Top Ten Boomer Cartoonists

OK. Any top ten list is arbitrary. Riddled with blind spots, biases, and bullshit. An exercise in triage. But that's unfair! Yeah, but a fair list would look like a phone book. I say: "Top Ten Boomer Cartoonists." I really mean: "Top Ten Late Mid-Twentieth Century Cartoonists: 1960-1970"* -- a jawbreaking, boring title with a handy asterisk directing you to the fine print. (*Underground cartoonists, single panel gag magazine cartoonists, and daily strip cartoonists only. This list excludes animators, illustrators, mainstream comic book artists, and editorial cartoonists while shutting out the dream teams of Playboy and The New Yorker so they don't stomp everybody else on the field.) But Gahan Wilson was a Playboy cartoonist. Go jump up a stump, OK? Basically, these are the top ten Boomer cartoonists who warped my mind. Fairness has nothing to do with it. Artistic talent alone doesn't cut it. Cartoonists are a weird hybrid of writer and artist. Some great artists who can't write create beautiful, lousy cartoons. Some writers who can't draw create ugly, outstanding cartoons. It doesn't make sense to me, either.

Mad Cartoonists
Jack Davis. The best of the best with a strong, fluid line and a high-voltage composition that only seemed sloppy to ignorant eyes. Not a scardy-cat cartoonist. Not tidy. But his raw, rough art breathed life into his drawings. Along with his work for Mad, he did movie posters, record covers, sports ads, you name it. Before Mad, he summoned fetid creatures in the EC horror comics. His characters leaped out at you in busy compositions that only looked like anarchy. Art so good it looked artless. An artist so good he had nothing to prove. A Southern gentleman, and a sui generis talent.

Mort Drucker. He did most of Mad's TV and movie parodies. The man was such a genius it hurts. He drew his pen-and-ink line art freehand -- without any pencil underlay or tracing and retracing on a light table. His sense of caricature was a superpower. Sean Connery, James Joyce, David Niven, Khrushchev, whoever. He'd look at somebody's face and nail it. He grokked the face's underlying structure: the core elements that triggered your brain's pattern recognition. On top of that, Drucker's parodies worked like storyboards. Not the stiff art of Torres and others. His panels moved like movies. As a kid, I looked at his stuff and thought, "I will never draw like that." I was right.

Underground Cartoonists
R. Crumb. This sex-crazed specimen popped the lid on his own twisted mind -- and a Fellini-esque freakshow spilled out. Mr. Natural, Flaky Foont, Devil Girl, Bigfoot, Whitman, the Snoids, Boy Howdy. Alive, alive, alive! By the man's own admission, his all-American freaks were acid-inspired. The weird, sleazy, working class, retro vibe of Crumb's art nailed America's ugly side — the face the PR of the official version air-brushes away. In the process, he let the Monsters of his Id hump your tender mind. Crumb drew (and draws) his dangerous visions with the most anal of inky instruments — the Rapidograph technical pen. A sick freak, Ralph Bakshi's mortal enemy, but a damn good draftsman. The sumbitch was too good for America and fled to France with his 75 RPM record collection.

Gilbert Shelton. Another damn good draftsman. Outside the inner circle of Kartoon Cultists, almost nobody remembers him, and that pisses me off. Sometimes, if you're too insanely funny, nobody takes you seriously. Shelton was insanely funny. This good old boy from Austin, Texas created, among other things, the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. Three SoCal dopers, whose exploits were exploited in a running underground comic series. As a goofball ensemble, these cats were right up there with the Marx Brothers and The Three Stooges. Shelton's comics were really little movies. His drawings were only theoretically flat -- they pulled you into a 3-D world that never stopped moving. Shelton's slapstick would make you howl, and spit out jets of whatever you were eating and drinking through mouth, nose and other orifices. But it was doper humor. Smartass intellectuals sneer. Rednecks reach for the nearest baseball bat.

Daily Strip Cartoonists
Charles Schulz. His Peanuts strip burned so deeply on America's brain that nobody really sees it for what it is anymore. Charlie Brown (the nice guy who eternally finishes last), Snoopy (Walter Mitty reincarnated as a dog), Lucy (Schulz' nagging, domineering wife reimagined as a cartoon character), Linus (a pint-sized Christian theologian). Unforgettable characters -- and that's no easy trick. The average cartoonist can't sit his ass down and create them. Layout-wise, Schulz' strip had a perfect simplicity and flow. That strip was funny -- and surprisingly dark. The bleak, occasionally suicidal humor of sun-starved Northern Europeans that creeps into A Prairie Home Companion. His kids were cute -- and often as mean as real kids. Bad things happened to good people. Rotten Lucy always won. Sweet Charlie was predestined to fail. It's God's will. Take heart. In the next life, he'd get to fly a kite, kick a football and win a baseball game.

