Alex Toth (1995) by Alex Toth

I’m sorry if the tone of this blog series has gotten a bit… chilly. It’s just that I didn’t quite realise before I started this just how many things Kitchen Sink had published that I didn’t really have much interest in. It’s not that the things Kitchen published were necessarily bad — it’s just that I find it hard to even summon even a cursory interest in writing about some of these books, so I may come off more like Grumpy Old Man Shouts At Decades-Old Comics than I intended.

Like — what is this book, anyway? It doesn’t really say so explicitly anywhere what the concept behind the book is.

We start with a bunch of introductions that don’t really clarify anything…

… but reading the book, it’s a kinda sorta overview of Toth’s career. But in a very vague way. We’re presented with a few odds and bobs that Toth has illustrated, and a couple of them are reproduced in full…

… like this badly reproduced CIA-financed pamphlet. (Toth doesn’t say how he came to work for the CIA, because… er… well, perhaps he didn’t even know that it’s a CIA publication?)

Similarly, we get other random illustration jobs he’s done.

And some of them are very random ideed, and the introductions are very helpful.

But as with virtually everything Toth has done, the artwork is good, but the stories are either hokey or barely there at all.

Toth is a very influential illustrator, and amazingly talented, but he has an unerring sense that draws him exclusively to illustrate pap. I’m not sure he’s even actually done something that’s actually a memorable read? If he has, I’ve forgotten.

(See, that’s like a joke, in that it’s structured as a joke, but not actually funny.)

Much like Toth’s own gag strips.

And then we get a long section of illustrators Toth thinks are swell.

And storyboards.

Oh, right, he illustrated the first couple of Torpedo 1936 episodes — those are actually good. And he left that, of course, and doesn’t think much of it, because he found it repugnant (I’m reading between the lines here).

And even here, the reproduction is horrible! Surely they had access to better material than this?

And then there’s some sketchbook stuff.

So what is this book? It’s like visiting Toth and having a peek through his archives, while he’s chatting a bit, I guess? And that’s probably a lot of fun for die-hard Toth fans, but for the rest of us, it’s a bit… er… not very interesting, really.

Toth is interviewed by Gary Groth in The Comics Journal #277, page 21:

I don’t think I realized to what extent
Toth refused to countenance opinions with
which he differed. I happily sparred with Gil
Kane and Burne Hogarth, two artists Toth
despised, incidentally, who were every bit as
principled and opinionated as Toth, but who
never took such arguments personally. Toth
did.
Following is my last conversation with
Alex. He agreed to an interview and I called
him up with the hope that we could get
started. I expected (or hoped) that our initial
warm-up conversation would segue into the
interview proper, but it was, sadly, derailed
before we got there. He said he was not in a
very civilized mood, and I suppose he was
right. Here’s a glimpse Of the man at his fierc-
est, most unmediated, and combative — typ-
ical of many of our conversations and of his
take-no-prisoners conversational style.

[…]

