Book Review: THE JOHN STANLEY LIBRARY: NANCY, VOLUME 4 by John Stanley and Dan Gormley (Drawn & Quarterly, 2013)

D&Q's STANLEY LIBRARY series must be getting pretty close to winding down; MELVIN MONSTER wrapped up some time ago, and this volume is the last in the NANCY series.  NANCY VOL. 4 covers issues #174-177 (1960) of the Dell NANCY title, and it's pretty clear at this point that Stanley is engaged in the creative equivalent of punching the time clock with these characters -- and when I say "punch," I literally mean "punch."  There is a mean edge to a number of these short tales that even the sharpest stories in the LITTLE LULU drawer cannot match.  NANCY's "nasty rich kid" character Rollo Haveall doesn't just play pranks on Nancy and Sluggo, he does things like throw hundreds of pies at Nancy while the latter is stuck in an expensive vase at the Haveall mansion.  (No prizes for guessing what happens to the vase.)  Nancy's resentment of her weird friend Oona Goosepimple gets more and more transparent as time goes on, even though it is clear that Oona really does appreciate Nancy's friendship, in her own twisted way.  Nancy screws up her Aunt Fritzi's dates with scarcely a note of regret.  And so on.  The stories are still quite fun to read, but you'll have a tough time identifying someone to "root for" here.  From Stanley's increasingly sour perspective, perhaps that was the whole point.

Book Review: THE JOHN STANLEY LIBRARY: MELVIN MONSTER, VOL. 3 (Drawn & Quarterly, 2011)

By the time these stories from MELVIN MONSTER #7-#9 (1967) were published, John Stanley had pretty clearly fallen out of love (or, given that we are in the twisted "monster world" here, perhaps I should say "fallen out of hate") with the project. With the solitary exceptions of two gags at the end of MELVIN #9, "human beans" are nowhere in evidence in these three issues, so we get no further enlightenment on how the denizens of Monsterville interact with the human world. Instead, Stanley seems content to "ring the chimes" ("toll the bells"?) on a small handful of themes that are just sturdy enough to sustain extremely brief stories. We do get a little bit of closure on the theme of "witch-teacher" Miss McGargoyle's trying to keep Melvin from attending grade school; the old bat finally gives in and allows Melvin to "graduate," but soon the kid is back, asking to attend high school (made so because Melvin raised the "Little Black Schoolhouse" off the ground on boulders; not one of Stanley's more inspired moments, I'd say). Also, the story "Supermonster," with its theme of a giant monster who needs to be pacified at regular intervals to prevent him from waking up and wreaking havoc, bears a frankly unsettling resemblance to the Gummi Bears episode "Let Sleeping Giants Lie". A childhood comics-reading memory bubbling up in the brain of the TV writers, perhaps? Still, even half-speed, deracinated Stanley is better than the majority of works by other comics writers. I'm still hoping for the second volume of THIRTEEN GOING ON EIGHTEEN, D&Q!

Book Review: THE JOHN STANLEY LIBRARY: MELVIN MONSTER VOLUME 2 by John Stanley (Drawn & Quarterly, 2010)

My review of D&Q's first MELVIN MONSTER collection could just as easily stand as my review of this SECOND collection (issues #4-#6, 1966-67). Stanley continues to mine the "good little monster" vein with fair success but never really comes to grips with how, exactly, the world of "Monsterville" interacts with the world of "human beans." He can't even get straight how one travels from one sphere to the other. Case in point: In "Broom Ride," Melvin falls off his "ghoul-friend" Little Horror's broom and plummets into what appears to be a "human bean" city park. He then gets back home by another application of broom power. This suggests that you need some sort of magic to "cross the border." Later, however, in "Pickapicnic," Melvin and Little Horror (wouldn't it have been great if Stanley had gone for a direct Harvey Comics parody and named her "Little Loatha"?) go on the monster version of a picnic (to wit: getting food by stealing it from others) and run smack into a family of noshing humans. No broom power or magical transport is on display anywhere in this story. This is a good illustration of my friend Brent Swanson's observation in his Amazon review of Volume 1 that Melvin's milieu never really "coalesces." A few more long stories might have fleshed things out a bit, but Stanley sticks like glue (perhaps, the very same glue that caused a number of pages in my copy of Volume 2 to be stuck together) to the six- to eight-page format that served him well during the LITTLE LULU days. D&Q includes no accompanying text, which is a pity.

