True Dicks

After plowing through the first volume of Walt and Skeezix the other day, I decided to keep exploring Classic Comic Strips, and started reading through the first volume of the complete Chester Gould Dick Tracy. I wasn't really surprised to discover that it reads a lot like classic Batman/Superman comics. I know that newspaper strips were what most comic book creators aspired to create, and I also know that many credit Dick Tracy as the inspiration for many elements of Batman - particularly the crazy, freakish rogues gallery. I'm only a few months in, so the villains have remained solidly real world thus far - gangsters, con-men and the like. I'm having a good time with it, but I'm waiting for it to get insane.

Well, I'm waiting for it to get insane in the ways that it is famous for. There's plenty of crazy in there already. For example - I didn't know that Dick Tracy was NOT a police officer when the series started. When the strip starts he's a dude who is having trouble getting work, but has faith that something will come along. He's just gotten engaged to a pretty young woman and is at her parents' home celebrating. His fiancee's father is a shop-owner who has just paid off all of his debts and has a modest savings as well. Local thugs know that this is a house with cash and pull a home invasion. Dick's would-be father-in-law is shot dead and Dick's fiancee is kidnapped! Dick is beat up, but mostly unharmed. When the police show up they see that he's angry, that he wants to fuck up the thugs, and decide to offer him a job as a plain-clothes detective on the spot.

Let's look at this. This is one of the most famous fictional police detectives of all time and he got his job with no training, no credentials, not even a job application! He's just pissed off after being victimized by crime! That's like if Death Wish had the police offer Paul Kersey a job at the end of the first act instead of leaving him to find his own brand of rough justice. That's pretty awesome, even though it doesn't strike me as entirely smart on their part. Then there's the whole 'unrealistic' factor too. I don't know how things worked back in 1931, but I'm skeptical that a dude would get offered a badge, a gun, and a leadership role on the force simply based on the fact that he was pissed off and wanted to get back at some dudes that done him wrong. I think groups that recruit that way are called 'gangs' not 'police'. Not to say that there aren't similarities between the two groups, but there are also differences that it is good to acknowledge.

Aside from the way that badges and guns are so casually distributed, my favorite part of the strip so far is how fragile women are in it. Women get hospitalized for anything. One of my favorite studies in contrast between the fragility of women and the sturdiness of men in the strip is a point when it is revealed that Dick's girl, Tess, has been in the Hospital for several days for a sprained knee and a bruised shoulder. Hospitalized. And when she's released, it's only under the condition that she take it easy and maintain bedrest. Meanwhile, a few pages later the villains drop a suitcase full of bricks on Tracy's head from a third story window, and this does no lasting damage to him whatsoever. There's also an interesting thing regarding timeline that goes on throughout the strip. The action and the cliffhangers frequently seem to cover moment-by-moment events, but characters will refer to a timeline that matches the measure of time that the readers experience. It seems to be one of the earlier appearances of that nebulous 'comic-book-time' that the Marvel and DC Universe are both so dependent on.

Of course, I'm making it sound as if my only enjoyment of these strips is ironic, and that's just not true. I like the way that it reads as wish fulfillment for people who were struggling in the depression and felt preyed upon by both circumstances and criminals. I love the contempt that it shows for con-men in particular, and how it's concerns are for the victims of crime. I love that it's concerned with justice. It reads better in bulk so far than the early DC stuff that I've read that came from a few years later. The action flows a lot better and Chester Gould is way better at building suspense and tension than most of the 'Golden Age' comic book dudes I've read were. Dick Tracy is just plain more consistently exciting than any of the golden age super hero stuff I've read. While Golden Age super heroes can't be beat for the pure craziness and invention of their ideas, I'm starting to really see that most of the finest craft of the period was happening in the newspapers. Too bad you've been Garfield-ed newspapers. New evidence presented to me shows you used to be awesome.

