Out of the Alley!
Hogan's Alley
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Dear fellow comics fan:
We're deep into production on Hogan's Alley #15, and we wanted to stay
in touch as we produce what we think is our most eclectic and
interesting issue yet. (Yeah, we say that every time, and this time we
mean it!)
FREE HOGAN'S ALLEY DAY: In observance of Free Comic Book Day
(Saturday, May 5), Hogan's Alley will mail a free copy to whomever
requests one on that date. So mark your calendars and remember to drop
us an e-mail on May 5, and we'll mail you an issue of our choosing.
If it's springtime, it's awards season for cartoonists! The movies
have the Oscars, television has the Emmys, and cartooning has the only
slightly less prestigious Reuben Awards. The membership of the
National Cartoonists Society has nominated cartoonists in a range of
categories, and the winners will be announced on May 26. The staff of
Hogan's Alley, using our peerless insight, a Ouija board and the Magic
8-Ball, has made our fearless predictions for some of the categories:
NOMINEES FOR THE COMIC BOOK DIVISION AWARD: Acocella Marchetto
("Cancer Vixen"), Gene Luen Yang ("American Born Chinese") and Marjane
Satrapi ("Chicken With Plums"). The fact that this division includes
so many non-Anglo names speaks to the impressive cultural diversity
that the comic-book form has attracted in recent years. SHOULD WIN:
Yang's culturally aware, Printz Award-winning novel transcends the
label of "comic book" and can be enjoyed by young adults and older
readers alike. WILL WIN: Marchetto's high-profile work in The New
Yorker has created a pre-existing fan base, and her courageous self-
portrait in "Vixen" is icing on the cake.
NOMINEES FOR THE EDITORIAL CARTOON AWARD: Mike Lester (The Rome News-
Tribune), Glenn McCoy (Universal Press) and Mike Ramirez (formerly of
the Los Angeles Times, now with Investor's Business Daily). Apart from
the obvious bias toward cartoonists named Mike, the nominees are
notable for their overall conservative perspective. SHOULD WIN:
Ramirez, an idiosyncratic stylist with a strongly iconoclastic point
of view, grabbed headlines in the cartooning biz when he was
unceremoniously and ham-handedly fired from the Times. WILL WIN: Among
strong competition, Ramirez.
NOMINEES FOR THE NEWSPAPER PANEL AWARD: Tony Carillo ("F Minus"),
Kieran Meehan ("Meehan") and Hilary Price ("Rhymes With Orange"). Is
this a category that attracts cartoonists who enjoy writing more than
drawing? (And we mean that as a compliment.) The three nominees offer
three types of observational humor with a postironic twist. SHOULD
WIN: For a long time now, Price has been writing strong material that
compares favorably with much of the current crop of New Yorker
cartoonists. WILL WIN: Price.
NOMINEES FOR THE NEWSPAPER STRIP DIVISION AWARD: Bill Griffith ("Zippy
the Pinhead"), Stephan Pastis ("Pearls Before Swine") and Mark Tatulli
("Lio"). The NCS created a Murderers Row with this lineup--each strip
is a starkly off-kilter accomplishment in the tremulous environment of
the daily comics page. SHOULD WIN: Griffith has been keeping the
comics page safe for surreality with the daily version of "Zippy"
since 1986 and could be said to have paved the way for others like
him. And as much as we enjoy "Lio," it's the new kid on the block
compared to the other nominees. WILL WIN: Pastis' strip is a winning
combination: a critical darling and darkly funny. And it doesn't hurt
that Pastis is a favorite among his voting peers.
NOMINEES FOR THE REUBEN AWARD: Those in the running for the top award
(despite common misperception, this award is the ONLY Reuben Award
given each year; the others are divisional awards) are Bill Amend
("Foxtrot"), Dave Coverly ("Speed Bump") and Dan Piraro ("Bizarro").
