comic strips – Nik Dirga

How Odd Bodkins by Dan O’Neill blew my fragile little mind

I was a comic strip-reading kid addicted to the funny pages when I stumbled across a peculiar yellow book – more of a pamphlet, really – at a friend’s house, called Buy This Book Of Odd Bodkins by a guy called Dan O’Neill.

A curious little strip that ran in the San Francisco Chronicle from 1964 until he was fired (apparently for the final time) in 1970, Odd Bodkins began as the quixotic adventures of anthropomorphic birds Hugh and Fred, having wry discussions about current affairs and encounters with oddballs like the Batwinged Hamburger Snatcher, Smokey the Bear and the ghost of Abraham Lincoln. The early comics in that yellow book were slightly edgy, although in a kind of Doonesbury-esque subtle way, casting an askew eye at a topsy-turvy world.

A few years later I found another book of Odd Bodkins, a big ol’ tome called The Collective Unconscience of Odd Bodkins, and man, that’s where things got weird. The same characters of Fred and Hugh were there but instead of gag strips they ambled along on an odyssey into the 1970s, and the comics got stranger and stranger, journeying to Mars and beyond. The backgrounds, nearly nonexistent in earlier strips, became swirling psychedelic landscapes, the lettering became baroque and extravagant, and the story, such as it was, became an extended walkabout in search for enlightenment in what felt like a world suspended at the end of time. The comics became far less about a punchline and more about a quest for meaning.

I didn’t quite get it all – a lot of the references were already ancient history by the time I read the comics – but I got it, you know? That was it. I was trippin’ on strips.

Once upon a time, iconoclasts didn’t mean crazed internet-addled sovereign citizen conspiracy theorists. O’Neill was one of the great independent thinkers and has never been afraid to stir the pot, or to, in the best editorial cartoonists’ tradition, cause good trouble.

Because he was publishing work in ‘mainstream’ media like the Chronicle, O’Neill couldn’t get quite as risque there as folks like R. Crumb, S. Clay Wilson and Gilbert Shelton did in underground comics. Yet that actually proved a strength, because forcing himself to draw ‘toons for the “straights” made O’Neill work harder to create bold, thoughtful strips without piling on the sex and drugs. He was the perfect gentle guide to more alternative viewpoints for me.

Of course, he could go “adult,” too. O’Neill is more widely famous for Air Pirates Funnies, a very adult X-rated parody of Disney’s Mickey Mouse that ended up in a copyright lawsuit that went all the way to the Supreme Court during the 1970s. Those are hilarious too in their own naughty way, if you’ve ever wondered what Mickey Mouse’s bits looked like. And the battle against Disney over these strips and the boundaries of what parody was and is is one of the great stories of creative freedom, wonderfully chronicled by Bob Levin in his exhaustive book The Pirates And The Mouse: Disney’s War Against The Underground.

This great little short documentary recaps the Air Pirates saga and is a fine introduction to O’Neill’s fierce individualism. “You can’t have more fun than drawing pictures and pissing people off,” he notes right at the start.

Air Pirates is very smutty and funny stuff, but it’s still Odd Bodkins that made me a fan of O’Neill for life.

Odd Bodkins was a great intermediate step between “kids” comic strips like Peanuts to the wild weird world of the underground. The handful of old ‘60s and ‘70s collections have been reprinted by O’Neill and can be found on Amazon, although I think a huge chunk of his work has never been collected, which is a bit of a crime for underground comics history.

Weirdly, Dan O’Neill moved to the same town that I grew up in up in the Sierra Nevada foothills, although I’ve never met the man – alive and well and drawing scathing cartoons about Trump well into his 80s. It’s fitting he ended up in Nevada County, which as I’ve written is kind of a weird, wonderful place.

When I turned to drawing my own comics, O’Neill’s scratchy, anarchic spirit was definitely one of the many ingredients in the cosmic gumbo that made up my work. He showed me you didn’t need to be a master artist to make a difference, and that a unique point of view and a sense of humour went a hell of a long way towards making great art.

