Understandable Pet Peeve: Exorcist Heads

I often make a point of nitpicking certain traits in comics that I find personally annoying.  Most of these faults comes not from wanting to bash a childish medium, but from caring too much.  There are certain problematic elements, from making silly preventive mistakes on page layout, or repeating stock poses that, once innovative, suddenly become overused.  Take for instance, the "landing from a distance when knocked back" pose.  In the past, athletic heroes had difficulty rolling with the punches, which usually resulted in their getting knocked out, or falling flat on their backs.  Nowadays, everybody seems content to lie their legs flat, with an outstretched arm and spread fingers.  Sure, that's cool and reliable, but surely it's not the only landing pose possible, is it?  How about a somersault flip to land softly?  Of brute force land, sinking the upper body, hidden beneath two outstretched knees?  Use your imagination, people!

However, that's not what I want to talk about, though it becomes tangentially relevant later.  In my last blog post, I mentioned the annoyance of not being able to see people's faces while they're talking.  In other mediums, you have the convenience of having the camera firmly fixated on the character's face in full view.  And that also includes people who are being knocked back.

One thing that often annoys me about serious American-style art is how static the majority of it is.  We see someone throwing a punch, and someone's head knocked back, but we don't get the sensation that they've been hit.  And when two guys fight, fight, they make a point of showing their muscular abs towards the screen, rather than how they'd ACTUALLY look confronting towards each other.  There's way too many examples to list, but here's a sample that bothers me in this otherwise excellent tutorial of people getting hit:

It's minor, but you can see both character's chests, when it'd functionally make more sense to have the punchee's stance facing his attacker.  But then, you wouldn't get to see both their impressive chests.  In this stance, it looks like the puncher's assaulting from sideways.  EscherGirls has a reputed legacy for posting the most outrageous contortionist positions females (and the occasional male) will twist themselves in order to show their sexy bits at all times.  (Mostly from a misunderstanding of how men's bodies can twist, and being appealing to the male gaze)  What's less remarked on is how often heads will do a full 180 to talk to someone while they're doing something else.

This is something that's so subtle that you don't even notice it, even when the perspective of their anatomy screams otherwise.  We're so used to seeing the character's faces that we feel alienated if all we see is the back of their heads without any interesting background details.

In fact, we're more likely to be put off if we don't see someone's face.  The horseman from Erstwhile Tales (Iron Hans) here is looking back at the peasant from a position that should be impossible, but because we're so distracted by his excited reaction, we don't even notice the disparity.

This is prevalent even in children's entertainment.  Here's a page from the Golden Shape Ernie & Bert Book.  In his task to show the convoluted line of process to rationalize putting a pot on Bert's head, Ernie leaves the room to gather the next item he's put to replace the previous misplaced object.  While going away, Ernie looks back, and we think nothing of it, because he's a Muppet.

Sometimes, it can be the result of a rushed job.  The Foobiverse used to be a repository of snarky commentary and observations about For Better or for Worse in its declining years.  But that same barbed attack lost much of its power when focused on the early years, when FBOFW was at its best.  Its saving grace is finding the hidden commentary that, like Al Capp's Lil' Abner, only becomes apparent in hindsight.  One of these discoveries lies in the cartoonist's need to meet her deadlines, via Lynn Johnson's abhorrent refusal to use erasers.

While this looks fine at first, the first commenter edited a panel to show that Elly should've been dragging stuff out of the impressively-sized crawlspace duct, rather than reaching over her shoulder.  From the wrong side.  (Though there's a lot of empty space, since the vinyl recordings are missing in the redrawing)

In other instances, it can be so subtle we don't notice at first, and either try to understand what we're seeing, or just overlook it and press on, figuring it as a minor annoyance, and wanting to get to the meat of the story instead.

For a long time, I was confused about baby Zenith's position, until I took a closer look, and realized why:  She was clutching her mother, while also looking back at the pool in horror.  If you look at her legs, it would've looked like she was dislocating all her limbs in the process.  However, if you consider that it's just her head that's twisted around, then her position makes much more sense.

Now, these disjointed heads look perfectly normal when faced head on.  That is,  as long as we don't have to face the nightmarish perspective from Tsuge Tadao's Trash Market:

Just an example of how cartoony art helps to tone down the body horror that would look downright disturbing if viewed the other way.