GARY GROTH, There was a nice book that came
out about you recently.
ALEX Yeah, full of typos and all kinds of
fuck-up s.
GROTH, Jokingl:You should have reviewed it
for us.
TOTH, Review my own bloody, so-called
book?
GROTE-I, [Jokingl:Yeah, you could have torn it
to pieces.
TOTH, Well, first of all, it really wasn’t my
book. It was Manuel Auad’s book, and those
bastards at Kitchen Sink did not send him a
proofed copy. That’s why those damn typos
and glitches and lousy color separation on
the cover existed. And then they screwed ev-
erything up even more by copyrighting the
damn thing in my name instead of [Manuel
Auad’sl, so there’s a lot to be desired in this
publishing thing, and I don’t think I want to
dance that tune again.
GROTHt Well, I haven’t actually sat down and
read it. just looked through it, but it looked
handsome, We actually have a review in the next
issue Of the magazine. I’m sure you’ll love it.
TOTH, Yeah, R. C. Harvey’s. Yeah, he was very
gentle. He didn’t note all of the typos and
misspelled well-known names.
GROTTI, Well, I cut all that Out Of his review.
TOTH, Oh, you did?
GR(YI’H, No, I’m just kidding.
TOTHt Well, he could have cited it because
I think Kitchen Sink’s editor needs a good
bump on the head for what he did. He used
his own editorial judgement, which was
wrong in every case.
GROTH: You think it was just sloppiness?
TOTH, Well, they complain about not [hav-
ingl enough budget for more proofreaders.
Well, hell, they had two free, absolutely
free proofreaders right here. Manuel, he
would’ve done it and then he would’ve sent
it down to me to double-check again. And I
would have sent it back and it wouldn’t have
cost them a penny. And it would’ve been cor-
rect and I would’ve caught omissions that
were glaring. There was no reason for what
they did; they fucked up some of the pages,
the arrangements of them, and omitted stuff,
Manuel had submitted like 180 pages, and
they cut it down to 144 and I think most of
those pages were the doodle pages, which
everyone who’s called me or written me
has said, “Gee, I wish there had been more
doodle pages.” Well there were. There were.
And some asshole editor decides on his own
hook, whether by pressure of other work-
loads, Which I heard was the big complaint
— “Well, gee, we got so many books to do
here, you know, we don’t have enough peo-
ple todo them.” Well, Christ. That’s no alibi.
Alibis just don ‘twork: it’s wha€s in print that
counts. I don’t want to hear anybody’s sob
story. It’s what’s in print that counts: that’s
what talks and walks.
GROTH, Well, that’s damned unfortunate. I
forget W’hat the book costs but it seems like they
could have made it a larger book andjust.
TOTH, Thirteen [dollars).
GROTH, They could have made it a larger book
and charged $15.
TOTH, Well, firstofall, ithad very little, ifany,
promotion. I was getting Manuel to [push
them] way back in March oflastyear because
they were sitting on it for a year, to get them
to get it ready for the big San Diego con. If
you’re gonna debut a book, debut it there.
And if the thing has got any value at all, word
of mouth will make it sell and they’ll have a
pretty good temp reading as to whetherwe’ve
got a dog or if we’ve got something that will
fly. So, no, no, they knew better. They knew
better. so they fucked around With it until
the end Of the year and that’s when it Came
out. And it was just a total botch.
GROTH, Did they cut it down with the editor’s
permission? Manuel’s or
TOTH, I think he caved on some of the stuff,
but I think they did some more. The most ir-
ritating — first of all, I hand-lettered all my
stuff and they converted all that to type.
GROTH, They did?
TOTH, Yeah. And they convinced Manuel that
was the best way to go because my lettering
was uneven, and I’ll confess to that Yes it
was. But it was there and it was in my hand
and they couldn’t fuck with it if they would
just reprint it as it was done. Another thing
that really pissed me off is that the letter that
Milt Caniff wrote to Manuel, for some god-
damn reason, don’t ask me why, I can’t figure
it out, and I haven’t got a copy of the letter
handy now. it’s buried under tons of crap
here. They chopped off the opening and the
closing paragraphs Of that letter, for no god-
damn good reason. They have no right to do
that That was a communication written ex-
pressly for the proposed book that Manuel
had in mind for years, and they didn’t even
know about it
GROTH, They did that without Caniff’s knowl-
edge?
TOTH V/ithouthis permission. I mean, there
it was. It’s gone: the opening and the clos-
ing. And they set that to type too when his
original note with crossovers and etceteras
would have made it much more personal and
genuine because I was getting very strange
phone calls from guys saying, “How come
a dead man has just written a forward for
your book?” And that wasn’t very funny,
and that’s the position that we were put in
because Milt always dated his notes. His jot
notes, you know, his freehand notes and all
of his little typed notes. So the whole thing
sucked, you know. It robbed us of that little
personal touch which would’ve been much
warmer. And the same thing would apply to
whatever I hand-lettered on my own.
GRO-n-it It’s an academic question at this point,
but Why didn’t Manuel Past say, “do it the way
I submitted it”?
TOTH, Well, Manuel was a virgin. He never
did this before. This was his first publishing
venture. It was his idea to gang all this stuff
up Of mine and shoot it into somebody and
see if they’d want to do it And I can’t remem-
ber if he submitted it to Bud Plant or anyone
else before he shot it over to the Sink. I was
blowing in his ear and telling him, “Try this,
try that. Talk to these people,” and he was un-
known, so he was getting a fast shuffle from
everybody. “Who the hell are you?” you
know. And so, here he had the damn dummy
ready to go and then finally it winds up in the
Sink’s hands and they sit on the goddamn
thing for a year or so. It’s not their property.
They have no bloody right to do that Either
you move on it within a fixed amount of time
or forget it “Fuck you. You’re not the Only
publisher in the business.” The Sink was
undergoing its own strange transformation
with all of this crap, the merger, the buyout,
who bought who, I don’t care. With what’s
his name back there — and then moving,
physically, his whole operation to the East
Coast All of that got in the way and whatever
turmoil there was showed up in this book.

