Steve Bissette is blogging about his days working with Allan Moore on Swamp Thing, and it’s fascinating reading. Three parts so far. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

EDIT: I can’t tell what Bissette means when he admonishes people to not “lift text” – extensive quotes, in toto or what. I don’t like it when people crib my entire blog for their blog posts, either. I am going to assume he doesn’t mean a few sentences withing the bounds of fair use. Whatever, I’ll just paraphrase instead of quoting and let you know that Bissette recalls editors actively discouraging creators from speaking with one another. Trot on over to his blog to read his exact words.

I did have one old guard editor in the early 1980′s (who has since passed on) forbid my speaking to the author of the comic I was illustrating. But that was the only instance I can recall this ever happening at either DC or Marvel. However, Bissette is a good many years my senior, and had a longer history at these companies than I did. But for a few jobs, I didn’t start working on a regular basis at either company until around 1987, though I had had a few gigs at both companies prior to that.

Found a lot of articles on artists in the current job market, none of them good news. Artists are (not surprisingly) losing jobs at a higher rate than in the rest of the professional sector, and the rate would be even higher were artists not simply ditching creative fields entirely.

At the LA Times:

Artists are unemployed at twice the rate of professional workers, a category in which artists are grouped because of their high levels of education. The artist unemployment rate grew to 6% in the fourth quarter of 2008, compared with 3% for all professionals. A total of 129,000 artists were unemployed in the fourth quarter of 2008, an increase of 50,000 (63%) from one year earlier. The unemployment rate for artists is comparable to that for the overall workforce (6.1%).

You can find the study at the National Endowment for the Arts website.

Another article at The Christian Science Monitor. Same theme.

“Artists are entrepreneurs in terms of their employment character. They’re the equivalent of small businesses – they require a lot more investment up front. They’re already in a pretty precarious situation. And in a market like this, artists are really hit pretty hard.”

Gee whizz, I say that every week.

How the arts performed during the Depression.

If we look at the arts as a life-giving form of social therapy, many other fads and fashions of the 1930s fall into place. The thrust of the culture, like the aims of the New Deal, was to get the country moving again. At cross-purposes in conversation, Astaire and Rogers seem perfectly ill-matched. Endlessly bickering with each other, they can agree on nothing. But once they dance, a swirling poetry of movement takes over.

TS Eliot rejects Orwell’s Animal Farm.

“We have no conviction that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the current time,” wrote Eliot, adding that he thought its “view, which I take to be generally Trotskyite, is not convincing”.

The Oresteia in plain English. Dear God, no. Please, no.

BEFORE:

Is it some grace — or otherwise — that you have heard
to make you sacrifice at messages of good hope?
I should be glad to hear, but must not blame your silence.

AFTER:

So you got good news?
You’re optimistic?
Tell me, unless you don’t want to.

I don’t normally advocate book burning.

From the Harlan Ellison Website:

EXTREMELY BAD NEWS

Harlan

Len Wein is…best known for co-creating DC Comics’ Swamp Thing and Marvel Comics’ Wolverine, and for helping revive the Marvel superhero team the X-Men (including the co-creation of Nightcrawler, Storm, and Colossus). He is also responsible as an editor for Alan Moore’s and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen, one of the most influential graphic novels made.

This makes me sick with worry and I am so sad for Len and his family. A loss for them, and a loss for the entire comics community. Man, there is no creator in the world who doesn’t go faint at the prospect of such a disastrous possibility in their own life, but to have it happen to someone who is not only a truly nice guy, but a giant in our field…wow, can’t wrap my brain around it.

So terribly, terribly sorry for you, Len.

c

Jeff Smith hosted some guest blogs at Boneville, and Rick Veitch stepped in with an excellent post, as well as some Rarebit Fiend cartoons, dreams in comic art form he created around the self publishing movement.

And for kicks, a file cleaning binge yielded this: a letter from Dave Sim, dated 1991. There was a minor kerfluffle some year’s back as a few oddfellows tried to distance themselves from the self publishing movement by denying one ever existed. Letters like this tell another story. A number of creators banded together, traveled together, promoted together, and tried to change the face of comics together. No use denying it. There’s a paper trail, folks.

While Jeff remembers the movement getting going back in 1993 beginning with a jam print a bunch of us created, this October 1991 letter from Dave pushes that date back quite a bit. Its quite a bit earlier than I remember as well, so no knocks to Jeff. This is all so long ago, my memories are starting to get a bit muddled.

While I did start self publishing in 1991, as you can see by the date on this letter, my first issue did not come out until quite late in the year.

Some interesting things I do not recall at all: some self publishers were already dropping out by the time I got started. I also don’t remember Hepcats predating my self publishing A Distant Soil. Nifty.

I did not participate in most of this 21 city tour to which Dave Sim invited me. In January of 1992, I was felled with a terrible case of pneumonia that almost put me six feet under. Many cartoonists got knocked flat, and a few were hospitalized after this overcrowded January convention in New York City that was so mobbed by fans, the fire department shut it down.

My health did not recover for nearly a year, though I did – stupidly, I must admit – try to travel only a few months later. I convinced myself that staying at a friend’s beach house in March of that year would help my lungs. It did, but Karen Berger wondered (quite rightly) why I was able to travel to the beach to enjoy the sea air, and still not meet my deadlines.

I had chronic respiratory problems that kept me sick and tired, almost all of which disappeared when I moved to the country. Now, I glow with corn fed health.

I digress.

