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Friday, January 07, 2011 ( 1/07/2011 07:11:00 AM ) Bill S.  “GEE, HOW I LOVE THIS KID.” For most of us who grew up with it, Chic Young’s “Blondie” stands as an example of the unwavering comic strip institution: repetitious riffs on American idle class home and work life centered on the hapless family man and his lithe-limbed homemaker wife. But as Blondie: The Courtship and Wedding (IDW/Library of American Comics) illuminates, the eighty-year-old strip initially was a different concoction from what we now take for granted. A screwball continuity series more in tune with Bringing Up Baby than the B-pic domestic features starring Arthur Lake and Penny Singleton, the early “Blondie” focuses on young Dagwood Bumstead and his girlfriend Blondie Boopadoop as their romance is repeatedly thwarted by Dagwood’s class-bound parents.Young, who previously had assayed a flapper strip entitled “Dumb Dora,” writes the title heroine as a spirited and ditsy young girl: a lot of the strip’s early punch lines feature her comically misunderstanding something while the rest of the cast fall over backwards or otherwise display an exclamatory overreaction. Her other-half-to-be, Dagwood, lacks the characteristic haircut that we associate with him today -- he keeps his hair slicked down -- and as a scion of wealth is a privileged layabout. At times, you can understand his parents’ reluctance to let him marry “beneath his station” and go out into the working world alone. The guy makes Bertie Wooster look like a model of manly competence. The other two major cast members in the strip’s early years turn out to be Dagwood’s parents (while Blondie’s ma makes some token appearances, she barely registers as a character). Pa Bumstead is a hot-tempered railroad magnate -- in some ways a precursor to Dagwood’s rageaholic boss Mister Dithers -- and a control freak, while Mom proves to be a fat matriarch with social pretensions. (Reading her word balloons, I couldn’t help imagining Margaret Dumont delivering the lines.) Young slathers on the fat jokes and the class jokes in the first year, though the former thankfully lessen as the strip progresses. Instead, we get storylines focused on our hero and heroine’s unsuccessful attempts to woo the rest of the stuck-up Bumstead clan (most memorably, Grandma Bumstead, an even more imposing dowager), then turning to our hero’s fumbling attempts to prove himself by holding down a job and going to college. There’s a curious sequence where Miss Boopadoop gets a job without ever finding out what her bosses do to make money and several storylines where one of the twosome temporarily breaks up with the other. Blondie, none too surprisingly, gets pursued by several eager young lads, though she always inexplicably returns to Dagwood. Though the early strips are snappily told, “Blondie” struggled to find its audience in its early years, a fact that Brian Walker in the book’s intro largely attributes to Depression readers’ lack of interest in its upper class milieu. A big issue in these early strips lies in the character of Dagwood: as a rich kid, he’s a major wuss. It’s rather telling that when the boy finally does successfully stand up against his parents, it’s through that most passive act of civil disobedience, a hunger strike. While Gandhi might have approved, you’ve gotta wonder how well this played with its Depression battered American readership. In the end, the couple’s upcoming transformation into beleaguered bourgeois couple-dom may have better suited them both. It certainly made Dagwood a more sympathetic comic figure. Still, reading Young’s early take on a comedy of manners can be fascinating for those of us who only know his strip’s more familiar incarnation -- kind of like learning about all the dumb and wild-ass things your parents once did back in the day. As usual with IDW’s “Library of American Comics,” the hefty collection of three years’ worth of dailies is beautifully packaged with clean reproduction (though one strip appears to be printed out of order). If at times, the art seems stiffer than it’d be in the days of Dagwood/mailman collisions, the slightly stodgier drawing style is suited to its nouveau-riche world. In the end, the Bumsteads’ release into middle-class home life seems to have ultimately been liberating for the cartoonist as well. (First published on Blogcritics.) Labels: classic comic strips # |Sunday, January 02, 2011 ( 1/02/2011 01:50:00 PM ) Bill S.  “WHAT CAN A SHABBY GIRL LIKE YOU DO?” A teen-rated fantasy romance, Juliette Suzuki’s Kamisama Kiss (Viz/Shojo Beat) opens on a fairly bleak note: heroine Nanami Momozono, a second year high school student, has been abandoned by her degenerate gambler father and evicted from the shabby apartment she used to call her home. Left to fend for herself in a city park, she happens upon a seemingly young man named Mikage who has been treed by a snarling dog; our girl shoos the beast, and in a dubious show of gratitude, he kisses her on the forehead and offers Nanami a place to stay.That offer turns out to have major strings attached: Mikage’s home is a Shintu shrine that he abandoned twenty years ago. By bestowing it on Nanami, he has made her a tochigami, a deity tied to the shrine. As the new godling, her primary duty is to answers the prayers of those who look for divine guidance in