Still at sixes and sevens, trying to figure out how all this shakes out long term.
In the short term, I'm just going to do more writing here at AMOC, hopefully, on a weekly basis the day before Rolly comes in so he can e-mail it to Matt.
Read the WALT KELLY (1969) section of SPARRING WITH GIL KANE. I'm not sure how much more of the book I'm going to read. The "here's what this is presenting itself as" and "here's what I think I'm actually reading" is jarring and not edifying in the way that, say, John's Gospel and the Koran are edifying.
Interesting? Um, interesting but not in a way you would get from the contextualizing of it. Kelly is being interviewed by Gil Kane at a National Cartoonists Society function. In this case, the missing information is that Kelly's POGO animated special has tanked ("the voices were good") not long before that and Kelly is definitely in "Is That All There Is?" mode. This was supposed to be a triumphal appearance as the POGO animated special carried him to new and undreamt-of heights. I always think of Roy Orbison's signature line as one of the Travelling Willburys "I still have some love to give" just before he died. Then George Harrison died and now the Travelling Willburys are…Jeff Lynne (sp?) and Tom Petty (deceased?). New and undreamt-of heights don't happen in your sixties (or fifties or forties, usually), but it's a very common syndrome. The more successful you WERE, the more susceptible you ARE to "Is That All There Is?"
[I'm very happy that I got to bypass that because I never really WAS successful even in the context of what Gil called comics' "small fame" even before I was demoted to non-human/sub-human in 1994 when issue 186 came out. One fifth the popularity of ELFQUEST, One tenth the popularity of the TURTLES. One-one hundredth the popularity of SPAWN. I never arrived AT "Is That All There Is?" because that's where I've always lived. Yes. This is all that there is or ever will be in this vale of tears. IT'S A GOOD LIFE IF YOU DON'T WEAKEN, as Seth put it.]
Kelly had been drinking and was belligerent. He had roughly four years left to live (he died while I was at the Detroit Triple Fan Fair in October of 1973 where I interviewed BWS, Mike Kaluta and Russ Heath). He would die of diabetic complications, so the fact that he was drinking at all let alone to the point of inebriation is a very bad vital sign. By 1969, A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS (1965) was already becoming the cartooning success gold standard and clearly Kelly was hoping to match or exceed that -- partly riding the coattails of that Hollywood success ("Okay, what's LIKE Peanuts?" leading naturally to POGO) and hoping that his best days were still before him.
[Which they weren't in those frames of reference but they were in terms of cartooning brilliance. I didn't read POGO until Watergate when I was reading it in my Dad's Globe & Mail. It was extremely toxic and bitter with Spiro Agnew as a jackal and J. Edgar Hoover as a bulldog. It was hard to tell which was more darkly brilliant -- the writing or the art. And that was still in the future, that work wouldn't be done until Walt Kelly was officially dying. The NCS -- and Gil Kane as an eloquent spokesperson -- is trying to pay tribute to the fact that Kelly is in That Cartooning Pantheon. And Kelly is having none of it. He's bristling at the Lifetime Achievement Award quality of it. Which everyone does who gets to that point. "But, I'm not DONE yet!". It's a Denial phase thing. Another aspect of "Is That All There Is?" "Let's talk about your work at Disney in the classic animation days." It was plainly galling to him. By NOW, POGO should have been the next Mickey Mouse and he the next Walt Disney. He shouldn't still be eclipsed by Disney's cultural radiance. In those frames of reference, yes, it was all over for Walt Kelly and had been since the mid-1950s with the first POGO comic-strip collections. You don't become the next Walt Disney in your sixties.]
Technically, A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS is a piece of garbage. It makes THE FLINTSTONES look like SNOW WHITE.
TECHNICALLY. But that's really the source of its success. The reason it got made when so many things aren't. It cost nickels and dimes to put together because the strip itself is complete minimalism. TECHNICALLY, there's nothing to it. Front view, side view, close-up, wide shot, WAY too long musical numbers which just repeat the same stock images. But, it's A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS. Skyer no higher. Schulz insisted that the Luke chapter 3 "For, lo, I bring you tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the City of David, a saviour which is Christ the Lord…" be kept in. FOUGHT for it. You're getting a scalp rush, right? THAT's why it's the gold standard.
Kelly would die in his 60s shuttling between his home base and Hollywood. It would be a stretch to say A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS killed him but only in the sense that "Elvis died when he went into the army" and "John Lennon died when he met Yoko Ono" are a stretch. I'd call it "cruel but fair". An inability to see that A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS was a Once In a Millennium Thing for a cartoonist. Schulz had no idea he would never be that successful with anything again. It was SO "thrown together". Just imagine what we could do with a Major Hollywood Budget!! Answer: Met Life commercials. Is That All There Is? Sorry, "Sparky" -- yes, A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS will prove to be "it". SNOOPY COME HOME is just SNOOPY COME HOME. Met Life commercials are just Met Life commercials.
