Topps #13: Like sands through the hourglass, so are the Days of Our Lives. .
This is a photo I took of Art Spiegelman in 1969 when we worked together in Brooklyn creating humor products for Topps Chewing Gum. That's the interior of the Topps Product Development Department out of focus in the background. Photo © 2011 Bhob Stewart.


One day Art told me he had been reading vintage comic strips at the New York Public Library. The memory of that returned some years later when a research project had me studying turn-of-the-century Hearst newspaper comic strips on microfilm. I was surprised to see so many strips that went unmentioned in books about comics. Unlike modern comics, they mostly had a flat look with panel layouts often characterized by full figures in large panels not unlike a stage proscenium.

Looking through Gothic Blimp Works #2 (1969) recently, I reread Art's "Grain of Sand Comix" and realized he had drawn it in the style of those early strips. I asked him to write a few paragraphs about the creation of "Grain of Sand", and he responded with the article below. Tiny images and words are embedded in the background  patterns, and these are not readable here even when the page is enlarged. Apparently Blogger has a size limit, so I've added a detail at the end of the article to show the miniature messages. For Publishers Weekly's recent (10/11) Art Spiegelman interview, go here.



Small Bits of Infinity

by Art Spiegelman

"Grain of Sand" was part of my apprenticeship as an underground cartoonist, a way to combine my love for old newspaper comics with a stab at making it all contempo by grafting some taboo subject matter onto the old form. A full broadsheet page in the centerfold of the Gothic Blimp Works was a strong lure, and I gave the page everything I had (which at that time was not much more than giving it hours of fine-line Rapidograph patterning). I wish I'd had the stamina and focus to explore “Festoria” further, instead of just making a one-shot teaser, but there were drugs to take and communes to join. Hey, it was the late 1960s, and I was 21.

My interest in old newspaper comics took root with the few tantalizing glimpses of a mysterious past that I found in Stephen Becker's Comic Art in America (1959), given to me as a birthday gift when I turned 12. I wanted to see more than the handful of black-and-white samples in that book and started logging serious after-school time among the bound newspaper volumes still somewhat available in some libraries back then—first exploring the main branch of the Queens library that I could reach by bike and later in the Manhattan library's newspaper annex far west of those lions on Fifth Avenue. Mostly I looked at the papers from the 1920s through the 1940s.

It's amazing to think how haphazard all my old comics spelunking was back then—I had a vivid enough imagination but just couldn't imagine a world bursting with volumes that would reprint vast swaths of Krazy Kat, Captain Easy or Dick Tracy. And books like the sumptuous Forgotten Fantasies or the full-size color Nemo books that Peter Maresca's Sunday Press has published in the past few years were on the farthest side of unimaginable. On the other hand, wresting comics history out of odd crevices made it all seem hard-won and urgent in a way that can’t be replicated when all things seem a keyboard click away. I didn’t really discover much of the first decade or so of very old Sunday funnies until Woody Gelman at Topps Gum took me under his wing in 1967. He first met me as a 15-year-old looking to score some original Jack Davis cartoon art to study. I “traded” him a copy of my imitation Mad crudzine, Blasé... and he saved it, writing me three years later—right after I graduated high school—to offer me a job at Topps that I kept for about 20 years.

I think Woody and I bonded over our interest in old comics: he hadn’t met too many 15-year-olds who knew what Little Nemo was. Woody seemed to be the only person on the planet who deeply cared about those old strips and valued them enough to archive them in his suburban basement filled to bursting with old paper. Woody was a visionary and a central figure in my life. He introduced me (and eventually the rest of the world) to Little Nemo in a really big way when he'd let me fall asleep in his Long Island basement surrounded by old Sunday pages. 



One of the singular aspects of those earliest newspaper pages—aside from their scale and the care given to the still-new technology of color separation—was the fact that the artists' "camera" viewpoint in those early pages wasn’t... cinematic. None of those Orson Welles angles or quick cuts that came with the comic books. Just full figures moving from panel to panel as if striding across a vaudeville stage. My "Grain of Sand" page echoed that structure as well as the approach to page structure that thought of each page as a coherent unit. Thanks to Woody’s collection I got to see the World (and the Journal and the Herald) in a grain of sand, and had the good fortune to hold small bits of infinity in the palm of my hand.