Book Review: THE JOHN STANLEY LIBRARY: THIRTEEN "GOING ON EIGHTEEN" Vol. 1 (Drawn & Quarterly, 2009)

Drawn & Quarterly has already done well enough by John Stanley with its fine collections of the creator's work on Dell's NANCY and MELVIN MONSTER. What those earlier volumes (especially the latter) lacked was a sense of perspective for those of us who are still catching up with Stanley's LITTLE LULU work and want to know how, exactly, these lesser-known efforts compare with that justly celebrated series. For its third (and thickest) STANLEY LIBRARY offering, D&Q makes up for past omissions by fronting the first nine issues of THIRTEEN "GOING ON EIGHTEEN" -- by far, Stanley's most successful original creation -- with an essay by cartoonist and graphic designer Seth, who ranks this 1960s series among the best "mainstream" comics ever produced. As things turned out, I would have liked the collection under any circumstances, but I appreciate Seth's pointing out how THIRTEEN ties in with themes inherent in Stanley's earlier work. (Frank Young, in his fine review of the collection at his Stanley Stories Blog, provides additional insights for those who are interested.)

I've never been a big fan of "teenage" comics, but THIRTEEN already ranks as one of my two favorites of that genre, along with Harvey's BUNNY. Those familiar with both will probably laugh, but I'm serious. I like BUNNY, that well-meaning and completely addle-pated Valentine to the groovy, ginchy late 60s, precisely because it's so truly bizarre. (That, plus the fact that uncredited artist Hy Eisman, bless him, didn't fall into the trap of ripping off ARCHIE character designs, as Tower, Marvel, and DC so conspicuously did during that same period.) THIRTEEN, by contrast, is much more down-to-earth and believable, tracing as it does the lives and loves of a pair of occasionally lovable, occasionally aggravating teenage girls. Stereotyping of the ARCHIE variety is nowhere to be seen, though I'm sure Stanley must have received some pressure from the folks at Dell to compete directly with the Riverdale behemoth.

Stanley takes a while to get into a groove with Val and Judy, his teen stars. Issues #1-#2 of THIRTEEN, drawn by Tony Tallarico, are easily the weakest of the nine reproduced here. The gags aren't great, and Tallarico -- an artist about whom I've literally never heard a kind word -- draws petite blond Val and chunky brunette Judy as though they're somewhere around 11 or 12. Stanley himself takes over the drawing chores with #3, and the extra burden, oddly enough, appears to have liberated him a bit. Funny supporting characters begin to appear -- Judy's annoying boyfriend-for-lack-of-a-better-alternative Wilbur, an equally slothful loser named Charlie -- and Val's next-door neighbor Billy, who rotates between the roles of "good friend" and fallback date option, develops a wickedly impish sense of humor. Frenetic action and controlled hysteria of the LULU variety become a standard ingredient of most plots. Reminiscent of LULU, as well, is the book's decidedly distaff-friendly perspective (no big surprise, given that teenage girls were the target audience). Val may be a "drama queen" -- her occasional bouts of weeping and wailing on her bed are hilarious -- and Judy a bit mean-spirited, but they shine in contrast to the totem-like Paul Vayne (a "dreamboat" who becomes Val's first semi-serious steady), the calculatedly "kooky" Billy, and the utterly hopeless Wilbur and Charlie. To be sure, everyone has good and bad moments in these pages, but the girls -- including Val's older sister Evie, who sometimes functions as goad, sometimes as sounding-board, for her flightier younger sister -- come off better most of the time. Sometimes too much better, as I'll explain below.

