Bryan In Sunderland,
Mantan the Funnyman
& Monday Misc.

[Image copyright 2007 Bryan Talbot]
"Sunderland! Thirteen hundred years ago it was the greatest centre of learning in the whole of Christendom and the very cradle of English consciousness. In the time of Lewis Carroll it was the greatest shipbuilding port in the world. To this city that gave the world the electric light bulb, the stars and stripes, the millennium, the Liberty Ships and the greatest British dragon legend came Carroll in the years preceding his most famous book, Alice in Wonderland, and here are buried the roots of his surreal masterpiece. Enter the famous Edwardian palace of varieties, The Sunderland Empire, for a unique experience: an entertaining and epic meditation on myth, history and storytelling and decide for yourself -— does Sunderland really exist?"

Morning, one and all, and a fine Monday it promises to be, too.

If you're aching to read my blather, there's a healthy weekend worth of posts awaiting you below, including mucho Cine-Ketchup for those so disposed.

Better yet, though, my interview with Bryan Talbot on his new graphic novel Alice in Sunderland is at last

online on PaneltoPanel.net, and Bryan is always worth reading!

Bryan and I are still at it, with more interviews on his recent and upcoming projects underway, which are plentiful. Few Americans are aware of the span and variety of Bryan's incredible body of work -- as cartoonist, writer, etc. -- or that his career dates back to the original British underground comix scene of the early 1970s.

We'll be covering all that and more in upcoming interviews, exclusive to PaneltoPanel.net and this blog.

In any case, be sure to give this initial installment some time today -- and be sure to order your copy of Alice in Sunderland with the signed Bryan Talbot bookplate from PaneltoPanel.net,

available exclusively here.

Tell them I sent you!

But that ain't all.

I'm always reading at least two books, and lately I've been devouring my preordered copy of Michael H. Price's brand-new book Mantan the Funnyman: The Life and Times of Mantan Moreland. I highly recommend this new tome to you, too. Michael H. is an old friend, so I'm a bit prejudiced toward any and all of his projects, mind you, but this is a real honey.

Packaged with an exclusive CD showcasing some incredible Mantan recording rarities from the 1920s to the '60s, hosted by Mike himself, Mantan the Funnyman offers a comprehensive and quite exhaustive overview of the late Mantan Moreland's extraordinary life, times and career -- and whole lot more than that.

Like almost all of Mike's books, this gem is peppered with a banquet of bon mots from Mike's own life and times, offering a multitude of narrative threads: Mantan's, Mike's (growing up in Texas with a jones for all things Mantan & musical), Mantan's daughter Marcella Moreland Young, and interviews and anecdotes from Rudy Ray Moore, Bill Cosby, Moe Howard (Mantan was almost the third stooge after Curly's death!), Aaron Thibeaux 'T-Bone' Walker, Frankie Darro and too many others to name here. There's a wealth of information lovingly culled from four decades in the newspaper biz (Michael H. has been a reporter and journalist since the late '60s) that also embraces the nooks and crannies of minstrel show and vaudeville history, the Southern "chitlin'" and black stage & music circuit, the black film industry of the '20s, '30s and '40s, the various incarnations of Amos 'n' Andy, the Charlie Chan films (which Mantan featured prominently in as Birmingham Brown), the ACLU's campaign against black actors and comedians like Mantan (which derailed the great man's career from the '40s on), and much, much more.

Michael covers so much cultural and subcultural history that the book functions as a crash-course on 20th Century civil rights issues in the entertainment industry as much as biography of its titular subject. Neatly contextualized with its foreword by Gregory Kane and intro by Josh Alan Friedman, launched with Mike (and Marcella)'s views on the savage caricature of Mantan that figured prominently in Spike Lee's akimbo agitprop feature Bamboozled,