I've also been reading about a different kind of dick this week. I just finished reading the first fourteen issues of volume two of The Flash. This was the run that began just after the end of Crisis on Infinite Earths and was the beginning of Wally West's inheritance of the mantle of Flash, making him no longer Kid-Flash. There's a few things that were really striking to me as I read these. The first and strongest is that, as written by Mike Baron, Wally West is a total dick. People who are bitching about what a horribly asshole Tony Stark is being portrayed as these days would do well to look at this twenty year old take on a popular character and see how sympathetic, likable, or heroic they find him. The most awkward part of reading the issues for me was that I honestly couldn't tell if Baron means for us to be reading him as an asshole or not. I think that we're meant to like him.

As I read these issues of the Flash I kept thinking that this version of Wally West was the perfect Dittohead Super-Hero comic. The hero not only demands compensation to assist a hospital in saving a life, he also seems to bitch ceaselessly in his inner monologues about the evils of taxes and insurance companies. He wins the lottery at the end of the first issue and, if anything, this just seems to intensify his complaints about the ways that government taxation and evil insurance rates inhibit his freedom. He's a womanizer who both gets with married women and starts making moves on other women when he hasn't broken up with his previous girl. The final story involves yuppies who get addicted to 'speed drugs' (how clever) that give them Super Speed, but the dialogue and text go way, way out of their way to point out how cool yuppies are and that these guys just got caught up in someone else's evil scheme while they were trying to find a new place to put their positive, capitalist energy.

The underlying message of every character and situation seems to be that insecurity and neediness will turn people into villains and threats, while cockiness and selfishness shows them as virtuous. Nothing about this comic aligned with my value system, I thought that the main character was a douche, but I still had a good time.
Kinda makes me wish that there were more comics out there with leads and politics that would annoy me. It's fun to see what the other side thinks is heroic.

Stripped Down

For the last week or so I've been trying to broaden my comics reading by exploring the world of Web Comics as well as that of newspaper Comic Strips. The two things that I've fallen in love with the hardest so far have been Chris Onstad's Achewood and Frank King's Gasoline Alley (currently being collected as 'Walt and Skeezix'). Both of these titles took me a little bit of time to get into.

I'd had Achewood recommended to me years ago by a couple of friends whose taste I really, really trust. I'd given it a shot at that time and decided that for whatever reason it just wasn't for me. Over the last few months I've started to see it mentioned more and more by 'notable comics commentators' (i.e. bloggers who write regularly and coherently about comics + a handful of paid critics), and I started wondering if I should give it another chance. I went back to the beginning of the strip and just started going through one-by-one. I spent a while wondering if people simply said that they liked it because they thought that it made them look smart for some reason. I didn't hate it, but I certainly couldn't understand what the raving was about and I didn't see any potential for it to turn into something that would warrant that either. Gradually though, as I got to know the characters and became more invested in their world, the strip started to win me over in a big way.

I'm not really sure at what point I started enjoying it, but I know that I became conscious that I was in love with it once I reached the middle of 2003 in the archives. I know that I wouldn't have made it through two years worth of strips if I hadn't started consistently enjoying it before that, but that was the point that it became clear to me that it actually did live up to all the hype. The most amazing thing is that the strip still hadn't fully matured by that point. Once I decided that I was all kinds of into it, it started to take my ideas regarding the heights it could reach, take those, and use them to show me how limited my imagination was with regards to quality. Every couple months worth of archives would knock me freshly on my ass by raising my expectations of how funny and perceptive this bizarre strip could be.

The stories started to get longer and more structured and the characters voices got more defined and expressive. The world got deeper through all of the side projects like Ray's advice column and the blogs and, holy shit, all the sudden Achewood is not just this web-comic that I dig - it's one of my favorite comics period. I'm starting to figure out how to budget getting all of the books and buying volumes of them as gifts to people and getting annoyed that there's only one volume of the blogs available right now and, what the hell just happened? I think that a lot of it comes down to me as a reader, as well as Onstad the writer, figuring out over time exactly what's going on. I figured out how to read the series at the same time that Onstad was refining his voice. By the time I knew how to approach it, he had already not only become the heir to Bloom County, he had already zoomed past that rarified air and discovered his own, stronger, more layered, more ambitious, more singular, and more detail oriented voice. Hell, I'm even buying the damn cookbook. That's how great this shit is.

