Panel Discussion - The ILX Comic Strip Poll Results

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

called The Book Of Leviathan, sorry

ooh it's in paperback as well:

http://www.amazon.com/Book-Leviathan-Peter-Blegvad/dp/1590200527

xposts yeah it was a reference to this writeup:

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.

nm.

I'm interested in other comics work by Blegvad. he used to draw a strip for terrible UK right-wing magazine Standpoint:

http://standpointmag.co.uk/taxonomy/term/501?page=5

I think he used to do a cartoon in David Hepworth + Mark Ellen's Word magazine as well. does anyone know of more recent material?

some more cartoons here

http://radiofreesongclub.com/artists/peter-blegvad

The '90s started two and a half decades ago, which is in the past iirc

27: GARFIELD MINUS GARFIELD by Dan Walsh (106 points, 4 votes)
garfieldminusgarfield.net/

A meme almost twice as good as the strip it undetournes, according to science.

Yeah, but his collaboration with Andy Partridge was in 2003, but now I see they have done work since the eighties, so OK I'm out.

some more cartoons here

http://radiofreesongclub.com/artists/peter-blegvad

^ nice

26: ZIPPY the PINHEAD by Bill Griffith (107 points, 6 votes)
Understanding Zippy The Pinhead

The second work in the poll that converted from page-based comics to a strip, but this change was lasting. Mostly a vehicle for absurdity in original mode, that aspect was retained in the shift to weekly and then daily mode, but more significantly, Griffith incorporated the approach of his other underground series, Griffith Observatory. More often than not, Zippy’s encountering of the oddities of American life are less a prompt for his non-sequitur reactions – whether positive or negative – and more an opening for “Griffy” to express an actual opinion on what these things say about US culture, politics, and character.

Probably the longest-running work in the poll still by its original author? Remind me to check that when we’re done.

http://www.zippythepinhead.com/media/one.jpg

http://zippythepinhead.com/Merchant2/graphics/00000001/2011/images/052311.gif

http://static.flickr.com/72/197175760_044b725c2a_o.gif

http://www.lostwackys.com/Wacky-Packages/Lost-Wackys/1970s/Bill-Griffith/zippy3.jpg

http://mrc-static.s3.amazonaws.com/Newsbusters/static/2009/12/zippypinhead.gif

http://38.media.tumblr.com/28da8809a2017432986718b46c87de5a/tumblr_mm7b1dRkVu1qzvn61o1_500.gif

http://images.tcj.com/2011/11/121494.gif

http://zippythepinhead.com/Merchant2/graphics/00000001/other/images/yow2.jpg

due respect

haha weird I have been re-reading my copy of "Pinhead's Progress" lately

was disturbed by the Zippy erotica book I saw in the shop a few weeks back, was that really necessary

Misread that as Ziggy erotica and gah.

what is the Zippy erotica book?

fear of flying iirc

made me sad

looks like it was something that included a reprint of Young Lust #8...?

This is Young Lust #8. It has a Dan Clowes cover. It came out in 1993, and it must have gone instantly in the shredder, because I have literally never gotten one response. I decided to put all of my characters into the most explicitly sexual situations I could possibly imagine, as a tongue-in-cheek critique of pornography. It was called "Fleshed Out," and you could see Zippy and Griffy arriving at a party at the upper left. I mean it's a porno. 1993, I was seven years into my daily comic strip appearing in respected newspapers across the country. I was sweating this out for months after I did it, thinking, "What have I done? Someone's gonna find out. They're going to cancel me in the Washington Post and the San Francisco Examiner, Seattle Post. It's the end of my career. Why did I do something so stupid?" But as I said, no one has ever noticed it. [laughter] I think I did a really good job. I highly recommend it. I reread it last week. This is the last page. Every one of the characters is engaged in a sexual romp. Explicit and pornographic as it could possibly be. In a previous page to this, I have Griffy in a compromising position saying, "Well, what is pornography? Whatever turns you on, right? Human sexuality is a complex phenomenon." And his girlfriend at the moment is saying "Hey, wait a second, I'm not finished with my scathing, uh" and he says "Of course, the male and female versions differ widely, in very distinct ways. The clinical approach puzzles me. These videos with their tight close ups of plunging meat. Only a dirt bald brute could find that arousing, n'est pas?" The punch line of this whole strip is at the end, his occasional wife and Zippy are having explicit sex and she says "Oh, Zippy, I love it when you talk dirty." And Zippy says, "Are we having sex yet?"