So Toth wasn’t happy with the book as printed. To say the least.

The Comics Journal #262, page 106:

Some of his break-ups seem leveraged
by demons whose consequences for the
man in their possession, as well as for
those they crash him against, make one
shudder — if not weep. Dick Giordano,
with whom Toth once sought to work,
heard himself denounced at a convention
as “the man who ruined comics.” When
Jerry De Fuccio, who had grown up with
Toth, was receiving chemotherapy, he
became infatuated with a nurse. Toth,
who had been calling and writing regular-
ly, announced, “You’ve got a family now”
and cut Off contact. Manuel Auad had
edited and published several Of •roth’s
books. Toth’s late wife had a son by a prior
marriage whose wife, like Auad, was
Filipino. On visits she brought pastries, of
which Toth grew fond. After his mother
died, the son stopped coming. Toth, who
missed the pastries, asked Auad for some.
Gradually, Over nine years, he began send-
ing Toth more and more ofwhat he
ed. “Frozen foods, underwear, chicken
thighs, cigarettes, you name it. But if any-
thing was late, there was hell to pay.”
Eventually this hell caused the two to stop
speaking. “Alex can be funny, generous, all
the nice you can think Of,” Awad
says. “Once my Wife fractured a finger,
and the next day two dozen roses arrived
from Alex. But if you get on his wrong
side, he will lay it on you.”

Paul Tobin writes in The Comics Journal #186, page 40:

Tbyrgin lies the tragedy of>the.book, for

Oops, the OCR on this page is totally illegible, so I’ll just include the page:

He’s more critical of the book than I am, and I think the book sucks, so…

This is the one hundred and seventy-fifth post in the Entire Kitchen Sink blog series.

The Crow (1994) by James O’Barr

Two years after Kevin Eastman bought Kitchen Sink (well, acquired a majority stake), and then pumped in an additional $2M, Kitchen Sink was broke and had to raise more money. It was sold to Ocean Capital Operations, who seemed to want the company to mine for more movie rights — the company had already spawned Cadillacs and Dinosaurs and The Crow, so there must be more, right? RIGHT?!

But the weird thing about all of this is that Kitchen Sink didn’t have any rights to anything they’d published — Denis Kitchen was a staunch supporter of creators’ rights, and the creators owned everything, so buying Kitchen Sink doesn’t really get you much, except some specific deals Kitchen had with specific creators (as a sort of agent, apparently — he served as a firewall between Hollywood and Mark Schultz, it seems like).

But Kitchen Sink Press did have one thing that actually sold copies: The Crow graphic novel, which went back to the presses more than a dozen times over a few years.

But I bought the Caliber issues (which were the source for the graphic novel) back when they were originally published, and I’ve forgotten to buy the Kitchen Sink collection! *gasp* Sorry! So let’s look at those instead.

*gasp* I’ve only got the second printing of this. I was slow on the uptake, I guess.

Anyway, this starts off with a nice, if oddly mouthless drawing of Ian Curtis, and then we get a quotation from Voltaire, and then we get a poem from Rimbaud.

What, no Baudelaire?

So we’re solidly in a territory designed to appeal to angsty thirteen-year-olds all over the world — O’Barr leans into this pretentious portentousness with no irony, with no sense of distance — he really commits, which is the appeal, I guess.

I’m a Joy Division fan myself, and plenty pretentious, but I really was too old (21) to properly enjoy this at the time. I just thought it was slightly risible, but I assumed O’Barr was, like, 18, so I just went with the flow.

But he was born in 1960, so he’s even older than me. However:

The Crow sat on a shelf for seven years, but at last he found a publisher with Gary Reed of Caliber Press.

