A few weeks later, I showed Bob some of the Carlson art I had been hunting from the Fun-Time and Puzzle Fun series. He was overjoyed. “You’ve got to write a book about all of this,” he exclaimed. “We have to have a book on it all. Right now!” Before long, we hatched a plan, developed a proposal, and spent a blithe but costly afternoon color Xeroxing his substantial set of Jingle Jangle.  A few years later, Perfect Nonsense: The Chaotic Comics and Goofy Games of George Carlson arrives in the world.

In the meantime, our meetings became more frequent, our emails more abundant, and our laughter so much louder. We went from monthly to weekly, and even twice weekly meet-ups, mostly at Carmon’s in downtown Champaign. Bob’s favorite greasy spoon, now sadly defunct, was tricked out in vintage Coca-Cola advertisements, World War II relics, and the occasionally snarky warning signs meant to ward off fussy complaints or special substitutions. Bob especially loved that, at Carmon’s, he could indulge in his favorite verboten habit of buttering his saltines to the point of almost untouchable slickness. Even then, as he gleefully prepped his crackers, he would occasionally turn around and peek over his shoulder to make sure his kindly wife, Linda, wasn’t there to give him a disapproving glance.

Though cartoons, comics, and their creators were always at the heart of our meetings, our discussions expanded over the years to include some of the most important ponderings of my life. We talked at length about art and identity, marriage and family (as we chatted about his, he helped me strategize the proposal that led to my own!), history and democracy, justice and gender, learning and love, and especially about our own equally intense distaste for limitless greed and systemic hypocrisy. It turned out that Bob and I shared a frantic vigilance for free speech and artistic expression. His great love of cartooning was fueled, in part, by an urgent need to give voice to the contentious caricature, withering satire, and dynamic dissent that tested and guaranteed a truly free public forum. His best drawing, and writing about drawing, was always meant to sharpen, fortify, and inform others about how great art could speak meaningfully to a troubled world. As grimly aware and awake as our conversations could sometimes become; however, we always wound up laughing, especially when we were musing over the transformative power of a particularly evocative editorial cartoon or caricature.

Bob’s kindly nature, and his impish urge towards mockery, also provided me with an essential restorative oasis from the daily grind of graduate program politics and Midwestern provincialism. In exchange, I gave him an extra outlet for his own artistic musings, fresh discoveries, and potential raves-in-progress. When he slept on Murphy Anderson’s couch to finish his book, I was the first person he met to share his findings when he returned to Champaign. Whenever he located a forgotten cartoonist or managed to wrangle a treasured interview, we savored the results in early, urgent form together. He often asked me productive questions about my dissertation work on Orson Welles, and I often proofed and poked at his lastest insights into classic and current cartoonists.  Our mutual tastes were well matched and myriad, and I treasure every single one of those conversations more fully every day. In the nearly 20 years since they occurred, I have never known their equal.

Our dynamic debates led, of course, to the sharing of not just research, but also items and artifacts from our collections, and we indulged in many magnificent hours together pouring over Bob’s absolutely unparalleled archives. Together, we adored rare samplings of Fisher’s Mutt and Jeff, Caniff’s Canyon, Parker’s Mopsy, Cho’s Liberty Meadows, and so very many more. Once, when my miscreant meanderings unearthed a rare cache of hundreds of Chicago American Sunday sections in the disused vault of a derelict Illinois chicken farm turned flea market on rural Route 47, Bob strapped us into his sedan and sped like the Green Hornet over the prairie for a return visit. I nabbed a few obscure Alex Raymond features, Vargas pin-ups, and Dr. Seuss drawings, while Bob scoured the horde of hundreds of sections – page by page – rapturously discovering forgotten tidbits from John Held Jr., Lawson Wood, Vernon Grant, Nell Brinkley, and many more. I gladly departed with an armful of treasures. Bob left dancing and smiling with a full wheelbarrow of funny papers. We spent the rest of the week binging on his findings and scrutinizing every cartoon, illustration, and spot drawing.  These were among the happiest times we shared together.

One of our later merry meetings would prove essential to comics history in ways nobody could have anticipated. One morning, I was early to Carmon’s when Bob came in buzzing with enthusiasm. He had just received an email from Scott McCloud who was coming into town that day to guest lecture at the U of I Art school. The event was not well advertised, but Bob had made a few inquiries and earned us an invite if I wanted to come. Of course, I agreed and we planned to meet at the Art and Architecture Department that evening.