It's a lineup mercifully devoid of "living legends," allowing for a
more level playing field. (It's never fun for a cartoonist to go up
against a Jack Davis or a Will Eisner.) SHOULD WIN: Piraro is beloved
by his peers and demonstrates daily that the comics page can still be
hospitable to brilliant art. Always solid and occasionally
transcendent gagwriting only adds to his credentials. WILL WIN: While
Coverly and Piraro will no doubt hold the hardware in their hands one
day, Amend will win for the years of popular work he's produced, and
making headlines with his unusual move to Sundays-only status gains
him respect from his voting colleagues (and, lucratively, opened up
plenty of spots on the comics page for them to occupy).
TRIVIA TIME: While you're in a Reuben Award state of mind, place these
previous winners in order from youngest to oldest when they won their
Reubens:
A. Hal Foster
B. Fred Lasswell
C. Ernie Bushmiller
D. Leonard Starr
E. Dik Browne
(Answers below)
A LIFE IN PRINT: Next month, Fantagraphics Books will publish a book
we've waited literally decades for: a biography of Milton Caniff,
legendary creator of "Terry and the Pirates" and "Steve Canyon,"
written by noted comics historian (and HA scribe) R.C. Harvey.
The main outline of Milton Caniff's life and career is the stuff of
cartooning lore. Born in 1907 in Hillsboro, Ohio, he grew up in Dayton
and worked his way through college at the Ohio State University in the
art department of the Columbus Dispatch. He was active in campus and
community theater but picked cartooning as a career on the advice of
the Dispatch's famed cartoonist Billy Ireland, who told young Caniff,
"Stick to your inkpots, kid. Actors don't eat regularly."
Caniff's next stop was the Feature Service of the Associated Press in
New York, where he landed in the spring of 1932. He concocted a comic
strip, "Dickie Dare," about a youth who dreams himself into adventures
with Robin Hood and other literary and legendary personages; it
started in July 1933, and in the fall of 1934, Caniff received a phone
call from Captain Joseph Patterson, the comics-conscious publisher of
the New York Daily News, who invited the cartoonist to do a comic
strip for the Chicago Tribune-Daily News Syndicate. Patterson told
Caniff that he wanted an action-packed adventure strip with a young
hero accompanied by a rugged, handsome mentor ("to handle the rough
stuff," Patterson said). And Patterson also specified the locale--
China, where, the Captain said, "anything can still happen." Caniff
promptly invented the celebrated "Terry and the Pirates," which
debuted on October 22, one of the pirates being the beautiful but
sinister Dragon Lady, his most memorable creation. Caniff rose to
prominence during World War II when he took Terry into the Army Air
Corps and told stories imbued with a trenchant pragmatic patriotism
that warmed hearts and steeled nerves on the homefront as well as the
battlefront. For military newspapers, he created a special weekly
humorous strip, "Male Call," which featured a gorgeous camp follower
named, cryptically, Miss Lace.
After the war, Caniff created a sensation when he left the Tribune-
News Syndicate in order to create a new comic strip, "Steve Canyon,"
that he would own all rights to. Until this time, almost no one owned
their own comic strips; and almost no cartoonist had ever quit a
popular strip in order to do another, untested one. Starring an
adventurous aviator, "Steve Canyon" was launched with great fanfare on
January 13, 1947, and when the Korean War broke out in 1950, Steve, a
reserve pilot, re-enlisted; he remained an Air Force officer
thereafter, becoming an unofficial spokesman for that service. Caniff
lost papers by the score during the Vietnam War because public
sentiment turned sour on the conflict and on all things military. The
circulation of the strip dropped from a high of 650 in 1958-60, when
"Steve Canyon" was on TV, to less than 100 when Caniff died on Easter
Sunday, April 3, 1988. Caniff's assistants, penciler Dick Rockwell and
letterer Shel Dorf, continued the strip until June 5, shortly after
Caniff's wife, Bunny, died.
We spoke with Harvey about his mammoth bio- -titled, appropriately if
verbosely, "Meanwhile...: A Biography of Milton Caniff, Creator of Terry
and the Pirates and Steve Canyon"-- about one of the comics' grand
masters. (You can see some art related to the book at
http://www.cagle.com/hogan/newsletter_extras/caniff_bio/caniff_bio.asp
.)
HA: Obviously, you were well versed in Caniff's life before you
undertook this book. Still, you must have encountered some information
that surprised you.
