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"You know, there's a lot to be said for just making people laugh." --
Preston Sturges, "Sullivan's Travels"
Imagine the world in black and white.
A Depression-era world of gray brick tenements and dingy clothes, of
monochrome movies, of newspapers and magazines that were severe, solid
blocks of black print on drab white paper.
Imagine that, and you can imagine the visceral thrill, once a week, of a
Sunday comics supplement - in full, glorious color.
If you were a young comics fan like Hy Eisman, your reaction might have
been: GULP!
Or maybe *SIGH*.
"It was the only place you saw color," recalls Eisman, now 77. "This was
before Technicolor movies. You'd wait a whole week to see that big blast
of color."
Eisman, a Glen Rock cartoonist, was impressed enough to make comic
strips his life's work.
Over the years, he has drawn "Snuffy Smith," "Mutt & Jeff," "Archie,"
"Blondie," "Nancy" and "Felix the Cat." For more than a decade, he's
drawn two of the King Features' flagship titles: "Popeye the Sailor" and
"The Katzenjammer Kids," which at 107 years old is the longest-running
title in comicdom.
Three days a week, he climbs to the upstairs studio of the house he
shares with his wife, Florenz, sits down at his drafting table and opens
his bottle of India ink.
There, he drafts the latest depredations of those two German
troublemakers, or Wimpy's newest encounter with a double cheeseburger.
Ironically, the coloring - the thing that drew him to comics in the
first place - is now done by computer in another state.
"The color in these particular strips is so stable, there isn't any real
room for creativity, so it doesn't really bother me at all," he says.
"It saves me a lot of time."
Technically, Eisman is "ghosting" the strips - that is, drawing
characters created by somebody else. But he has had plenty of
opportunity to put his own stamp on them.
"The gags are more up to date, they involve cellphones and computers,
but I try to keep pretty close to the creators' work, so that people who
are fans can still recognize them," Eisman says.
He has vivid memories of reading both "Popeye" and "The Katzenjammers"
as a child.
His father was out of work and his mother had tuberculosis; neither had
the means to support him. Between ages 5 and 9, he was in a Clifton
orphanage with perhaps 25 other children.
No picnic, as readers of the Depression-era comic strip "Little Orphan
Annie" could have told you. But at least he had the eight-page Hearst
Sunday comic supplement - which in those days was printed full sheet
size (considerably larger than the "broadsheet" paper you're now
reading) and with vivid colors that seemed to leap off the page.
"I would read 'Bringing Up Father' first, and go through the pages to
'The Katzenjammer Kids' on the last page," he recalls. "I used to love
'Flash Gordon,' so I'd read that last. That was the pièce de
résistance."
Millions of Depression-era readers did the same - as do newspaper
readers to this day. The "funnies" were the one part of the paper that
people could rely on for an escape from the wars, crimes and calamities
on every other page.
To kids in the grim 1930s and '40s, the Sunday funnies were pure
pleasure at 10 cents a copy. That's why, from the time Joseph Pulitzer
introduced the first regular comic strip ("The Yellow Kid") in 1895, the
Sunday funnies have been the most reliable newspaper circulation
booster.
"You only went to the movies one day a week, you only saw the comics
once a week," Eisman says. "You'd really look forward to it. There was
always suspense, always a tag at the end to bring you into next week.
Kids would run out of the house when the paper was delivered, and would
grab it before the parents got to it. It was that much of a draw."
More recently, the funny pages have become a battleground - between old-schoolers
who still see the comics as the happy part of the paper, and young Turks
who see them as an ideal platform to tackle serious, even disturbing,
social issues.
Suicide, alcoholism, mugging, drug abuse and gay rights have found their
way into the comics section. In 1993, some 21 newspapers dropped a
four-week continuing story line of "For Better or for Worse," in which a
teenage character came out of the closet.
Does such stuff belong in the funnies? Maybe - though Eisman has his
doubts.
"Life is horrible," Eisman says. "That's why people want to read the
comics. There's enough misery in everybody's life that you could write a
soap opera, for crying out loud."
It's the dilemma Preston Sturges satirized in his classic 1942 comedy,
"Sullivan's Travels." Sullivan is a Hollywood comedy director who wants
to make a serious movie about real problems. In order to research "O
Brother, Where Art Thou?" (yes, that's where the George Clooney movie
got its title), he decides to hop a freight train and go out looking for
trouble. After being robbed, framed for a murder and sent to work on a
Georgia chain gang, he winds up sitting with other convicts laughing at
a Mickey Mouse cartoon. "You know," he says at last, "there's a lot to
be said for just making people laugh."
Which pretty much describes Eisman's attitude toward entertainment.
"When I go to a movie, Florenz drags me to a lot of movies with
messages," he says. "I enjoyed 'Kinsey,' it was well-acted. But when I
come out of a movie, I want to feel good. I don't want to think about
all the stuff that crazy man did."
Even so, Eisman has been known to push the envelope in his own
cartooning.
The first time was in the 1960s, when an adventure strip he co-created,
"Joe Panther," was nixed by his syndicate. Southern newspapers didn't
like the fact that the hero, a Seminole Indian detective, was mixing
with white folks.
More recently, he was asked to redo a "Popeye" strip that depicted a
sunbathing woman with her halter off (her breasts were not visible), and
another in which Brutus, looking for a computer date that will "lift his
spirits," is fixed up with an alcoholic kleptomaniac.
"I sent the strip in, and they said, 'You know, we have to be cautious -
it might disturb people who are alcoholic kleptomaniacs.'Ÿ"
Bottom line - to paraphrase "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" - is that Eisner
doesn't care so much if the subject matter is "bad," as long as it's not
drawn that way.
"It comes down to my own tastes," he says. "If it's drawn well, I think
anything should be allowed. I still feel it's a visual medium."
E-mail: beckerman@northjersey.com
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