Gasoline Alley was something that I'd also been hearing about for years, but in it's case what I'd been hearing about was the 'importance' of it. Well, there's nothing like 'importance' attached to something to make it sound unappealing. There's also the fact that the comics section in the paper I grew up with carried Gasoline Alley when I was a kid. I know now that it was well past the period that is subject to any measure of acclaim, and that King had been dead for a long time and hadn't been associated with the strip for some time before that and blahblahblahblah, but the associations that my childhood encounters with Gasoline Alley left were hard to shake. Those associations were that Gasoline Alley was boring, unfunny crap about uninteresting old people. I knew that I was 'supposed' to want to read the old ones because I love comics, but, well, they weren't in print and, boy, what a disappointment that was. Sincerely.

Oh. Wait.

They're suddenly coming back into print? In big editions like the Peanuts books? Aw, maaan. *sigh* I guess this means I'll have to check them out at some point.

Oh. Wait.

Chris Ware is involved? And he's spouting off about how getting these collected is his dream project? And talking unendingly about how much influence he's taken from them. *whew* That's got me off the hook. I mean, why would I want to waste my time with something that fucking Chris Ware is not only the biggest champion of, but seems to be unable to shut up about.

Fuck Chris Ware.

Fuck Acme Novelty Library, fuck Jimmy Corrigan, and more than anything fuck his boring-ass, one-note, dishonest, bullshit writing.

Chris Ware has yet to write a comic that didn't leave me feeling that he may be the only person on the planet who didn't get beat up enough when he was a kid. Depression-posturing is just not remotely interesting or attractive on someone after the age of 14. If Gasoline Alley/Walt and Skeezix/whatever-the-fuck it is is one of the main sources of inspiration for this asshole, lord knows I don't need it.

Then I found myself scanning the shelves at the library the other day. I wanted to find something that was the first volume of a series that I hadn't read before, as well as something that was outside of my usual range of interests. My eye fell on Walt and Skeezix. It was one of about a half dozen titles I took home that day. Out of everything that I pulled out of my bag when I got home, I thought that Walt and Skeezix was the one that I was least interested in, but somehow it drew me in and made itself the first one I started reading.

You can read about the whole history of the strip from more informed and eloquent sources than me. It went through kind of an interesting evolution to become what it eventually became, and it's worth reading about if that sort of thing interests you. It interests me, I dug it, I'm not going to bother regurgitating the stuff that I've read on it over the last week. What I will say is that I am completely hooked. It's a gag a day strip that focuses on a group of dudes who really love their cars. I am not at all a car guy. I take the bus everywhere. But even though this was done in the '20's, I recognize these dudes. I have known a few gearheads in my time and it looks like they were pretty similar back in the day as they are today. Then one of the dudes has a baby dropped on his front step and the series gets another layer. We start getting a lot of strips dedicated to a gearhead bachelor dealing with being a single dad.

Cute.

Nice.

Human enough to carry truth to today. It'll make you chuckle. It'll make you go, oh aren't people just like that. In other words, it'll make you feel like you have become the thing you see anytime you have watched your parents or some other disliked, out-of-touch representation of 'older people' read 'the funny papers'.

Then, after a little while you start to notice that the baby is aging at a natural rate. And that Walt's priorities are starting to shift. And that there's some real human relationships going on behind the joke-a-day structure. And, more interesting, that the joke-a-day structure is actually frequently utilized to show the readers who these people are, as much as it is used to generate a chuckle.

Once I started picking up on that I looked at the years of the strips original publication, and started to do some thinking. I knew that one of the things that it was famous for was that the strip took place in something approximating 'real-time' where each character ages 1 year for every year of publication, but that didn't really mean much to me until I was watching this kid Skeezix learning how to walk. Suddenly I'm wondering where his life is going to go, and realizing that he's going to be an adolescent in the middle of the depression and that he's going to be 20 when the US gets involved with WW2, and I'm feeling all protective of him and wondering what's going to happen to him. Around this time King is starting to build in longer story arcs, and create questions about characters and..... I want to know what happens next. And I don't want spoilers. And I'm invested. And why the fuck doesn't Chris Ware apply his prodigious talent to something this good and rich and human instead of continuing his 'I'm serious because I'm self-loathing and depressed' posturing?

