Matt Baker: The Art of Glamour

Good Girl Art flourished in the late forties/early fifties and focused on heroines who were strong but also gorgeous in the manner of WWII pin-ups. Two of the foremost practitioners of this art were Baker and Bill Ward (who would later go on doing his distinctive penwork for men’s magazines and Cracked). Baker, initially working for a comics shop known as the Iger Studio, drew a variety of spunky heroines, some with “girl” affixed to their title (Sky Girl, Tiger Girl). The Art of Glamour includes sample stories from this period, including two featuring a scantily clad crime-fighter known as the Phantom Lady. If the stories ultimately prove slight, the art is anything but. Baker had a knack for rendering his leggy characters with a sensual naturalness that was unmatched by any other artist of his day.

That the man isn’t better known today can be attributed to several factors: the studios he worked for typically peppered their stories with pseudonyms in place of legitimate credits, while the comics fandom that would work at unearthing so many uncredited artists didn’t really burst in full-blown action until after his untimely death from a heart attack in 1959. Too, much of the work that he did in the early fifties was for comic book genres – romance titles and westerns – that wouldn’t receive much fannish attention for years. An anthology of fifties romance comics, Romance Without Tears, which featured a hefty selection of Baker art is unfortunately out of print.

Baker himself also had several personal strikes against him in the early days of the industry: an introvert who was one of the few black artists in early comics, he also (though The Art of Glamour soft-pedals this suggestion) appears to have been gay. Whether any of these factors kept him from working more high-profile projects, one thing is clear: he inspired an army of imitators even as he was still working. Baker’s natural way of draping clothes on his voluptuous femmes was especially noteworthy.

His way with (comic art) women led to his involvement in one particularly intriguing project: one of the first graphic novels, a paperback “Picture Novel” written by fledgling comics pro Arnold Drake and Les Waller entitled It Rhymes With Lust. The story of a ruthless redhead named Rust Shannon who schemes to take control of a copper mining town after her corrupt politician husband dies, Lust was a crisp little noir, a project for which Baker was admirably suited. Drawn on graftint paper with plenty of shaded backgrounds, the 1949 novel looks like a B-picture from the era, but since those weren’t getting much critical respect at the time, it’s not surprising that the paperback comic with the seemingly dirty title didn’t either.

Matt Baker’s editors, Jim Amash and Eric Nolen-Weathington, structure their appreciation by opening with a quartet of color stories: two featuring the vigilante Phantom Lady, two centered on more comic dames like waitress Ginger Maguire, a former ferry pilot in the Pacific theatre who gets demoted to waitress “serving mustard to the better class of pilots.” An opening essay by Alberto Becattini provides a chronological overview of the man’s career with appreciative commentary by some of the artists who worked with him in the forties comics shops. One interesting snippet for fans of EC comics: both the line’s editor Al Feldstein and mainstay artist Jack Kamen worked as inkers on Baker’s work – you can definitely see Baker’s influence in the latter’s work for EC’s crime comics, though I don’t think that Kamen ever drew a woman as provocatively as Baker’s.

A series of reminiscences with family, friends and colleagues follows, the volume concluding with three more reprinted stories, two of which are presented as the original pencil and ink pages. Throughout the rest of this lavishly packaged book, of course, are Baker covers, panels and pages from both his comics and short-lived attempts at newspaper syndication work, as well as illos that he did for men’s magazines. (In this last, he and fellow Good Girl Artist Bill Ward followed similar paths.) While some of the remembrances focus more on the mundane aspects of the artist’s life than necessary, the art speaks for itself.

Now where’s the full-blown Baker anthology?

(First published on Blogcritics.)

Labels: comics history

“WEIRDOS, GRIFTERS, HUSTLERS” . . . AND STORYTELLERS: Ingeniously conceived and executed, Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey’s The Comic Book History of Comics (IDW) charts the history of comics utilizing the medium itself. Originally published as a six-issue mini-series as Comic Book Comics, the trade collection depicts the medium’s storytelling evolution, its rocky course as a business, as well as its creative touchstones. Throughout the book, attention is paid to both the creative talents who added to the medium as well as the occasionally more dubious types who bankrolled what was first seen as a “fly-by-night” business. Certain figures, familiar to most longtime comics lovers, regularly appear in the book – Siegel and Shuster, Jack Kurtzberg/Kirby, Will Eisner, and a young hyperactive kid named Stan Lieber (who would later, of course, shorten that name to Lee) – first seen scrambling to make a place for themselves in a profession that was initially considered “a couple of steps below digging ditches.”

Van Lente and Dunlavey follow the art and industry from its earliest Depression Era days as a cheap collection of reprint comic strips through its Golden Age blossoming with the creation of Superman and the development of various post-war comic book genres (romance, crime and, ultimately, horror comics) then into the fifties Silver Age which brought a rekindled interest in superheroes. If there’s any area where the duo fall short in the first half of their volume, it’s in the scant mention given to actual funnybooks: animal comics that brought us the work of Carl Barks and his cohorts as well as the earliest incarnation of Walt Kelly’s classic Pogo – and the teen funnies like Archie – though I suspect for many mainstream fans this isn’t an issue. I do wonder why there’s no mention of Jack Cole’s revolutionary wise-guy superhero Plastic Man, though.

The second half of the volume moves us into the sixties, with both the Marvel Age and the underground comix movement, then into the development of the direct market distribution system and the graphic novel. The growth of European comics and Japanese manga are also given their own chapters, but these prove relatively slight. The focus of Comic Book History remains on the American industry. Fair enough: a Manga History of Manga would provide enough material for its own full volume.

Where this book excels is in using its own medium to depict the changes in art and graphic storytelling that occurred through comics history. The book’s opening chapter cannily demonstrates how sequential panel-to-panel narrative developed using the classic Abbott and Costello dialog “Who’s on second?” while a later entry shows Dunlavey beautifully parodying and explicating the development of Jack Kirby’s groundbreaking style. Writer Fred Van Lente also has a sharp eye for the shady mistreatment that so many of these “work-for-hire” creators received over the years. He doesn’t, for instance, let Stan “The Man” Lee off the hook for lapping up the “auteur’s” credit for “creating” the characters in the Marvel Universe when in fact the work was a collaborative one with artists like Kirby and Steve Ditko.

Both writer and artist present their material fairly and with a large amount of verbal and visual humor. An accounting of the infamous Air Pirates case (where a rag-tag group of counter-cultural artists were sued by the Disney Corporation for producing underground comics that used their characters) depicts both the Disney and Air Pirates’ versions of Mickey Mouse facing off against each other with Roy Orbison and the members of Two Live Crew standing in the background, for instance, illustrating how different the copyright infringement case might have gone in the aftermath of more recent music sampling decisions.

Comic Book History’s greatest achievement, though, lies in humanizing a creative community that historically has been obscured through company hype and fannish mythologizing. (Recently, while watching an episode of Ken Smith’s Comic Book Men on television, for instance, I watched both Smith and his cohorts blithely echo the assertion that Stan Lee was entirely responsible for the Marvel Universe.) Paying attention to a group of inventive storytellers who frequently worked in crappy conditions for insufficient credit or money, this book provides an invaluable and engaging history. Both loving and knowing, it's one that the medium well deserves.

(First published on Blogcritics.)

Labels: comics history

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