RCH: In putting flesh on the bare bones of the Caniff legend--950
pages of flesh--I learned much more about Caniff's life and picked up
a few insights, too, into the way he worked and thought. And about how
memory functions. Caniff enjoyed a reputation for having an excellent
memory, but, as it turns out, his memory wasn't all that good.
Consider, by way of example, the story of the creation of "Terry and
the Pirates."
That part of the legend is largely the one Caniff himself created in
reporting the event over the years, time and time again. Upon repeated
tellings, the story was abbreviated and distilled. And the further
into the past the occasion itself receded, the fresher Caniff's most
recent recollection of it became in comparison. It happens to us all;
it is a condition of the mind and experience. By this very human trick
of memory, Caniff's memories as he reported them assumed the stature
of fact in his mind so that the thing he was most likely to recall was
the last version of the story that he'd told, or the one he most
frequently related. Very early on, in order to make the point that an
aspiring cartoonist must be ready for opportunity when it knocks,
Caniff truncated the story of "Terry"'s inception, telescoping the
events of a couple of weeks--or more--into less than a week. By
Caniff's usual account, Patterson called him on a Friday, wanted the
strip he described by the next Thursday, and on the following Monday,
"Terry" was in print. But when I tried to put this sequence of events
into narrative form, it wouldn't fit. It took at least another week.
Maybe more. And in the course of researching the moments of "Terry"'s
birth, I ran across a nearly lost facet of Joseph Patterson's life
Patterson was unquestionably a key figure in the strip's creation.
Patterson picked the locale for "Terry." He did more than that to
shape the concept of the strip, but in picking China as the locale for
a romantic adventure strip, he put the right man--Milton Caniff--in
touch with material that would prove unusually compatible and
stimulating to him. The right man in the right setting produced an
extraordinary artistic achievement. Why China?
Although I never pondered the question at all when I first read
accounts of the birth of "Terry and the Pirates" years ago, now that I
reflect on it, the question is an obvious one. The Orient, as it was
called in Patterson's day, has doubtless always been an intriguing
place in the imaginations of most Occidentals, but China was scarcely
on everyone's mind in 1934. Patterson was newsman enough to know what
was going on in China then, but still, at this remove from the event,
it would appear that he virtually plucked the notion out of nowhere.
Clearly, that was not the case. Patterson's interest in China was
deeper than an interest in headlines and news. And it was personal and
steeped in distant glory.
HA: What in Patterson's background would have led him to make that
choice?
RCH: Patterson had entered Yale in 1897 but interrupted his tenure
there for a year to serve an apprenticeship in the family calling. But
his baptism in journalism was not performed at the family font: He
went to cover the Boxer Rebellion in China as an aide to a reporter
for Hearst's "Chicago American." Bloody and brief--it lasted only a
few months--the Boxer uprising of 1900 was the final spasm in a 60-
year succession of attempts by imperial China to rid itself of the
encroaching colonialism of "barbarous" Western civilization. Chinese
history in the 19th century is punctuated by a series of military
actions by which the always-victorious European colonial nations
succeeded in prying from China's grasp its own natural resources. By
the end of the century, China had been cut up into spheres of
commercial influence, in each one of which a different foreign power
exercised the exclusive right to develop mining concessions, to build
railroads, and to establish trade. The Chinese were reduced simply to
serving foreign masters, who were busily inflicting Christianity as
well as economic slavery upon the ancient civilization.
The resultant anti-foreign and anti-Christian sentiment in the country
was galvanized into rebellion by an arcane secret society of
"righteous, harmonious fists," hence, the Boxers, which began
terrorizing Christian missions and other foreign enclaves in northern
China in late 1899. Although little more than roving bands of looting
bandits at first, the Boxers were fanatics, believing that the
righteousness of their cause would enlist eight million spirit
soldiers, who would descend from heaven and sweep the land clear of
all foreign devils. Their early successes against unarmed missionaries
helped recruit thousands to their ranks, and when they reached Peking,
they seemed likely to overwhelm the handful of staff and troops at the
foreign legations there. The garrisons succeeded in holding off the
opposing force of 25,000 or more Boxers for 55 days, until an
International Relief Force from Tientsin lifted the seige on August
14, 1900.