O’Neill has always pushed at the system, and found the funny in the chaos of the world. He blew my mind at a very young age and part of me has never quite been the same since.

Crime and punishment: The glorious gore of Chester Gould’s ‘Dick Tracy’

Ah, the good old days, when a man and his family could pick up the morning newspaper and see a criminal’s head jammed in a torture device, or a thug buried alive in ice, or perhaps impaled on an American flag.

Newspaper comics are rapidly becoming a thing of the past, but in its heyday in the last century, nobody went harder than Chester Gould’s “Dick Tracy,” who’s been fighting crime since 1931.

There’s a tendency sometimes to imagine the past was somehow cleaner and more innocent than the modern day, but the stuff Gould was pumping out to be read over the breakfast table each day was dark and often very, very twisted riffs on crime and punishment. Hard to imagine it being published in the anodyne world of what’s left of today’s newspaper comic strips.

A recent re-read of strips from the post-war era in the handsome Library of American Comics volumes confirmed how unrelenting Tracy’s world was – the need to grab readers every day means there’s very little internal life for Tracy, who catapults from one criminal to the next, a rogue’s gallery of grotesqueries who rarely survive the first encounter with him. Fighting crime is all he is.

It’s a black and white world, but sometimes that stark certainty is a lot of fun in fiction because real life sure ain’t like that. I sometimes like Steve Ditko’s Mr A, too, even if it’s dogmatic and reactionary and I don’t agree one bit with his philosophies.

You certainly don’t want to binge-read years of Dick Tracy’s adventures in one go, as it can be a bit much, but in smaller doses – imitating the frequency they originally came out in – it’s riveting stuff. You can see why with its cliffhanger endings and rapid-fire action it became one of the biggest comics of all time.

Now, as a fellow with somewhat liberal leanings, I’ll admit that Gould’s Tracy is often the epitome of right-wing fascism. Crooks are bad and he is right and in real life I imagine Dick Tracy would’ve had more than a few internal affairs investigations going on over his conduct.

Many people only know Dick Tracy from Warren Beatty’s intriguing but slightly undercooked colourful movie take which didn’t quite capture the fierceness of the comic strip. Gould’s own ‘Tracy’ comics famously became weirder and more eccentric the longer it went (such as when Dick Tracy went to the moon) and his conservative opinions became stronger as the strip went on, but at its zenith in those 1940s-1950s strips, nobody wrote a better gritty crime comic strip.

Crime does not pay, they say, and for a while there Gould unrelentingly showed why day after day in some of the most gruesome images to ever be seen next to your morning ‘Blondie’ and ‘Gasoline Alley’ visits.

Happy 30th anniversary to my comic strip ‘Jip’!

To quote that band half my pals listened to nonstop back in the day, “What a long, strange trip it’s been…”

So it was 30 years ago this week that I started drawing a daily comic strip for The Daily Mississippian in my final year of university. Jip premiered on August 20, 1993 and ran for just about a year, 140 or so daily episodes of college hijinks heavily inspired by Doonesbury, Bloom County and Martin Wagner’s Hepcats.

I’ve written about my Jip days before and republished the strips as free PDF downloads a couple years back. (Advertorial: You can get Book 1 here and Book 2 here!) But, unlike my other comic Amoeba Adventures, I’ve never really returned to Jip in the years since I graduated – you can’t go back to college, after all.

Still, when I realised this week marked a whopping three decades since it kicked off, I couldn’t help but wonder what my wide-eyed dog-faced college freshman Jip would be up to in the strange world of 2023 – so here’s a special anniversary strip! If only we knew then what the future held…

Meet Galexo, the creepy hero who finally defeated Batman

Everyone knows Batman and Robin. But did you hear the one about Batman and Robin and… Galexo?

A bizarrely uncharismatic space superhero, Galexo parachuted his way into the late 1960s/early 1970s Batman syndicated newspaper strip towards the end of its lifetime, and thanks to an argument between publishers, he ended up pushing Batman out of his own comic entirely, doing something the Joker could never manage – killing Batman.

