Month: December 2023

Hoping to See Your Face Again Next Year: Donald McGill’s Saucy Holiday Cheer

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New traditions appear very easily – do something for a second time, and hey presto, it’s a tradition! Since last December was enlivened by some mushroom postcards — see Fungus Friday: Amanita New Year (To Get Over This One) — this year I’m bringing back English master Donald McGill, King of Saucy Postcards for an old-yet-new-to-us crop of festive offerings from some hundred + years ago (the following are from the 1910s and 1920s).

These run the gamut from cheeky to raunchy to creepy, in the classic vein of ghosts for Christmas*. Speaking of Christmas, it may now be over, but the spirit of holiday cheer sure isn’t gone (despite the total absence of snow in these normally snow-covered lands of ours), so let’s have a look!

Some involve all sorts of hivernal mishaps —

The consequences of pre-holiday, er… cheer.

Some of the usual daydreams brought about by possibly too many spirits** —

— and the aforementioned ghosts, somehow especially startling when they’re born under McGill’s pen.

I’ve kept my absolute favourite for last: this revenant is so sad yet grotesque. I’d like to see the faces of people who got mailed this particular card!

~ ds

* As per another lovely tradition, we’ve recently been rewatching Christopher Lee’s Ghost Stories for Christmas. Highly recommended! Some are available on Youtube, like for example Number 13.

** As somebody who attended the Christmas office party this year, I can attest to the funny influence alcohol has on a bunch of normally restrained people when it comes to romantic advances.

Christmas With the Otterloops!

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« Gaah! » — Petey Otterloop

Given that it’s Christmas Eve, it seems fitting to parade some of our favourite things, and Richard Thompson‘s (not to be confused with his musical homonym) Cul de Sac (not to be confused with Mr. Polanski’s 1966 psychological thriller) belongs front and centre in that festive cavalcade.

I’ve gathered most of the yule-themed Cul de Sac Sundays… one of these days, I might devote an entire post to Madeline Otterloop’s Christmas sweater dailies.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

RT: « The creepier side of Christmas. A German Expressionist Christmas has been done by someone, somewhere, I’m sure. » December 11, 2005.
RT: « Taking down Christmas is always so hard. I like the timing here. » January 1st, 2006.
RT: « Petey dreams of Christmas with music by Tchaikovsky. » December 24, 2006.
RT: « Santa Claus commands a lot of fear and awe in children. I could never get a coherent sentence out when sitting on his lap when I was a kid, and I doubt I could today. Thank God I don’t believe in him anymore! » December 23, 2007.
RT: « The first appearance of Dill’s mysterious, malignant, poignant, and possibly educational toy. I just wanted something that’d be easy and repetitive to draw, because I was behind. » December 30, 2007.
RT: « What I like the most is the tree seller’s resemblance to a mortician. » December 21, 2008.
December 28, 2008.
RT: « Drawn from life. Nothing more need be said. » December 19, 2010.
RT: « Petey’s faith in his commentaries’ scathing qualities is misplaced. » December 4, 2011.
RT: « Doing this was a joy. The hard part was doing it in pantomime. » December 11, 2011.

-RG (and ds!)

Holiday Havoc With Angel and the Ape!

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« A merry Christmas to all my friends except two. » — W. C. Fields

I was in the middle of writing a post on another topic, getting bogged down in its complexities, and then it dawned on me that Christmas was fast approaching, and I’d better switch gears pronto.

Thankfully, I had something in mind: an Angel and the Ape tale initially produced in the late 1960s but orphaned with the book’s cancellation. It was half-heartedly released from limbo –shall we say buried? — in one of those awkward tabloid format volumes, Limited Collectors’ Edition C-34: Christmas With the Super-Heroes (Feb.-Mar. 1975, DC) and not even advertised on the front or back cover… which is why it took me decades to learn of its existence.

On average, Angel and the Ape was only marginally funnier than the rest of DC’s humour books (save of course for Shelly Mayer’s consistently hilarious Sugar and Spike), but still leagues ahead of Marvel’s painful Not Brand Ecch et al. A&A was, imho, at its peak when E. Nelson Bridwell wrote it, lobbing some choice barbs at the esteemed competition.

To briefly illustrate my point, here’s a relevant panel from Angel and the Ape no. 3 (Mar. 1969, DC).

Script by Bridwell, pencils by Oksner, inks by Wood. The redhead in the green cape and star-spangled tights is Stan Bragg, editor-in-chef at Brainpix Comics, a clever amalgam of the Smilin’ One and his Rascally subordinate. “When you write good stories and do good artwork, don’t I sign it?“

-RG

More Minutes With Carol Lay!

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I talked about Carol Lay all the way back in 2017 (see The Giant Licking Machine), but did her a disservice by only featuring a single one of her Story Minutes. I am here to remedy that inadequacy.

In 1990, Lay drew a 5-page story for LA Weekly titled The Thing Under the Futon (read it here – the thing under the futon even has tentacles). « The pay was several times what independent comics paid and the audience was larger and included women », Lay quips on her website, so a one-time story planted the seed for a weekly comic strip called Story Minute, so named because it would just take you a minute to read a story (I might also add that it’s very difficult to stop at reading just one). That eventually was rechristened Way Lay and ran until 2008.

My introduction to the subject at hand.

As I mentioned in the earlier post, the most recent collection of these is Illiterature, published in 2012, and it’s where the strips below have been selected from. Lay picks all kinds of topics as strip springboards, but since I am the one selecting the ones to feature, there’s a definite interpersonal tilt, as I think her forte is her ability to showcase the inner workings of a close relationship by plonking people into a slightly surreal or sci-fi context. The line between cynical and poignant is navigated with ease.

« I kept mostly to the order in which I produced the strips, but I took the liberty of tossing some clinkers or shuffling a few so that they flow better in book form… I also used my artistic license to improve on some of these older works – I’m a better writer and artist than I was when I created these strips… In a sense several of the strips in these volumes are ‘director’s cuts’ in that I’m a better director now than when I drew them. »

This one has a Ben Katchor-esque vibe.

Support Carol Lay on her Patreon here!

~ ds