http://zippythepinhead.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=allYLs&Category_Code=ruc&Product_Count=4
i own a bunch of the first run Young Lust comix; got em from my dad's high school graduation present of his old underground collection

traded funny aminals #1 for a full run of Melmoth in Cerebus; always been a regret

hahaha wtf man!

ah, it's not that rare, just a dumb move. I have it in reprint in any case.

just looked in Lost & Found - that story is 6 pages in a 364-page, 35-year long collection of miscellania, not a "Zippy erotica book"

the campaign starts here for a full graphic novel though

or to have a single 22-year-old issue of an anthology Griffith edited for 22 years before that banned, Shakey's call

I have that issue (magazine-sized iirc?) but haven't read it btw!

I didnt call for anything to be banned.

I looked at the book for 30 seconds and wasnt sure what it was

You are truly the most pedantic of pedants

hey you're the one who only looked at those six pages, too "disturbed" and "saddened" and "unnecessary" to look at the cover hmm, methinks the lady doth protest too much

25: THE SPIRIT by Will Eisner, Jules Feiffer, Wally Wood and diverse hands (113 points, 6 votes)
The official page on willeisner.com was apparently written by someone who has never read any Spirit comics

And here we have one that – I think? – while it did convert from multi-page stories to strips, never did so under the hand of its creator.

May 11, 1947:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-CRqyq6xve2Q/VFAKkkvSGGI/AAAAAAABEj4/CdzyMKhWqIM/s1600/Spirit_Mag_11-33_470511.jpg
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-OAaNWIAlb9M/VFAKjG2Ee3I/AAAAAAABEjo/1wPnUWUYQKs/s1600/Spirit_Mag_11-34_470511.jpg
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-8r5RrjTcNXs/VFAKjkH4tmI/AAAAAAABEjs/06jqInWfKvk/s1600/Spirit_Mag_11-35_470511.jpg
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-1mOMm73-pEg/VFAKlFt3OII/AAAAAAABEkA/GZ8bBk76FOY/s1600/Spirit_Mag_11-36_470511.jpg
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-pDtLbjHr908/VFAKlzkcy9I/AAAAAAABEkE/QhkiIL3gB6I/s1600/Spirit_Mag_11-37_470511.jpg
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-erWknHpNAu0/VFAKmUBRDUI/AAAAAAABEkM/tnyhlTs981Y/s1600/Spirit_Mag_11-38_470511.jpg
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Vlxcl5oheBU/VFAKnIqn7fI/AAAAAAABEkY/-0svue6MsEU/s1600/Spirit_Mag_11-39_470511.jpg

September 1, 1940:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-KdyGxMsjtyg/T1aTLWmck2I/AAAAAAAAfRo/XmKt81wXV2o/s1600/spiritsection1940-09-01p01.jpg
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Wp29tWl4w0w/T1aTOH4MvjI/AAAAAAAAfRw/9gxjUQezyGM/s1600/spiritsection1940-09-01p02.jpg
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Ulj9gq8vDWo/T1aTQ1FfwSI/AAAAAAAAfR4/kUC_B1VtX4A/s1600/spiritsection1940-09-01p03.jpg
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-zgpI4WcXi7I/T1aTTGh_agI/AAAAAAAAfSA/0cK9lTVPBKo/s1600/spiritsection1940-09-01p04.jpg
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ZvS6aVmlFMA/T1aTV7mKwEI/AAAAAAAAfSI/MMuz2fRPsuE/s1600/spiritsection1940-09-01p05.jpg
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-b_zYmnYUmd8/T1aTYt16ACI/AAAAAAAAfSQ/vqD-CVYJlP0/s1600/spiritsection1940-09-01p06.jpg
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-DQVsRwPmK8o/T1aTbLhfniI/AAAAAAAAfSY/xENye27g4kU/s1600/spiritsection1940-09-01p07.jpg