These strange oddball strips have fascinated Batman aficionados for years but were rarely seen until reprinted in the handsome 2016 collection Batman: The Silver Age Dailies and Sundays Volume 3 1969-1973. The book is a story of Batman’s strange decline in the comic strip – while it starts out with solid artwork and stories featuring Batman’s traditional foes, by the end of 1971 the strip started to collapse upon itself.

A weird struggle between the newspaper comics syndicate Ledger and National Periodical Publications (later DC Comics) was the reason – seasoned comics writer E. Nelson Bridwell was sacked and unknown Ledger staff brought in, and the strip declined in quality rapidly. But it was still kind of recognisable as Batman comics, until in April 1972, Galexo was clumsily introduced, and Batman announced it was time to “turn our duo into a trio” with his creepy spaceman hero pal … who apparently has ESP and other science stuff.

Galexo is a rather horrifying figure, adorned with a greasy-looking mullet and a migraine-inducing colourful costume and wearing a weird helmet that resembles a truckers’ cap. He has no personality, and a tendency to lecture about his superiority. Nobody should lecture Batman, but the chill Bruce Wayne in these strips just hangs out and lets Galexo blather.

These strips are objectively terrible but kind of fascinating – look at the complete lack of attempts to make the art dynamic, with endless tight cropping onto the figures’ heads, dialogue overwhelming the panels entirely, and almost abstract surrealism. Batman and Robin barely appear in costume or when they do they’re reduced to Galexo’s cheer squad.

After several aimless weeks and awful art, Batman and Robin were apparently pushed out of the strip entirely in favour of Galexo and his friends, but the title still remained Batman’s.

It’s not every day that you found a newspaper ditching a comic strip with a public note that it’s become complete garbage, but such was the fate of Batman and Robin and Galexo as the Stars and Stripes newspaper dumped it along with many others:

The Batman-less Batman and Galexo strip apparently carried on in a few overseas newspapers in places like Singapore for another year or so. Clearly, someone at the Ledger Syndicate wanted to make Galexo the next big thing. These rare final strips collated here are a weird trip, like an adventure strip imagined by someone who’d never actually read a good comic strip.

It’s a weird footnote in comics history – after beating The Joker, the Penguin and Riddler countless times, the caped crusader was finally laid low… by a trucker-cap wearing spaceman with an ego.

I’m pretty sure despite almost every other C-list comics character getting a revival at some point, Galexo was never, ever seen again, the “Poochie” of Batman comics history.

Everything I need to know about America I learned from ‘Doonesbury’

I’ve written before about how I miss when newspaper comics were a bit more central in pop culture. And few have been more topical and controversial than Garry Trudeau’s venerable daily Doonesbury, still going strong, if less frequently, after 50-plus years.

For nerdy kids like me who grew up reading the comics pages and scouring thrift shops for old paperbacks, Doonesbury was our political education. The first Doonesbury book I remember picking up was 1981’s “In Search of Reagan’s Brain,” a pointed if often mystifying to me satire of the then-new US President’s penchant for vagueness and nostalgia. I barely knew who Reagan was at my tender age, but something about the complicated, arcane world of Doonesbury made me want to get the joke.

Later, I bought classic treasury collections like “The Doonesbury Chronicles,” which awakened me to strange early ‘70s concepts like communes and Walden Pond, or to Nixon and Ford and the Watergate figures. There were the just plain funny strips, but then there were the ones that made me want to learn more to get the references.

Pre-internet, the past was a rather mysterious country, and to be honest, my history classes that I recall of primary and high school education always seemed to focus on the really distant past, on Founding Fathers and constitutional principles and occasionally something as fresh as World War II.

Little was taught about injustice, or racism, or the many wrongs and missteps in America’s long, tangled history. Doonesbury had Black, Asian and gay characters long before it was common. Through Doonesbury, I learned that America was always many things at the same time, and the obscure political and cultural figures of 1975 and 1984 it stuck in my head made me want to learn more about it all in my own time.

