Panel Discussion - The ILX Comic Strip Poll Results

Though bringing up the Shmoo after Lil' Abner's appearance in a poll is a bit like bringing up Chachi in a Fonzie tribute, my apologies.

Capp has to be p much the most despicable comics creator ever:

http://www.newsfromme.com/2013/04/20/the-shame-of-dogpatch/

oh wau: Dan (The Imp) Raeburn dropped a giant Capp dis in 1999

xpost!

whenever i've tried to read abner it just comes off as a bit too broad and obvious for my taste, like capp couldn't help looking down his nose at all of his characters, even the sympathetic ones. i felt this way before i knew anything much about capp as a person.

man

The only thing about Li’l Abner that is funny now is the fact that so many people once gave a hoot about it. After plowing through all forty-three years of Capp’s daily comics—comics consisting almost entirely of vicious burlesques, boilerplate dialogue, and ridiculously contrived “situation comedy”—one is bored beyond all emotions save irritation.

brutal

34: MOOMIN by Tove Jansson and Lars Jansson (74 points, 4 votes)
Offical history.

Nine years after the first novel in Tove Jansson’s series of whimsical/existential tales for children (mostly), a UK paper commissioned her to begin a weekly strip for adults (mostly). The strip had a stronger focus on social satire than the inner dread and joy of the books, and was widely syndicated at the time, but rapidly forgotten after its two-decade run. Three years in, Tove’s brother Lars began collaborating on the writing, and secretly taught himself to draw in the event that she decided to quit. This happened in 1960, and Lars continued for another 14 years solo.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v228/effgeevee/moomins005.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v228/effgeevee/moomins009.jpg

I'm sceptical that there are 33 comic strips better than Moomin

bought a couple of jules ffeiffer books after reading about him on this thread, loving them, thank you v much ilx

Which Fieffer books, Stevie? Would highly recommend Tantrum if you haven't got it already (tho' it's one long original narrative rather than a collection of VV strips)

Fun fact (probably known by most people here): Feiffer also wrote the screenplays for Carnal Knowledge and Popeye.

Got one called boy girl boy girl, and have his nixon book coming in the post! like the sound of the long narrative...

My favourite Feiffer screenplay is for Little Murders, based on his play - criminally unavailable on DVD

? The elliot gould movie? That is on dvd, i've watched it

It was once issued on DVD in the US, but has been out of print for years, and has never had an official European release

It's on youtube, I've had it cued up to watch for a while (and never quite managed it)

it's good!

still kinda marveling at that Al Capp takedown, I had no idea about most of that stuff. Have read bits of the strip over the years and (kinda similar to Pogo) been kinda perplexed at its rep - what was it with 40s-50s America's fascination with fake yokel vernacular? - but that piece really lays it out well.

xpost Jim O'Rourke once wrote a nice piece about Little Murders:

http://old.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/49687

Also search: 'Hey Jules' by Drew Friedman

if Boy Girl Boy Girl has a bunch of Bernard and/or Huey strips, it ought to be great

33: GREAT POP THINGS by Colin B. Morton & Chuck Death (78 points, 3 votes)
a 1998 best-of collection printed so badly that it hurts one’s eyes to read

A ratty, funny, wildly-inaccurate parodic history of rock and pop music, appearing in weekly music papers int he late ‘80s to mid-‘90s, pseudonymously drawn by the lead singer of The Mekons. Most strips managed to condense an artist’s entire career into three or four panels, and continuity was rarely maintained from one week to the next.

Fricke: Packing each frame with rude caricatures, textual puns and mischievous apocrypha, Death and Morton recount rock's crucial episodes and life stories, skewering superstars and demolishing hagiography along the way. When Dylan goes electric, a heckler doesn't shout, 'Judas!' He yells 'Boo! Do you know any Judas Priest?' U2 make a concert film about 'a hugely famous Irish group going to America and inventing all forms of American music simultaneously.' … Morrissey was outraged by the huge chin that Langford gave him in an early cartoon. (Langford made the chin even larger in later strips.) But when Morton interviewed Polly Jean Harvey for a magazine article, he confessed to his part in "Great Pop Things"' devilish PJ Harvey parody ('She tried to change the world in her fake-leopard-fur fifty-foot invisible-bunny costume'). Her response was a shriek of delight: "Oh! I've got it up on my fridge."

http://sp8.fotolog.com/photo/40/55/57/ashbrg/1126871966_f.jpg

http://www.beefheart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/MortonDeath4.jpg