THIRTEEN is very much a work powered by the "gas fumes" of the 1950s -- to the extent that one critic of these stories goes all postmodern on us and describe the comic as "a clear example of the concept of 'cultural hegemony.'" That in itself is a reason for me to enjoy the series; though the title's first issue appeared in 1961, it radiates that 50s sense of cultural contentment that drives the Left so crazy about any era over which it does not hold hegemony. Don't be fooled by the well-groomed setting, though. In this title, Stanley has some rather raw things to say about the quest for love, suggesting that, while unrequited love may be painful, requited love may be just as harsh. Val's relationship with Paul Vayne ends up causing no small amount of stress; she worries about losing him and is not a little nervous about what her relationship with Paul might do to her tie with Billy. Judy, less attractive than Val even after she suddenly drops a few dozen pounds, is desperate for the "right guy" but winds up settling for Wilbur, an oaf who refuses to pay for Judy on dates and insists on wearing a filthy hat everywhere he goes. Even Evie gets the fuzzy end of the lollipop when her steady throws her over (and we don't even get to see it "live"). Sure, some may carp that Val and Judy care more about impressing boys than they do about maximizing their career options or "finding their voices," but the former is where the "funny" is, no matter what era you're living in.

As with most Stanley collections I've read, the collective effect of reading Stanley stories is more significant than the impact of any one story. I do have some favorites in this collection, though. "A Maiden's Prayer" finds Val trying to enjoy a picnic with Paul Vayne even as she desperately tries to steer him away from trees, walls, and any other places where "Val and [fill in the blank]" carvings are present. We do get an odd moment when lightning strikes a shelter where Paul and Val are hiding from the rain. The way Stanley depicts the accident, the duo are lucky to have survived unscathed! Next thing you know, turkeys will start flying (yes, Mr. Stanley, I remember well that goof from a LULU story). The stories in which Val tries to dodge the unwanted attentions of a bespectacled "admirer" named "Sticky Stu" bring back wistful memories of a time when I, myself, was enamored with a high-school classmate and always had to be around her. I'd like to think that I was better company than the poker-faced Stu, however.

THIRTEEN does have one feature that I don't care for at all. Thanks to those strange postal regulations that gifted us with GYRO GEARLOOSE backup features in UNCLE $CROOGE and GOOFY quickies in DONALD DUCK, the title concludes every issue with a brief story starring Judy Junior (who looks like a younger, shorter, and even chunkier Judy) and a little boy, Jimmy Fuzzi. I've read those GYRO and GOOFY stories, however, and Judy Junior is no Gyro or Goofy. What she is is a painfully pushy, overbearing brat whose apparent sole purpose in life is to make Jimmy miserable. Sure, Stanley wanted to make the girls the star characters of the title, but this is going too far. Seth claims that he could read a "whole book" of these supposedly hilarious tales. They may work for him, but, for me, they simply seem cruel -- like an endless string of Lucy-pulls-the-football-away-from-Charlie-Brown gags without the pathos (and infrequency) that made those PEANUTS gags memorable (and tolerable). At least in LULU stories, put-upon characters generally get a chance for revenge; Jimmy almost never does. To make matters worse, the characters constantly refer to one another by name, a gambit which gets to be like Chinese water torture after a while. Stanley's LULU stories had an edge to them; the JUDY JUNIOR tales hone that edge down to razor-sharpness and then ask you to perch on same. I'll pass.

In his Introduction, Seth comments that Stanley wasn't greatly affected by the oncoming post-Camelot cultural tsunami in later issues of THIRTEEN, apart from an occasional Beatles reference. But then, Stanley's comics always seem to take place at a certain remove from the topical concerns of the real world -- all the better for Stanley to concentrate on his plots and characterizations. The fact that he can make this approach work in a quasi-realistic comic like this one is a considerable tribute to his talents. I'm definitely on board for future collections of this title -- and, if Dark Horse or someone else would only agree to publish the collected BUNNY, my "teen comics dream," such as it is, would be complete.

Book Review: THE JOHN STANLEY LIBRARY: NANCY Vol. 1 by John Stanley and Dan Gormley (Drawn & Quarterly, 2009)

To start on an ominous note: a number of people appear to have the wrong idea about the issue numbers and dates for this volume. The title page says that the book contains stories from Dell NANCY #146-150 (1957-58). In searching out appropriate screen grabs for the blog post, however, I found an electronic copy of the first story, "Oona Goosepimple," complete with original Dell indicia -- and, guess what, it first appeared in NANCY #162 (April 1959). Wikipedia, and the estimable Don Markstein, come closer than D&Q, but they miss the target as well, with each citing NANCY #166 as the site of Oona's debut. So both the Internet and the "dead tree peddlers" struck out in this case.