But Doonesbury would never have lasted if it was just a blithe satire of the news of the day, and it was the characters who kept me coming back for more – everyman Mike Doonesbury’s journey from idealistic student to ‘80s ad man to ‘00s digital hipster to today’s almost senior citizen, football player turned wounded veteran B.D., eternal hippie Zonker, Hunter Thompson stand-in Duke (who became rather tiresome through overuse), or fiery campus protester Mark’s long journey to coming out.

Doonesbury always felt kind of like the story of a family as it journeyed through five decades of America, and that human touch is what made me want to learn more about the years it spanned.

Doonesbury is still going 51 years on – longer than Schulz did Peanuts now – although it’s been new strips on Sundays only since 2014 or so which makes it feel like it’s entered a slow final victory lap around the cultural arena. Trudeau’s been viciously funny with the Tr**p years but it’s a lot harder to pay attention in the Age of Outrage. Mike and the gang are still around, and they’ve got children, and their children even have children as Doonesbury turns sweetly generational.

I guess I know more about how the US and the world works now in my own encroaching middle age, and there’s certainly no shortage of places one can pick up history and knowledge now, but I’ll always kind of long for the days when Trudeau’s characters were my newsprint guides to the follies and foibles of the wider world.

Charles Schulz and Peanuts: He walked the line

Like pretty much every cartoonist who ever picked up a pen, I worship at the feet of Charles M. Schulz, the master of the simple line.

I’ve written before about my love for the rapidly vanishing newspaper comic. After a steady diet of them as a kid, classic Peanuts strips are embedded in my brain. Even if I last read them 20, 30 years ago, they seem like familiar friends. I read them now less with an eye for the gags (although Schulz could be side-splittingly funny, especially when it came to depicting rage), and more with an eye on the craft.

They say that writing is often the art of chipping away, scraping off the excess to find the truth underneath all those fluttering words. In my work as a journalist, you’re trained to get to the point. Every single panel by Schulz feels like the point – comic art stripped to the barest essentials.

When I first started drawing my own little silly comics years ago, I took my inspiration from superhero superstars Neal Adams, John Byrne and particularly the insanely detailed crosshatch-filled black-and-white work of Dave Sim and Gerhard on Cerebus. I did a fairly awful job of imitating these far better artists, because I didn’t have the base of skill underneath.

Even though I loved Peanuts, if you’d asked scribbling young Nik if Schulz was a great artist, he might’ve said no, but he was a good cartoonist. But now I see clearly the detail in his design, how he could dash off a few lines to clearly delineate a house, a brick wall, a kite-eating tree, a doghouse, and it worked.

Have you ever tried to actually draw Charlie Brown, or Snoopy, like Schulz did? Most budding cartoonists give it a try, and it’s harder than it looks. I’ve done a few Peanuts pastiche/homage comic strips over the years, and every time it’s like learning to draw with a new limb:

You look at his earlier strips, and there was a more ornate feeling to the art, with some tricky perspective shots and more detailed backgrounds that were gradually abandoned as the strip shrunk in scope, but widened in its emotional palette. By the time Schulz hit his stride by the mid-1960s, he’d refined Peanuts to the point of abstraction. Things got weird – a kite-eating tree? A bird who spoke in scratch marks? Snoopy becomes a helicopter? – but because of Schulz’s humble everyman style, the surrealism of Peanuts always seemed downright cozy.

There’s other cartoonists who went equally spare, like Crockett Johnson’s Barnaby (Barnaby surely a distant relative of Charlie Brown?). More recently, Jeff Smith’s Bone always dazzled me with its simple, clear lines. Yet many other remaining gag cartoons like Wizard Of Id or Family Circus or Dennis The Menace were simply drawn, but never quite managed the deep control and deceptive depth Schulz could with his art.