Word of the siege of Peking reached the outside world at the end of
June. Patterson could not have reached Tientsin, the staging area for
the Relief Force, much before August 4, when the troops set off for
Peking. Straggling with the multinational army in 104-degree heat
through fields of grain ten feet high the 90 miles to Peking,
Patterson would have witnessed the last flaunting of old style
imperialism, the final flourish of traditional, pre-mechanized
military campaigning. Under a rainbow of fluttering guidons came the
French Zouaves in red and blue, Germans in pointed helmets, Italian
Bersaglieri with tossing plumes, the famed Bengal Lancers on Arabian
stallions, and turbanned Sikhs, then Japanese, Russians--the
Babylonian column followed up the Pei Ho River by a supply train of
junks and sampans six miles long. A wondrous sight, the mounted and
trudging might of colonialism in full martial panoply. Just the sort
of thing Hearst papers doted on in that era of jingoistic journalism.
Hearst, after all, had virtually started the Spanish-American War just
two years before with sensational headlines that screamed the national
outrage at the sinking of the battleship Maine.
HA: Could a young person like Patterson have possibly known what was
happening?
RCH: As a youth on sabbatical from college, Patterson might not have
recognized that the assault on Peking quickly degenerated from an
organized military operation into a footrace between rival nation's
troops, all bent on having first crack at looting the richest of the
imperial city's spoils. But he couldn't have been ignorant of the
pillaging that ravaged the city for weeks after the allied arrival.
Everyone--soldiers, civilian volunteers, Chinese servants, and the
elite of the diplomatic corps--joined in the sacking of Peking,
looting, torturing, murdering, and raping. This last, the most
grievous because the most dishonoring indignity to be heaped upon the
surviving Chinese, many of whom had not even joined in the rebellion.
Indeed, "anything" could happen, and a lot of it did. Almost no one
raised an eyebrow: collecting the spoils of war was an ancient
folkway, a crime well sanctified by centuries of custom.
The Boxer Rebellion was China's last dynasty's last gasp. The Manchus
had failed to drive the foreign devils out, and the conquering powers
exacted more commercial concessions and continued their political and
economic exploitation of China. By 1916, the central government, for
all practical purposes, ceased to exist, political power having passed
entirely to provincial warlords, who ruled and marauded their fiefdoms
absolutely.
After his adventures in the Orient, Patterson returned to Yale,
graduated in 1901, and joined his father's "Tribune" staff as a
reporter. But his experience in that most romantic and foreign and
mysterious--to an Occidental--setting must have made a deep and
enduring impression upon him. That he would pick China as an ideal
locale for an adventure strip seems, now--upon reflection--inevitable.
He undoubtedly remained interested in China most of his life. His
interest was sufficiently alive to prompt him to read an obscure book,
"Vampires of the China Coast," as late in his life, at least, as 1934.
And he recommended it to Caniff as a source of background information
for the new strip.
HA: How influential was the book?
RCH: In "Vampires of the China Coast," Caniff found a lurid vision of
piracy on the China Sea and the germ of a unique inspiration.
"Vampires" takes the form of a novel, but the publisher's disclaimer
says it is based in fact: "The terrific episodes of this narrative
actually, and recently, happened in China where the author lives. The
characters, only, are fictitious. ... But their piratical exploits
along the shipping routes from Shanghai and Hongkong--as told in this
story--are often spoken of in the China seaports of today." The
author, identified only as Bok, is as obscure as his book; alone, the
publisher's testimony asserts the book's authenticity. That and a
handful of photographs in the book that depict a condemned pirate, the
summary execution of a pirate by revolver, the deck and bridge of a
looted and burned ship, and before-and-after pictures of a pirate who
suffered "ling chee," or Death by a Thousand Cuts.
