Too-ra-loo-ra Hulu-Hulu Yay...

... exults Kimba at the happy news that all 52 episodes of Kimba the White Lion are now available for viewing at Hulu!  You can find them here.  I've just finished updating all the episode links in my Kimba reviews. 

Book Review: AL CAPP, A LIFE TO THE CONTRARY by Michael Schumacher and Denis Kitchen (Bloomsbury, 2013)

The contentious, cantankerous creator of LI'L ABNER has deserved a major biography for quite some time.  Alexander Theroux' glorified term paper THE ENIGMA OF AL CAPP (1999) could best be described as "an outline of a rough draft of a synopsis" and was marred by obvious political partisanship besides.  Though Schumacher and Kitchen indulge in their own share of tsk-tsking at Capp's abrupt swerve to the right late in his life, they do a far better -- and, no surprise, much more thorough -- job of placing Capp in the context of his time and explaining why his cartoon brainchild became such a massive hit in the mid-20th century.  Even so, there is quite a bit left unsaid here, and I can easily imagine a more comprehensive biography emerging at some point in the future.

LI'L ABNER is fondly remembered as one of the first comic strips to specialize in social satire.  It's not hard to understand why Capp should have gone that route; starting with the famous childhood accident in which he lost a leg, his rise to fame and fortune was anything but smooth and untroubled.  At a time of socially sanctioned anti-Semitism, his Jewish roots also cast him in the role of an outsider.  The result was a man with many rough edges.  Capp, for all of his surface geniality, was not a nice person, as Schumacher and Kitchen display in ample detail.  Capp's lengthy, nasty feud with his ex-boss Ham Fisher brings to mind Henry Kissinger's comment about the Iran-Iraq War, that it was too bad that both parties couldn't lose.  Fisher paid the ultimate price, losing all of his friends and committing suicide, but Capp's reputation also took a major hit as a result of the decades-long disagreement.  Arguments with family over LI'L ABNER marketing initiatives (Capp was also a pioneer in the public exploitation of his strip), serial infidelity, and the like paint a grim picture, culminating in several sex scandals in the early 1970s that wrecked Capp's reputation for good and all.  Even Capp's frequent parodies of other creators' comic strips, the most famous example of which is the DICK TRACY parody FEARLESS FOSDICK, could be considered a passive-aggressive form of fighting back against perceived rivals, however much Capp might have argued that he admired the original creations.

The major failing here is Schumacher and Kitchen's inability to articulate why, exactly, Capp took such a dramatic turn to conservatism during the 1960s, going on campus to hector students and such.  One comics encyclopedia of note trotted out the cliched rationale that Capp turned conservative after he had gotten rich.  This conveniently ignores the fact that Capp stayed a flaming liberal for a good while after LI'L ABNER's highest circulation figures and most lucrative licensing deals had been achieved.  The "he was a nasty guy" argument doesn't work either, since Capp was what he was for many years before the 60s.  My own opinion is that Capp, like a fair number of old-fashioned New Deal-style liberals, was genuinely appalled by what was going on during that giddy time and determined to attack and parody it, but that his satirical skills had gone off the boil since the salad days of the 40s and early 50s.  (Charles Schulz always argued that Capp's decision to let Abner and his perpetual romantic pursuer Daisy Mae get married in 1952 knocked the bottom out of the strip; Capp was not pleased and did a rather cruel parody of PEANUTS some years later, leading the mild-mannered Schulz to demand that Capp cease and desist.)  Capp had always sought publicity for himself and his strip, but, in the late 60s, the somewhat cruder execution of the LI'L ABNER storylines was mirrored in Capp's partaking of such harebrained stunts as confronting John Lennon and Yoko Ono during their "bed-in for peace."  Creatively, Capp had simply lost it, and the over-the-top insults and radical-baiting made it all too easy for the intelligentsia to write him off as a lost cause.  Had Capp been, say, twenty years younger, his assault on the left might have been more successful.