Schulz’s smooth line got sadly shaky in his final years of Peanuts, due to health problems. The easy effortless lines of the strip’s peak gave way to an old man’s more hesitant form. Yet the DNA of a master craftsman was still there in every panel, despite his struggles.

But boy, when he was at his best – which to be honest, was for most of Peanuts’ staggering 50-year-run – Charles Schulz laid down a line that many would imitate, and few would ever better.

Stripped down: In praise of the humble newspaper comic

I love comic books, but I also love comic strips. And man, I miss them.

The ritual of paging through a newspaper and basking in the glory of an entire page or two of comic strips has been something I loved most of my life. One of the first things I remember reading were battered paperbacks of Charles Schulz’s “Peanuts,” the Citizen Kane of strips. I remember clipping out old strips from The Union newspaper when I was growing up and making makeshift albums of them.

One of my first jobs in real life was as a newspaper boy delivering that same Union, and so I got to read “Peanuts” and the rest before anybody else. Years later at a small town paper in Mississippi in my first job after college, one of my wage-slave gigs in a less computerised era was pasting up the newspaper’s comics pages by hand, clipping them out from the glossy sheets the syndicates sent and gluing “Shoe”, “Luann” and the like onto the page. Finally, I was making the comic strip pages!

As I grew older, I moved on from “Garfield” and “Peanuts” to “Bloom County” and “Doonesbury” (where I learned more about US politics than I ever did in school) and finally the surreal charms of “Red Meat” and “Zippy The Pinhead.” I even achieved the ultimate dream when I drew my own comic strip “Jip” for a little more than a year for my college newspaper, where I unashamedly pilfered from all my favourite comic strips for inspiration.

Comic books are huge intellectual property now and fodder for countless blockbuster movies and TV shows, but the comic strip feels somewhat cast aside, quaint, an echo of the past. Yet at its peak through most of the 20th century, the newspaper comic strip was probably far more influential on popular culture than comic books, an eclectic mix of cornball, adventure and gags that showcased how diverse the medium could be.

Newspapers have been shrinking for years now and the comics page is one of the casualties. A lot of strips that have been going for a long time have ended this year, and it’s hard not to imagine even more will follow as papers fold and comic sections, where there are any left, shrink further.

The immortal “Calvin and Hobbes,” “Bloom County” and “The Far Side” in the 1980s and 1990s might’ve been the last big gasps of the comic strip as pop culture giants. The death of Charles Schulz in 2000 seemed the end of more than just his era. It was a portent of the end of comics pages as a cultural touchstone.

When I moved to New Zealand in 2006, it was a bummer to find out that the country’s biggest newspaper didn’t have a comics page at all. Pal Bob assures me that wasn’t always the case, and NZ newspapers once had robust comics sections too (including great Kiwi comic strips like the classic “Footrot Flats” by Murray Ball). But by the time I arrived down here, nuthin’. Somehow, a newspaper feels like it’s missing something irreplaceable without a page full of goofy comic strips.

And yeah, I’ll admit, many comic strips have been pretty mediocre or gone on for literally decades longer than they should’ve. It’s hard to believe relics like “Andy Capp” or “Snuffy Smith” (mining that ever-topical hillbilly humour 90 years past its peak) are still going. When I do see the comic strip pages in America on visits now, they’re a pretty dusty lot. Given the ageing demographics of print media and their fetish for snorefests like “Mark Trail” and “The Lockhorns”, fresh new talent finds it hard to break in. There are a lot of “zombie comic strips” out there that take up the space that new talent might have.

(As an example of comic strip inertia, that newspaper I worked for in Mississippi back in the mid-1990s still ran “Bringing Up Father,” surely one of the last papers anywhere to run a strip that began in 1913 and finally keeled over in 2000.)

The comic art form hasn’t gone anywhere of course, and endless legions of great, diverse creative folk are doing amazing comics online and elsewhere. But there’s a part of me that will always miss the humble newspaper comics page, where Garfield, Snoopy, Doonesbury and many more leapt out from the ink every single day.