Walt Kelly. He drew Pogo and drew it beautifully. A wistful, gentle, idiosyncratic world of talking animals who lived in a swamp. Quotable animals. "We have met the enemy and he is us." Yeah, we all know Kelly said it. His line art was obsessively detailed -- with a sharp hierarchy and use of solid blacks that made everything clear. One strip showed only black, outlined shapes. The alligator outline noted that, "These silhouettes sure save a mess of drawing." A man after my own heart. When I try to do what he did with pen and ink, the resulting splatter looks like a crime scene.

Al Capp. The cartoonist behind L'il Abner -- a world of hillbillies that stood for America. The Beverly Hillbillies ripped him off. Capp's strip was a whole lot smarter. Full of great characters and lots of running gags. The Jethro Bodine-esque L'il Abner was a professional mattress tester; Daisy wanted to get him on a mattress and test him; Mammy sold a hallucinatory substance called Kickapoo Joy Juice. Capp's pen speared Dick Tracy with the vicious caricature of Fearless Fosdick. He speared the hippies and the counter culture as well. (One scruffy war protestor's sign read: DON'T SEND ME TO VIETNAM. "Me" was crossed out. "Our Boys" was substituted.) Lousy bums like that are ruining this country! !@$ cowards! Yeah. Capp was slightly to the right of the John Birch Society, but the man could draw. One of Walt Kelly's few peers.

Single Panel Magazine Cartoonists
Gahan Wilson. The man made horror funny with the twisted karmic symmetry of a Harlan Ellison story and dripping, eldritch entities straight out of H.P. Lovecraft. Shmucks on a sport fishing boat ask, "Why'd you name your boat the Revenge captain?" Behind them, the captain removes the human mask from his grinning fish face. Dr. Frankenstine rages that GE beat him out on the death ray. A guest in a mansion sees human heads mounted on plaques like hunting trophies. The Edwardian gentleman rages, "Damnit! Staff knows this door is supposed to be kept locked!" Black humor, eh? Charles Addams was Wilson's obvious predecessor. But Addams' humor had a skull's sadistic grin. Wilson's a decent guy who makes a joke about the rotten things humans (or aliens) do to each other. A great self-taught artist, never fussy. He draws just enough detail to make the cartoon work. Then he stops.

Jules Pfeiffer. He captured hipsters, flipsters, long-gone daddies and asshole conformists with scratchy line art that wrapped around the contours of human bodies in space. His full-page spreads (for The Village Voice and other rags) broke down into unmarked sequential panels. Within these panels, saints and self-absorbed jerks would argue, soliloquize and speculate. The vast majority were trapped in the mirror maze of self. Indifferent to what they did to other people, and either clueless to how they looked or paralyzed with self-consciousness. His dialog kicked ass; his politics leaned to the left. Gary Trudeau, Robert Altman and many others stole from him.

Shel Silverstein. Yeah. We know him as the lovable cartoonist behind Where the Sidewalk End and The Giving Tree. This delightful children's author also penned the twisted Uncle Shelby's A to Z Book (which advised kids to dump a box of lye down the toilet and tell their parents that they ate it -- all the better to get their stomach pumped and get a lollipop after the ordeal) as well as horndog humor for Playboy involving more orgiastic combinations than I have time to list. More of a beatnik than a hippy; as anti-establishment as they come. Airy compositions with lots of white space. Tough, unstudied line art, sometimes loving, sometimes scathing. Silverstein poked the powerful and the powerless alike. In his spare time, he wrote raunchy lyrics for Dr. Hook and Johnny Cash. "A Boy Named Sue" was one of his tunes. Don't ask me about the sequel.

Post-reality. What a concept.

Schopenhauer, as Monty Python pointed out, was boozy bigger who could drink you under the table. A lesser known fact? He ruined reality for everybody.