On my way to the presentation, I was stopped at a campus town light when I noticed Damian Duffy at the corner. I had not seen Damian since our course had ended, but his work had been far and away beyond any of his classmates in terms of depth and thoughtfulness (I will never forget his sequential adaptation of Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”!) Anyway, there I was looking at him on the corner. I took a chance, pulled over, and invited him along. He was glad to hop into my hand-me-down jalopy, and off we went. He and I and Bob were each welcomed warmly by one of U of I’s newest Art and Design professors, John Jennings, and we all enjoyed McCloud’s signature examination of comics forms and voices to no end.

Afterwards, John invited the lot of us to dinner at Biaggi’s, where Bob and Scott did their usual mad dance around the question of “What is comics?” That was fun, and possibly even important, but the meeting of John Jennings and Damian Duffy that night has led to some of the most provocative comics on Earth. It is one of my gladdest random encounters and none of it might have happened if Bob had not been the tireless, persevering advocate for comics art, history, and theory that he always was.

Years later, the benefits of Bob’s friendship remain just as plentiful. Without trusting Bob, I would never have gained the experience of a lifetime, editing down the manuscript of Meanwhile for publication. Without his trusting my condensing super-powers, he might not have finally faced completing the project with the same unrelenting zeal. Without Bob, I may not have managed to find my way to giving presentations on George Carlson, Carl Barks, and several others at the Ohio State University’s Festival of Cartoon Arts, a landmark scholarly event which has now evolved into the richly diversified Comics at the Crossroads celebrations. Thanks to his encouragements, I presented, wrote, taught, and published on comics for many years, and met many of the best friends and fascinating colleagues I have ever known, including especially Jonathan Alexandratos and Tracey Bealer, the Dynamic Duo of Denver’s once thriving Romococo/Page 23 Pop Culture Conference, whom Bob recommended so vehemently that I just had to go there and see for myself.

Most importantly, without Bob’s early encouragements, I know that Perfect Nonsense and the full story of George Carlson’s incredible career and even more inscrutable cartooning may not have been told. Bob Harvey himself was crucial in determining the fate of the Carlson estate, which led me to another kindred spirit and faultless friend, George Hagenauer, whose own writing and advocacy for comics creators and their histories is legendary in its own right.  George and Bob not only helped to facilitate the Carlson book, but also assisted in shepherding the bulk of Carlson’s papers to the D.B. Dowd Modern Graphic History Library at Washington University, where they continue to thrill students and scholars alike. All of this, and so much more, comes from Bob’s efforts, connections, and belief in what good people can do and say about each other.

There are so many more stories and joys that I could share about this outstanding man and his creativity, generosity, and love for art and laughter. With IJOCA’s permission, I would like to conclude by indulging in two more, one famously funny, the other somewhat more somber.

Some years ago, I found myself seated with Bob at an academic conference to remain nameless. We were both presenting on our recent research, but at the moment we were listening to a fairly intriguing but extremely theoretical presentation on an obscure Italian Funny Animal comic strip by a young, earnest, and brilliant Italian scholar.  Before I continue the tale, we need to remember two things about Bob. First, as many of his associates knew, he was slightly hard of hearing, and tended to sit as close as possible to presenters so that the microphone in his wickedly clever hearing aid watch could register what they were saying. In close conversation also, Bob was always edging just a little bit closer to you as he got more interested in the topic, which I always enjoyed but others who were new to his scooting enthusiasm were sometimes uncomfortably unaware that he was eager to hear more of what they had to say.  Anyways, that day, Bob was right up front, and I was right there next to him.

The other important detail is that Bob and I shared a healthy skepticism for heavily jargonized cultural theory.  Bob was a firm believer in the democratic politics of clear, direct language, though he - and obviously I also – could indulge in some fairly overblown rhetorics once we really got going.  In most cases though, Bob believed in George Orwell’s admonition that an honest writer will “never use a long word when a short one will do.” His “Rants and Raves” may have been composed of many, many words – but almost all of them were short, and his sentences, though sometimes serpentine, generally make direct sense.  But back to the presentation on the Italian mouse comic, which was a veritable vocabular pyrotechnic display of trendy buzz words, complex and confounding Cultural Studies concepts, and daringly applied deconstructive theory. Usually, such stuff would send Bob screaming from the intellectual buffet.

When he and I had encountered such work in previous situations, he would sigh to himself, switch off his hearing aid watch and get down to doodling in his sketch book- usually crafting a fairly unflattering caricature of the speaker and their pretentious pronouncements. This time, however, there was no such action. Bob seemed engaged and interested in the young scholar’s unique perspectives on cartooning and, despite the hefty tempest of French, Freudian, and philosophical name dropping, I saw him set down his drawing book and turn his microphone watch up rather than “off.”  With my special interest in anthropomorphic comics, I too was enjoying the presentation, and I looked forward to the discussion afterwards as it related to a fairly fun and sophisticated comic strip that was completely new to us both.