A fuller treatment of Capp's life and art must wait for the future, but Schumacher and Kitchen's book is a good place to start learning about both.

DUCKTALES RETROSPECTIVE: Episode 30, "Home Sweet Homer"

This is a VERY easy episode to love; it's been in my list of the best DT episodes from the first time I saw it.  A "deep dive" into Greek mythology, a killer villainess (Tress MacNeille as Circe, in what I would argue was a key breakout role for her entire voice-acting career), splendid visuals, a meaty (and not entirely conventionally exploited) subtheme involving the desire of youth to emulate age and the lineaments of heroism... and a guest spot by Unca Donald!  What's not to like?  Actually, Greg raises some very good points about some potential weak spots, and he's not simply talking about the all-too-convenient deus ex machina "reverse time twister" that appears at the end and sucks Scrooge and HD&L back into the present day.  I think I may be able to set his mind at ease about them, however.

It's entirely plausible that Anthony Adams may have drawn inspiration for this free-handed adaptation of The Odyssey from Carl Barks' "Oddball Odyssey" (UNCLE $CROOGE #40, January 1963).  There is a bit of evidence of cross-pollination in the fact that Scrooge's mind is foozled in both stories -- by the Sirens in Adams' tale and by Magica De Spell's "hypnotic perfume"-soaked letter in Barks' story.  I think it is telling, though, that Adams literally allows Scrooge to be bewitched by the REAL mythological Sirens (oxymoron alert?).  Adams takes the whole "adaptation" business far more seriously than did Barks, whose flippant and slightly snarky story is basically just a Ducks vs. Magica battle placed in an unusual setting.  Adams does compromise on some of the character and place names, but, just as he did when he allowed real Vikings to invade Duckburg in "Maid of the Myth," he takes full advantage of the opportunity to place the Ducks into an historical and mythology-tinged context, thereby capturing what Duck comics fans love most about some of the best Duck stories.  He also treats the source material with respect, and, yes, I'm saying this despite the change of Ithaca to "Ithaquack" that got GeoX so exercised.  Keeping Homer and Ulysses' names was definitely the right call, and changing King Aeolus and Scylla to "King Blowhard" and "Yuccalinda" was acceptable in view of the fact that the modernized names capture the nature of the characters that they represent quite well.  In all honesty, "Ithaquack" and "the Colossus of Duckapopolis" are exceptions for Adams, rather than the rule; he used real and quasi-real Viking names in "Maid of the Myth" and would later name one-shot villainous characters "Dr. Horatio Bluebottle" and "Captain Blackheart," so it's not as if he was prone to always going overboard with the Duck puns.  I wonder whether "Ithaquack" was forced upon him.

The episode gets off to a rather hasty start -- following the Ducks' receipt of Donald's letter and Scrooge's recognition of the feet of the broken Colossus of Duckapopolis, we're whisked off to the Sea of Tuna almost before we can catch our breath -- and, taking this in combination with the "reverse time twister" ending, it's entirely fitting to wonder with GeoX as to whether "Homer" might not have worked better as a two-parter.  (Certainly, a guy who once wrote a rock opera entitled An Eye in Each Head ought to have been more inclined towards including some scenes with the Cyclops.)  But the speedy coming and going do have their advantages, as well.  In one of the most sublime scenes of the entire series, Scrooge's yacht is carried into the past by Circe's misdirected "time twister" and then lands in darkness -- which then coalesces into a dramatic night scene before the gates of Ithaquack.  I don't think that this sequence would have worked as well had the episode taken more minutes to work up to it.  The suddenness with which the Ducks are transported to 1100 BC gives the audience a certain feeling of disorientation, which is precisely the right mood to invoke in this case.