He wrote a book called "The World as Will and Idea." Not an easy read. The big point: Reality isn't some objective something out there. The world is what you make of it. What you want frames reality.
Think of reality as a roarshack blot. There's no meaning there. Mind imposes meaning.
The genius with the most powerful will wins.
So, a cannibal frames you as food.

The boozy Schopenhauer framed this as a hellish Buddhist nightmare. 

It can happen here

My byzantine, nearly published, SF novel revolved around a global peace movement protesting a war that didn't exist. The protests were a form of historical reenactment in a world addicted to simulation. Protest as dress-up and play-acting. Nostalgic, trendy role-playing, without any sense of what the reality actually means.

A clever idea. A little on the smug, snarky, snotty side, maybe. But clever.

I never for one freaking instant imagined it would actually happen.

Free information!

Bullshit wants to be free. Information wants to be really, really, really expensive. 

Allow me to elaborate ...

Up until the mid-1990s, LexisNexis had a very expensive lock on decent, searchable articles and legal and public records. Then the Internet stomped onto the scene like Godzilla! By the early 2000s, lo and behold, the floodgates opened, and a world of free research opened up – first-rate stuff, just there for the taking, I’m telling you, like thousands of suburban homes ready for glue-huffing teenagers to strip bare. 

Like Pynchon’s Zone, this anarchy didn’t last long. By the mid-2000s, the informationally propertied got smart and bought expensive locks. Suddenly, all those free newspaper and magazine articles weren’t free no more. After a brief appearance, the free accessmylibrary.com vanished into the gelatinous blob that is Cengage – which politely suggested you open your naked eyeballs to the glare of HighBeam Research and pay a subscription for the formerly free stuff. JSTOR, meanwhile, maintained and expanded its Great Wall of Academia. (Including the fracking article from 1990 in Film Quarterly for which this blog is named.) Aaron Swartz tried to drill a hole in said wall. JSTOR sicced the feds on his ass. Facing 35 years in federal prison, Swartz hung himself. But relax, kids ...

An army ant carpet of snot-nosed thieves with no political agenda are ripping off all the meaty bits of pop culture you could ever want. Free -- if illegal. And a global septic tank of legally free information remains – from data-mining social networks to an infinitude of asshole opinions and choirs preaching to choirs. As to original research, if you want, say, detailed explanations of the Flat Earth Theory or why pointy headed Lizard People are behind chemtrails and the Illuminati, a wealth of steaming data awaits. Yes, all the stupid stuff is free! And most of the smart stuff that’s just there to distract you. The smart stuff that actually matters … well, that’s not for everybody.  

There’s a story here, damn it. It’s worth a book, a movie … a freaking magazine article. But nobody’s paying me to research it.

So you’ll have to settle for my unsupported speculation instead.

It's free.

Conspiracy Theory vs. Chaos Theory

It's fool-proof. What could go wrong?

Chaos Theory explains how order emerges out of chaos and vice versa. There's complicated math involved, so let's keep it simple. The closest analogy is Film Noir. Specifically, the Heist Gone Wrong.

It always happens. Yeah, you might have a few clean getaways. But, sooner or later, everything goes to hell.

Because there's no such thing as a perfect plan.

No matter how clever you are, nothing ever goes according to plan.

Somebody talks. The henpecked bagman blabs to his cheating wife about the racetrack job. The boss' twitchy friend who just got out of prison slaughters everyone in the jewelry store. The lookout drops acid, goes on an apeshit killing spree, and the clean bank job spirals out of control. Or the bank job goes like clockwork, but the getaway car gets stuck in traffic.

Film Noir/Chaos Theory maps perfectly to politics, the economy, everything. A neo-conservative cabal starts a war to turn Iraq into an American client state? They wind up with the Islamic State instead. The fat-cat Saudis pay off the mullahs to keep the peasants in line and the oil money to themselves? One fruit seller in Tunisia sets himself on fire and everything goes to hell.

Something always goes wrong.

Chaos Theory is scary. Nobody's in charge. There's no great plan. The universe is literally out of control. The good guys don't always win. A happy ending is not guaranteed. Nothing's guaranteed. A freaking asteroid could wipe us out tomorrow.

The Blind Watchmaker creates order. The Blind Watchmaker smashes the watch. hi-ho!

Scary, huh?

Have a nice day.

Conspiracy Theory, on the other hand, is oddly comforting. The deck is stacked. But there's order behind the seeming chaos. A simple explanation. A unified field theory that explains everything. The game is rigged. Life is unfair. But it's not random.

