Yesterday I Spoke for a Duck

Yesterday was the day to pick up The Catt from school. The 5:40 a.m. embarkation had been wise; the traffic presented not a single snaggletooth all the way from Point A to Point B. About a half hour outside of Champaign I started with the wake-up calls, but to no avail. Wouldn't you think that the sarcastic barbs I kept leaving on The Catt's voicemail would jar him into awakenness by osmosis? But no.

I got off the interstate and refilled the gas tank, tick tick tick. I arrived at Ye Olde Hopkins Hall but still no answer on the phone, tick tick tick. It was a nice sunny morning and I strolled through the courtyard, tick tick tick. I meandered through the glass-encased study lobby which looks out on the courtyard, tick tick tick. And then I... but wait! Through the window I saw a beautiful brown speckled duck with two ducklings! Directly outside on the grass where I had just been minutes before! The mother duck was 1.5 feet long from head to tail and the two ducklings were each three inches long from head to tail; the babies were a much lighter hue than the mother and their coat had the appearance of fur rather than feather. The three of them were marching around in single file on the grass in the courtyard right outside the picture window while I watched from inside. Why do I never seem to have my camera with me when I want to take a picture?

As you know I was in no particular hurry, so I kept watching the parade. But the longer I watched the more peculiar the whole milieu struck me. That the duck family was even in this courtyard was unusual right off the bat; how many times have you seen ducks marching around in your back yard, for comparison's sake? And the mother duck was quacking in a non-stop and frantic manner. Also, the mother had a fairly pronounced limp in her right leg (maybe that's what all the quacking was about?). And this marching the three were doing followed a perfectly circular pattern. Around and around and around they went, circling what I then saw was a two-foot by two-foot metal grate that was right there in the middle of the grassy courtyard.

Hold on, the cast of characters is poised to grow. From stage left, a uniformed grounds-maintenance man enters the scene. He must hear the maniacal quacking out there, but he seems oblivious to the duck parade and instead is focusing on the metal grate. He steps gingerly toward the grate, seemingly on tiptoe, and apparently not wanting to disturb the circular march that I was watching. He briefly peered down into the grate and then exited the scene as gracefully as he had entered it; maybe his responsibility had been to check on the flow of water that was under that grate?

I decided it was time to try ringing The Catt's phone again. No answer, of course. I left a message about how I was communing with nature and enjoying the circular parade. As I was blathering into the phone, I watched as one of the ducklings broke formation and wandered onto the crossbar of the metal grate. The crossbar was wide enough for this little duckling to walk across it, but how steady on its feet do you expect a baby to be? I was right to be worried! As I was finishing up that latest voicemail message, I was horrified to see the duckling hop blissfully upward an inch and then FALL into the abyss! I SCREAMED! I ran through that long lobby to go back outside to the courtyard to see if there was something, anything, I could do to help that little duckling that I feared was lost to a raging current far below the grate.

Here comes the feel-good part of the story. When I reached the grate I was VERY relieved to see that there was no water under it at all! Probably at some point in the past there used to be some water-related functionality to the grate, but I was pleased to see a solid bottom about three feet below the grate. The duckling was hopping around down on the floor, and it was even lined with grass clippings that had cushioned his fall. He was fine!

Now get ready for the twist you didn't see coming. I sure didn't! On that grass-lined floor where the little duckling was hopping around, there were also five of his brothers hopping around with him! Six ducklings had fallen through that grate, one by one by one. Imagine the distress of that mother duck! Her frantic quacking (which was continuing at full volume through all this, by the way) had nothing to do with her limp but everything to do with the fact that her babies were disappearing one right after another. Oh, she knew exactly where they were and that they were unhurt, but she also knew she was helpless to save the little guys.

So I got to work with the rescue. I curled my fingers around the bars of the grate and pulled and OOF! Nothing! It must be screwed in place, I thought to myself. I tried squeezing my hand between the bars of the grate, but that wasn't going to happen. I spun my head around with three hundred sixty degrees of frustration, and then tried pulling on the grate again. This time it budged! It hadn't been screwed down, it was just very, very heavy. Slowly and deliberately, I lifted off that heavy grate. The quacking continued, of course.