Actually, the first appearance of the Wednesday Addams-like Oona highlights an important point about Stanley's approach to Ernie Bushmiller's characters. Having pretty much burned out on LITTLE LULU, Stanley was probably delighted to put a new set of "Lulu-esque" characters through their paces. The fact that Nancy, Sluggo, and company were well-established figures in a popular, long-running comic strip, however, must have given the creator some pause. Lulu, who began her career as a pantomime character in gag cartoons, had had plenty of room for development when Stanley began to flesh out her neighborhood. Nancy and Sluggo may have had shallow, uninspired personalities, but Stanley must have felt that he needed to hew to them, at least for a while, as he settled down to his task. One can therefore regard the eccentric Oona's appearance as something of a "sowing of the wind" with an eye towards reaping a later "whirlwind" of story possibilities. The rest of the early stories in this collection are fairly unremarkable, making Oona -- a black-clad girl with beady eyes who gives everyone around her a case of nerves and lives in a spooky house with a surprise (usually of the nasty variety) around every corner -- stand out all the more starkly.

Once Stanley gets his feet under him, he begins to pull Nancy and Sluggo in directions the unimaginative Bushmiller would never have contemplated (though Dan Gormley's art, if a bit more unpredictable than Bushmiller's, does give the comics the same stodgy look as the comic strip). You can see it coming when Stanley devotes an entire one-page gag to sending up Liberace in the person of "La Plunke," an impresario with a rhinestone-studded piano. For panel after panel, Nancy makes bitchy comments about La Plunke's talents, or lack thereof, climaxing by claiming that La Plunke, and not his piano, should be "hung" when she sees the latter getting lowered out of the stage door. Nancy's remarks scandalize her Aunt Fritzi a bit, which seems only right, as Nancy's relationship with her aunt is a lot more abrasive than Lulu's with her parents. Perhaps Stanley thought that Fritzi's not being Nancy's mother gave him a bit more leeway. Likewise, after treating Sluggo as a generic boy character in earlier stories, Stanley takes Bushmiller's notion of Sluggo as a "dead-end kid" and runs with it. In "Lower Education," Nancy forces Sluggo to go to school but thinks better of it after Sluggo starts fantasizing about using his education to become President. She ultimately convinces the janitor to keep Sluggo in the basement and have him sweep floors. Tubby may have played hooky on occasion, but the existence of parental figures in the LITTLE LULU "universe" wouldn't have allowed for this sort of a cynical resolution.

Stanley's innovations in handling the NANCY characters didn't prevent him from borrowing liberally from the LULU "template." Rich kid Rollo Haveall is basically Wilbur van Snobbe, take two, while the crook Bill Bungle (aka Bill Bungler, aka Bill Bumble -- perhaps Bill's incompetence was catching) reflects Stanley's apparent delight in using an adult figure who is hopelessly inept at his supposed specialty, a la the truant officer Mr. McNabbem in the LULU stories. If the NANCY stories -- even at their best -- fall a little short of the quality of the LULU oeuvre, then one reason may be the lack of a strong "bench" of supporting players. In the stories collected here, at least, Nancy has no "girl sidekick" to compare with Lulu's Annie; eager though Oona is to make friends and do things with Nancy, she's essentially a walk-on oddball. Likewise, the annoying neighbor kid Pee Wee isn't nearly as memorable (or annoying) as Alvin of "Story Telling Time" fame. Given the raw materials that he had to work with, however, Stanley's NANCY tales are unexpectedly fun and entertaining.

The last page of this volume has a picture of John Stanley (in the company of his editor Oscar LeBeck, Dan Gormley, and other worthies at Western's New York office) and a brief biography -- which just happens to be the same one that appeared at the end of the earlier MELVIN MONSTER collection. What this Library really needs is a volume-by-volume, bit-by-bit biography of Stanley in the manner of the articles that appeared in Another Rainbow's LITTLE LULU LIBRARY. As long as Fantagraphics keeps reprinting the same two-page Charles Schulz bio in THE COMPLETE PEANUTS, though, I guess it would be hypocritical of me to complain about D&Q dropping the ball.