I've just finished the first volume of Walt and Skeezix, and I have the second waiting for pick-up at the library and I've sent in an interlibrary loan request for the third. Next up is Dick Tracy and then Terry and the Pirates. Sometimes I can't believe how many truly great comics already exist that I still have yet to read.

Blogger. Dude.

I'm not quite sure how to tell you this.

All of your fonts are terrible.

I'm just going to have to pretend that this is not the case.

I am going to have to close my eyes and think of England as I type.

Why can't you have better fonts blogger?

This hurts my soul.

I feel like kind of a moron.

I just realized that there is this whole 'preview' button where I can examine the looks of different fonts and sizes before I publish my thoughts for all of you to enjoy.
That means this will be the last entry I make involving working out what the font dynamics and boundaries in my relationship with blogger.
I hope.
I guess I don't really know what the future holds between the two of us, but I'm hoping that as we are spending so much time on this issue up front that we can consider it taken care of.
It is on my end blogger.
Where we go from here on this is up to you.

That's better.

I'm still not thrilled about the appearance I've got going with my letters here though. I was going with the Times font and I've gotta say that it's just not doing it for me. The size is decent enough though now that I've gone 'large'.
Is having 'normal' as 'too small for a normal person to comfortably read' some kind of similar media created aesthetic to the whole beauty myth where the media tells us that what is 'normal' and 'beautiful' is actually 'anorexic' and 'unhealthy' and 'verging on suicidal'? Is calling letters that are ridiculously tiny 'normal' some kind of continuation of the whole beauty myth? Some means by which blogger is trying to remind me that I'm fat?
Fuck you blogger.
Fuck you for calling me fat.
Okay.
I'm going to see how I like living large with 'Arial' instead of 'Times'.

Damn.

I went for the 'normal' size on my letters and they look all kindsa tiny now that it's posted. That is not normal blogger. That is forcing people with normal vision to put on reading glasses size. That is dog-shit is what I'm saying blogger.
Let's see how 'large' looks.

I'm Jake. I sell shit.

Howdy there cats and kittens. So, I'm Jake and I been a Register Jockey for some time. My life's not real complicated. I like to read comics. I prob'ly drink a little too much beer. I don't get laid enough. Pretty simple really. I figure I'll spend most of my time here talking about the register jockey-ing and the comics reading. They're not that unique, but lord knows they are more unique than another dude talking about drinking too much and going sexless again. I have not researched this, but I imagine that over 43% of all blogs kept by single males involve whining/boasting about getting wasted, trying to masturbate, and waking up in their own filth. I don't need to add to the collective voice of generations of spoiled douches trying to fulfill some kind of Bukowski-esque fantasy of manhood. I'm aspiring to be better than that.
I'm not sure where I want to start off with talking about comics. I've been reading Douglas Wolk's 'Reading Comics' over the last couple days and my head is spinning with all kinds of thoughts in response to it, but they are far too scattered to try to deal with yet. I'm sure that this thing is going to get all sorts of rambly most of the time, but I should at least try to avoid doing free-form, unconsidered response to a 400 page book of criticism. That is too far in the ol' rambling direction in my opinion. That being said - his essay about Cerebus is worth the cost of the book all by itself. And his chapter on Grant Morrison is just as good. And his 'defense' of Chris Ware does a pretty good job of arguing all of the reasons that I not-so-secretly suspect that Chris Ware is an asshole and unquestionably find his work dishonest and unreadable.
But I'll get more into that as I go on.
I think my first post after this one will be about the register jockey side of my life, because I feel like I've got a handful of things to say about that situation that can be put together in something resembling an organized and readable fashion.
I'm trying to be considerate to you, hypothetical-future-reader. I'm trying to pay attention to your needs.
I am sensitive.
Shit. This was just supposed to be an introduction and now it's getting all out of hand.
For right now you just need to know that I am Jake and that I sell shit.
That's my introduction to me.