2.08.2006

Masters of American Comics, Part I

We were lucky enough to spend the last weekend in Los Angeles, visiting friends and seeing the Masters of American Comics exhibit. It's being shown in two museums and roughly divides the last century in half — The Hammer Museum covers the early days of comics in newspapers, and the Museum of Contemporary Art covers books and graphic novels. As we did with the exhibit, I'm splitting this into two days.

Our friend S. works at the Hammer, and was able to offer some additional insight along the way. The exhibit has been years in the making, and a great deal of effort was put into simply gathering the material. So much of the work was destroyed and there are very few central collections of comics, so most of them came from private collectors or small institutions (a noted exception is Art Spiegelman, who keeps and maintains control over his work). The exhibit moves on from Los Angeles to Milwaukee and then New York City, but the number of pieces will be cut from around 900 to around 400 for various reasons; most of the pieces that will not travel are the original newsprint samples that are too fragile. Also, the work of Charles Shultz will be rotated so that no one piece is exposed for too long.

We began on Saturday morning at the Hammer, where the show opens on a room of Winsor McKay. It's an extensive selection, and there are several examples of the original art and the color proof (which seemed to be printed on higher-quality paper), along with the final newsprint piece. I was familiar with the innovations he made in design and layout in Little Nemo in Slumberland, but it was a special treat to see the original inked art up close, which just emphasized what a masterful draftsman he was and the strength in his contrast between thick and thin lines. A happy discovery was another strip, The Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, which, like Nemo, centers around dreams/nightmares/fantasies, but with a rotating cast of grown-ups and the visions generally brought on by overeating. An exception to that storyline — perhaps my favorite piece of the whole exhibit — was a strip, narrated by the drawn figure (a model for that season's clothing). As he has ink splattered on him and smudged across him, he ponders the mental state of the cartoonist, "I wonder if this designer has not been drinking . . . " It's a wonderful mix of precise artwork and pattern, messiness, and joke on the nature of illustration.

Next was Lyonel Feininger, a name I recognized from college studies of the Bauhaus, but whose cartooning work I did not know. For just two years at the beginning of the century, he produced The Kin-Der Kids and Wee Willie Winkie's World. The examples shown emphasized his composition and the many formal design elements he brought to the page.

A large section on George Herriman followed. Krazy Kat can be a lot of work to read, but the many original inked illustrations allowed me to concentrate on the quality of the art and design as well as the story, and there are a few exceptionally funny ones. (As a side note, around this point I really began to appreciate the lack of explanation of the work other than the artist bio on the wall at the beginning; I have a tendency to get sucked into those, sometimes spending more time with the story behind the art than the art itself). There were final printed pieces along with the illustrations, and a few hand-watercolored illustrations that he had given as gifts. It's amazing to think about how sophisticated this work is on so many levels, and to think how appreciated it was by such a wide audience.

From there, it was Frank King. I'd always seen his Gasoline Alley as a sweet, sentimental, dated strip. But the focus in this exhibit is on his innovations in layout and passage of time — such as the way he would divide a single illustration into panels, or how he would sweep in and out of fantasy. He also had some sophisticated examples of coloring, experiments in format (as when he simulated woodblock, or drew everything with circles) that he found clever ways to work into the narrative. His work was definitely an eye-opening discovery for me

The exhibit turned to E.C. Segar's Popeye. I confess, I really wasn't inclined to spend much time with it. Fatigue was setting in, and compared to the work that had come before, it was plain and wordy. In a later discussion with S., I learned that this work was included more for its narrative, especially its longer "arcs" and multiple plotlines.

I headed to Milton Caniff next; the examples were almost entirely weekday Terry and the Pirates with a few pieces from Steve Canyon. For some reason, I've always been drawn (so to speak) to his illustrations, so I was biased to like them from the start. It was terrific to view the brushstrokes up close, but also to be able to spend some time examining the composition and pacing of the strips. There were a few that showed a couple days' sequences, but they were mostly isolated and really made me concentrate on the design that went into them. One I kept coming back to was a fistfight in the shadows, where about 75% of the strip is solid black.

The Chester Gould display provides a nice contrast to Caniff in his expressionist, sometimes almost abstract work on Dick Tracy. The artwork is dynamic, the pacing and characters sometimes just bizarre, but in the context of the whole exhibit, I could see where it fits in.

The Hammer's portion concluded with Charles Shultz. It's easy to sentimentalize about Peanuts — and then with the current reprints, wonder what we're sentimentalizing about. The exhibit brings a few samples from every era and helped me really remember what was joyous (if that term can be used for Charlie Brown) about the strip. In looking at its long history, it was amazing to see the change in art over the years, but always so minimal — yet so expressive.