Like Mike, I became a Mantan fan for life thanks to a late-night TV broadcast of the Monogram WW2 'walking dead for the Third Reich' opus King of the Zombies (1941). Mantan's character Jefferson 'Jeff' Jackson was, to my young eyes, clearly the most pro-active character in the movie, its true hero: yes, he runs away when common sense prevails in the face of danger (which always seemed utterly pragmatic to me), but it's Jeff who uncovers the menace to civilization (a Nazi scientist cultivating an army of zombies), insists this be dealt with, and, as Mike puts it, "laughs in the face of danger... and gives the white guys plenty of jovial back-talk in protesting his second-class citizenship" (Jeff is the valet of the film's nominal hero played by Dick Purcell). Moreland's playing subverted the film's horror element completely; once the villain succeeds in enlisting Mantan into the ranks of his walking dead (apparently via hypnosis: 1940s zombies were always ambivalent about their status in terms of living or dead), he pushes over the lanky lineup of stiffs with the line, "Move over, boys -- I'm one of the gang, now," which cracked me up enough to prompt my dad to stir from my parent's bedroom and insist I watch my movie quietly -- no laughing out loud.

That proved difficult, but not as difficult as it proved to see more Mantan; I fell for Mantan's brand of comedy that evening, and always kept an eye out for his films thereafter. This was a tough task in the era of succinct TV Guide movie listings, no articles on Mantan, and no internet. Still, I lucked into a few, and was constantly surprised at the unusual (and sadly usually fleeting) Mantan appearances, right on up to his murder-victim cameo in Jack Hill's delirious Spider Baby, or the Maddest Story Ever Told (1964), which I didn't see until the video explosion of the 1980s (and a taped-off-broadcast vhs copy my late amigo Bill Kelley sent me).

FYI, my other fave Mantan movie line that's zombie-specific remains "If there's anything I wouldn't want to be twice, zombies is both of 'em!" Michael H. spices his new book with an abundance of Mantanisms, many imminently quotable, but to quote 'em, you gotta read 'em.

Visit the Midnight Marquee book site and scroll down to order your copy of Mantan the Funnyman now -- it's now in print, I received my copy the last week in February, so don't hesitate!

There's also Michael H. and John Wooley's latest installment in the extraordinary book series Michael launched with the late, great George Turner back in the 1980s, Forgotten Horrors.

The first edition of the first volume, as I recall, was a full-size trade paperback published, oddly enough, by Eclipse Comics, an aberration in the Eclipse lineup to be sure, but a grand and glorious revelation for die-hard horror movie buffs like moi. Micheal H. and George later prepared at least two revised editions, and Michael H. has since considerably expanded, revised and extended that pioneer effort into a series of books with various partners (co-authors and publishers, natch). I've got 'em all in my library, proud to say, though they're still in boxes just now... the move is over, but the unpacking has yet to begin in terms of my library. Sigh.

This latest installment covers the years 1948-49, and I can't wait to see what lost treasures, curios and obscurities Mike and John have brought to light -- and also can't help salivating over what awaits us once they get to the 1950s!

Forgotten Horrors 4: Dreams That Money Can Buy is

likewise on sale at the Midnight Marquee book site, and well worth ordering ASAP.

And that's that this Monday AM, have a great one!

Regional Comics: A Request and Invitation for Input

Last weekend, I got a call from Montreal asking for (ahem) Professor Stephen Bissette. Well, I'm neither a professor, doctor, or Ph.D. -- just a layman in academic terms, now teaching about a field I worked in professionally for one-year shy of a quarter-century.

Still, I reckon I'm Prof. Bissette this morning, sending out a call for assistance from anyone out there reading this in a position to respond with information.

While prepping next week's CCS class ("Survey of the Drawn Story," aka Comics History), I'm stumped by a phenomenon I know played a key role in the adoption of comics as a popular medium. These are state comics histories or historical regional comics, and I suspect they were once a staple of local papers and/or state educational and historical societies -- but right now, "I suspect" is about all I can assert, and I do that tentatively at best.

The earliest examples I know of pre-date the birth of American comicbooks per se (that is, pre-1933), and most of those I've tracked down are closer to Ripley's Believe It or Not! in format than comic strips or comicbook narratives proper, but that may be representative only of those state comics histories that were originally crafted for and published in regional newspapers unwilling to accomodate a comic strip proper. However, little or nothing has been written about this geocentric genre that I can find.