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-zsSCH4C2dvI/U8ZMqCNcAMI/AAAAAAAABgY/UcyABkUu7ns/s1600/msppop1.jpg

https://33.media.tumblr.com/25ca4e265a219185c5a0e008d39edcde/tumblr_nd6mx6svmp1s180omo1_500.png

http://www.beefheart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/MortonDeath3.jpg

if Boy Girl Boy Girl has a bunch of Bernard and/or Huey strips, it ought to be great

it does, and it is!

omg I have never heard of Great Pop Things, wow thanks

Heh I remember Ben Watson once fuming abt Great Pop Things because they took the piss out of Alexander Von Schlippenbach's name

Wish I could find 'Steve Albini feeds his cat' somewhere.

Thats like ILM THE COMIC STRIP

32: JULIUS KNIPL, REAL ESTATE PHOTOGRAPHER by Ben Katchor (81 points, 4 votes)
Kniplpage. (Official site, containing a single strip.)

A middle-aged man, seemingly out of time, wanders the city with the aim of capturing still moments of dignified architecture, but frequently gets distracted from his inner ruminations by the intrusion of human flotsam.

http://i.guim.co.uk/static/w-620/h--/q-95/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/9/8/1410186754018/22bb248d-4adf-48d5-bb7a-edae6e956639-1020x698.jpeg

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-3Nr-z3vV_V4/TccGoJuM9EI/AAAAAAAAA2Y/AURWyX_cQZE/s1600/katchor-the-radiator-musician-da-julius-knipl-real-estate-photographer.jpg

http://www.uky.edu/~grissom/knipl.gif

ben katchor is great

in my top 10

Such an amazing piece of work. Super nice guy, too.

Here's a link to a really big pic of a book he signed to me:

https://highter.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/tumblr_mld7whrbrn1qbknquo1_1280.jpg?w=700

I loved Great Pop Things; had no idea it was written by a Mekon!

I think I need to buy that collection, bad print or no.

drawn by a Mekon!

31: BARNABY by Crockett Johnson (93 points, 5 votes)
Volume 1 – decades of trying to get a reprint licence finally pays off

A boy named Barnaby wishes for a fairy godmother. Instead, he gets a fairy godfather who uses a cigar for a magic wand. Bumbling but endearing, Mr. O’Malley rarely gets his magic to work — even when he consults his Fairy Godfather’s Handy Pocket Guide. The true magic of Barnaby resides in its canny mix of fantasy and satire, amplified by the understated elegance of Crockett Johnson’s clean, spare art. ...In its combination of Johnson’s sly wit and O’Malley’s amiable windbaggery, a child’s feeling of wonder and an adult’s wariness, highly literate jokes and a keen eye for the ridiculous, Barnaby expanded our sense of what comics can do.
...As Coulton Waugh noted in his landmark The Comics (1947), Barnaby’s audience may not “compare, numerically, with that of the top, mass-appeal strips. But it is a very discriminating audience, which includes a number of strip artists themselves, and so this strip stands a good chance of remaining to influence the course of American humor for many years to come.” He was right.
Barnaby’s fans have included Peanuts creator Charles Schulz, Family Circus creator Bil Keane, and graphic novelists Daniel Clowes, Art Spiegelman, and Chris Ware. It had many fans beyond the world of comics, too. Dorothy Parker compared Barnaby to Huckleberry Finn, and said: “I think, and I am trying to talk calmly, that Barnaby and his friends and oppressors are the most important additions to American arts and letters in Lord knows how many years. I know that they are the most important additions to my heart.”

http://www.cbgxtra.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Barnaby%20intro.jpg

http://westfieldcomics.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/BARNABY-420814.jpg

https://locustmoon.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/barnaby-magic.jpg

http://www.philnel.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Barnaby1947-7-13.jpg

I love the strips in the Smithsonian collection but have never seen any others, unfortunately. Great stuff.

ah he did Harold & The Purple Crayon, knew that style looked familiar

yeah I was surprised to learn he'd had a daily strip

http://www.michaelspornanimation.com/splog/wp-content/b/barn1.jpg

barnaby is incredible. if i'd owned the fantagraphics reprint way back when i sent in my ballot for this poll it might've been my no. 1.