I carefully put one foot down on the grass-lined bottom and was happy that it was solid and I didn't fall through. The six ducklings were scurrying around, not fully realizing that their adventure was drawing to a close and they would soon be reunited with their mother. I put my open hand under each duckling and, one at a time, boosted them up to the freedom of the grassy courtyard where their mother was (of course) quacking, about ten feet away. Each one waddled directly over to the mother duck. The instant the last one was out of the hole, she stopped her quacking. How about that! The mother duck started marching, now trailed by all seven of her ducklings. (Where is that camera when I want it?!) No longer in need of a circular parade, the group marched to a covered spot under a nearby shrub.

(Can we fast-forward for one paragraph? After The Catt eventually woke up and the duck family had marched far away, I put T.C. to work taking a few pictures. Here is the infamous grate and this is what the inside of it looked like. Most ominous of all, here is photo of a sister-grate located just twenty feet across the courtyard from the grate we've been discussing; yes, that is water you see down there!)

The uniformed grounds-maintenance man came back on the scene and had witnessed the completion of my mission. He told me he had seen the ducklings trapped under the grate and went to call somebody to help get them out. He said he had been worried that the mother duck wouldn't take the babies back if he had intervened. I told him (and I'm quoting myself here), "She knew she needed help."

I Finally Got One!

It was back in 2007 that I told you I had been searching for years for any page of Batman artwork drawn by the idiosyncratically stylistic Frank Robbins. Go ahead and click here if you'd like to re-read that article.

One of the great joys of collecting, of course, is to ascertain an item that has long been elusive. It is my pleasure to announce that I am now the owner of a beautiful Robbins Batman page. You can savor it yourself right here! (And you can earn extra credit points if you observe that the beautiful lettering on the page is by the great Ben Oda, my favorite comics letterer of all time.)

Allow Me to Introduce. . . Ken Paulson

I used to (and maybe I still) wish that throngs of people would discuss the current week's new comic book releases in the same way that all the sports fans rehash the week's big games. Great hay has been made of the fact that President Obama is or was a bit of a comic book fan. Did you read earlier this month how much the drummer of System of a Down paid for Action Comics #1? And with seemingly half of all theatrical releases focusing on the four-colored characters that we've been lifelong fans of, it's no longer scandalous in the western hemisphere to proclaim that you're a comics fan. It is just a little refreshingly exhilarating, however, to discover that a high-profile celebrity shares our hobby. Ken Paulson is or was a bit of a comic book fan. (And, though my journalistic training is minimal at best, I am fully aware that I just buried the lead.)

Who is Ken Paulson? For the past five years, his name was glanced over every day by millions of peoples' eyes (possibly including yours). You see, from 2004 until just last month Ken Paulson was the editor of USA Today. And how do I know he likes (or liked) comics? Because I personally bought a handful of beauties from him thirty-one years ago!

Back when I was a college freshman, I joined the University of Illinois Comic Book Club. We would congregate in a University meeting room every Thursday evening and have lively discussions about the latest comics and the goings-on in the world of comics. It was great fun, but I wanted to prosletyze beyond the boundaries of that meeting room.

I decided to join the staff of The Daily Illini to write articles about comics. The DI was a five-day-a-week (or was it six?) tabloid-sized paper that printed wire stories of world news and syndicated columns as well as student-produced features and local content and commentary. The weekly entertainment-related pull-out section was entitled Revue.

Ken Paulson was the editor of Revue. It slips my mind whether Revue was just starting up when I came around or whether they were rejuvenating an existing construct, but it was announced that a Revue cover logo was needed. I wandered off and came back to the next meeting with this. Ken liked it and selected it and this design did serve as the Revue logo for at least the next year. (Department of full disclosure: I handed in the hand-drawn design but declined when Ken asked if I wanted to draft the camera-ready technical drawing. The unnamed draftsman who drew it up did a perfect job and has my belated thanks.)

I told Ken that I wanted to write an article about comic books (not knowing yet about his interest in them). He asked what did I want to write about comics? I had been collecting original artwork for a couple of years by that time, so I picked that as the topic. Ken approved the idea and off I went.