I'm going to share with you this morning (in summary form) what little I know, and much of that is thanks to two Texans who ride (stand?) tall in their saddles: Jack 'Jaxon' Jackson and Michael H. Price.

In researching Vermont cartooning and cartoonists, I have seen various cartoon-format Vermont and/or New England maps (including a cherry one Joe Citro steered me to in the early 1990s, and that we used as the prototype for our own Vermont's Haunts 'Weird VT' cartoon map); I would like to track down more, and my interest is suitably perked as of now to make that a destination item in my 2006 flea market expeditions. I've turned up two collected paperbound books of yore -- Quaint Old New England by James Burke, Jr. and William B. Coltin, "illustrated by Jack Withycomb" (Triton Syndicate, Inc., Hartford, CT, 1936), and This is Vermont by George Merkel (The Vermont Historical Society/Elm Tree Press, Montpelier/Woodstock, VT, 1953) -- and I've no doubt there's more (I have dim memories of a relative having a cartoon history of either VT or New England on their shelves when I was a small lad, circa 1959-61).

As I said, it was Jack Jackson and Mike Price who turned me on to the seminal state comics history I'm aware of, Texan History Movies by Jack Patton and John Rosenfield (in contrast to the bylines on Quaint Old New England, cartoonist Patton's name precedes writer Rosenfield's on the earliest edition I have in my collection).

I'm happy to be proven wrong, but seems likely to me that Texan History Movies might be the most celebrated, reprinted, and discussed of all regional comics histories. Patton and Rosenfield's strip was published in The Dallas News as a daily from the fall of 1926 through to June 1927, Thanks to Mike (and to my late amigo Charlie Powell), I have three editions in my collection: the 1935 "Centennial Edition" (Turner Company, Dallas), published to tie-in with the 1936 Texas Centennial Central Exposition and which also incorporates three "Texas History Plays" by Jan Isbelle Fortune; a landscape-formatted paperback "Sesquicentennial Edition" (Pepper Jones Martinez, Inc., Dallas, TX, 1985), which notes in its indicia previous editions from 1943, 1956, 1963, and 1970, citing its reprint as an "abridgement and revision of the 1970 Revised Edition by Graphic Ideas, Inc."; and what might be the most recent reprint, an undated commemorative "Collector's Limited Edition" (PJM Publishers, Ltd. -- actually 'Pepper Jones Martinez' of Dallas, TX, once again) with an official "Certificate of Authenticity" inside ("...We certify that this... is an exact replica of the unabridged 1928 original edition. We further certify that the printing plates... have now been destroyed"). In all incarnations, it's a lively read, sparked throughout by Patton's spry and energetic cartooning and peppered with slang and racist slander (Native Americans and Mexicans are the primary targets) that was palatable in the late '20s but has been oft-censored since (as detailed by a Comics Journal article I can't lay my hands on this morn).

Texan History Movies may remain the seminal regionalist comic of all time in that it was a key catalyst in launching Jack Jackson's expansive comix and graphic novelist career (from the proto-underground God Nose to Jaxon's essential Skull and Slow Death stories to his ongoing historic graphic novels that began with the Slow Death story "Nits Breed Lice" and the serialized Comanche Moon), while inspiring other Texans to ride similar paths (like Mike Price, fer instance). It's also an expansive work, grander in scope and length than any other I've seen (it's over 200 pages long, in a full 12" x 9" format that incorporates eight panels per page plus a central explanatory text block) and by far the most playful and entertaining of its breed; Patton and Rosenfield avoid the sanctimonious piety of the genre like the plague, spicing their telling of their beloved state's history with much rich and sometimes randy humor.

Could it be comics histories of all fifty states exist? There must be more comics histories of other states in the Union, and I'd love to hear about them and/or see them.

So, consider this a call to arms -- let me know if your home state has such a comics volume in its heritage, and if it does, let me know, please! I'd welcome any and all info, access to copies, or (if you're so inclined) info on where and how I can purchase and/or borrow a copy. You can post comments here (which all can access), or email me directly (msbissette@yahoo.com) with the particulars and permission to quote your email missive here and/or for a future article to be published. If there are articles or papers on the subject, I would love to see them.

"Professor" Bissette says -- Thanks, one and all!