After Circe's medallion is smashed and her power broken, the reappearance of the "time twister" leads to another superb sequence, in which the highlights of the Ducks' own mini-odyssey are glimpsed in reverse and Scrooge and the boys then literally try to "get things back together" before plunging into the Sea of Tuna at dawn.  I can see Greg's point about the "reverse Grand Tour" lasting "too long," but, in view of the episodic nature of the source material, I can also understand why Adams chose this approach.  King Blowhard's blowing-out of the candle provided a neat bookend to the earlier "splashdown in darkness" scene, and, after the Ducks are left drifting on the sea and wondering whether they really have returned to their own time, the appearance of Donald provides the definitive breaking of the mythological spell (unless you count Donald's continuing tendency to exaggerate his Naval exploits as their own peculiar brand of mythology).  I only really have one issue with the ending: Since all of Circe's pig spells are reversed when the medallion is broken and she herself is turned into a pig, wouldn't it stand to reason that the "time twister" would simply cease to exist?  (Think of the fate of Merlock without his talisman at the end of DuckTales: The Movie.)  Perhaps the "breaking" of this particular spell consists of the "twister" returning the out-of-time Ducks to the status quo ante and then winking out of existence.

Given all the talk about "learning to be a hero" and "wanting to be just like Unca Scrooge" that percolates throughout -- not to mention the pointed absence of Webby -- this ep definitely qualifies as a "guy show."  How ironic, then, that Tress MacNeille's Circe is the most powerful character on display.  MacNeille's performance simply makes this episode and leaves very little doubt that, had the creators been so inclined, Tress would have provided an excellent (albeit unaccented) voice for Magica.  Even such anachronistic words and phrases as "wimp," "twerp," and "You've come a long way, baby!" fail to spoil Circe's appeal.  After all, she really does seem to "love [her] work," which helps to put any villain over, especially one with such a delightfully overbearing personality.  (Despite her defeat, I could have sworn that I saw her reappear on The View at some point.  But that's just me.)

MacNeille is at her best when she gets the chance to switch between voices, as in the scene at the end of act two where she turns herself into Homer's captive Queen Ariel and, later, when she faces off against Scrooge and changes voice styling from Ariel to Circe in the course of a single line ("Just what I wanted to know!") just before turning Scrooge and Homer into pigs.  OK, so it's not as creepy as Frank Welker's Sirens (not many things COULD be), but it's still plenty impressive.

Next to Circe, Scrooge, HD&L, and the Odyssey-related supporting players, King Homer comes up looking pretty wan and weak.  Bland voice, bland personality, bland everything.  I therefore need to take a moment to address Greg's concern about the way in which Circe's defeat was handled -- namely, the fact that Homer plays no role at all in bringing the arrogant sorceress low.  Everything in the episode seemed to be leading up to a climactic scene in which Homer lives up to his great Uncle Ulysses and proves his worth once and for all.  For sure, that's how a conventional animated series would have played it.  But, here's the thing -- the heroic Scrooge, the man whom the Nephews take turn claiming that they plan to emulate some day, the self-assured dispenser of words of wisdom, doesn't play a role in defeating Circe either!  Instead, HD&L do the job all by themselves, while the menfolk are trapped in pigs' bodies.  This feat didn't come out of nowhere; after all, it was HD&L who saved Scrooge from the Siren Monster, doped out a way to use the Ummagumma fruit to appease Yuccalinda and escape the whirlpool, and, for good measure, told King Blowhard how to cure his allergy.  I can't help but feel that Adams was trying to make an ironic point here: sometimes, heroism amounts to simply doing your job with a minimum of fuss and taking advantage of opportunities as they come your way.

So, what was the point of those talks Scrooge had with Homer about living up to the deeds of Ulysses?  Scrooge's bragging during the course of these chinfests appears to be setting him up for a big fall somewhere along the line, but, since he wouldn't have had the ability to counteract Circe's magic spell in any event, one can't really say that he pays a penalty for them.  The key, I think, lies in Scrooge's commenting that he's read about Ulysses' exploits.  Homer doesn't indicate that he knows what Scrooge is talking about, so we have to assume that, at the time of "Home Sweet Homer," the "exploits" haven't been recorded yet.  It may be that Homer really is something of a "wimp" and that his real gift lies in -- as GeoX suggested -- telling the story of Ulysses' adventures in such a dramatic manner that Homer's "biography of his Unc" came down to us as The Odyssey.  It's a variation on the old saying, "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach."  In this case, Homer may truly be meant for the life of a scholar and storyteller, rather than that of an heroic adventurer.  After all, as Scrooge himself points out at the end of the episode, "Young people usually grow up to be themselves."