You can see here what the article looked like in print. The New Gods artwork that accompanies the article is by the great Don Newton and Dan Adkins with crisp lettering by the always-excellent Ben Oda, but that is not the panel I would have suggested for inclusion. You can see here the original of the page of artwork, which I supplied to the DI when I handed in my article; I was probably hoping they would instead use the beautiful three-panel sequence that you can see at the top of the page. (By the way, I claim without substantiation that this was the first article about collecting original comic book artwork that was ever printed in any newspaper; there have certainly been others since then, such as this one.) To help my little article find a wider readership, I sent a clipping of it to Don and Maggie Thompson who reprinted it in their Beautiful Balloons column in The Buyer's Guide (and they rightfully questioned some of the brash and fannish claims I made in the article, by the way).

Ken Paulson was pleased enough with the piece on original art that I was given a green light to propose another. It was around this time that Superman Versus Muhammad Ali was being published by DC Comics, so I pitched doing a phone interview with artist and writer Neal Adams covering his entire career but focusing especially on the Superman/Ali book. Ken flashed the green light again and off I went. It was a bit daunting to be interviewing one of my all-time favorite artists, but Adams was very easy to get along with and the call went well. When I later handed my article to Ken, he grew frantic as he skimmed over it, paging faster and faster. Tell me there are quotes, he said. Well, there (gulp) weren't; I had paraphrased all of Adams' answers, and that wasn't what Ken had been expecting. I made a follow-up call to Continuity Studios in New York City and garnered some quotes that I interleaved into my existing manuscript. The centerspread of that issue of Revue was dedicated to my article and you can see here how it looked.

Mike Gold of DC Comics had provided me with photstats that I requested of Adams artwork and the DI's production staff hit one out of the park with their marvelous layout design. Oh, and one more thing! Ken Paulson even let me draw the cover of that issue of Revue, as you can see for yourself here.

I must have gotten busy with my studies after that because those were the only two articles I ever wrote for Ken Paulson and The Daily Illini (although I did shift gears and produce quite a few drawings for editorials and feature articles, but that's a blog story for a different day!). Somewhere along in here I did learn of Ken's own interest in comics, and when he told me he was selling some of his collection I couldn't resist seeing what there was to see! If you can imagine this coincidence, I gravitated toward and purchased his run of Neal Adams X-Men issues, which had been a gaping hole in my collection.

Now fast-forward a few decades with me and look at this article from 2004. Yes! The white hair couldn't stop me from recognizing the Ken Paulson that I had known years before, and there he was being named editor of USA Today (not one of the three newspapers I read every day, but I have a respect for every daily newspaper). I couldn't help myself from penning a little congratulatory note to Ken, and I sprinkled it with anecdotal remembrances to tickle his memory bone (such as the fact that he would sometimes invert his name on a byline into the pseudonymous Paul Kennison). Ken dashed off a note in return and he complimented my memory!

A couple of years later a nice article about Ken and USA Today appeared in The New York Times (which is one of the papers I read daily). Then at the end of last year it was announced that Ken was moving on. My first thought was to write him another little note, but my second thought was to headline him here in The Hayfamzone Blog. Hooray for second thoughts! And congratulations to Ken Paulson on his successes!

Still More Gifts!

The H.I.T. (Hayfamzone Investigative Team) is out on assignment now so it's been a little quiet here in the newsroom lately. Never fear, they will return! The Team promises a provocative and informative report for next month.

In the meantime it is my pleasure to be able to share with you a few more excellently wonderful comics-related links that you may not yet have come across on your own.

I. First up, how about a website that interviews a different comics creator every day of the year? I am not kidding! Take a look here.

II. I've written numerous times about my appreciation for good comic book lettering and how the great Ben Oda is my favorite letterer of all time. I think I neglected to mention previously that I have many second-favorite letterers. Among them would definitely be Gaspar Saladino (mainstay letterer for 1960s and 1970s DC) and Ira Schnapp (designer of the impeccable logos for Action Comics and The Flash), both of whom are written up nicely over on Dial B for Blog. (Maybe you'd even like to see for yourself that I, your humble host, used to dabble in lettering? Take a gander at this little chestnut.)