I don’t know whether that means that he drew The Crow in 1982? Which would make the Joy Division/The Cure references more topical, and would make my guess at his age less wrong.

The book shifts between quite well-rendered pencil drawings (when there’s a flashback or a dream sequence) and er less well-rendered pen-and-ink drawings.

O’Barr is quite good at drawing moody faces, but when he draws entire figures, the proportions of the body parts often don’t match up — the heads are too big, or the arms stick out randomly from the torsos.

And he’s absolutely the worst at drawing action sequences.

The story is totally derivative: He witnesses his girlfriend being gang-raped, and he’s shot and left for dead (but makes a recovery (possibly supernaturally)), and goes after the rapists, and kills them off.

So why was this such a major, major success? I was sampling pretty much everything that Caliber was publishing at the time (because they’d done some good stuff), so I bought this not because I was making an effort to buy it, but automatically. But it was an resounding success, with Caliber having to go back into multiple printings pretty much immediately.

I can’t believe that there were that many people waiting for a comic book that has an avenging vigilante that quotes Joy Division lyrics. Is it just because it’s a “modern” take on Death Wish? That’s a popular genre, and O’Barr commits to it, while making it “deep” and stuff? Because as much as I make fun of this book, it does have a certain jennesequa. It’s got a proper mood.

Pick a head size… any head size…

Third printing!!! And more Joy Division lyrics.

How can you tell a bad guy is really bad? When he tortures and kills somebody with Downs.

Hey, gotta have some Cure lyrics in here, too…

I do like that “Next” box.

*rolls eyes*

The final Caliber issue is mostly dedicated to showing the rape and the murder(s).

And O’Barr goes way further than most popular culture depictions of rape (not shown here), so I guess he was prescient that way.

There were five issues planned, and Caliber solicited the fifth issue multiple times, but it was never published, which (reading O’Barr’s wikipedia page) looks like something of a pattern with O’Barr — he’s apparently announced a number of projects over the decades, and haven’t really delivered many of them. But he did finish this one storyline — Kevin Eastman’s Tundra took over the publication, and managed to squeeze the concluding chapter out of him, which led to the enormously successful graphic novel collection, and presumably also the movie.

But I’m slightly curious as to how the storyline ends, so I’ve now bought the collection from ebay, and when it arrives, I’ll natter on a bit about it here after this colon:

[TO BE CONTINUED]

I got a Kitchen Sink collected edition here now — it’s unclear what printing. Kitchen Sink was usually pretty scrupulous about stuff like that, so I’m guessing it’s a very late printing.

It’s very nicely printed, though.

I didn’t compare with the original comics, but it looks like the artwork hasn’t been edited. And in particular, the somewhat uneven lettering hasn’t been tweaked, which is something I’d assume they would have wanted to do. But it sold hundreds of thousands of copies, so I guess that wasn’t a problem anyway.

But the “final issue” — Death — is what I got this for, and it’s a pretty hefty ending.

The pencilled bits are reproduced wonderfully here.

About goodly portion of the issue is taken up with the avenging guy gearing up like in Infinite Schwarzenegger:

But of course Schwarzenegger does less stretching and interpretive ballet, which is what makes The Crow so deep.

The rest is the revenge: The guy kills all of the villains. He goes easy on the least evil of them, but the rest get killified until they are thoroughly dead.

And then there’s a long section of illustrations, poetry, covers and stuff.

The package is really well put together.

The Comics Journal #159, page 15:

O’Barrcreated The Crow in 1981. The five-
part series was described by Entertainment
Week/v as a reaction to the death of the artist’s
girlfriend in a car accident, although they gave
no source for this information. O’Barr himself
is quoted in Amazing Heroes #157 as saying the
story was based on the murder Of a “young cou-
ple for a $30 engagement ring. ” The dedica-
tion to The Crow suggests another possible
inspiration: the 1980 suicide of Ian Curtis.
former lead singer of the British rock band Joy
Division. Attempts by The Conlics Journal to
reach O’Barr for clarification regarding the the
source of his inspiration of the character were
unsuccessful.