Sesame Street Magazine

It's just recently come to my attention that the AV Club is doing several articles devoted to Sesame Street, ranging from the psychedelic Pinball animation to the first (failed) attempt at a feature-length film, Follow That Bird.  It may seem intuitive making education entertaining now, but at the time Sesame Street debuted, it was considered revolutionary.  In fact, there were early critics who decried their way of teaching, saying that it wasn't how they were taught.  "I never had any fun growing up in school, so why should children enjoy learning?  They've got to learn the value of hard work."

Originally, Sesame Street was aimed at educating young black children, which is why the setting takes place in an urbanized Ghetto.  However, the resulting popularity of the show expanded beyond their intended audience.  The vast variety of distinctive characters with personalities created a merchandising bonanza, all funds of which was fueled back into the public sector keeping PBS afloat.

Sesame Street was one of the few shows that had Close Captioning available, that made it easier for me to understand what was being said.  As I've mentioned before, it's incredibly difficult to lipread a Muppet.  However, I had to be told secondhand that the majority of the text that made it onscreen was drastically reduced and simplified, so I missed out on most of the subtle jokes and commentary that went in the dialogue.  On the one hand, it's understandable to keep the amount of text at a reasonable level so not to intimidate younger readers off.  On the other hand, it's still disappointing knowing that I only got a fraction of the material that basically reduced the entirety of a clever sketch into cliff notes.

At times, I regret tossing away the majority of my Sesame Street memorabilia, confident I'd outgrown the subject material and could safely retain the lessons in my head.  I was particularly proud of the margins in the Follow That Bird colouring book, which were the only source of letting me understand the story of what the heck was going on.  For some reason, one of the silent pages staring both Super Grover and Bert & Ernie in the air had Super Grover yelling "MOMMIEEEEE!", even though that scene never happened in the movie.  One particular passage I distinctly remember adding was "Big Bird walked and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked until he was very very very very very very very very tired."

In the midst of this promotional merchandising and book material was the Sesame Street Magazine for very young children, which had varied artists such as Tom Leigh, Normand Chartier, Mike Smollin and Joe Mathieu who were responsible for some classic children's books in the same lines.  Several of these books were based on sketches that appeared on the show, such as The Great Cookie Thief, The Many Faces of Ernie and The Bert & Ernie Book.

One thing that the Muppet Wiki neglects in their Magazine covers is that there were some wraparound covers that continued around on the back.  As a result, we only see half of the intended image.

On the other side of this cover was Oscar the Grouch painting the name for his rather messy-looking boat, GrouchShip.

This rather poignant cover is made doubly so by having the extra-long scarf wrapped around the necks of three to five other diminutive muppets, increasing in size before extending to Big Bird and Snuffy.

For this cover that took place in late March, we see a brief reversal - Bert looking happy for a change in front of Grover holding a suppressed smile while Ernie looks on with jealousy.

It's only on the back that the emotions are reversed, with Bert looking on disapproval, and Grover and Ernie looking on with amusement at Bert's present consisting of a Rubber Duckie tied to a balloon saying "April Fool".  Only Grover is consistently cheerful on both accounts.

As for the actual content of the magazine itself, my memory is rather sketchy.  All I have to go along with are the bits and pieces I've found here and there.  One of these samples comes in the form of a cut and paste puzzle where you would have to put the correct tool needed for the job...

...which would result in a complete picture on the reverse side.

Obviously, this was back when Grover was the poster child for cuteness before Elmo snatched away that position from him.  Below is one of Joe Mathieu's pictures that I vividly remembered, back before I realized it was a Norman Rockwell tribute.

Other cutouts were closer along the lines of full-pagers that were intended to be folded into quarters, resulting in a miniature book with cutout flaps.

If you open the door (instead of turning the page, you'll see this lovable furry face staring back into your soul:

Continuing onto the middle section, you'll come across the easy teaching part, with the answers clearly available in connect-the-dots form - so easy that you don't even have to bother writing down the numbers in the first place, let alone double-check the references.  It never even occurred to me to find the odd monster out on the wall there.

At the time, I was unable to possess enough imagination to accurately portray a monster, so I just took off from Herry monster's mirror instead, and tried drawing a self-portrait, which went as well as expected for someone whose preferable communication tool was crayon.

There was another cutout page book staring Mumford the Magician and his Amazing 3 Birds act that for some reason I can't seem to find.  It's popped up sporadically in my previous forays into my nostalgic archives, but hasn't made itself available now, so I'll describe it as best as I can.

