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SINCE SPIDER-MAN will be the biggest thing at the multiplex this summer, we decided to capitulate to the season and embrace animation in print. But not the pulpy, stapled, ink-on-your-fingers kind of print. Look beyond the manga and the comix and the 'zines, and you'll find an abundance of worthwhile cartoon books from sources as highbrow as The New Yorker and as lowbrow as Mad and Playboy. No surprise that sex and scantily clad babes abound here, but office politics and simple child's play are equally important. Using few words and careful pen strokes, these artists and illustrators prove that ponderous prose can be the last thing we want to read this summer. The pleasures of one good panel, however, are like a popsicle—they don't require such close attention, and you immediately want another one after finishing.
The Glamour Girls of Bill Ward
Edited by Alex Chun (Fantagraphics, $22.95)
Tijuana Bibles: Art and Wit in America's Forbidden Funnies, 1930s–1950s
Edited by Bob Adelman (Simon & Schuster, $15)
Bill Ward used to say he always knew art was his destiny—his surname was "draw" backward. Starting out as a layout man laboring on the two-fisted adventures of Doc Savage and the Shadow, he spent World War II penciling Captain Marvel comics while he was supposed to be on lookout at an airfield tower. When the violent old comic-book world was demolished by Senate hearings in 1954, Ward switched his focus to cheesecake pinup pictures for Romp, Stare, and other cheapo girlie books.
The Ward girl was an awkward crayon apparition conjured with incredible income-boosting swiftness and an obsessive attention to fetishistic detail. Her boobs were the biggest in the business, bulging so perilously as to threaten to poke out the also bulging eyeballs of ogling males. Her negligees were intricately lacy; her stiletto heels could put out any eyes not punctured by her nipples; and her thigh-high stockings, opera-length gloves, and serpentine locks were as theatrical as her bust.
Glamour Girls sumptuously reproduces over a hundred of Ward's 1956–1963 pinups, plus a few of his "peek-a-beauts" covers for Gee-Whiz and romance comics. His late-career harder-core porn is largely ignored, but that's OK: Ward's art (and heart) were essentially innocent.
Looking back to a lewder, less innocent era in Tijuana Bibles, Art Spiegelman points out in his characteristically brilliant introduction that the first true comic books had nothing to do with the mainstream funny pages in the newspaper. These "Tijuana Bibles" were neither biblical nor Mexican, but all-American original underground comics. The artists of these "eight-pagers" started churning them out during the Depression, featuring movie stars and famous funny-page characters in flagrante delicto and emitting colorfully ridiculous smutty dialogue. Minnie Mouse soothes Donald Duck's "hard feelings" by letting him "put a duck egg in." Claudette Colbert does obscenely wide-mouthed Joe E. Brown. And don't even ask about the infamous orgy Popeye, Moon Mullins, Maggie, Jiggs, and Major Hoople staged.
The comics, at first look, are bizarrely interesting, then quickly grow stupid and repetitive; one wishes the commentary part of the book were longer. Spiegelman says he boned up on Tijuana Bibles by reading "a swell master's thesis for the University of Washington written by Robert Gluckson in 1992," but doesn't quote it. This nicely done paperback needs more pages of Gluckson-esque scholarship, even if it meant we had to do without a few pages of the Marx Brothers gang-banging a showgirl. TIM APPELO
The Complete Peanuts (1950–1952)
By Charles M. Schulz (Fantagraphics, $28.95)
Even from the get-go, Charlie Brown was an unpopular boy. As evident in Charles M. Schulz's first Peanuts strip—initially titled Li'l Folks in 1948—our beloved hero smiles while walking past his friends Peppermint Patty and Sherman; though once he is out of earshot, Sherman says, "How I hate him!" Good ol' Charlie Brown—always the butt of jokes, a perpetually depressed little boy, forever tortured by the little red-haired girl. Well, he's about to have his revenge, as local publisher Fantagraphics Books begins to chronologically reissue all of Charlie Brown's exploits in 25 volumes over the next dozen years.
Volume 1 is a sturdy hardcover tome of nearly 350 pages. Although Schulz's Sunday strips are sadly reproduced in black-and-white, not color, this first volume will be particularly fascinating to Peanuts aficionados. Here we can see how Schulz ironed out the kinks of his new strip and developed his characters. In its embryonic stages, Linus was an infant, Schroeder a preverbal though piano-playing toddler, and Snoopy just a happy-go-lucky dog without his charming thought bubbles.
Schulz (1922–2000) introduced a new paradigm for cartooning: a world where children were contemplative instead of slapstickish; they functioned without the presence of adults. Umberto Eco says, "The world of Peanuts is a microcosm, a little human comedy for the innocent reader and for the sophisticated." The quote comes from a biographical essay included on Schulz by David Michaelis, who's at work on the first comprehensive Schulz biography. Also contained here are a short introduction by Garrison Keillor and an interview with Schulz conducted in 1987, when he was still hard at work on his strip. He retired in December 1999, then died three months later. Thanks to Fantagraphics, however, good ol' Charlie Brown lives again. SAMANTHA STOREY