30: ERNIE POOK'S COMEEK by Lynda Barry (95 points, 7 votes)
The first volume of a stalled? abortive? complete collection

One of the highest achievements of the America alt-weekly era, Barry’s strip mines the endless depths of young children’s interiority. Playfulness, terror, loneliness while never being alone, internecine power plays invisible to adults, the opacity of the future, laughter and the value of shared memory, regardless of the experience – all the classics. Barry abandoned the strip after three decades only because the entire market died from underneath her.

http://www.isthmus.com/media/2012/01/19/lyndabarry-comeek011912g.jpg
http://www.straight.com/files/styles/article_main/public/files/images/wide/CAR_Pook_2090.jpg
https://misterjep.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/weirdo.jpg

I've re-read some 1980s Barry collections in the last month and am pretty sure I ranked her far too low on my own ballot, wherever I put her

her ear for the language of children is uncanny

29: DICK TRACY by Chester Gould (100 points, 6 votes)
IDW launched their classic strips series by straight-up Xeroxing Seth’s design for the Peanuts hardcovers

There was something that Chester Gould understood about the comics medium that I don't think anyone else has really clued into to the same extent that he did. The whole thing is forward momentum. It is technically considered to be "bad comics" to take up half a panel with a caption that stiltedly describes everything that is going on. Chester Gould didn't think that was "bad comics". Just the opposite. If the gangster threatens to throw the bomb in one panel and you explain what Pat Patton is about to do and how Dick Tracy signals him in the caption in the next panel and then show Pat shooting the bomb out of the guy's hand and into the pickle brine in the following panel…Chester Gould is saying, that's GOOD comics. Set up, explanation, gunshot "OW!". The reader wants to see the bad guy get shot in the hand so the sooner you can get him shot in the hand, the better your comics are. If you can get from point A to point C with one long-winded caption, that's better than using two or three panels to get there.

About two seconds before I was going to say something, as if Chester read my mind he mentioned the weird way that he drew Jean Penfield, the writer. She first appears in the 1/24/34 Sunday strip as a typical 30's brunette fashion plate. Then starting Monday and Tuesday her head just keeps getting bigger and bigger along with her eyes – bigger and bigger and further and further apart. It's beyond even the outer boundaries of Chester Gould caricature. She's like an alien life-form or something. Each eyelash is about the length of Dick Tracy's nose. It's all you can do to read what's going on in the strip for trying to figure out what it is with this hydrocephalic 30's brunette fashion plate.

[…]

But, obviously, Gould didn't once look at her and think – maybe that's a little distracting. Obviously, he always stuck with what was working for him: hell bent for leather forward momentum in the storyline. It soon becomes obvious that the point of Jean Penfield is to get her into her negligee so she can talk to people on the phone and then get attacked in her mansion, and then shoot someone in her mansion and then almost get blown up in her roadster and then get abducted in her roadster and then to drive her roadster off of the road, then wrestle for the steering wheel with her "kidnaper" and then crash through a shack, then brush a haystack and then dash STRAIGHT FOR THE HUGE STORAGE TANK OF OIL.

Eyes? No, I can't say that I was too worried that the size or her eyes or the size of her head was a little distracting, Chester Gould appears to say from across the intervening seventy-three years (thinking to himself all the while: It's comics. What don't you understand about that?)

One of the Pop Artists in the 60s did a Dick Tracy strip that was all gibberish. He basically traced all of the faces and figures but then rearranged all of the words in the captions and word balloons so that they made absolutely no sense. The intent, I'm sure, was High Irony, Camp, to try and show exactly how devoid of content DICK TRACY and all other pop culture was. The thing was, it still had that incredible forward momentum. Even though you knew that each panel contained nothing but gibberish, you still read every word and looked at all the pictures. Pavlov was right, especially when it came to Chester Gould's storytelling. MUST READ! MUST LOOK AT! MUST READ! MUST LOOK AT!

With the circulation and readership that DICK TRACY had, it must've perplexed Chester Gould on an on-going basis. "They can see how I'm doing it, they can see how successful the strip is – why do they insist, instead, on doing strips that move so SLOWLY?" To Gould, it must've seemed as if everyone else's stories were as slow as molasses in January. Because they were, by comparison. Gould, by contrast, was always trying to figure out how to make things go faster. There's a great moment in the 3/4/34 strip where he letters the word balloon directly INTO Tracy's hat. He's got a certain amount of information to impart in Tracy's word balloon, there isn't room for all of it OVER Tracy's hat, so he just letters straight into the hat and then inks the hat around the words. Why not? Why stop and think or even slow down and think? There's a whole rest of a Sunday page that needs writing and drawing. It's COMICS!!