When the panel ended, and the applause died down, Bob’s hand shot up from the front row as if he had joined the color guard. The moderator smiled and acknowledged his question, to which Bob responded, “That was great. I had no idea about this particular comic and I am not aware of the ideas you are associating with it here. Thank you for this presentation. I have just one question.  Are you serious?”

For a moment, all speech, breath, and coronary function in the room ceased. The confused foreign presenter, who was brilliant but struggled occasionally with the meanings and purposes of American English cadences, teetered a bit like a tree about fall with the last whack of the axe. There were a few nervous chuckles somewhere in the distance, and then Bob repeated loudly: “Well? Really? Are You Serious?” Anyone who ever knew Bob Harvey well recognizes this turn of phrase as one of the finest compliments this brilliantly driven polymath could offer. To truly understand the tone in which Bob intended his question, you have to consider hearing the phrase in the context of watching your favorite baseball team beat the Yankees in the bottom of nineth with a grand slam when you are down by three. Or, perhaps your college aged child has just announced that they are engaged to a supermodel who recently also earned the Nobel Prize for Medicine?  In so many ways, this terrified speaker had managed to win the ultimate Bob Harvey lottery. He should have recognized that Bob was filled with regard and gratitude for introducing him to this new comic strip and its potential deconstructive values.

He didn’t. Instead, he more or less plopped down in his chair and looked, pathetically, at the moderator, who moved on discretely to the next question.  Bob turned and asked me what happened, and I told him that time was short and that they had to move on. He shrugged and said, “Huh, I guess I missed that. I turned my watch up too. That was great!”

I can say the story does have a happy ending. As it happened, Damian Duffy and I wound up sharing a hotel shuttle with the baffled Italian during a lunch break. We introduced ourselves as Bob’s friends, and for a moment, I think the poor man feared we were sent to kill him.  Instead, we gave solace and sanctuary, explaining the true meaning of Bob’s question, and that he would almost certainly love to chat with him over martinis later that evening at the conference happy hour. The man was nervous and skeptical, but he did join us, and over several chilled cocktails, Bob managed to smooth out the nearly disastrous international Comics Studies crisis with his infectious laughter and his irresistible witticisms. Bob even asked repeatedly for a copy of the presentation so that he could study it more closely; again, a sure sign that he was completely engaged by what he had heard.  I am unsure if Bob ever actually received the presentation, but I can gladly say that night Bob, Damian, myself, and several other creators, critics, and associated miscreants build several substantial bridges which still handle a great deal of Comics Studies traffic –a few still offer regular service to Italian fumetti as well. I also recall that Bob and the Italian were arm and arm singing (I think!) at one point in the hazy late hours of the symposium.

            My second and final memory is more truly tragic, but also indicative of Bob Harvey’s multifaceted brilliance and benevolence.  As grim fate would have it, years before “The Italian Job,” Bob and I were scheduled to meet at Carmon’s in the early afternoon of September 11, 2001. That morning I had my first shocking sight of the smoking Twin Towers on TV while waiting to drive Rosalie, my future spouse, to work at the U of I Writing Center. The car radio gave us worse and worse news as I made the brief circuit of campus to drop her off. When I headed to downtown Champaign towards Carmon’s, the first tower fell.  I got there a little early as usual, and a small crowd of diners were riveted to the tiny Trinitron TV in the corner of the café that was usually reserved for Cubs games. Like the rest of world, we all sat stunned and hushed seeing what we could not believe. Bob came in about 20 minutes later, visibly shaken and just as disturbed as everyone else. I remember I felt somewhat comforted that he had his usual leather satchel under his arm as he scooted up beside me and turned to the television.

Eventually, we talked a bit. Bob was proud veteran, an active and adamant journalist, and a bit of a patriot when it came to his great regard for the freedoms and benefits of the American way of life.  Again, I think he partially loved comics and cartoons because of their capacity to parody people in power and creatively criticize hierarchies of privilege.  He was a deeply socially conscious citizen and he, like all of us who were witness to the 9/11 tragedy, was deeply shaken. 

That morning, we spoke of many things, in more hushed and humbled voices than was our habit.  First, there were the compulsive questions, the admonitions of disbelief, and the repeated statements of sympathy and support for the victims, the responders, and New York City in general.  Bob loved New York, the center of American editorial cartooning, comic strip culture, and of course, mainstream comic books.  He and I both wondered out loud what this all might mean for those overlapping interests and industries. Ever the National Cartoonists Society member, Bob began to mention how some of his editorial cartoonist friends had already begun email discussions of how best to deal with the catastrophe that was less than 6 hours old.  He wondered aloud how different artists he knew might attempt to portray the World Trade Center, the Statue of Liberty, and the city itself in the days ahead. 