Anyway, back at the NCS meeting…
Kelly starts doing a riff on having two girlfriends and his wife finding out and chaining him to his drawing board. Which I think is why Rube Goldberg "chimes in" (as the book puts it) from the audience. It's either Goldberg's last NCS meeting or one of them. He's 86 and will be dead before Christmas of the following year. I think that what happened was that Goldberg realized "Oh my god, he's doing me." Which is an extremely eerie moment because Goldberg in 1945-46 -- when Goldberg basically created the National Cartoonists Society -- had been the age that Kelly is in 1969. i.e. early 60s. i.e. a little younger than I am right now. It's as if I'm frozen in this…50-year-old tableaux where only Goldberg and I know what's going on. Not a fun reading experience, And everyone else is washing out to a sepia tone and the sound quality is going tinny. "Uh, Rube, Gil Kane's supposed to be interviewing him. You're not supposed to interrupt". Goldberg can't save Kelly from his place in the audience but he can at least try to contextualize things for him. Try for some sort of ameliorating gloss in this Nightmarish Cringeworthy Moment. I'm here, Walt. I know what you're trying to do, but It isn't 1946 any more, Walt. We don't DO that anymore. Don't DO this to YOURSELF.
There IS a place for this, is what Kelly is obviously wrestling with through an alcoholic fog, listening to Gil Kane's smooth-as-oil intellectualisms. Yes, I want these nice things said about my work. Yes, I want my work discussed in these superlative terms this nice young man -- whoever he is -- is using. Maybe in THE ATLANTIC or TIME magazine. Like Milt Caniff and Al Capp used to get. Like Charles Schulz is getting now. But, that's there. i.e. the imagined Walt Disney moment when it finally all comes together. The Academy Awards. The Tonight Show. The Emmys. Here, in a squalid hotel meeting room in Somewhere, Connecticut I'm supposed to be cracking everyone up as a former NCS president. I don't even know who three-quarters of these people are.
"Like I used to do".
Yes, Rube. Like you used to do. What happened, Rube? Where did it all go? This used to be so much…fun. IS THAT ALL THERE IS?
I'm here, Walt. Think of the great cartooning and illustration names you most admired. We may be the only two in the room who know who we're talking about, but WE do know who we're talking about. And that's important. WE remember.
It ISN'T important. Sic Transit Gloria Mundi shouldn't surprise you in your sixties. If it does, you're Doing It wrong.
Goldberg was financially independent before he became a cartoonist because of his father's money. His father was a land speculator and…everyone is completely euphemistic in the comics field about these things…either a loan shark or a Shylock or just a loan officer. It's always hard to tell if it's an anti-Semitic pig with lipstick on or genuine anti-Semitism. Or -- self-evident truth of Goldberg's father's generation -- look, Jews have to make money, too, in the 19th century USA and there aren't many doors open to us. Call it what you will, non-stupid Jews are always just getting ready to survive the next pogrom. And the next pogrom is always just up ahead where and when you least expect it. Don't kid yourself. And don't try to kid me.
So Goldberg, was insulated by that, by his father's money, always just did whatever took his fancy and I think he started the NCS as a vehicle for himself because he had been a Vaudevillian comic temporarily and what was then called a toastmaster (and still is if you're on that circuit). He probably wasn't good enough to make a living at it at a high elevation, but as I say he didn't need to. I think what he thought was, "I know all these guys. They're good guys. Anti-Semites but not anything out of the ordinary with any bunch of goys in the 1940s. A little less now that the concentration camps have been liberated. That's probably just temporary. But! Some of them are very funny because they make a living being funny. I'M funny. Funnier than most of them. Why don't I start a Cartoonists' Club? We can rent a room somewhere, bring in some dancing girls, a cash bar, a buffet table and basically spend two or three nights a year getting corked and cracking each other up." And, by all reliable reports, that's what happened. It was just a big piss-up social-club thing and -- no big surprise -- Rube Goldberg got elected its first president. In no small part, I'm sure, because he was the quickest and funniest of them all. It's one thing to be funny on paper. It's another thing to be funny on a Vaudeville stage or at a banquet head table when the hoots and the catcalls are always just around the corner and when everyone is already three sheets to the wind. Good ol' Rube. A credit to his race. One funny Kike, I'll tell the world. Picture facing that intentionally and coming out of it in one piece. For Rube Goldberg it was "This isn't nearly as pressure packed as an actual Vaudeville stage. This is fun."