http://www.umich.edu/~csie/comicart/StripArt/Gould090147.jpg

http://cdn.coollinesartwork.com/Images/Category_2/subcat_29429/TracyDaily03151948.JPG

http://cdn.comixology.com/previews/sep120385/sep120385-07.jpg

I'll admit it, I have LOVED the Dick Tracy reprints after only having been vaguely curious. As Sim points out, there are spelling errors galore and wild plot inconsistencies and maguffins, and Gould REALLY isn't very good at comedy when he turns his hand to it; but the stories are remarkably engaging and you never want to stop reading until the conclusion - by which point he's started to weave the next plot into the strip. The brutality shines through also: when people are beaten half to death they look beaten half to death and might have been being beaten for two or three weeks in publication duration, when people drown you see them drown slowly over three or four strips. The threat is always very real and villains don't come back (90% of the time) because they are dead (90% of the time).

Having said all that, I think we are only a couple of volumes from Moon-era, which might be where I've had enough.

One of the Pop Artists in the 60s did a Dick Tracy strip that was all gibberish. He basically traced all of the faces and figures but then rearranged all of the words in the captions and word balloons so that they made absolutely no sense. The intent, I'm sure, was High Irony, Camp, to try and show exactly how devoid of content DICK TRACY and all other pop culture was.

Sim is wrong about Jess Collins' intent here, right? This account says that he regarded Gould as a hero:

http://poemsandpoetics.blogspot.co.uk/2009/10/jess-collins-images-from-tricky-cad.html

this comics journal article kind of makes a similar argument to Sim, but is less polite to Gould:

Gould’s Dick Tracy was profoundly influenced by the pictographic possibilities of Modernist formalism – geometric reduction, simplified color, aggressively linear compositions that eschewed photorealist nuance for an almost industrial graphic design immediacy – Gould had a primitivist magpie eye for purified ways of picture-making.

By breaking the linear narrative agenda of the original strips, but keeping the graphic vocabulary intact, Jess identifies and brings to the forefront Gould’s inherent avant-gardism. This undoubtedly would send Chester spinning in his grave — if he hadn’t been very much alive and kicking at the time the collages were made, in the middle of a long slide to the same cultural phantom zone occupied by Al Capp.

http://www.tcj.com/reviews/o-tricky-cad-other-jessoterica/
http://www.tcj.com/reviews/o-tricky-cad-other-jessoterica/

28: LEVIATHAN by Peter Blegvad (103 points, 4 votes)
website from 1999

Former Slapp Happy musician takes a break from collaborating with John Zorn and Andy Partridge to draw a dreamlike, existential weekly for a British newspaper, through most of the ‘90s. The baby Leviathan, or Levi for short, is a descendant of Henry, Barnaby, and Nemo, but also related to the protagonists of Chester Brown’s abandoned Underwater; Levi’s dreamscapes and encounters are oft beyond literal comprehension, frequently functioning as metaphors for the workings of adult life, but here with an awareness of how opaque they are to grown-ups, too.

"Peter Blegvad's comic strip is one of the greatest, weirdest things I've ever stared at.  Give me Leviathan or give me death!"
                                                        --Matt Groening

"Whenever I'm asked for proof that literature, art and poetry can exist in comic-strip form, I point to Peter Blegvad."
                                                       --Ben Katchor

http://oletheros.com/wp-content/gallery/reviews/levi_parentage.jpg

http://www.moorsmagazine.com/images22/leviathan3.jpg

http://www.believermag.com/issues/200911/img/blegvad_leviathan.jpg

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_2WwQ6zNxXY0/TG45DQG7XZI/AAAAAAAAAZI/KlgUfnWl-kc/s1600/Leviathan-3.jpg

en Francais

http://www.bedetheque.com/media/Planches/PlancheA_201631.jpg

http://www.du9.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Leviathan-p05.jpg

If he's taking a break from working with Andy Partridge, he'd have to go back in time to draw these strips.

my dad used to but the Independent on Sunday when I was a kid and the occasional glimpses I caught of Leviathan used to fascinate/unsettle me in equal measure, also realising years later that the guy from Slapp Happy drew it was a real 'I can't believe this person who did x is the same person who did y' moment

Kinda wish I'd placed Leviathan higher on my ballot, but glad to have known about it/voted for it.

never heard of it, and I'm a big Blegvad fan, psyched to explore that website

no print collections of this, I assume?

There was a hardcover published in both the US and UK.

he'd have to go back in time to draw these strips.

he would if he hadn't drawn them in the past