A few years later I did another obscure newspaper strip, "Skeeter Grant". It was commissioned by my pal Willy Murphy, a fine San Francisco underground cartoonist who, like Roger Brand, died before his cartooning mission was fully accomplished. He was editing the comics supplement for a short-lived San Francisco weekly folly called The Sunday Paper... and the chance to work in color was as big a lure in 1972 as the chance to work broadsheet size had been when I was offered the centerfold of the Gothic Blimp. The strip I did there was based on a real dream I'd had in Woody's basement.
                                                                                               --© 2011 Art Spiegelman

Labels: art spiegelman, gothic blimp, roger brand, stephen becker, topps, willy murphy, woody gelman

  ¶ 7:46 AM 1 comments

 
Here are two pages from Gothic Blimp Works #2 (1969). Above is an ad for an Allen Ginsberg LP on Douglas Records with artwork by John Thompson, who briefly lived in New York in 1969. Scroll to the bottom for Thompson's background on the creation of this ad.

Below is another of my Gothic Blimp collaborations with Larry Hama. Ron Haydock wrote the page, and I inked Larry's pencils. Haydock, screenwriter for Ray Dennis Steckler, also arrived in New York in 1969, and he wound up crashing at my West 12th Street apartment. He seemed in a near catatonic state. Since he had no money, no job and was incapable of contributing to the rent, I suggested he begin scripting. I would leave each morning to work in the Product Development department at Topps Chewing Gum in Brooklyn, and when I came back in the evening, Ron would show me what he had written. Two of these were scripts for stories I packaged as finished art and sold to Jim Warren for Creepy: "Valley of the Vampires" (#28) and "Spellbound" (#29).

Ron soon returned to the West Coast, and in 1977, after a failed attempt to raise some cash by selling a script to Steckler, he was killed by an 18-wheeler while hitchhiking back to LA from Vegas. Miriam Linna, who interviewed me about Ron in 1990, has written extensively about his career as a writer and rock musician in Sin-a-Rama and elsewhere. Her Norton Records label offers a CD compilation of his recordings, 99 Chicks: Ron Haydock and the Boppers.

John Thompson recalls: "In the Oxford University Press History of Berkeley in the Sixties, I'm mentioned as one of the two leading graphic artists in that Scene. In the Summer of Love 1967, at 21, I graduated in Art History from UC and found myself at the center of a countercultural whirlwind. Thus, I'm also mentioned in The History of the Haight Ashbury with those poster artists, though I was part of a group of aspiring poets in Berkeley.

"During the next couple of years, Ginsberg and his lover Peter were often a strong part of that scene. But my favorite poet/artist was Daniel Moore, who was close to Allen (to see his writing and art google danielmoorepoetry.com). So that's how I met Allen and saw him at EVO in 1968 and again when I lived near EVO in 1969. As much as I enjoyed 'some' of Allen's poetry, he was taking too many drugs at that time and was a sex addict. So because I was good looking with long, long hair, he often hit on Lin and I and tried to get us high. Aside from that aspect of his crazy persona, he was very kind to me.

"Allen and I knew record producer Alan Douglas (later Jimi Hendrix producer), so Allen sang some songs of William Blake's for me. I was a Blake scholar, so Allen's jubiliant over-the-top voice didnt really capture Blake's intentions. Nonetheless, Alan and Allen asked me to design, pencil and ink art to promote their album. They liked the compostion I penciled, but I inked Allen's profile that resemble his profile and beard and glasses but made his skin look older (because at my age Allen seemed like some old guy).

"Thus, Douglas liked it, but Allen was troubled that his profile didnt look younger and cuter. Douglas paid $100 to me to use it on the back page of EVO (or Gothic Blimp), and it would take several pages to decode the symbolism in that image."

Labels: gothic blimp, john thompson, larry hama, miriam linna, norton records, ron haydock

  ¶ 9:58 AM 2 comments

  .
This is a page Larry Hama and I did in 1969 for Gothic Blimp Works #4, an issue I co-edited with Kim Deitch. There's a curiosity in panel eight. I pasted in a reduction of a Topps poster, "Wanted for Highway Robbery: TV Repairman", but only now do I notice that the Jack Davis cartoon of the repairman appears to be blacked over. Strange. But a lot of strange things were happening in 1969.

I asked Larry to identify the person in the fourth panel and anything else he recalled about our collaborations. Larry responded, "I can barely remember stuff I worked on 20 years ago, let alone stuff I did 40+ years ago! I also haven't seen those pages in probably more than 35 years. People from Marvel and DC are always calling me to ask about stuff I worked on in the 1970s and early 1980s, and 75% of the time I can't help them at all. But the guy in panel four is definitely the guitarist from Country Joe and the Fish. I think the pic I copied is on the back of Electric Music for the Mind and Body."

Actually, as we see below, it's David Cohen on the back of their second album, I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die.

Labels: gothic blimp, kim deitch, larry hama, topps

  ¶ 8:56 PM 0 comments