Panel Discussion - The ILX Comic Strip Poll Results

for people looking for much, much larger images of early-C20th newspaper strips, Sunday Press is having a sale - eg two table-sized volumes of McCay's Little Nemo for US$185, down from $250

http://www.sundaypressbooks.com/

Speaking of Little Nemo, this exists. I am very close to breaking down and ordering a copy.

that one's still the same negs as the Fanta books from the 80s AFAIK.

So are the Sunday Press versions much higher quality in addition to being larger? I wound up ordering that new collection last night regardless; reviews seemed generally positive and I had Amazon gift cards burning a hole in my pocket. I don't know all that much about the reputations of all the prior anthologies.

53: CAPTAIN EASY by Roy Crane (49 points, 2 votes)
Four enormo hardcovers in a bundle

Wash Tubbs gets taken over by sidekick.

http://www.lambiek.net/artists/image/c/crane_r/crane_captaineasy1941.jpg

http://cdn.comicartfans.com/Images/Category_16688/subcat_32609/Captain%20Easy.jpg

http://www.art4comics.com/capeasy.jpg

http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/easy2-625x337.jpg

Are these colours legit?

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Am9n2FV8y7U/TxaXTHtV8kI/AAAAAAAABlA/kHibSFMCy-4/s1600/captain%2Beasy%2B1.JPG

Yep. There are some coloring notes from Rick Norwood in Fanta's vol. 1 that confirm that and describe the process. Almost all the pages are reproduced from scans of the printed pieces.

amazing, would love to see that (in some kind of generous library). (also for ppl to post it on DK2 argument threads 13 years ago!) that one seen alone, seems done almost entirely for effect, not realism or narrative flow or anything traditional.

also a+ on the varying body types in the harem.

And the page composition, esp. on the right side: top of tree, middle of tree, bottom of tree. Decades ahead of Neal Adams.

Because I'm bored and waiting for work that should have come to me a week ago, here are those coloring notes. Most of this stuff won't be news to people who know the pre-digital comics production process.

For most of the history of the color Sunday comic strip, the colors were produced mechanically rather than photographically. The artist drew the strip on heavy, slightly off-white "boards," usually twice the size of the printed art. Then, in those pre-Xerox days, Velox copies were made on glossy white paper. The Velox process was both more time-consuming and more expensive than modern methods, and so the number of Velox copies was kept to a minimum.
Roy Crane then splashed colors directly onto the original art as a color guide, at least for the first frew years of the Sunday page.
The original and four Velox copies were then sent to the color separators. (Most Sunday comics were colored by Chemical Color Plate Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut.)
Young women sitting on tall stools at drafting tables created the color by adding black ink to three of the Velox prints, one for yellow, one for cyan, and one for magenta. The fourth Velox print provided the black. They were helped in this task by the artist's color guide and by a colorist who placed a transparent sheet over the color guide and, with a grease pencil, wrote color values. For example R2B3 meant that the magenta Velox would get a number two screen would have a number three screen in the same area. The result, when printed, would be a shade of purple.
A proof page was then prepared with each color on a separate overlay, and changes were made as necessary. The artist did not see the strip in color until he got that proof page in the mail, in some cases not until he saw the printed strip in the Sunday paper.
As you can see on the following pages, the artist's colors were not an attempt to create a painting, but just enough color to help the color separators do their job.
All of the Sunday pages in this book, with one exception, are from color color scans of Sunday pages printed in the newspapers. The one exception is the strip for October 6, 1935, where no color newspaper page could be found. That page has been colored in-house from a scan of a page in a newspaper that ran [the] strip in black and white.

That specificly dense luridity looks like it might have been designed for a specific storyline (I found the week before's). Wonder how much of that was Crane and how much might have been a separator who was on that particular job that month.

52: GET YOUR WAR ON by David Rees (51 points, 4 votes)
Entire thing here.

Clip-art office “lols” acquire furious satirical bent.

http://mnftiu.cc/blog/images/war.002.gif
http://mnftiu.cc/blog/images/war.006.gif
http://mnftiu.cc/blog/images/war.093.gif

=51: AMY & JORDAN by Mark Beyer (54 points, 3 votes)

Even Amazon doesn’t have used copies of the Pantheon hardcover. Anybody want to buy mine? And the German one?