Back to the books, Buddy!

Not until Greg made his point about Homer's decidedly unheroic role in this episode did I fully understand how unconventional this episode is.  Rather than going for the obvious point about "learning to face your demons," Adams challenged the logic of the situation head-on and came up with a clever solution that is believable, funny, and makes sense in literary and historical context.  Rather than injuring my opinion of "Home Sweet Homer," Greg's comment actually makes me appreciate Adams' efforts all the more.

  

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"DuckBlurbs"

(Greg)  We begin this one with the sky shot in front of the mansion as a duck in mail clothes with a package of letters [is] walking in a slanting motion. Oh my goodness; it cannot be. It's Quacky McSlanty! See; his gimmick is that he walks on a slant. This is even worse than Vacation Von Honk and even Benzino Gasolini. Even Benzino's gimmick in drawing attention to himself was interesting if you can take him being absolutely annoying. Quacky doesn't have even the grace of Von Honk's vacation gimmick to save him. Quacky is like a gimmick from WWF circa 1993-1996. And of course he cannot pull the letter through the mail slot. So he twists the arm (after thinking about it) and puts it through the mail slot and walks out in a slant. Thank god he's gone.

I'm willing to give Adams credit for at least trying to use McSlant.  Don't forget that Quacky also appeared as a literal "spear-carrier" in the opera scene at the start of "Maid of the Myth."  Those were his only two appearances apart from the birthday-party scene in "Sweet Duck of Youth." Actually, the mailduck appears somewhat older than Quacky did in any of his previous scenes.  Maybe this is Quacky's Uncle Askew, or something.

(GeoX) Blowhard wants to stop sneezing as Huey wonders if something on the island is making [him] sneeze. There are only two choices at this point: (1) the duck feathers or (2) the big ass berries. My MONEY, MONEY, YEAH, YEAH is on the berries since he was sneezing before the feathers took into effect. Louie's money is on the berries as it's the pollen of the Umma-Gumma fruit. Translation from Duckcrap to English: Gummi Berries.

Alternative (and far more believable) translation:  Adams was referring to the Pink Floyd album Ummagumma (1969) here.  My wife Nicky has a special edition release print of the album cover.

"Yooouuu JESSSST! David Gilmour couldn't hold a CANDLE to Syd Barrett!  Syd was a... MMMMOUNTAIN of a MMMUSICIAN."

(GeoX)  [T]he Sirens--purple mounds with duck heads on top--are super-creepy in a somewhat Lovecraftian way.

I have to admit it -- I still find it hard to watch this scene.  The Sirens just sound so bizarre.  Full marks to Welker for his voice performance here.  By contrast, the Yuccalinda monster is almost cute.  Almost.

Next:  Episode 31, "Much Ado About Scrooge."

RIP Jonathan Winters

Here's the late Winters' most famous scene from his most famous movie role.  I've always loved this movie, overkill and all, and this scene encapsulates why.  Winters' destruction of the gas station is positively operatic in scope.

Book Review: LIBRARY OF AMERICAN COMICS ESSENTIALS, VOLUME 2: THE GUMPS "THE SAGA OF MARY GOLD" by Sidney Smith (IDW/Library of American Comics, 2013)

The newest addition to the LIBRARY OF AMERICAN COMICS line-up is going to provide quite a challenge for comics collectors -- but not an intellectual or aesthetic one so much as a physical one.  These long, slender ESSENTIALS volumes, each of which will collect meaningful material from a classic bygone comic strip, are meant to give readers a feel for what it was like to follow strips during the days when the art form was given the newspaper page space it truly deserved.  Each page reproduces a strip at full original size.  Unfortunately, there are so many pages in the volume -- well over 300, in this case -- that as one moves towards the back of the book, the turned leaves that have "come before" display an increasing tendency to "flop over."  Over time, this will no doubt play havoc with the binding.  If only spiral binding were an option here.

