On the Road and Off Again

The Ocean County College students, teachers, and administrators I met during my trip to the Garden State ten days ago couldn’t have been more attentive and interesting during my Powerpoint slideshow and afterwards. This is the kind of thing that makes authors view traveling around as worthwhile.

Having Eddie along for the lengthy drive made it feel as much like a family excursion as a professional speaking engagement, and it’s thanks to Eddie that I have some snapshots to share with you instead of my usual embarrassed excuses for having forgotten to take my camera out of its travel case. He also served as my "roadie" by making sure that my computer, notes, and technical peripheral were taken care of while I chatted with audience members and signed copies of Stuck Rubber Baby, which had been assigned reading for some of the students in advance of my talk.

FRANÇOIS: The new Stuck Rubber Baby cover [See my previous blog entry or the smaller version of the same artwork below. —H.C.] is so different from the previous one. I wonder what motivated that choice? It seems to me that, instead of emphasizing the connectedness of all the characters, as did the first cover, this one shows a main character all alone, remembering bits of his past (he does look older on the cover), with the silhouettes looking a bit like ghosts lost in, well, the fog of memory. Interesting choice, to say the least.

HOWARD: Well, one wants to have a distinctly different cover if one is going to redo a book’s cover at all.

And actually, even back in 1995 I was drawn to the images of Toland meditating alone at Bluerabbit Lake (pages 146-147 in the book) as a good emblem for the story as a whole. Even though the book has all of the civil rights activism stuff in it, the unifying theme is Toland trying to find out who he is and learning to be honest with himself.

As you can see by visiting this old feature showing how the 1995 cover came to be, my first thought even then was to suggest the book’s duality by juxtaposing the conflicted yearning represented by the "imaginary children" playing on the lake’s surface with an ominous Klan rally in the sky. While Joan Hilty, who is serving as the editor for next-year’s Vertigo re-issue, understood my inclination to use the Bluerabbit Lake image as a jumping-off place, she and her colleagues at DC Comics thought that adding on a Klan rally in the sky, as I had suggested in 1995, was probably trying to cover too much ground. Also, they feared that featuring the unexplained children might be overly confusing to potential readers who hadn’t yet read the story. They were probably right about that.

Professor David Bordelon of the OCC Department of English and Literature, who doesn’t seem to have a personal web site I can link to, had been my main contact person since he first emailed me back in February to ask if I would visit the campus as part of the department’s Visiting Writers Series. Once I had set foot on the grounds he introduced me to his colleague, author Jayanti Tamm, and later on, over lunch, to a tableful of most interesting fellow faculty members.

Below: Me pausing for a quick farewell snapshot alongside Professor Bordelon in the OCC parking lot before Eddie and I hit the road back to North Adams.

Steve’s ongoing fascination with large and threatening forms of non-human life were subsequently manifested in Tyrant, his gone-but-not-forgotten comic book saga of the 1990s that forever raised the bar when it comes to the exploration of dinosaur life from egghood onward.

Steve, being a Vermonter himself (and an instructor at the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction), knows whereof he draws when it comes to disturbing life forms that may set one’s spider-senses a-tingling if one stays out too late in the Vermont forests on a moonless night.

So for those of you who have been putting off your Halloween gift-shopping until the last minute, could there be a better Halloween stocking-stuffer than The Vermont Monster Guide? Remember, just because the Citri-Bissette book under discussion limits itself to a geographically specific population doesn’t mean that creatures from the Green Mountain State or their cousins from other states don’t occasionally vacation in your neck of the woods. Won’t they be surprised when they peek in your window on Halloween night and discover that their existence has now been fearlessly documented for all to see!

And won’t they be pissed!

Mad Man

I discovered Mad when I was fourteen, which is pretty much the perfect age to make that discovery. I can still vividly remember the cover of the particular issue that grabbed my eyeballs that day from a Birmingham magazine rack, even though I haven’t laid eyes on it since my collection of Mads was lost decades ago during an unfortunate garage sale of items that had been cluttering up my mother’s basement. (As you can see, I have even been able to locate the cover in question, which was #37 in the series and which sported typically wonderful cover art by Norman Mingo, online at Doug Gilford’s Mad Cover Site.)

Let’s say you’re an author named Joseph A. Citro who is described as a "respected monster hunter" by the publisher (University Press of New England) of your new book. And let’s say you’re in need of an expert depicter of monsters to decorate your new book about the subset of scary creatures who have reportedly been making the wilds of Vermont extra-creepy during the last few million years. Who’re ya gonna call?

Artwork
©2009 by Stephen
R. Bissette

Then a high school classmate of mine said, "You think Mad is funny now? You should see what it was like back when Harvey Kurtzman was editing it!"

(There was no missing the reverential tone Charlie used in speaking the name Harvey Kurtzman.)

And without intending any disrespect for Al Feldstein, I have to say that the reason for Charlie’s special reverence for Mad‘s founding editor swiftly became obvious.

Once I had moved to New York and I had gotten a foothold in professional cartooning, I found myself rubbing elbows with Kurtzman periodically at conventions and other industry gatherings, but we never became close. That wasn’t true of my principal underground comix enabler Denis Kitchen, who represented Kurtzman’s creative projects to publishers while the man was alive and has overseen the man’s artistic legacy in the years since Kurtzman’s death—in the process all but becoming a member of the Kurtzman family.

A Tangential Postscript:
"What—Me In Mad?"