Mumford naturally made a big presentation out of being able to make birds appear, but when viewed under the flap of his hat, four birds were there.  He figured that he looked under the wrong place, because having more than the expected number of animals appearing is grounds for failure, so he checked inside a magic box, expecting the correct outcome, but instead:

"My, my my, Five birds.  What's going on here?"
Seeing no success in any of his attempts (including looking under a cage, which resulted in six birds), Mumford decided to go back to the basics.
"I'm going to look in my magic book to see what I am doing wrong..." and under the flap for the magic book were three birds.

The only way you could preserve the interior of these cutouts was was by photocopying them, and having colour copiers would be considered expensive even back then.  The text to Big Bird's Birthday Book (postmarked April 3 and illustrated by Ellen Appleby) was so faded that it's difficult to make out.  To save yourself the irrelevant eyestrain, here's the reproduced text as best as I can figure:

"Big Bird's Birthday is this month.  To help celebrate his birthday, you can make a little book to keep beside your ___ ___ cut out these ___ ___ page 1 on top of page 3 and 5.  Staple these pages together.  Then read A Birthday surprise for Big Bird."

If you're wondering why there aren't more complete versions of the children's magazine, these samples should show you why.  Any parent who'd get this for their children wouldn't balk at having these bi-monthly timewasters occupying their offspring's attention away from distracting electronics would hardly be put off by any intentional vandalism these temporary books would go through.  Not to mention that many of the pages wouldn't make much sense until they were cut up and reorganized into something comprehensible.  I even had a page about Trick-or-Treating that was glued to a Television costume I wore for years.  Sadly, there are no high-def photographic closeups of the image in question, leaving the haunting memory a perpetual mystery.  For any obsessives who demand perfection from their collections, is it at all surprising that so many of these found their way to the trash heap?  If what you've got is incomplete, what's the point of having them around, if only to remind you of what a mistaken wasted opportunity you made?

The only collections of Sesame Street material were compiled in books like the Bedtime Storybook and The 15-volume Sesame Street Treasury, which while overly large, don't seem to contain the same material that was once in the magazines.  You'd think the wealth of available material printed back then would be up for grabs for reprinting, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.  Much of it was elementary-level knowledge, but people have fond memories of things tickling the back of their heads, not to mention children who'd be pleased with discovering old material once again.

Do you suppose these magazine order forms are still good?

Pet Peeves: Rearanged panels

This is something I've seen quite often, but has hardly ever been mentioned.  This isn't in the same realm as Perplexing Reprints where there are various panels drastically different from their first printing.  Nor is it in the vein of being confused from the layout of a double-page spread.  This refers to two panels being accidentally switched around so that the comic in question winds up being slightly out of whack.

This has happened more than once, and one of the easiest examples I know of is this early Calvin & Hobbes Sunday comic:

For a long time, I thought this was how it was supposed to go, but other more faithful reprints have had the last two penultimate panels switched around so that Calvin winds up sliding before announcing his mortality verification.  Even now, it's difficult for me to go back to the right version, despite knowing that it's the proper way to go.

This wasn't an isolated incident, since I wound up seeing instances of switched panels everywhere.  I don't have the albums and treasuries in question, but these recreations should be close enough to get my point across.

With these panels out of composition, Garfield winds up acting rather schizophrenic, long before Garfield Minus Garfield relayed that role to Jon.

While the composition of the bodies are more consistent, the overall flow of events is a mess.  Garfield winds up losing his enthusiasm halfway through, only to suddenly regain it near the end, and then lose it completely.  While I can look back and laugh about it now, it bothered to me no end, because it wasn't how the joke was supposed to go.  Knowing comics forwards and backwards isn't quite the same when they're slightly out of alignment.

EDIT - After thinking for awhile, it occurred to me that ironically enough, I got the composition of the rearranged panels wrong.  It was most likely the 3rd and 4th panels, rather than the 4th and 5th ones.  I must've subconsciously chosen this new alignment, solely because it was more pleasing to the eye.



The Peanuts collection Brothers & Sisters: It's all Relative was the worst offender, having not one, not two, but FOUR comics, each with the same mistake.  See if you can figure it out.

For this last one, Charlie Brown is pointing down exactly to the next panel.  These comics only make sense if seen in a strange zig-zag pattern that's at odds with the other comics in the book.

The modern-day equivalent to such reprinting mistakes would be having pages switched around or showing up multiple times in the same book, all of which I've seen in various publications, which for a long time was one of the main arguments against having trade paperbacks of comics, since they would be radically different from their "better" pamphlet format.  Things have considerably improved since then, but mistakes still abounded.