love and relationships. Naturally, our young heroine feels like she’s in over her head. Also inhabiting the shrine are two masked onibi-warashi (like will-o’-the-wisps, the helpful glossary at the back-o’-the-book tells us) named Oniki and Kotetsu -- plus a fox-like familiar named Tomoe who is still p.o.ed over Mikage’s abandonment. Apart from a pair of fox ears and some pointed fingernails, Tomoe looks like your typical dreamy shojo male lead -- and true to romance conventions, he wants nothing to do with Nanami. To him, she is a “shabby” human incapable of even weeding the shrine garden properly. In addition to Mikage’s kiss on the forehead, though, there’s another significant buss in the book: the one way our girl can force Tomoe to remain at the shrine. If she kisses the fox shinishi, she’s told, he will be forced to do her bidding. Much of the first volume, then, is devoted to establishing both characters’ place and relationship in the shrine. And for all his crankiness, Tomoe clearly has begun to feel an attachment to our heroine with or without that kiss. When she follows him into a land inhabited by all manner of voracious supernatural creatures, he can’t help seeking her out after he hears that the girl is being menaced by an old woman ogre called an onibaba. Though he says he’s doing so to watch the girl get eaten, we know differently. Typical girl meets rude boy romance, in other words: amusingly detailed and steeped in the specifics of Shintu shrines, where writer/artist Suzuki says she used to play when she was a child. Though the first volume features some demonic figures (the most dire being the old lady ogre who states, “If I eat the flesh of a tochigami, I may be able to live a thousand more years”), the lightly lined art downplays this menace in favor of wispy romance. As a godling overseeing relational prayers and wishes, it’s Nanami’s role to play cupid to the timid and unconnected -- which we see her do for the first time in the opening volume’s final chapter. Whether our newly enshrined heroine will be able to make it with the slightly softening Tomoe is a question that will doubtless be answered many volumes in the future, of course. I can see plenty of shojo readers -- the ones who made Fruits Basket a success, for instance -- wanting to read on to find out how this human/demon romance comes to full fruition. (First published on Blogcritics.) Labels: sixty-minute manga # |Saturday, January 01, 2011 ( 1/01/2011 07:02:00 AM ) Bill S.  “THAT’S WHEN I LEAP FROM THE CASKET, SCREAM AT THE TOP OF MY LUNGS!” Midway into Bleu’s fourth disc, the mundanely titled Four (The Major Label), as I listened to the sweetly poppy “When the Shit Hits the Fan,” I found myself thinking back to the first time I heard Nilsson Shmilsson and “The Moonbeam Song.” I remembered my double-take back in the early seventies when the song’s lyrics first sliced through its gorgeously crooned and orchestrated sound and I went, “Did he just sing ‘bits of crap’ in that song?” Having put the Bleu disc into my car’s CD player without checking the track titles, I had a similar reaction: “Didn’t he just sing ‘It’ll bite you in the ass’?”The Nilsson comparison proves apt in more ways than one: like Harry, Bleu (a.k.a. William James McAuley III) has written tunes for teenybopper idols (with the former, it was the Monkees; with the mutton-chopped one, it’s the Jonas Brothers) and displayed an affinity on his own discs for addictively hooky tunes carrying bruised and occasionally philosophical lyrics. Both pop-rockers have a love for early r-&-b: with Shmilsson it was Ray Charles and the Crescent City; for Bleu, it’s horn-y Memphis soul. Neither artist is afraid to dip into schmaltz -- Four contains a track (“How Blue”) that sounds like it could’ve been pulled off a Bread album -- though, thankfully, that predilection has been kept to a minimum on this release. To these ears “Blue” is the only skippable track on Four. The rest proves poppishly addictive. “Dead in the Mornin’” is a compelling gospel track where the singer imagines skipping out on his credit card bills and willing all his possessions to friends and listeners; “In Love with My Lover” is a soulful horn-backed ballad that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on Otis Blue; “I’ll Know It When I See It” is a power poppy expression of cautious optimism, while “Everything Is Fine” (co-written with Jellyfish alum Roger Joseph Manning Jr. -- make up your own lineage joke, if you must) has the lo-fi melodiousness of pre-Wings McCartney. Could do without having to wait four frigging minutes before getting to hear the bonus track, “My Own Personal Jesus,” another gripping horn-drenched number -- in part because its lyrical consideration of faith and the difficulty holding onto same ties so much of the album together. There are regular reflections on the transience of life on this disc -- even the anthemic “B.O.S.T.O.N.” contains a spoken break with a eulogy for our hero -- which could be reflective of Bleu’s prior too-brief experiences with major label-dom (see 2003’s Redhead). Reportedly, the singer raised the money for this release on his own label by soliciting money from fans on the Internet. A testament to pop willfulness: Everything Is Fine, indeed. (First published on Blogcritics.) Labels: pop-n-roll # | |
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