Audible Althouse #51.

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I talk about comics, especially Popeye:



There's some stuff about the "Masters of American Comics" show at the Milwaukee Art Museum and Art Spiegelman writing about cartoons in Harper's Magazine. Then there's that list of conservative rock songs and Pete Townsend's reaction to "Won't Get Fooled Again" being on it. I talk a bit about Bob Dylan. (The Paul Simon song I can't quite remember is "Night Game.")

There's some exciting violence involving a spider that occurs early on in this podcast. And the whole thing ends with a discussion of cool. And Kookie.

"We're emenies on account of we both loves Olive Oyl."

Said Popeye, wondering why Curly wanted him to come over, in an old E.C. Segar comic I was reading today at the Milwaukee Art Museum, which has a big, cool exhibition called "Masters of American Comics."

I'd been looking at comics art for about half an hour, working my way through the Winsor McKay and Lyonel Feininger comics, and got to the Segar stuff, and that line of Popeye's made me laugh out loud. And then I was doubly amused to realize that was the first laughter I'd heard at this huge exhibition of comics. I stayed for another hour, and I think I laughed one or two other times, but I never heard anyone else laugh. It was like a church in there. Is this the effect of museums or did the curators choose the very comics that were least likely to make you laugh? Fantasy and surrealism loomed large. So did serious comics like "Maus." And a lot of the humor was the sort of thing that you appreciate intellectually and don't giggle over. Like:

And with insipid porcine vapidness he lapses into somniverous oblivion.

That's a caption in a "Krazy Kat" comic, as a pig goes to sleep.

"S'turbil" = It's terrible, in Krazy Kat dialect. She also says "Jee-Wizzil." I find all of that amusing, but you'd only laugh out loud at that sort of thing in a social situation, where you were interested in elevating the mood of the people you're with. In the museum setting, everyone's floating along in his own little reverie.



Hmmm.... I see there were no women artists in this exhibition, and there were 15 male artists. I'm surprised, not because I think there is a woman who deserved to be in this group. (Winsor McCay, George Herriman, Lyonel Feininger, E.C. Segar, Frank King, Chester Gould, Milton Caniff, Charles M. Schulz, Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, Harvey Kurtzman, R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Gary Panter, and Chris Ware.) I'm surprised because I would have thought curators would feel uneasy about a show with that many artists that lacked even one woman. Thanks for not patronizing me.



Anyway, it's an excellent show, well worth the trip to Milwaukee if you're roughly in the area. It will be there until August 13th.

And, in case you don't know, the museum itself is quite the architectural marvel:

Art Spiegelman on the Muhammad -- and other -- cartoons.

I want to write something about Art Spiegelman's piece in the June issue Harper's Magazine, and it's frustrating not to be able to link to it. I hate to think I've reached the point where I feel that it's not worth reading things I can't link to. Remember that Kevin Kelly piece from a couple week's ago about how, in the future, everything would need to be on line to matter? I feel myself falling into that future. If Art Spiegelman wrote an article in Harper's that I can't link to, is that like Art Spiegelman thinking his own private thoughts or muttering to himself when he's walking alone on a deserted beach?

But I did go over to Borders and pick up a paper copy of the magazine, which was worth doing not so much because it reprints the notorious Muhammad cartoons from the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, but because of the luscious reprints of some cartoons from the 19th and early 20th centuries. These old cartoons are brilliantly drawn and politically vicious. What is the point of beginning the article with these images? Spiegelman writes:

Cartoon language is mostly limited to deploying a handful of recognizable visual symbols and clichés. It makes use of the discredited pseudoscientific principles of physiognomy to portray character through a few physical attributes and facial expressions. It takes skill to use such clichés in ways that expand or subvert this impoverished vocabulary. Cartoonists like Honoré Daumier, Art Young, and George Grosz were masters of insult and were rewarded for their transgressions: Daumier was imprisoned for ridiculing Louis-Phillippe; Art Young, the Socialist editor of The Masses, was tried for treason as a result of his anti-World War I cartoons; and George Grosz was tried variously for slander, blasphemy, and obscenity before fleeing Germany as the Nazis rose to power.

Spiegelman goes on to criticize the Muhammad cartoons: most of them are not well drawn, they lack a discernable message, and -- in his view -- they fail to "speak truth to power." Cartoons are important: why aren't they better? Quite aside from the issue of stirring up religious fundamentalists by depicting Muhammad, there's the problem of decline in cartooning, an argument you pick up almost instantly upon looking at the old cartoons Spiegelman has chosen.

Hard-hitting cartoons have mostly been replaced by topical laffs in gag-cartoon format or by decorative "Op-Ed" style illustrations whose meanings are often drowned in ambiguous surrealism.

"Rancorous visual satire" is in short supply these days. Spiegelman wants more of it. I agree.