Word: stripped
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...superhero, there had to be a hero. In the early '30s that was Dick Tracy, Chester Gould's city cop with an FBI agent's love of forensics and gadgetry (the Crimestopper's Textbook instructed kids on how to catch bad guys). What's striking today about the strip is its sanctified sadomasochism. No question, Tracy could dish it out, as in this sequence from 1947: "Like a whip, a piece of chain flies through the air - a chain attached to Tracy's cane handle. AGAIN AND AGAIN, the chain slashes! Tiny pieces of glass fly through the air." More...
...Will Eisner, who died two years ago at 87, was a force in the medium - two media, really, comic strips and graphic novels - and as both an artist and an entrepreneur, for more than six decades. TIME.com maven Andrew Arnold calls him "one of comix' greatest forward-thinkers." In the biz from his teens (everybody started young in comics), Eisner wanted to break out of the newspaper-illustration straitjacket, saying, "A daily strip to me is like trying to conduct an orchestra in a telephone booth." So at 23, on June 2, 1940, he introduced The Spirit, which...
...encouraged to make his protagonist a bit more like them; only reluctantly did he slap a mask on the Spirit to establish his kinship to the superheroes. New York (Metropolis, Gotham) was here called Central City, though later the Spirit traveled abroad. Sometimes he nearly disappeared from his own strip, making only a perfunctory appearance in the lives of supporting characters or guest villains. In that sense, The Spirit was a proletarian comic strip with a collective hero: the "little people" of Central City...
...peruse the strip in sequence - as you can in the handsome collection called The Spirit Archives, now up to its 22nd volume - is to see Eisner shift within genres and tones. One week's story might be a melodrama, the next a comedy, the third a parable. But beyond the variety of stories was a striking visual consistency: the tone was bold, dark and mature - a grownup vision, compared to the adolescent world-view of the standard superhero strip. To quote Feiffer: "Will Eisner was an early master of the German expressionist approach in comic books - the Fritz Lang school...
...iddeal. The L.A. museums were a car-drive away, and everyone drives out there. Back here in Manhattan, Newark might as well be New Delhi. As Spiegelman wrote to the show's producers: "While swell for New Jersey residents, placing the first half of the 20th century's comic strip artists into the Newark Museum is, from the perspective of this provincial New Yorker, the equivalent of hiding them in a Federal Witness Protection program." The Jewish Museum also censored some of Crumb's more robust drawings, provoking Spiegelman to withdraw his art from the show he had helped inspire...