Now here's a fun fact ...

Chaos Theory explains Conspiracy Theory.

Conspiracy Theory is a spontaneously emerging phenomenon. It's an urban legend that converges around a strange attractor and grows. A rumor that grows and grows like a game of telephone.

Some building contractor in Topeka watches footage of 9-11. The guy thinks, shit, that looks like a controlled demolition. He tells his friend.

Who passes it on to his buddy.

I know this guy in Topeka. He says 9-11 looks like a controlled demolition. 

The next call up a notch. 

This guy in Topeka blows up buildings for a living. He knows for a fact 9-11 is an inside job. 

On and on it goes in a game of one-upmanship.

What if Bush let 9-11 happen?

No. Bush made 9-11 happen.

Al Qaeda works for them.

There is no Al Queda!

There were no planes!

The planes were holograms. 

No demolition either!

They used missiles.

The story gets better and better.

The spontaneously emerging theory is a specific model for a collective hunch. It's a hunch that everything is not what it seems. No, man. The scrum of politics and economics only looks random. There's a small group of conspirators at the top pulling the strings and running the show. The Puppet Masters! They've rigged the game so the house always wins.


Each conspiracy theory gets more and more specific. One conspiracy theory converges with another conspiracy theory. And they all come together like raindrops on a car window.

9-11 Truthers talk to UFO cultists, talk to Flat Earthers, talk to Bible-thumping end-timers, talk to Vaxxers talk to deadender militia nuts, talk to the sons of the John Birchers (who rave about the Illuminati, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderbergers and the Council on Foreign Relations). Without even trying, the lunatic fringe gets the story straight.

And they've all got a pretty damn good idea who's really running the show. Either the Lizard People from Space. Or the Illuminati. Or those pushy people who control Hollywood and the banks.

It's all fun and games. Until six million Jews wind up in the oven.

The loonies blindly build their delusional architecture. Bloody consequences aside, they do it for a reason.

Hey, somebody has to win.

Conspiracy theorists can always say the winners cheated, then work their way backwards to explain how. It's all part of the plan, man. Something happens? They wanted it to happen. ISIS wasn't a colossal screw up. The Illuminati planned it all along. No, we don't control the oil in Iraq. The war was all about disrupting the oil supply. You think the crash in oil prices is a freaking coincidence, man?

When a lousy thing happens, somebody always cashes in. Conspiracy theorists can always say the profiteers made the lousy thing happen. Cui bono. That's Latin for follow the money, man.

Yeah, the heist went wrong. You're not seeing the big picture, man. The bank's gonna dump the security company, get a new one. And it's not just the bank they hit. Whole chains of banks from Maine to Florida. Big contract, man. Millions and millions of dollars. Think about it. 

It's a theory that can't be disproved.

By analogy, think of an obsessive-compulsive, jealous guy who thinks his wife is cheating on him. Every random act, every casually dropped word fits into that theory. Why'd she hang up the phone when I walked into the room? OK. She had six clean panties yesterday. I counted them. Now there's only four panties in the drawer. Jesus. Now it's six panties again! The same panties, but in a different order. I know she's cheating on me!

The evidence is crap. The guy's out of his mind.

That doesn't mean his wife isn't cheating on him.

Fiction is Fiction and that's a Fact

Take the premise seriously. Fugate's first command of fiction writing. I come down from the mountain and hurl this marble tablet on the head of shucks everywhere.

My beef was what with Hollywood hacks who write in terms of Car chase/explosion/fight/sex scene/foot chase through narrow alley/gunfight/explosion/sex scene -- troweling in plot, character and motivation into the cracks of said story beats like Bondo in the wounds of an old Chevy. The indifference to logic pissed me off mightily. Indignation no less than righteous. 

Goddamnit. You're interrogating a dangerous alien who can turn into gaseous form and the fracking alien is on the other side of a plexiglas sheet with holes in it. Seriously?

Review: The Man in the High Castle

Finished the Amazon.com adaptation of Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle.

I'm impressed. The adaptation could easily have been lurid, cheap and exploitive. Red dawn-— with Nazis! They didn't go that route.
Yes there are chase scenes, skullduggery and so on. But hey also communicated the deep dark oppression of living in an occupied country. The resistance does its thing. But they also have jobs, boys and girl fiends to worry about.
spycraft, mass graves and betrayals.