[…]

In spite Of The Crow’s violence, weaponry,
and vendetta theme. O’Barr has repeatedly
stressed in interviews that The Crow transcends
the action-adventure genre. More than once, he
touted the last issue’s “enormous body count”
as an outstanding feature, yet he feared that The
Cron’ could • •degeperare into a Punisher-type
book. • • if he had continued beyond that point.
To O’Barr. the distinction comes in the motiva-
lion Of the character —
•the personal tragedy
of Shelly’s brutal murder. ”
It was this distinction that led O’Barr to
remark that the Crow adaptation should not
“degenerate into a Wish-type film,” and
it was a telling one to Brandon Lee, who saw
Eric as “a plum role” — One which could lead
him away from the unsophisticated action-
adventure films which had previously solicited
his talents.

Uh yeah… degenerating… into a Death Wish type film.

Amazing Heroes #157, page 56:

James O’Barr’s vision for The Crow is
deep, dark, sorrowful and violent.. .a
story he describes as one of retribution.
“It’s based on a true incident that
happened in 1979,” says O’Barr, “when
a young couple was killed for a $30
engagement ring.” In O’Barr’s version,
however, the young man survives the
brutal attack, and seeks retribution for
the crime.
This five-part mini-series, which
O’Barr originally wrote as a complete
book, is broken down into five chapters:
“Pain,” “Fear,” “Irony,” “Despair,” and
“Death.” “The first three books contain
flashbacks that hint at what has
happened,” O’Barr says, “and the fourth
book explains everything.” The Crow
appears throughout the series as a
symbol, and its meaning is revealed as
the story progresses.
Although the series is extremely
violent, O’Barr refrains from depicting
excessive gore. Sexual scenes and pro-
fanity are also kept to a minimum.
O’Barr feels it is more of a challenge to
keep the readers hooked on the story
rathen than on gratuitous use of profanity
or gore.
The Cmw will make a special preview
appearance in High Caliber #1, in an
eight-page story entitled “Inertia.” The
five-part mini-series will first appear in
February 1989.
O’Barr will be rendering his gloomy
tale of The Crow in the haunted tones
of black-and-white, but the covers will
be in full color, painted in watercolors
or acrylic. The writer/artist promises to
depict events in The Crow “in a very
realistic fashion.”

Again, looking at O’Barr’s wikipedia page, it looks like O’Barr has done quite a few covers and illustrations after finishing The Crow, but it looks like he’s never actually drawn a comic book ever again? I may well be wrong, though. On the other hand, why should he? He’s presumably got a lot of money from the movie adaptations.

This is the one hundred and seventy-fourth post in the Entire Kitchen Sink blog series.

Illegal Alien (1994) by James Robinson and Phil Elliott

Oh, I was thinking of Resident Alien, the much later series that was turned into a TV series…

The concept is suspiciously similar: An alien lands on Earth and takes over somebody’s body, and then it turns out that the alien is pretty nice. It’s not an unusual concept, though, and the particulars are very different.

This alien takes over a mobster’s dead body, and then starts inventing stuff, and then the KGB, the CIA and other organisations turn out to be interested.

It’s a frustrating read. Some things are over-explained to the point of ridiculousness (see above), and other parts are just vaguely hinted at (what’s the KGB/mobster connection anyway)?

The other problem is that there’s at least twice as many characters here than there needs to be. At least. And Elliott, who used to have a more cartoony, stylised (and stylish) styling style seems to be attempting to tone all that down and deliver something more “normal”.

Or is he just trying to do Beto Hernandez? It certainly looks that way. Which brings me to another problem with this style and the number of characters: Many of them are just extremely difficult to tell apart, especially as Robinson doesn’t use Beto’s trick of having everybody mention each other’s names all the time. I.e., “Hey, Luba, can you fetch that hammer?” “Yes, Doralis, I’ll do so.”

So some things are vague, and some things get repeated so many times… I think that guy things “I know I killed him” a dozen times?

Robinson would go on to greater fame with Starman over at DC, of course.

I guess this book originated at the Tundra UK office, because it doesn’t really seem like a thing that Denis Kitchen would have chosen to publish himself.