Amy and Jordan has only three recurring characters: the eponymous couple and Amy’s sickly son Ba Tilsdale, who dies of neglect but occasionally returns as an ominous statue. Amy and Jordan’s relationship is antagonistic, yet they’re resigned to being stuck with each other–somewhere between Akbar and Jeff and Vladimir and Estragon. They share a decrepit apartment (critics speculate that they live on the Lower East Side) and slog through various mediocre jobs. Each strip chronicles a mysterious or unfortunate occurrence. The minor, disheartening tribulations of urban life–navigating the subway, run-ins with weirdos, vermin–take on monstrous proportions, and the city becomes a horrific carnival of disaster. Amy and Jordan are menaced by “demons carrying carving knives” and gigantic insects, and plagued by poisoned food. Many of the strips combine ordinary annoyance with surreal violence: when Jordan goes outside to ask a crazy man to stop screaming, the man responds unexpectedly: “He’s wrapped his snakelike tongue around my body. I’m paralyzed. I can’t move! Well it’s good. Now Amy can sleep unmolested.” Beyer’s stilted, clunky dialogue makes even the most disturbing events funny, and his characters’ reactions to tragedy are gruesomely pragmatic. … Watching the parade of downtrodden souls trudging past their window, Amy concludes, “The world is a horrible place filled with terrible people.” - Zoe Roller

YAAASSS

I had two copies of this. Gave one to an ex. The other came with a signed Beyer illustration on an index card B-)

I love this comic so. fucking. much.

have almost bought that book a few times because it feels like it's the kind of thing that's right up my alley, but something about beyer's art is really creepy and off-putting to me. but i love the way those panels are designed, so i should probably just suck it up and give it a chance.

OK have some more then

http://cdn.comicartfans.com/Images/Category_528/subcat_154126/beyer2.jpg

http://www.outsiderartnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/7D485583-27DC-4CDE-ABA92332B58949CF.jpg

http://www.comicartcollective.com/artImages/8040BE08-AC23-498F-8B5AC1FA3C0791D3.gif

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-fYDQ9nbUgT8/TZypwTH0IzI/AAAAAAAAA7w/tp1rJAKz6Ow/s1600/beyer2.jpg

http://www.scotteder.com/Images/Category_2/subcat_850/beyer-aj-what.jpg

http://www.comicartcollective.com/artImages/7173A64B-63F8-4EA9-92377AD076929B38.gif

I can only take Beyer in small doses, but damn, his stuff never looks less than fucking GREAT.

yeah, that's the tragedy of his aesthetic - absolutely perfect for once-a-week exposure in a paper, wearying even in the Maroverlag collection, let alone the Pantheon one - I never came close to finishing the latter

Get Your War On such a Bush-era thing, from back before we all stopped really even caring about wars

=51: LITTLE LULU by Marge (54 points, 3 votes)
Marge and Lulu: The Art of the Deal

You might be thinking of the comic books, done anonymously by John Stanley.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d9/Firstlittlelulu022335.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/1d/Little-lulu-1943-marge.jpg
http://www.lambiek.net/artists/image/m/marge/marge_lulu2.jpg
http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger2/1656/3636/400/marge_lulu1.jpg

=49: PEARLS BEFORE SWINE by Stephen Pastis (55 points, 2 votes)
Universal

Pearls Before Swine is a syndicated comic strip that runs in 750 newspapers around the world. The strip pairs an angry, arrogant Rat with a sweet but dumb Pig, the latter of whom is protected by a violent, albeit delusional Guard Duck. Pig and Rat’s friends also include a bookish, intelligent Goat, and a poor, besieged Zebra whose only goal is to keep from being eaten by his inept and inarticulate next-door neighbors, the Fraternity of Zeeba Zeeba Eata crocodiles. Oh, and there are some lemmings who kill themselves.

https://fashionsspeaklouder.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/bwvnkw.jpg

http://www.indyweek.com/binary/7417/1349599133-pb100823__library_fine_.jpg

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content//photo/2008/08/13/PH2008081302511.jpg

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-07XFuj_4A-o/TZOKOy7zmJI/AAAAAAAAAVo/idmzYjd33Wg/s1600/pearls%2Bbefore%2Bswine%2B2011%2B03%2B30.gif

=49: WONDERMARK by David Malki (55 points, 3 votes)
Wondermark

C19th illustrations detourned for ironolols.

http://www.wondermark.com/comics/013.gif
http://www.wondermark.com/comics/147.gif
http://www.wondermark.com/comics/119.gif

http://www.wondermark.com/comics/260.gif
http://www.wondermark.com/comics/275.gif

i like marge's original LL cartoons a lot, really wish they'd get a full reprinting. it's funny how little resemblance they bear to the john stanley comics -- lulu's personality seems very different.