The thing was most of the NCS were "also-rans". They were wealthy to varying degrees and they had however many subscribing newspapers they had to make them middle class or upper middle class but they were all "running ahead of the freight train". Year after year after year: trying to stay 12 weeks ahead of publication date. No time off, no vacations, just work, work, work, work. Dreaming of the animation or movie deal that would make them wealthy enough to hire someone else to draw their strip so all they needed to do was drink, eat and play golf. At the NCS meetings without their wives (as opposed to the NCS banquets with their wives) they Blew Off Some Major Steam. The NCS Newsletters (which I've read a lot of courtesy of the Billy Ireland Library at Ohio State University and Eddie Khanna's generosity in getting everything photocopied and mailed to me-- Milt Caniff saved EVERYTHING and his widow donated EVERYTHING) are like mimeographed Shriner's newsletters, embarrassingly badly written and concerned with suburban trivia and Family Newspaper-style salaciousness. Could everyone please pay their dues? Just a reminder that you need to pay for the banquet ahead of time and it's $5. Please send your check to Marge Devine ASAP. The Major Cartoonists are underrepresented because, basically, they won. They were actually known by the general public. They actually were wealthy and did hire people to do their work for them. Except Schulz. Key point. They didn't need to go to an NCS meeting with a bunch of drunks to be a Famous Cartoonist (capital F capital C). They WERE Famous Cartoonists. Every one of them a fraction of what Charles Schulz and PEANUTS were. Bigger and smaller fractions, but everyone outside of Schulz a fraction.
Except at the non-wife meetings themselves which had their own social chemistry and where everyone was a Famous Cartoonist. Where Rube Goldberg shone, year after year for at least the first decade of the NCS's existence, with exactly the kind of story Kelly was trying to tell about having two girlfriends on the sly and was clearly just making a mess of.
And Goldberg, as I say, being 86 at that point and obviously not drinking to the point of inebriation -- if at all -- has also bypassed the "Is That All There Is?" trauma Kelly is clearly enduring. He's a) still wealthy and b) in the dictionary. Goldberg, Rube (1883-1970) U.S. cartoonist; full name Reuben Lucius Goldberg. As creator of the comic strip characters Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts (and inventor of complex mechanical devices to achieve simple tasks), Boob McNutt, and Lala Palooza, he satirized American folkways and modern technology.
However, even there, comics scholarship was catching up with him. Bill Blackbeard's comments in Maurice Horn's THE WORLD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF COMICS which would be published in 1976 had obviously been circulating for some time:
His foolishly complicated inventions which gained him dictionary-entry (for "Rube Goldberg contraption" etc.) appealed to the same broad audience base, even though it was not his unique idea. W. Heath Robinson had developed fanciful inventions of his own in various cartoon series for English magazines and newspapers in the 1910s, while the American strip cartoonist, Clare Victor Dwiggins, introduced devices very similar to those of Goldberg's in a New York World Sunday page called School Days of the 1900s, which Goldberg must have read before he ever drew any of his own comic contraptions, since his early Mike and Ike ran in the same comic section. A curious case of a strip cartoonist better known than any of his characters (except possibly Mike and Ike).
But, at age 86, really, what was the difference? And 50 years later, what's the difference? Everyone knows what Rube Goldberg contraption means. There is absolutely no danger of that becoming a W. Heath Robinson contraption or a Clare Victor Dwiggins contraption by popular consent at this late date.
Eisner made the acquaintance of New York
Sun editorial cartoonist Rube Goldberg…
he was sitting in a chair off by himself, one
hand tightly gripping his cane…Goldberg
said, "The Spirit, what kind of thing is that?"
"Well, it's different than the daily strips,
Eisner said. "I believe the medium is an
art form and that there is tremendous
opportunity for literary potential in the
field."
Goldberg looked at Eisner, banged his
cane down, and shook his head in
disgust.
"Bullshit, boy!" he said. "You are a vaudevillian
like the rest of us. It's just vaudeville,
just plain vaudeville; don't ever forget that ."
A SPIRITED LIFE p. 168
"Will took me to my first NCS meeting," Jules
Feiffer recalled, "and I heard my first argument
about whether to admit women. Rube Goldberg
didn't want women admitted because you couldn't
say 'fuck' in front of them. Alex Raymond was the
only one who stood up for admitting Hilda Terry
("Teena"). I don't remember Will saying a word."
A SPIRITED LIFE p. 169
More soon, God willing!
Dave