Robinson is interviewed in The Comics Journal #199, page 105:

Everything was about trans-
formation. ltwas sort of an exercise in storytelling, and
it unas just something that was in me and I wanted to
tell. Phil Elliot is an artist that unfortunately has not lit
a fire under anyone in terms of his style, but who I
respect greatly, and who I think is a really overlooked
creator. It was another chance to work with him at a
time when I don’t think anyone else really was dying to
do so. And I would love to work with Phil again on
something else. I’ve just have not had the time to
pursue that. So that, in a sense, what Bluebeard
was. It was an exercise — failed or not, I’m not sure —
but it was something I’m glad I did.
SPURGEON: No•w both 67 Seconds and Bluebeard are
moreformally structured. You mentioned the transforma-
hons in Bluebeard, and there’s also the timing motifof67
Seconds. Was thre a conscious effort to develop those
kinds
ROBINSON: I think ids also there in Illegal,dlien. Illegal
Alien actually has kind of an interesting history. Phil
had the first part, and we offered that with a synopsis
of all six issues to Dark Horse, and there was like a
verbal agreement that they would do it as a six-part
thing in Dark Horse Presents. There was the overall
synopsis which is the alien takes over the hit man’s
body and with the second issue, we go to London and
it becomes another slice-of-life *Ealing Films” type
story. Again, I’m going back to my film metaphors, but
I was trying to do an Ealing Film if they had stayed
around long enough to do an alien science fiction
film… but one with all the human slice-of-life stuff
that Ealing Films excelled at.
Anyway, Dark Horse read the first part set in
America, but I don’t think they could possibly have
read the proposal showing that the bulk of the story
took place in 1960s London. So they came back saying
it was derivative of other comic stories. I never found
outwhat they meant by that, butl can onlyassume that
they only read the first part, and ifyou look at that on
its own… ifs a little bit like Silent Invasion with the
FBI in Americahunting aliens. But it takes such a swift
tangent after that. So Dark Horse chose not to publish
it, but Phil ‘.vas so convinced in it that he wanted to see
it through, so he kept on working on it, and it was
many years later that it was finally published by Kitchen
Sink. Thatwas something else I did three or four years
before it was published, and it languished around for
awhile.

Comics Scene Volume #2, page 60:

“The other thing I should mention
is I have a graphic novel coming out
from Kitchen Sink called Illegal Alien.
It’s a small black-and-white, it’s set in
1960s London, it features aliens, the
Kray twins, the CIA, KGB and mods
and rockers and ice cröam vendors. It’s
a quirky and exciting little book. I try
to do something every year that doesn’t
make me any money, but has a good
story that I want to get out of my
system. I do them just for my own san-
ity and my own self-worth as a writer.”

It has never been reprinted, but there’s a couple reviews out there:

Despite a few mild faults, this remains a charming book with a playful innocence that’s ultimately endearing. Be prepared to suspend belief and enjoy an old-fashioned kind of tale that remains surprisingly fresh amongst its present-day peers.

This is the one hundred and seventy-third post in the Entire Kitchen Sink blog series.

The Comic Strip Art of Lyonel Feininger (1994) by Lyonel Feininger

This is a quite large book — not quite Raw size, but almost — and apparently reprints all of Feininger’s comics, i.e., Kin-der-Kids and Wee Willie Winkie’s World, both from 1906. We get a pretty short introduction by Bill Blackbeard, presumably because of size constraints: A book of this size was probably not very cheap to produce. (On the other hand, Kitchen Sink still had (some) Tundra money to squander at this point, I think…)

And… yowza. The artwork here is amazeballs. Not static at all, as some comics from this era had a tendency to be.

And it’s all one long narrative, which is an odd choice for a weekly strip. But I mean, there’s not really much to the narrative: Some guys take a trip (to get away from the family or something), and it’s basically one long chase scene.

While the artwork is really amazing, and the storytelling is prescient, the story itself isn’t that gripping, and the jokes mostly fall flat. He’s got a constant patter going on, but the jokes mostly are just… there. We’re not talking Krazy Kat.

And even at this size, it’s reproduced too small. The lettering gets uncomfortably small to read (at least for these tired eyes).

But I mean… it’s endlessly graphically inventive.

So it was cancelled pretty quickly. I assume that all of this was an attempt to class up the comics pages with some real culture or something?

The Wee Willie stuff is even less amusing to read, but it’s got its charms.

It’s a beautiful book, with the gorgeous colours reproduced very well. But as a read, it leaves something to be desired, in my Philistine opinion.

