Upcoming events

Light posting for a while—but I thought I'd mention (from the Blvr site):

7 NOV 2008 — On Nov. 12, 2008, the Believer will collaborate with the live performance and public radio series Selected Shorts, featuring Broadway and Hollywood actors reading classic and new short fiction.

This evening will feature readings of stories selected and introduced by editors Ed Park and Heidi Julavits. The evening’s readers will include Alec Baldwin and playwright Will Eno.

Believer readers can get discounted tickets by using the code SSP253 when ordering tickets online; by phone to the Symphony Space box office at (212) 864-5400; or in person at the theater, located in Manhattan at 2537 Broadway at 95th Street.

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And here's a Dizzies Press Release for next Monday—sounds amazing:

MODERN POETS
The Adventures of Krazy Kat
Monday, November 10, 6:30 p.m.
Theater 3, 4 West 54 Street

This program reconsiders cartoonist George Herriman's iconic comic strip Krazy Kat, which first appeared in William Randolph Hearst's New York Evening Journal in 1913. Poet Monica Youn reads her collection of works about Ignatz Mouse, Krazy Kat's antagonist, and J. Hoberman, senior film critic of The Village Voice, discusses Krazy Kat's impact on the comic strip. Meghan O'Rourke, poet, critic, and co-poetry editor of The Paris Review, moderates a discussion. This program is a collaboration between MoMA and The Paris Review.

Graphic Fridays

I.
The smoke from Krazy Kat's chimney.

II.
Just discovered: Dash Shaw's BodyWorld.

"They have a team of interns who screen blogs for information regarding possible previously undiscovered or untested plant life."

III.
The most heartbreaking Pinakothek yet.

IV. Another day, another (almost) Ouroboros?

Does that make me Krazy? — Blue note

1.
I recently reread Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo—a delirious, chimerical book that packs its entire paranoid worldview in just over 200 pages. One of the book's dedicatees is "George Herriman, Afro-American, who created Krazy Kat."

2.
Herriman himself, of course, was more guarded in matters of race. From Wikipedia:

In later life many of Herriman's newspaper colleagues were under the impression that Herriman's ancestry was Greek, and Herriman did nothing to dissuade them of this notion. According to close friends of Herriman, he wore a hat at all times in order to hide his "kinky" hair. He was also listed on his death certificate as "caucasian".

This biographical info comes from Jeet Heer's introduction to the 1935–1936 volume in Fantagraphics' invaluable Krazy & Ignatz reprint series.

3.
Yesterday, I received the latest Krazy installment, devoted to Herriman's color strips. This focus makes Heer's latest introduction ("Kat of a Different Color") thick with some curious—and unintentional?—double meanings:

Depending on the resources of the local papers, [certain strips] could appear in four colors or two or in black and white. Therefore the color scheme itself couldn't be central to the story.

The many years doing black and white also left their mark. Black and white are never default choices for Herriman: he always uses them with intent. This can most clearly be seen in the famous page of November 5th, 1939 [page 56] when black ink spills down the page like a raging torrent. This page reminds us that for the artist black is not a lack of color but rather a force in its own right.

The use of color reinvigorated Herriman as an artist, giving him new challenges and opening the way for his best work.

4.
The intro has some good insight into why color would seem to be problematic for Herriman: His hand-colored strips (given as personal gifts) are "almost translucent, a delicate, watery wash," but the coloring process used by the Hearst papers (for which he did KK) favored more in-your-face tints.

His fellow Hearst artist Cliff Sterrett "forge[d] a jazzy style that suited the Hearst colors perfectly." The introduction reproduces a Sterrett page ("Polly and Her Pals"), two-thirds of the panels of which are riven by a huge bolt of red lightning. It's exciting stuff. But then we get to the last panel. Here we see a carnival game in which a nickel buys you three balls—to be hurled at the immobilized, panicked head of "Rastus."

Alas, there's no acknowledgment of this ugly conclusion. One might—might—be willing to forgive the caricature, but the violence here feels obscene, and unfortunately distracts from the reliably delightful Herriman panels that follow. Short of joining Reed's crew of art-thieving revisionists, one wishes a different example had been chosen.

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In other comics news, Dizzyhead Brent sent us this completely mystifying Beetle Bailey strip:


Why the blue face? What does the punchline mean? Is the humor race-based? If so, how? If not, then what? Brent asks: "Is this 'meta-humor'?" I ask: "Is this 'humor'?"

(Apparently the face is rendered normally in the paper—it's only blue online.)