Set in the late '20s, shortly after Chiang Kai-shek assumed leadership
of Sun Yat-sen's visionary Kuomintang Party and launched the
Nationalist Rebellion, the tale traces the career of a young woman
called Moon Shadow, whose name is Tsin Gum, meaning "A Thousand
Pieces of Gold." She falls in love with a fellow Communist
revolutionary named Chan. Chan joins a band of pirates and soon
becomes their leader. After he dies in a raid, Moon Shadow assumes
leadership of the pirates, and they build a stronghold on a deserted
island from which they attack foreign shipping. Taking advantage of a
local superstition about vampires inhabiting their island, the pirates
don skull masks, bat wings, and flowing cloaks whenever they sally
forth. Bok offers a species of Robin Hood ethic as moral justification
for these escapades: the pirates prey almost exclusively upon the
"foreign dogs" and the corrupt elements of the government and the
military. But this excuse seems pretty frail in the closing chapters
of the book, which dwell with gruesome, repugnant detail on the
tortures inflicted on hapless captives and hostages for ransom.
Despite its thematic weakness, the book supplies a trove of
information about Chinese tradition as well as vivid insight into the
lives and practices of Chinese coastal pirates--much of which, less
the more grisly parts, Caniff could use as grist for his new mill.
HA: Did Caniff model the Dragon Lady on Moon Shadow?
RCH: The Dragon Lady was hardly Bok's Moon Shadow. Not even on her
maiden voyage--and certainly not as she eventually matured under
Caniff's guidance. Moon Shadow, as portrayed by Bok, was a bungled
character. Ostensibly a doctrinaire Communist, she drops the party
line without a shrug once Chan puts his arms around her. As long as
Chan is alive, she functions as a thoroughly traditional female
stereotype from romantic fiction: She melts into his embraces, murmurs
endearments to the "Lord of her Life," and quivers with foolish
feminine fears every time he leaves on a raid. Bok tells us that she
became the pirate chief "owing to her clear, calm way of surmounting
difficulties" and, of course, because she is the widow of their
leader. But what we see, mostly, is a somewhat fluttery Victorian
female. Moon Shadow is scarcely the Dragon Lady, but she was a woman
pirate along the China coast, and that resonated with Caniff. Early in
her career, the Dragon Lady abducts Terry and Pat Ryan and takes them
with her to her island stronghold in a deserted monastery. In the
Dragon Lady's island retreat, we find the only overt borrowing from
Bok's "Vampires of the China Coast": Moon Shadow took refuge in a
monastery on an island. But Bok had left his pirate queen's leadership
qualities entirely to his reader's imagination; Caniff imagined those
qualities and gave them memorable form in creating his most celebrated
and enduring character.
HA: In your conversations with Caniff, did he mention that book as an
influence?
RCH: Caniff told me about Bok's book during one of my interviews with
him in his studio in New York. I visited there only two or three
times: Most of our conversations took place over the phone. It took me
about five years to write the first draft of the book. I was working
full time at my regular employment, but I squeezed in 90 minutes of
writing every morning by getting to the office that much earlier than
the opening hour of eight o'clock. As I forged along, I would come to
blank places in the official record, and questions would arise.
Periodically, I sent Caniff a list of questions and made an
appointment to phone him for answers. Sometimes, our Q&A wandered
afield somewhat. One of those occasions involved "Vampires of the
China Coast."
Caniff told me that soon after "Terry" and the Dragon Lady had
achieved some measure of national fame, Bok apparently sought to cash
in on Caniff's success. The hapless novelist showed up at the News
building one day and hit up Patterson for a piece of the action. "He
didn't put it on a royalty basis or anything like that," Caniff said.
"He just said he'd heard Mr. Patterson was very generous."
I laughed and then said, "Patterson probably wasn't having any of
that. He probably pointed out that Bok's book purported to be factual
and that facts are in the public domain." Caniff joined me in
laughing--"Probably," he agreed--and we went on to other subjects and
questions.
Several months later, for some reason or other, Caniff brought up the
Bok visit to Patterson again. He had clearly forgotten that we'd
talked about it before. This time, when he told the story, I let him
finish it without interrupting. And he concluded it by saying that
Patterson had repulsed Bok's bid for a piece of the action by pointing
out to Bok that his book purported to be factual and that facts are in
the public domain, so he had no claim on the Dragon Lady. Caniff had
appropriated my ending, my punchline to the story!