Yeah, it was interesting to see how distinct Lulu is when I was looking for images. How late did it run or reprint anywhere? Genuinely curious how much exposure the voters had (obviously, from the blurb)

couldn't you just have had a post with the word "wondermark" and left it at that?

you assume Wondermark is going to be the best-known strip in the entire poll?

can we just like maybe post a list of the rest of the results

I was happy posting the results! sic wanted to do it.

I blame the poor reliability of undersea fiber to Australia

try kale.

should be re-rolling out as soon as I'm unemployed & have moved 10,000 comics and records into storage

=47: TERRY & THE PIRATES by Milt Caniff (56 points, 4 votes)
Complete in six volumes.

The adventure begins with young Terry Lee, "a wide-awake American boy," arriving in contemporary China with his friend, two-fisted journalist Pat Ryan. Seeking a lost gold mine they meet George Webster "Connie" Confucius, interpreter and local guide. Initially, crudely drawn backgrounds and stereotypical characters surrounded Terry as he matched wits with pirates and various other villains. He developed an ever larger circle of friends and enemies, including Big Stoop, Captain Judas, Cheery Blaze, Chopstick Joe, Cue Ball and Dude Hennick.
Most notable of all was the famed femme fatale, the Dragon Lady, who started as an enemy and later, during the war, became an ally. Caniff included a number of non-American female antagonists, all of whom referred to themselves in the third person. These included the Dragon Lady herself and crooks and spies like Sanjak and Rouge. In a rather bold move for a 1940s comic strip, Sanjak was hinted at being a lesbian cross-dresser with designs on Terry's girlfriend April Kane.[3] Caniff purportedly named the character after an island next to the isle of Lesbos.
Over time, due to a successful collaboration with cartoonist Noel Sickles, Caniff dramatically improved to produce some of the most memorable strips in the history of the medium.

http://allstarcomicart.com/auctionimages/uploads/775_2.gif
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/cartoonamerica/images/ca062-06582v.jpg

http://cdn.comicartfans.com/Images/Category_10270/subcat_93001/CANIFF_TERRY%20SUNDAY_CAF.jpg
http://cdn.comicartfans.com/Images/Category_5676/subcat_10373/Milton%20Caniff%20-%20Terry%20and%20the%20Pirates%20Partial%20Sunday%20Comic%20Strip%20Original%20Art%20dated%2011-19-39%20Chicago%20Tribune%201939%20small.jpg

=46: GARFIELD by Anonymous Employees (58 points, 6 votes)
The official web site for the cool fat cat with games, fan club, e-cards and online catalog.

Jim Davis created and contributes jokes to this comic strip about a fat cat who is lazy and likes lasagna, and his proto-Redditor owner. Piggybacked on the format of B. Kliban’s “dead cat” cartoon books, and was so successful it became the default format for strip collections for a decade.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_M6vB-ENvPwQ/Rg8qZTytkSI/AAAAAAAAACM/6DHr6JtwTpA/s1600-h/Garfield.gif
http://www.mezzacotta.net/garfield/comics/0129.png
http://www.reocities.com/televisioncity/5479/garfcomc.gif

debut strip:

http://www.comicmix.com/media/2007/06/19/garfield_19_jun_1978.png

Because someone had to:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B_D7ZpkVIAAXHR8.jpg

what the

idg this poll, the rollout, or the joke in that Garfield strip

the joke in that Garfield strip is that Jon just drank a cup of dog sperm

Does dog semen resemble coffee in any way

Apart from being hot when freshly made

I'm not familiar enough with dog semen to say

but... drinking dog semen doesn't make you pregnant. so the implication is that the cup contains ... dog pregnancy test results? idgi

which would be (I guess) dog urine (or blood)? neither of which resemble coffee.

Garfield hates puppies

but... drinking dog semen doesn't make you pregnant.

oh my god dude

maybe Garfield is pregnant with puppies somehow

learning so much here

I have other obvious observations if yr interested

but... drinking dog semen doesn't make you pregnant.

Now you tell me.