III. Have you ever read a study of a comics logo? There are a couple dozen of them as written by latter-day comics letterer Todd Klein over on his blog. Not only does Mr. Klein discuss the history and aesthetics and evolution of such iconic logos as those for Batman and The Spirit, he also unveils a few unused preliminary designs for some logos he has personally toiled on (such as the one for last year's Death of the New Gods). I am particularly fond of his never-used and intricate Hangman, but my all-time favorite Todd Klein logo is his Time Warp.

This might be an appropriate moment for me to tell you that I too have designed a few logos along the way. You can click here to see one of them, but your have to promise to come back next month to read the rest of the story. It's sure to be a H.I.T.!

An Analogy Across All Entertainment Media

Of course most comic book stories start with a splash page, a full-page drawing intended to capture the reader's interest. I also used to like when an artist would draw a double-page splash (most often on pages two and three of a story) whether it was to punctuate the grandeur of a setting or to have an action scene seem as large as life itself; Mike Grell regularly employed double-page splashes in his Warlord stories and Jack Kirby included them in his stories in many different comics titles (and, with a tip of the hat to original art collector supreme Tod Seisser, you can click here to see a comicartfans.com gallery room filled with TWENTY-NINE fabulous Kirby double-pagers!).

But what if an entire comic book story was comprised of full page and double-page splashes? This may have even been tried once or twice in the long history of comics, but the result would not be a good comic book story. The beauty and magic of comics lies in their panel-to-panel storytelling, which would be sacrificed if each drawing were inflated to a full page.

I've heard the new Bruce Springsteen song "Working on a Dream" on the radio a few times over the last couple of weeks. It's instantly likeable and serves nicely as background music in the car while I drive. But then one time I listened more consciously to the song, and I was shocked at the mindless repetitiveness of what I heard! The phrase "working on a dream" is first sung a few seconds after the song begins and then it is repeated NINETEEN times (yes, I counted) by the time the song ends. This is the epitome of lazy songwriting! Does Mr. Springsteen think his fans are so hopped-up on days-long video-gaming that ear-candy repetitiveness to an insane extreme is the only way he can weasel his way into their psyches?

What if every shot in a Steven Spielberg film was a close-up? What if Dr. House lobbed sarcastic barbs nonstop for the entire 52 minutes of his television show? What if a song was all chorus and no verse? What if every page of a comic book was a splash page? I'm sorry to have to report that you can have too much of a good thing.

Two Gifts for You!

I like occasionally sharing with you interesting things that I find as I scale the internet, and today is your lucky day! These two items both have their roots in comic strips, but their tentacles reach outward toward comic books and video and even fine art.

First Gift

Returning readers of The Hayfamzone Blog might recall that Mutts by Patrick McDonnell is my favorite of all the current newspaper strips. And, as you might expect, Mutts has an internet presence with a site seemingly maintained by Mr. McDonnell himself. You can investigate the page here. But my gift to you goes much deeper than that! I found a feature nestled in the website in which Mr. M. explains that the title panel of Mutts on Sunday is usually an homage to a design from the world of comics or fine art. With one click you can see side-by-side the Mutts panel as printed and its inspiration, including but not limited to images related to Action Comics and Flash Comics and Dick Tracy and Popeye and Salvador Dali and even The Hulk. Yes! Just go here and start clicking!

Second Gift

One of the earliest icons of newspaper comic strips was Krazy Kat by George Herriman, dating all the way back to 1913. Here is a nice-looking website devoted to all things Krazy, but my main focus today is on KK's forays into animated cartoons. Here is a 1916 Krazy Kat and Ignatz Mouse cartoon and here is the better-known 1960s take on the characters. Put a comma right here. Other, less concerned blogs would pat you on the head right about now and send you on your way home, but not The Hayfamzone Blog! No, no. All of the preceding was mere prologue to what I feel is the most striking and compelling of all the adaptations of the Krazy Kat world; wait until you see this!