That's how history is made. And that's how the Caniff legend was
constructed over the years: He pieced together the best stories he
could find or imagine from the fragments of his past. They all bore
considerable resemblance to actuality: He wasn't fabricating his
entire life. But he admitted that he sometimes varied the "facts" in
order to tailor a story to make a particular point. In the case of the
Bok anecdote, the point was a punchline. But the storyteller's habit
occasionally created mysteries. One of the things I wanted to know,
for instance, was where Caniff was when he got the fabled phone call
from Patterson in the fall of 1934. Was he sharing a studio with Noel
Sickles at the time? Or not?
HA: What was his relationship with Sickles?
RCH: Sickles was an old friend from Columbus who had joined the AP
through Caniff's offices. Sickles inherited the aviation strip,
"Scorchy Smith," when its creator, John Terry died, and in "Scorchy,"
Sickles would perfect the chiaroscuro technique of drawing that Caniff
would imitate and make famous in "Terry." They shared several studios
in New York, and it seemed to me that if they were sharing one when
Patterson phoned, Caniff might've said to Sickles, "This is the big
time!" Or some such. So what did he say? If anything?
Sickles and Caniff shared a studio in the New York Daily News Building
beginning November 1, 1934. That much is certain: I've seen the rent
receipt. And they shared studios in Tudor City over the next two years
or so. I've seen rental records for most of them. But they took the
News Building studio after Caniff signed with Patterson. My question,
purely for the sake of telling the story, was: were they sharing a
studio when Patterson's assistant, Mollie Slott, first called Caniff
in October 1934?
HA: Had Sickles ever addressed the question?
RCH: Sickles was irritatingly both definite and vague in his interview
with Shel Dorf. Sickles says, "I would go over and visit Milt in his
apartment and then when we got the strip it was our studio together in
another part of Tudor City." And then Shel asks, "Which strip was
this?"
"Scorchy Smith," says Sickles.
Dorf: "So then the two of you--he was producing 'Dickie Dare' and you
were producing 'Scorchy Smith' out of the same studio?"
"Yes," says Sickles, "and right around then he also got a call from
Captain Patterson to do a strip for them, which turned out to be
'Terry and the Pirates.' So we got a studio together in order to
facilitate getting the strip together."
At first, he seems to say they were together when Caniff got the call;
then he seems to say they weren't. Caniff's recollections are no
better. I asked him a couple of times, and he gave answers just like
Sickles'. When I pressed him, he gave up, saying, finally, that he
couldn't remember "the chronology" exactly, but he knew they began
sharing a studio "about the time" he took on "Terry." Both men agree
on that. My problem, then, was how to "read" these recollections.
HA: And how did you read them?
RCH: How does human memory work? With both men, the first part of
their responses to the question is "Yes"; then, as memory kicks in and
begins turning over, they seem to back away from the affirmative,
becoming a little less definite. Is memory correcting the first,
virtually automatic, response? Or is it confusing the matter by
conjuring up their entire history of studio-sharing--in several
different studios--over the next couple of years? Although there are
rent receipts in Caniff's records for all the studios they shared
beginning with the one in the News Building in November 1934, there
are no receipts for any studios before that. But that may not be
significant: there are no receipts for his earlier studio at the
Y.M.C.A. either.
In the last helpless analysis, I resolved the issue by simply choosing
the alternative I liked best: It seemed to me a better story if they
were sharing a studio when Mollie Slott called. But they may not have
been. I chose a Tudor City site for their first studio together
because all of the studios they shared in New York City were in Tudor
City except the one in the News Building. And when Caniff read that
part of my book, he said nothing to suggest that my version was wrong.
But then, his inability to recall this detail with precision is the
matter at issue here to begin with. Later, I learned and reveal in the
biography that the reason Caniff couldn't remember is that it probably
didn't happen like that at all.
In short, I was, at last, able to clear up the mystery. But that, I'll
leave for you to find for yourself. That, and numerous other
revelations, answers to other plaguey questions. Why doesn't Connie,
the Chinese sidekick who fastens himself onto Terry and Pat Ryan, show
up in the first Sunday adventure? How much drawing did Sickles do on
"Terry"? Why did Caniff credit Joseph Patterson for inventing the
youth-mentor relationship between Terry and Pat Ryan when precisely
that relationship prevailed in the earlier "Dickie Dare" between
Dickie and Dan Flynn? What explosive fib did Walter Winchell tell in
his gossip column on New Year's Day 1945? How much drawing did
Caniff's "drawing assistant" on "Steve Canyon," Dick Rockwell, do? How
did Caniff's secretary of thirty-one years, Adelaide Gilchrest, die
and why? What's the dirty joke that gave Hotshot Charlie his name? And
what name did he use when he re-appeared in "Steve Canyon"?