I admit that I was rivetted as he continued on, comparing the preferences and potential choices that certain cartoonists might make once the world had some inkling of what was actually at stake in the aftermath.  He spoke compulsively but methodically without interruption, citing several examples from iconic illustrators who had dealt with similar disasters like Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, the Hindenburg, and the JFK and MLK assassinations.  It dawned on me that I was witness to an incredible intellect seeking context and comparison from his unique knowledge, an encyclopedic familiarity that might still stand as the single most comprehensive individual knowledge of editorial cartooning on the planet. It was a moving, masterful display of intellectual grief and I felt the incredible gravitas of every element of Bob’s searching catalog of examples of acute, unyielding art arising to confront unacceptable loss, sadness, and rage. Somehow, we ordered. Eventually, we ate, but we continued to share ideas about what it all might mean for the creators, journalists, and medias that we loved.

At some point, our conversation turned to the much-anticipated Sam Raimi Spider-Man adaptation set for release in a few months. The topic was not then as odd as it may seem now. Of course, there would have to be serious considerations for the 9/11 attacks across the comics community, but especially at Marvel where most of their iconic characters were situated in New York. At the same time, we both knew – as a prominent comics journalist and a media graduate scholar – that Raimi’s film was expected to include a climactic battle between Spider-Man and the Green Goblin at top of the World Trade Center. Of course, every significant publisher in comics did eventually develop meaningful specials, collections, and memorials to focus on the many heroes and victims of the 9/11 terror attacks. At Marvel, the sobering black cover of Amazing Spider-Man 36 would spark powerful debates about how fictional heroes must respond to actual horrors. Also, the climax of Raimi’s film was indeed greatly altered and reshot as a post-9/11 homage to the community solidarity of New York City responding to the most terrible day in its history.  At the time, however, I admit that our Spider-Man talk might have been a bit odd, as we both struggled to grasp the significance of what was unfolding around the country that afternoon.

As it turned out, at least one of Carmon’s customers found our speculations deeply offensive. As we were talking – we had been there for some time out of shock, uncertainty, and perhaps a mutual need to linger among friends in whom we could truly confide – an elderly woman who had been seated with her friend nearby arose and stood between us and the TV we had all turned our chairs to view.  She was visibly upset and spoke directly and forcibly to Bob, scolding him for somehow trivializing these terrible events with childish concerns and idiotic conversations about cartoons and super-heroes.  I understand and sympathize with her misunderstanding and her apparent outage which mirrored what millions were feeling across the nation, but I am sorry to say that she was not at all polite or responsible in her excoriation of the two men whom she perceived to be offensively ignorant of the need to take such news seriously. She lashed out especially harshly at Bob, perhaps because he was a bit closer to her age, and her lambast continued on for what felt like several minutes.  When she finished, she turned away in disgust and indignation, and marched out of Carmon’s with her lunch companion.

The next several seconds were a blur. I remember thinking that I wanted to try to explain our debates to her but that it was too late and probably a pointless endeavor, but my main concern was a deeply protective urge to justify and defend Bob Harvey’s incredibly unique and perceptive response to how comics and cartoons would engage with the century defining realities of 9/11. I rushed to try to assure or comfort him after hearing the screed that he must have found deeply unnerving and undeserved.

As I shook off my stunned state and looked up at him, I found him blithely buttering his crackers.  He smiled at me a little, tapped at his hearing aid and said, “Who was that person? Was she talking to me? This thing has been off kilter all day and I couldn’t hear a word she said.”  I admit that I almost choked on my own laughter.  On a day where humor of any stripe was almost certainly at its national nadir, Bob Harvey found a way to make me smile at the absolutely absurdity of our efforts to communicate meaningfully about the darkest of realities.   It took a little time, but I explained what had so upset her, and though he seemed to sympathize a little with her misunderstanding, he admitted, “Well, that’s kind of stupid. If she is so upset, why was she listening to us in the first place?” Then he got us right back into our debates about how the best comics of recovery might arise to inspire, support, and soothe a wounded culture in the tough times ahead.

There are so many more fond memories of my great days with Bob that I hope to share with his many friends and colleagues as we all pay our respects for the immeasurable good he brought into our lives, our arts, and our stories. For now, though, I will rest my voice in honor of his. Thank you, Bob, for every part of you that you shared so honestly and eagerly with me – and everyone else whose lives you nurtured, narrated, and renewed.  Your many legacies of love and laughter will keep us all constant in our sequential adventures to come.

A version of this remembrance will appear in a future print issue of IJOCA.