I passed on the first ESSENTIALS collection but wasn't going to miss this opportunity to peruse a healthy chunk of THE GUMPS.  Sidney Smith's peculiar mixture of domestic slapstick, adventure, melodrama, and subpar artwork held a remarkable fascination for millions of Americans during the 1920's and 1930's.  One could seriously argue that, in this one strip, Smith anticipated the popularity of soap operas (crafting narratives that strung the reader along for months at a time, an inch or two at a time), the development of radio and TV situation comedies and such modern-day satirical "family" cartoons as The Simpsons, King of the Hill, and Family Guy, and the whole notion of the "mysterious rich uncle" (Andy Gump's billionaire Uncle Bim) that would culminate in Carl Barks' creation of Scrooge McDuck.  As is the case with most pioneers, what Smith actually did with this bubbling thematic stewpot was frequently crude and amateurish, but one must give him full credit for "getting there first."  He was also ahead of his time insofar as marketing his characters, ginning up publicity, and living the "cartoonist's high life" were concerned.

THE GUMPS, for all its popularity back in the day, has not been well served when it comes to reprints, even those of an historical nature.  One fairly sizable reprint volume was released in the mid- 1970s, but all reports are that it was pretty casually thrown together, basically just an effort to cash in on the then-fashionable Jazz Age nostalgia craze.  Smith's most famous GUMPS continuity, the story of the greedy Widow Zander's attempt to entrap the credulous Uncle Bim in an unwanted marriage, has been reprinted in dribs and drabs in various places.  Now comes IDW with a high-quality (though, as noted previously, physically awkward) presentation of Smith's second best-known continuity, the one in which he literally shocked the country by letting a much-loved character die.  "The Saga of Mary Gold" is so fiendishly well orchestrated that even a modern reader who occasionally shakes his or her head over Smith's shameless use of melodramatic tropes will come to understand why a press report labeled Smith "The Most Unpopular Human in the World" for actually daring to do the deed.  (Of course, this "unpopular" creator saw the popularity of his strip skyrocket during this period, so he was laughing all the way to the bank, no doubt driving there in one of the fast cars that he liked to buy.)

"Mary Gold" plays out over a period of one year (April 1928-May 1929) and takes its sweet time getting up to speed, as Andy Gump and his wife Min meet and get to know the Golds, their new next-door neighbors, and their charming and lovely daughter Mary.  In the interim, chinless Andy gets plenty of time to opinionate about anything and everything, and, in this extremely wordy strip, that's like giving Homer Simpson the keys to the doughnut shop.  In a sense, it's rather unfair to compare Andy to characters like Homer and Peter Griffin; next to them, he's practically a MENSA member.  A better analogy might be a long-winded Hank Hill who doesn't just tell you "That ain't right!" but goes into excruciating detail as to exactly why it "ain't right" and/or how it can be put right.  In between well-packed word balloons, a plot finally begins to coalesce, as poor-but-honest inventor Tom Carr and rich-but-venal banker Henry Ausstinn compete for Mary Gold's hand.  When some money that Andy had intended to invest in one of Carr's creations goes missing, suspicion falls on Tom, and he becomes a wanted fugitive, while Ausstinn moves in to take advantage of the situation.  The balance of the tale is vintage soap-opera material, complete with a dramatic court trial and an equally dramatic revelation at the moment when wedding vows are to be exchanged.  But then comes the kicker... which, as Jared Gardner notes in his Introduction, opened up entirely new vistas for the comic strip as a whole.  Just one year after the end of "Mary Gold," for example, Chester Gould would launch DICK TRACY and kill off a character within the first week of the strip's existence. 