Gift Within a Gift

As I was wrapping your second gift, I got to thinking about the shared history I have with Krazy Kat. My earliest introduction to KK was the 1960s animated cartoons, but my first viewing of the original Herriman strips was in Golden Funnies in the mid-1970s as published by Alan Light of Comics Buyer's Guide fame. (I still have my subscription copies of Golden Funnies, of course, although I haven't looked at them for over thirty years.) Well, I started digging around on the internet and guess what? I found a YouTube video interview with Alan Light from 1982; to put a time-stamp on it for you, that's the year that Alan hired me to draw for The Buyer's Guide and this interview is about 1.5 years before Alan sold TBG to Krause Publications. As you watch the video here you probably won't be able to help wondering if this parade of gifts from me to you will ever end.

Look What I Found in the Quarter Bin!

Well, it wasn't exactly in the quarter bin. But there was a half-price sale at Atlas Comics last week and I paid $1.50 instead of the $3.00 that was marked on the tag.

The Omega Men #29. The cover date is August 1985. That particular issue slips your mind, you say? For a quick reminder, you can see the cover here.

The reason I bring it up is because that issue has a drawing by ME published in it! Yes!

Back in those days of voluminous free time I would write letters to the editors of some comics, and a few of them did find their way into print. I even suggested a title for a letter column that was selected and used for a number of years (namely, "Via Pony Express" over in Weird Western Tales and/or Jonah Hex).

I don't hesitate to reveal to you that I would write letters to comics that were known to receive the fewest letters. I can guarantee you'll never find a back issue of Batman or The Legion of Super-Heroes with a letter from me because I never wrote to those best-sellers. Instead I was writing to Weird Western Tales and Weird War Tales and, yes, The Omega Men.

Machiavellian of me? No. I just figured that if I was taking the time to write letters in the hope that they would get printed, I might as well write to titles most in need of letters to print. The strategy is analogous to buying shares of stock in a company when they are at a sixty-five year low.

Mr. Alan Gold was the editor of The Omega Men in 1985, and the artist was Mr. Shawn McManus (whom I recently blogged about for having been the artist of the 2008 Ear-Fall-Off Floyd issue of The Legion). One issue, Mr. Gold put out the call for letters to the editor. That was a bright green light to me and I started composing. Here is the text of the missive I wrote, as published in The Omega Men #29:

"Dear Mr. Gold:

As quick as you are to note the dearth of mail to your letters column, may I just as quickly make a bold suggestion? Instead of begging for letters, why not let the letters page be run by those few who do see fit to write in to you? Yes, I'm talking coup d'etat here. First order of business for the new regime: lift the restriction of printing only letters on the letters page. What else, you ask? I'm glad you did!

That letters page needs color, sir, and I aim to help you splash it on. We're thinking of drawings now, colored drawings, and I have graciously enclosed a couple of scribbles with which you might inaugurate this fine new idea. Where will it all end? If only I knew. The spring breeze is scented with paths to be chosen and decisions to be made, and I will not desert you in your time of need."

And here is a photo of that printed letters page. Yes, that is Virmin Vundabar, one of the great characters from Jack Kirby's Fourth World. Maybe V.V. was appearing in a storyline in OM at the time? I don't remember, but it must have been pertinent in some way since Mr. Gold did print the drawing. You wish you could see a larger image of the drawing itself? Okay! Just look here (and sorry about that slight blur). And click here to see V.V. as drawn by J.K. himself.

Alan Gold's printed response to my letter was as follows:

"I'm all for printing readers' art occasionally, Brian, when there's room. The following specifications should be met, however, by budding artists: (1) art should be no wider than 3"; (2) it should be relatively simple (no eensy-weensy detail or cross-hatching); art will be reduced to 60% of the original size in the printed comic; (3) it must be black and white , on white paper ( we'll do the coloring at DC); the drawing must be done in black ink (no pencil, crayon, pastels, shading, wash,etc.). If you want your art back, be sure to enclose a SASE. Bear in mind, too, that a letter mailed for OM #26 won't see print till OM #30, and that's a long wait you have to settle down for.

Mr. Gold's invitation to others to send in artwork for publication fell flat and there were no other takers. I realize that this entire topic is somewhat anachronistic in that letters pages have been almost entirely absent from comics for the last ten years or so, but they used to be vital. And, by the way, I did get a handful of other drawings published on other DC Comics letters pages around this same time. I'll have to tell you more about them later since I'm fresh out of time for today!