Robert Boyd writes in The Comics Journal #178, page 63:

The Comic Strip Art of Lyonel Feininger is a
book no serious scholar Of the comic strip form
should be without. Lyonel Feininger’s entire
American comic strip output is handsomely
reprinted in this oversized book, along with an
interesting (though flawed) introduction by Bill
Blackbeard. Reading The Kin-Der-Kids and
Wee Willie Winkie’s World will undoubtedly
cause many readers to experience a sense of
regret that Feininger did so little, and that the
comic strip wasn’t his life’s work. This is an
understandable reaction, but wrong. lfFeininger
had continued to be a professional cartoonist,
he would never have developed into a painter,
and his paintings are far more important artistic
works than his comics. His oeuvre as a painter
has fundamentally greater significance and
power than his comics and cartoons.
Blackbeard touches on Feininger’s career
as a painter briefly in his essay, but in a surpris-
ingly dismissive way. Feininger earned his bread
as a cartoonist for about twenty years, and
during part of that period, he was Germany’s
most successful political cartoonist. If he had
died before drawing The Kin-Der-Kids, he
would still be assured a relatively prominent
place in the history of cartoons. The Kin-Der•
Kids and Wee Willie Winkie’s World simply
form an astonishing climax to an already distin-
guished career. And yet, he gave all this up for
painting. And it was not painting in a commer-
cially viable style; Feininger threw his lot in
with the avant garde at a time when no modern-
ist painter could hope to make a reasonable
living for himself. Feininger was not indepen-
dently wealthy, and had a wife and children to
support, yet he still gave up a lucrative career
for a very speculative one. Why? This is a
fundamental question which Blackbeard fails
to address in his introduction. (The other major
question about The Kin-Der-Kids strip is an-
swered in Blackbeard ‘ s introduction — namely,
why did The Chicago Tribune publish such a
bizarre strip in the first place?)

[…]

Feininger moved to Paris in
1906 to become a painter. He
studied with Matisse and ran in
the most advanced artistic
circles. But this kind of paint-
ing couldn’t support himself
and his wife, so he continued to
do cartoons for money. This
was when he drew The Kin-
Der-Kids and Wee Willie
Winkie’s World, as well as a
series of brilliant cartoons for
the Parisian journal Le Témoin.
(A very interesting companion
volume to The Comic Strip Art
ofLyonel Feininger would be a
collection of Feininger’s Le
Témoin cartoons and a selec-
tion Ofthe best Of his earlier cartoons.) Feininger
considered this work a horrible compromise he
made in order to earn enough money to live.
And yet, when we see these eartoons and comic
strips now, it is clear that they surpass every-
thing he had done before. It was here that
Feininger went from being a very good cartoon-
ist of a particular school, to being a great car-
toonist and a unique talent in the history of
cartooning.
Feininger created a comic language that
was his alone. I’ve already mentioned the “big
hands” aspect Of his drawing. Feininger devel-
oped ways of showing humans in motion with-
out motion lines — as shown by the wrestlers
and soccer players in The Kin-Der-Kids. The
large, flat, uninflected areas of color (as in
Cousin Gussie’s blue hat and coat) are ways of
depicting figures and objects that no one else
ever imitated.
In some ways, Wee Willie Winkie’s World
was even more radical. You won’t see clouds
like those on page 40 until Mattotti enters the
scene 80 years later. Likewise, virtually no one
has ever carried anthropomorphism to quite the
degree that Feininger did in this comic strip
(one thinks of a few early, weird Disney car-
toons and some of Kim Deitch’s work). Natu-
rally, Feininger’s obsessions from childhood
remain — the tall, narrow buildings (see the
chimney sweep page in The Kin-Der-Kids), the
big black steam locomotives throughout.
One wonders what would have happened if
Feiningerremained a cartoonist. He might have
spawned a new stream in American comic art.
Although there are certainly exceptions, it seems
to me that virtually every American comic strip
and comic book falls broadly into one of four
stylistic spheres. The earliest (and strongest) is
the scratchy style associated with Barney
Google, The Gumps, Mutt and Jeff, and Krazy
Kat. Then came a realistic illustrational style
associated with the work of Hal Foster and Alex
Raymond. The clean, brush-work oriented style
ofDisney is one important stream (with Pogo as
its highest achievement), and finally the mod-
ern minimalist style that Peanuts pioneered.
Feininger’s work clearly is outside Of all
these currents. However, if Feininger had man-
aged tocontinuedrawing American comic strips,
I suspect he would have ended up like Winsor
McCay — producing a body of work recog-
nized for its brilliance but essentially
uninfluential.
But Feininger left cartooning behind for the
very good reason that cartooning and comics
were inadequate forums for his art. For most Of
their history , comics have been industrial enter-
tainments tied up with the circulation-building
needs Of newspaper magnates and comic book
publishers, for whom comics were nothing more
than a way to sell papers. Anything that would
interfere with selling papers — drawing com-
ics with Strong personal content and high artis-
tic aspirations, without censorship — was not
only discouraged, it was unthinkable. The same
goes for comic books.
This is no longer the case. This changed in
1967 when Don Donahue published Robert
Crumb’s Zap #1. (Similar changes were hap-
pening with other “industrial” arts at the time,
such as movies —the decline of the studio
system — and pop music.) Now it is possible
for artists like Crumb, Lorenzo Mattotti,D Ian
Horrocks, ChesterBrown, or Jason Lutes
to produce comics that are equal in intent
and accomplishment to the paint-
ings Feininger produced. Perhaps
if Feininger had been born 100
years later, he would have never felt
the need to give up comics
for painting.