While Smith's storytelling style is familiar to those who are well-versed in pop culture, I must admit that he occasionally does things that leave me baffled.  Take the curious case of "The Eagle," for instance.  This mysterious figure is introduced during Tom Carr's exile and makes sidebar appearances in literally every strip for a full month, with Smith breathlessly telling us where he is, where he's going, etc.  It soon becomes clear that "The Eagle" is some sort of bounty hunter looking for Carr, which would suggest that he's going to play a role in Carr's ultimate capture and return for trial, right?  Er... not so much.  The way in which Smith writes "The Eagle" out of the story (assuming that you can say that this perpetually tangential figure was "in" the story in the first place!) quite literally made me sit up and say, "What the f---?!"  Then, too, Andy and Min's son Chester abruptly appears in the story about midway through (around Christmastime), hangs around for a while, and then just as suddenly vanishes.  Was he away at boarding school, or something?  Or did Smith suddenly remember that he was part of the Gump family too, and then just as suddenly forget?  I get the distinct impression that Smith's creative approach was rather... casual.  Either that, or he simply liked pulling his audience's chain.  In any event, the formula worked, at least up until Smith's death in a car crash in 1935.  I'm glad that I finally got a chance to see it in action... and I certainly wouldn't mind other GUMPS continuities showing up in future ESSENTIALS volumes.

Book Review: KING AROO, VOLUME 2 by Jack Kent (IDW/Library of American Comics, 2013)

Still struggling to catch up hereabouts...  I was hoping to post the next DUCKTALES RETROSPECTIVE this past weekend, but life once again got in the way (or ran me over, "as the bee may case").  In the interim, I'll try to catch up on some overdue books -- book reviews, that is.

For a while there, it looked as if we weren't going to make that second journey to the kingdom of Myopia.  IDW evidently had considerable difficulty finding good-quality copies of Jack Kent's KING AROO strips from the period 1952-54, and, as a result, this volume is checking in a year or two late.  (To be fair, some other publishers' classic comics reprint projects remain stubbornly stuck on the launching pad.)

I can give this volume no higher praise than to say, if you enjoyed the first AROO collection, then you'll certainly like this one.  By now, Kent's drawing style has definitively settled into the deceptively relaxed, scritchy-scratchy approach that would carry his strip through to the end.  Distinctive differences between AROO and its closest strip relatives -- KRAZY KAT and POGO -- begin to manifest themselves.  Among these are a curious predilection for bad puns (complete with appropriate groaning reactions from the victims) and a willingness to occasionally take the characters outside Myopia's one square acre of territory.  Sometimes, these travels land our friends in the "real-for-sure world," for example, when Aroo goes to England to attend Queen Elizabeth's coronation.  (This being a fantasy strip, Aroo and his major-domo Yupyop stop on their way home for an extended visit in a surreal land called Hebefrenia.)  Aroo also literally "travels through time" -- a grandfather clock, to be precise -- and winds up in a "world beyond time" where he runs into such fanciful figures as Diogenes and a "missing link."  On occasion, Kent seems to be borrowing directly from his hero George Herriman, crafting a long story in which a retired moon-jumping cow is encouraged to get back into action and a series of gags involving a "coach dog," both of which ideas popped up at various times during KRAZY KAT's run.  Well, there are much worse places from which to swipe.

I was a little surprised that Bruce Canwell's "groundbreaking" introductory biography of Jack Kent wrapped up in this volume.  So what ancillaries can we expect in future volumes?  Artifacts from this fairly obscure strip seem to be rather thin on the ground.  I would hate for a lack of supporting materials, combined with the arduous search for easily reproducible strips, to cause the next edition of this fine series to be delayed even longer than Volume 2 was. Hopefully, IDW has discovered a reliable pipeline of material and Volume 3 will appear in short order.