Book Review: THE JOHN STANLEY LIBRARY: MELVIN MONSTER, VOLUME 1 by John Stanley (Drawn & Quarterly, 2009)

Thanks to the success of Dark Horse's LITTLE LULU volumes, John Stanley "stock" is up, and now Montreal-based D&Q is joining the frenzy with the first of a promised series of volumes collecting Stanley's non-LULU works. MELVIN MONSTER dates from the mid-1960s, by which time (1) Stanley was working for a Dell Publishing outfit that had split off from Western Publishing and was attempting to establish itself as a comics-publishing contender; (2) Stanley was drawing, as well as writing, his stories; (3) Stanley was working entirely with characters of his own creation; (4) Stanley's attitude towards the comics industry was rapidly souring (he would quit the business altogether by the end of the decade). All four factors have a heavy influence on MELVIN, which, while entertaining enough, doesn't quite measure up to Stanley's peerless work with Marge's characters.

At first glance, MELVIN appears to be drawing upon the same zeitgeist that gave rise to such contemporary TV series as The Munsters and The Addams Family. The title character is, after all, a monster and interacts on a fairly regular basis with humans (or, as Melvin calls them, "human beans"). A closer examination, however, suggests that the character of Melvin owes just as large a debt to that of Casper the Friendly Ghost. To the chagrin of his square-shouldered, hulking, overbearing "Baddy" and bandage-wrapped "Mummy," Melvin wants to be as close to a normal boy as one can possibly be in the abnormality-riddled community of "Monsterville." His attempts to actually attend "The Little Black Schoolhouse," as opposed to buying into the "normal" practice of playing hooky -- thereby scandalizing the "teacher" (a dyspeptic witch) on duty -- are particularly funny. Melvin's attitude towards "fitting in" veers between mild defiance and stoic acceptance (e.g., when he agrees to slide down his slide into a "daggerberry bush" without screaming, only to take refuge in a cave after the fact and painfully give forth with the requisite number of "Ow!"s). The family pet, a crocodile named Cleopatra, is perpetually trying to eat him. Even his "guardian demon," who's supposed to protect him from harm, is fairly useless. Given all of the above factors, Melvin is an easy character for whom to root and should make an appealing hero. His milieu, however, is not as well-defined as it ought to be, and much of that is Stanley's fault.

In the absence of the experienced editorial hands that had been employed by Western, Stanley appears to have had some trouble deciding how, exactly, Melvin should relate to the human world, or even how his work should be organized. Issues #1 and #2 consist of single narratives broken into distinctly titled parts (shades of Harvey Comics' 10- and 15-page stories) in which Melvin takes a "detour" into "Humanbeanville" along the way. These stories plainly suggest that humans live in, so to speak, a different dimension than monsters. With issue #3, we get a paradigm shift: the stories are now stand-alone, and Melvin runs into humans as a matter of course (even getting tracked by "monster hunters"). This is a bit disconcerting, to say the least. In both manifestations, the humans (whom Melvin appears to admire on principle) do behave pretty much the same -- namely, like jerks. A rich owner of a "private zoo" wishes to add Melvin to his collection (where are Superman and Lobo when you need them?); several human kids spin Melvin like a top; a rich couple living in a penthouse mock the "riff-raff" below; and, of course, there are the "monster hunters." The adult characters in the LULU stories never came off as badly as this. Creeping cynicism, you suggest? So do I.

Stanley's artwork in MELVIN reflects a comment that I recall him making about Irving Tripp's artwork on LULU (for which Stanley provided scripts and pencil roughs) being overly "static." Stanley's work is much livelier, if a bit inconsistent: the monster characters are very cartoony in appearance, while the humans look as if they've stepped out of a New Yorker cartoon. Melvin straddles these two extremes, being neither realistic-looking nor overly stylized. Again, a better editor might have suggested that Stanley bring the two disparate styles a bit closer together. Occasional misspellings in Stanley's lettering -- plus an awkwardly-placed caption that appears to have been shoehorned in at the last minute -- lend further credence to the theory that Stanley, working on his own, needed more editorial help than when he was part of a creative "team."

Subsequent volumes of the JSL will reprint Stanley's comic-book work on NANCY -- which, it goes without saying, will probably look and "feel" a lot more like LITTLE LULU -- and such additional all-Stanley enterprises as THIRTEEN, GOING ON EIGHTEEN. It will be interesting to see if the theory that I've posited here -- that Stanley was better working with established characters that he could "embellish" than with original creations -- continues to hold true.