Well…

Richard Marshall writes in The Comics Journal #63, page 98:

Feininger remains an enigmatic
figure in comic strip history.
Working in an American art form for
an American audience, he was intro-
duced as a German. He had very few,
if any, conscious disciples (Harry
Grant Dart’s Explorigator, which
began in the New York World soon
after The Kin-Der-Kids’ demise ,
does seem to be a deliberate take-off.)
And strangest Of All, his superb ,
stunningly excellent weekly strip
lasted only seven months! A brief
visit, if one fraught with utter
mastery.
(Feininger did produce one other
comic strip, which ran concurrently
with the last few episodes of Kin—
Der-Kids and then succeeded it for
a brief period: Wee Willie Winkie’s
World. In my opinion, it was the
better strip of the two; it is a shame
that Dover declined to reprint this
short run—19 weeks ‘in all—for it
would have made this volume a
complete collection Of Feininger’s
strip work. It is unlikely that any
publisher will print a volume so slim
as to feature only the complete Wee
Willie Winkie’s World.)

Kin-Der-Kids was #40 in the Top 200 Comics of all time in The Comics Journal #210, page 68:

As a painter, Lyonel Feininger
would eventually gamer the aes-
thetic acclaim that in a better world
would already have been his as a
cartoonist. In each area of his cre-
ative endeavors, Feininger was
attuned to the preoccupations of
the fine arts of his day, so much so
that biographer and critic Hans Hess
noted that a single comic strip se-
quence “contains the problems of
modern art in a pure form” as well
as Feininger’ s own solutions tosame.
What will strike contempo-
rary readers of 1906’s The
Kin-der-K1ds is a stunning burst Of
pictorial imagination informed by
cultivated taste and executed with
distinct flair. Today we get caught
up by the colon and their bold
combinations, the clever construc-
tion ofpanel and page, the expressive
line work, the stylized design, the
purposeful exaggerations and dis-
tortions, and we need never be the
wiser for the international
artistic movements they re-
flected. Instead we are carried
away by the glorious full-
page Sunday funnies with
Feininger’s remarkable crew
of kid adventurers, dashing
across the globe in a bathtub,
chased by Auntie Jim-Jams
and her dreaded bottle Of
medicinal fish oil.
Despite its madcap na-
ture, the strip radiates a
gentleness and takes time to
revel in wonder (commis-
sioned, as it was, to serve as a
commercial foil for the furi-
ous rough-and-tumble ofthe
Hearst Rrnny pages). In that
better world, it would have
lasted more than 29 episodes.

This work has been reprinted later:

In 2011 Sunday Press Books published the book: Forgotten Fantasy: Sunday Comics 1900-1915, ISBN 978-0-97688-859-8, collecting the complete The Kin-der-Kids and the complete Wee Willie Winkie’s World.

This is the one hundred and seventy-second post in the Entire Kitchen Sink blog series.