May 23, 1948:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-s5wRQsZr54s/UZlvaQSNqhI/AAAAAAAAzEs/xoD5LuhzI8E/s1600/Spirit_Mag_08-35_480523.jpg
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-_cVPHrKVC5o/UZlvbYw4JpI/AAAAAAAAzE0/Pyehh7bRot4/s1600/Spirit_Mag_08-36_480523.jpg
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Btfryb57fGk/UZlvbwz5CnI/AAAAAAAAzE8/o3EaVEThVcI/s1600/Spirit_Mag_08-37_480523.jpg
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-dPOrfQCVI_k/UZlvcqvH0fI/AAAAAAAAzFE/91aodHLryys/s1600/Spirit_Mag_08-38_480523.jpg
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-l9UFam0nBqk/UZlvdB11BmI/AAAAAAAAzFI/cF-zH06FPMQ/s1600/Spirit_Mag_08-39_480523.jpg
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-cg2w6Rp5TEI/UZlvdl56W4I/AAAAAAAAzFU/FO3mk64rTPo/s1600/Spirit_Mag_08-40_480523.jpg
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-PFP438j-LNs/UZlveQ4Tu0I/AAAAAAAAzFc/OKQaCSnBwd8/s1600/Spirit_Mag_08-41_480523.jpg

methinks the lady doth protest too much

lol what sinister ulterior (perhaps puritan?) motive could you possibly think I have here. I was following my kids around the store flipping through things, I didn't check the indicia of every book I opened.

just lookin' for pinhead porn

24: GASOLINE ALLEY by Frank King (114 points, 6 votes)
Dailies collected by D&Q / Sundays collected by Dark Horse

Commissioned as a strip to appeal to the new demographic of middle-class car owners, it accidentally revolutionized the funny pages by following a “real-time” format, and allowing abandoned baby Skeezix (spelled backwards is Skizzix) to grow up before the readers’ eyes. King’s facility at creating a relatable soap opera narrative outshone his also remarkable skill at designing innovative and gorgeous full-colour Sundays, until resurrected by Chris Ware for the 3rd volume of D&Q’s titular anthology. Started in 1919, King stepped down from the Sundays in 1951, and expired from his remaining contributions to the daily (by now co-credited) in 1969.

http://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Gasoline-Alley-092912.jpg

http://www.umich.edu/~csie/comicart/StripArt/GasolineAllyFrankKingRachel.JPG

http://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Gasoline-Alley-100521.jpg

http://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/050528.jpg

http://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/021526.jpg

http://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/King-Frank-GA-9-6-21.jpg

http://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/042026.jpg

http://www.comicbookdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Gasoline-Alley-The-Complete-Sundays-Vol-1-interior-1.jpg

http://www.markstaffbrandl.com/CAA/gasoline.jpg

http://hiandlois.com/files/2013/10/gasolinealleycolor.jpg

here's a working version of that broken Sunday:

http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y115/kitbrash/Gasoline-Alley-The-Complete-Sundays-Vol-1-interior-1_zpscrneyqq3.jpg

http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/king-sequence1-625x740.jpg

https://conversazionisulfumetto.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/gasoline-alley-ware.jpg

http://www.du9.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Gasoline-Alley-Sunday-page-by-Frank-King.jpg

https://theperiodicfable.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/gasoline-alley-1.jpg

Those Sunday GAs are so beautiful (I know some of them from the Smithsonian newspaper strip anthology) - love the combo of autumnal pastoralism and agressive graphic modernism, looking to the past and the future simultaneously. Wish there was like a one-volume 'best of' collection of these, in a (physical and financially) affordable form.

http://www.amazon.com/Gasoline-Alley-Complete-Sundays-1920-1922/dp/1616553340
two volumes for 80 bucks seems reasonable. i simply don't have the space.
but i do have all the daily reprint books.

-How does the sap know when it's time to come up again?
-How do you know when it's time to play marbles.

two volumes for 80 bucks seems reasonable.

but that's actually eleven volumes for over $800, p much the exact opposite of what Ward was wishing for

King stepped down from the Sundays in 1951

there IS a Maresca / Ware table-sized best-of though! if I had a home I'd probably be ordering it in one drink's time