For the answer to these and other cliffhangers, you need the book,
"Meanwhile...: A Biography of Milton Caniff, Creator of Terry and the
Pirates and Steve Canyon."
HA: A pithy title!
RCH: That's the title. A mouthful. And, at 950-plus pages, a handful.
Only $34.95 at Fantagraphics or at Amazon.
QUICK HITS: This website gave us goo-goo-googly eyes: Fans of Billy
DeBeck and Barney Google will want to visit http://www.comicartfans.com/GalleryRoom.asp?GSub=38013
, where Rob Stolzer offers a look at some sketches DeBeck produced,
demonstrating his casual mastery . . . Here's a chance to see a little-
known World War II sideline of pioneering animator Max Fleischer:
drawing pictures to accompany news stories. Visit
http://www.archive.org/details/max_fleischer_news_sketches . . .
"Gasoline Alley" has a long tradition of celebrating the beauty of
autumn, and now those breathtaking Sunday pages are collected at
http://www.rogerclarkart.com/htl/GA-AutumnWalk.html. While you're in a
Gasoline Alley state of mind, you might want to read our interview
with current Alley steward Jim Scancarelli at
http://www.cagle.com/hogan/interviews/scancarelli/home.asp . . We've
been hooked on music that ties into comics ever since Neal Hefti's
theme song for the Batman TV show was broadcast. (And are you Spider-
Man fans aware that 1975's "Rock Reflections of a Superhero" is now
available on CD?) So we were intrigued when Roy Schneider, creator of
the United Feature-syndicated "The Humble Stumble" strip, recently
released his album "The Humble Sessions." Once we played it, it
remained in heavy rotation in the Alley. An appealing mix of genres,
the album showcases Roy's versatility and musical craftsmanship.
(We've seen Roy perform live numerous times, so this quality came as
no surprise, but it will be revelatory to the newcomer.) You can
sample tracks from the album at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/royschneider
. . . Longtime readers of Hogan's Alley know that we are nutty for the
highly stylized animation of the 1950s, so we were entranced by "Wings
for Roger Windsock," directed and produced by the great Gene Deitch.
See for yourself at http://www.archive.org/details/wings_of_roger_windsock.
ANSWERS TO TRIVIA TIME:
D. Leonard Starr was 40 when he won a Reuben Award in 1965 for "On
Stage."
B. Fred Lasswell was 47 when he won in 1963 for "Barney Google and
Snuffy Smith."
E. Dik Browne was 55 when he won in 1973 for "Hagar the
Horrible." (Trick question alert: Browne was a lad of 44 when he won
in 1962 for "Hi and Lois.")
A. Hal Foster was 65 when he won in 1957 for "Prince Valiant."
C. Ernie Bushmiller was 71 when he won in 1976 for "Nancy."
SUBSCRIBE TO HOGAN, WIN ORIGINAL ART: Once again next issue, we will
be randomly inserting pieces of original comic art into subscriber
copies of Hogan's Alley #15. Marcus Hamilton, artist on the daily
"Dennis the Menace" panel, has graciously agreed to donate rough
drawings he develops before executing the final inked drawings. Each
one is a lovely, one-of-a-kind work of art in itself, and all you have
to do to have a chance to win one is subscribe to Hogan's Alley.
(We've put one example online at http://www.cagle.com/hogan/newsletter_extras/DTMsketches/DTMsketches.asp).
You can subscribe at http://www.cagle.com/hogan/subscribe.asp. If
you've never experienced the wonders of Hogan's Alley, you can order a
copy for a mere three dollars at that web page as well. Surely you can
forgo a cup of Starbucks for 144 pages of cartooning delight.
Thank you for reading. We encourage you to forward this e-mail to
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Please visit our Web site at http://www.hoganmag.com and our shop
featuring classic comics characters at http://www.hoganshops.com.