Anyway, before the end of 1992, I was on those self publisher tours and doing jam prints and the like. So, this letter seems to prove that the self publishing movement may be a little older than 15 years. Regardless, Jeff decided to build a self publishing celebration around certain events that were more than just a trickle of creators trying to get their comics into shops, and the self publishing tours of 1993 were significant milestones in that.

And for more snaps and giggles, do check out Steve Bissette’s blog for interesting remembrances of comics in the 1970′s and early 1980′s, particularly his work with Alan Moore in Swamp Thing. Steve has an uncanny memory, and I am very much looking forward to spending more time digging through his archives for his remembrances of the self publishing days which, for me at least, are starting to seem very distant.

It’s been years since we’ve spoken, and Steve has always impressed me with his decency, his honesty, and his charity.

Alas, for whatever reason, a lot of the images on his blog simply won’t load for me. Don’t know what that’s about.

c

I’ve done a good deal of ghosting of other artists over the years, but sometimes I have to sign confidentiality agreements. In that case, you never hear about the gigs, of course.

For Lynn Johnston’s famous strip For Better or For Worse, I did the hand painted colors on some of her limited edition prints, which, I think, were published by Stabur Graphics (?). It was so long ago, I do not recall all the details.

Naturally, I did not receive credits for this work, but that’s not a problem for me. People aren’t reading the strip because of my coloring, and I was very well paid.

Lynn Johnston had strong opinions about what she wanted. That made her good to work with because there was never any confusion or searching about. She also kindly gave me a couple of the signed prints for myself.

I can’t recall if I ever posted about this job before, but again, I have done so many gigs over the years, I just can’t remember everything.

I ghosted on Brenda Starr for Ramona Fradon briefly as well, but when I saw the artist years later she didn’t remember me, so I am not the only one with a faulty noggin! I don’t blame her. Over the years she must have worked with lots of people. I did art on the daily strip, but it was a strip that didn’t appear in my local paper, and I don’t think I have copies of anything I did. It was very long ago. Maybe around 1991.

Anyway, I have always been very flexible with my work and able to adapt, so unlike some creators have always been employed and able to make a living at what I do. I am lucky I haven’t had to go get a day job or to depend on a spouse to afford to pursue my interests.

The last time I had a part time job was around 1989: I worked as a caretaker at my condo association! I had to test the water in the swimming pool, do minor cleaning in the clubhouse, and keep records of who used the gym. Easiest job I ever had.

c

Reposted, because the Open House is on April 25 , and it is still a dirty rotten gyp that Rose O’Neill gets just about zero recognition from the comics industry.

It’s the 100th Anniversary of the Kewpie, and Rose O’Neill’s beautiful estate museum at Bonniebrook is celebrating with an annual Open House on April 25. This free event will feature “refreshments and entertainment”, as well as massive loads of exuberant kewpishness.

Thanks to Roxanne Young, secretary of Bonniebrook, and Martha Melton for writing to bring this to our attention. You can learn more about the Kewpiesta and other events in and near Branson Missouri by visiting this link at the Branson Courier.

Branson’s “Kewpiesta” is an annual commemoration of the “Kewpie” and its creator Rose O’Neill, which has become an Ozarks tradition since its initial beginning in 1967. It is a combination of Rose O’Neill and Kewpie events that is unmatched anywhere else in the world and includes the exhibition and auction of Kewpie Dolls and Kewpie collectibles, social events, and the annual meeting of the International Rose O’Neill Club.

I posted about comics and illustration pioneer Rose O’Neill and her contentious relationship with her husband Grey Latham, as well as Latham’s efforts in the development of film projection here.

While almost everyone has heard of the Kewpie Doll, almost no one I know in comics has any familiarity with its creator Rose O’Neill, who was once one of the most famous women in the world. O’Neill was honored last year by the National Women’s History Project, but alas, O’Neill has yet to win a posthumous Eisner or any other award recognizing her contribution to comics.

The Rose O’Neill Society has a website with an extensive biography, gallery, and shop, as well as information about the museum at Bonniebrook which houses dozens of pieces of original art, including her Sweet Monsters illustrations. These were exhibited to great success in Paris in 1921. The museum will begin offering prints of these works by the end of the month.

Rose O’Neill’s Kewpies were a worldwide phenomenon, based on cartoons she created for The Ladies Home Journal. The pudgy, cherub-like characters in O’Neill’s illustrations made kids clamor for huggable versions. Soon O’Neill was manufacturing bisque porcelain winged cuties, and elaborate paper dolls.

Here is O’Neill’s original patent registration drawing for the dolls.

Nicknamed The Queen of Bohemian Society, O’Neill’s circle of friends included Thomas Hart Benton, Booth Tarkington, and Kahlil Gabran. An unflattering portrait of O’Neill is said to have popped up in one of Tarkington’s novels, though no contemporary photos of her match the description of the 200 lbs woman rudely described.

O’Neill was also a novelist and some of her books are in the public domain. You can read them for free at Project Gutenberg.

She was also a prominent feminist. Here we see Kewpies campaigning for women’s rights:

Have a look at her illustrations here at The American Archives.

A sculptor, and poet as well, O’Neill’s largely untrained talent and accomplishments are even more remarkable considering the times in which she lived.

She has been lauded in many national art exhibits such as Monstrous Craws and Character Flaws at the Library of Congress.

For a detailed overview of Rose O’Neill’s Kewpie doll manufacturing history, check out this link for the Cameo Doll Factory.

It would be immensely satisfying to see this gifted woman get the attention she deserves from the comics community. It’s well past time she was inducted into one of our numerous Hall of Fame Award whatnots.

Please take some time to peruse the links here to learn more about the remarkable Rose O’Neill. Thanks.

c

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