Domu was one of the earliest Mangas I ever saw in French, and I started off with the last third, which was quite a traumatic experience.  It was one of the scariest things I'd ever seen.  There was so much death and destruction involved.  I had absolutely no idea who all these people were, and why they were dying left and right.  At the time, I thought that Cho was a boy who'd aged overnight after facing off the assault from Etsuko's rampage.

The Dark Horse English version helped clear things up, but there were a few pages that bothered me.  In the 3rd issue, the police interview with the press had the pages on opposite sides.  But more than that, I felt that the rearranging of some panels felt slightly off.

If you've read Telophase's essays on Manga page layout (and you should) you'll remember that there was a section on making the eye flow easily rather than forcing your vision to go all the way from left to right, and back again, but in a zig-zag pattern, that unlike the Peanuts comics above, was more intuitive.

Now, here's that same scene of destruction as above.  I couldn't find the same book I saw years ago, and am not going through the trouble of flipping the text, but see how much smoothly it handles.

If that's not enough proof, check out this scene of collateral damage in the mostly silent anti-climax climax, where Etsuko is conducting a final psychic assault that's just barely glimpsed at.

And the slightly modified version:

Not only does the position of the broken chain make more sense, the bent beam is also more consistent.  Somehow, the proofreader for Blade of the Immortal got their wires crossed and forgot to correct a flipped panel.

If I hadn't already known about these comics beforehand, I would've been more upset.  But when it comes to reprinting something that the rest of the world doesn't already know, the result can only lead to further confusion.

Krazy Kat is generally regarded as one of the finest (if inexplicable) comics, and the reprinting project was especially challenging, since there were so few reliable collections available.  So when the first strip of 1933 was presented, it left the impression that there was some hidden underlying message lost on readers not sophisticated or smart enough to figure out.  As a result, no one dared point out that there was something in the sequence of events that didn't make sense, lest they appear foolish, even if it would've allayed some general suspicion.

If it weren't for the generous contribution of a German Krazy Kat fan named Erich Brandmayr, the resulting comic would've gone completely unnoticed.

This wasn't Fantagraphics' only reprinting mistake.  The first album of Popeye the Sailor Man had
Even more annoyingly - the panels in question are numbered, so catching this mistake should've been obvious when putting it together.

At first glance, the two strips in question seem to be perfectly natural, but the lack of recapping right from the start should've been a tip-off.  Since daily comics tended to refresh the reader's memory every day, reminding them of the events of last time.  When placed all together, the result is something that's 50% rehashing, 50% story, and 50% running jokes.

Cerebus and Akira produced serial stories that when their exploits were collected into telephone books,
their narratives flowed so smoothly without disruption, interruption or recapping - making it almost impossible to find the seams in the works.  A trait that still hasn't been matched with recent comics.  (But there's still time)

At the penultimate reveal in Minds, Cerebus' adversary, Cirin, sees an event in Cerebus' childhood that's of great personal importance and interest to her,

AND THEN:

To make matters more infuriating, this interruption only makes sense when it shows up in context later on.  All the dramatic build-up that'd been growing then is gone because a copied page was put in the wrong place.  At first, I thought this was an isolated event, but I saw another book in a second-hand comic store, which had the exact same misprint.  I have no idea if this is an aberration or not, since I can't find any mention of it anywhere.  Doubtless, any new readers who came across this misleading passage must've been grossly confused.

This isn't solely limited to just Newspaper strips and comic books though.  MAD Magazine suffers from this same symptom.  Because the dimensions of the magazine don't conform to the typical size of a comic paperback, some panels wind being out of order.  While this is fine for thematic articles such as "A MAD look at..." where which panels you read don't matter, it plays havoc when certain articles are slap-dashed haphazardly.

The article The Facts of Life (& Death) is ruined with the last two panels out of sequence:

Of all the artists, none was treated more slipshod than the legendary Don Martin.

His stories would start out normally enough (or as normal as a Don Martin character gets), and then things start getting weird before the punchline.


So far, the cut-and-pasters (I don't know what the proper technical term is) seem to have the most trouble in trying to tell when a Don Martin character is walking away.


Somewhat fittingly, a Sesame Street parody, Reality Street in a state of reconstruction wound up with this situation, fixing what wasn't broken.  Anybody who's been forced to undergo construction on their street can surely relate.

The one singular exception to all this was a Bloom County comic which was rerun from Berkeley Breathed's early days of B.O. (Before Opus).  Here, it looks like Milo is about to leave before Freida figures out the calculation, only to be prevented from doing so.  Ironically, making the penultimate panel the punchline wound up making it personally funnier than if it were left alone.