At left and below: ancient mini-comics containing Cruse art

Anyway, today’s mini-comic-creating scene is different in many ways from the one Geerdes nurtured. For one thing, there’s no cohesive community of stoned hippie readers eager to consume by the thousands whatever the present generation of outsider cartoonists produces. Still, there’s a similar sense of community among those who, albeit on a smaller scale, insist on bucking the money-grubbing tides to draw on a shoestring whatever off-beat comics they feel like drawing.

And it’s been refreshing, since I moved to New England, to meet a Vermont cartoonist named Colin Tedford, who with Daniel Barlow has founded the Trees & Hills Comic Club, through which he plays a creativity-nurturing role not unlike the one Clay Geerdes played for comix newbies like me several decades ago.

At left: a Very Vicky panel

I was briefly a grad student at Penn State University forty years ago. My stay at PSU in the fall of 1968 was funded by a Shubert Playwriting Fellowship, and a couple of my short plays (one of which can be found on this very web site) even made it onstage as part of the theatre department’s Five O’clock Theatre student workshop series.

Personal issues quickly derailed my attempt to be a Very Good Fellow that fall, unfortunately, and I fled to New York over the Christmas holidays before making much of a dent in my Shubert money.

Despite the inauspiciousness of my grad school career, though, I had a mostly good time at Penn State during my brief stay, the odd depression and panic attack aside. I forged several enduring friendships, helped paint the set for a main stage production of O’Neill’s Ah Wilderness, and even made good grades somehow in the courses I took.

So despite the fact that so much time has passed since then that not a single inch of the campus I encountered looked remotely familiar, I nevertheless felt a definite twinge of nostalgia when I returned to PSU last weekend at the invitation of Eileen Akin, coordinator of PSU Special Collections Library’s Audio-Visual Collections and Fred Waring archives, who asked me to give a talk as part of the Graphic Novel Speakers Series she spearheads.

Below: Eileen and I commune with cartooning greats in the Waring collection’s Cartoon Room

An honorary member of the National Cartoonists Society and the host of annual NCS golfing retreats at his Shawnee-on-the-Delaware home base, Waring was the regular recipient of thank-you art from his legion of grateful ‘tooner friends.

Hence the "Cartoon Room" at Penn State, because of which the PSU library’s Waring archive is as notable for its walls full of framed cartoon originals that almost nobody has ever seen as for its long shelves of Waring choral arrangements and displays of fascinating memorabilia from the decades during which Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians graced music-lovers with their unforgettable performances and broadcasts.

Below: Just one of the reasons why Eileen Akin’s lair at PSU is a feast for any cartoon-lover’s eyes.

You can bet that we’ll be carrying the Hillary banner proudly in the general election, though, if she ends up copping the nomination. She’s not short on confidence-inspiring qualities (particularly when she lets her better angels carry the day). And we urge present-day Hillary folks to similarly work their butts off to elect Barack if his campaign for the nomination carries the day. Let’s don’t let the White House remain in the hands of the party that’s spent eight long years inflicting more damage on the U.S. than would have seemed humanly possible — even given the track records left by Reagan and Bush the dad.

Between Clinton and Obama, we think Omama offers more than his opponent does of what America needs in a leader today. So Eddie has packed his bags and headed to the Pennsylvania hills to act on his beliefs.

He does that kind of thing. It’s one of the attributes that made me fall for him 29 years ago.

On Valentine’s Day I made a return visit to White River Junction, VT, at the invitation of that city’s new creative crown jewel, the Center for Cartoon Studies.

CCS, which was conceived, founded, and is now overseen by graphic novelist James Sturm, offers a two-year course of study for aspiring comics creators ready to settle in Vermont and get serious about honing their craft under the tutelage of cartooning professionals like Jason Lutes, James Kochalka, Stephen R. Bissette, and others.

This was my second time to swap thoughts about comics with a batch of Steve Bissette’s students. Steve and I go back a ways, of course, having swapped war stories about the comics industry in various settings over the decades. Like hosts of comics fans, I had admired his talents from afar well before we found ourselves conversing face-to-face at assorted events where cartoonists congregate. Steve helped raise my profile beyond underground and gay circles by interviewing me, along with his co-author Stanley Wiater, for their 1992 book Comic Book Rebels, and when Eddie and I first moved to the Berkshires Steve was quick to invite me up to White River Junction to speak to the students in the CCS class he was teaching at that time. I enjoyed myself back then and had a similarly entertaining time this year.

Steve amazes me. In his alternate identity as a blogger, he puts me totally to shame. Where does he get the energy? Where does he find the time? It’s been two weeks since I visited CCS and only now am I managing to get my act together to compose a few paragraphs marking my trip. It’s a good thing it’s not up to me to funnel "breaking news" to CNN!

I learned recently that Steve and I both spent time during the 1980s collaborating with one "Jovial Bob Stine," the man who edited and largely wrote Scholastic’s Bananas magazine before mutating into R. L. Stine, the fabulously (and deservedly) successful author of the Goosebumps juvenile horror novels.

However…

…if I were going to be in the Big Apple this Friday night, you can bet I would subway up to the Bliss Hall Art Gallery at Bronx Community College (181st Street & University Avenue) at 5 PM to attend the opening reception for The Color of Comics, an exhibit put together by Eugene Adams and my comics colleague Alex Simmons showing the diverse ways that African American and other characters of color have been and are being portrayed in the comics medium.

Unfortunately, there’s no way I can make the drive down to be part of the fun, but at least I’ll be represented at the show by Anna Dellyne Pepper and her son Les from Stuck Rubber Baby. Who knows? This might be the night that Anna Dellyne breaks her pledge never to sing in public again, and I have no doubt that Les will be hitting the bars in Greenwich Village later in the evening.

Last week I wrote about my recording session for an adaptation that may or may not ever happen of The Swimmer With a Rope In His Teeth. Now I want to belatedly take note of the passing last April of the woman from whose imagination the book’s title character sprang.

I’m embarrassed to acknowledge that I didn’t post anything about Jeanne Shaffer’s death at the time I learned about it. I’m terrible at composing quickie obits when friends depart, and in the case of Doc Shaffer, her achievements merit better-rounded tributes that I can provide by folks who knew her better than I ever did.

Jeanne and I may have produced a book together, but our actual face-to-face visits were limited to maybe half-a-dozen. The visits we did have were sprinkled across a span of decades, the first of them occurring while I was an undergraduate drama-speech major at Birmingham-Southern College forty years ago.

1967, specifically. Jeanne, a composer and educator whose professional home base was at Huntington College in nearby Montgomery, envisioned an opera based on an allegory she had dreamed up about a swimmer who undertakes the rescue of an entire population of miserable people. Itching to start coming up with music for it, Jeanne was scouting for a librettist she could team up with.

Someone who knew that I was an aspiring playwright told her I might be interested in having a go at it. Ignoring the fact that I was a 23-year-old greenhorn, she chased me down and pitched the project.

I loved Jeanne’s story and spent a few months trying to nail down a proper approach. But although she was unfailingly encouraging throughout that period, I soon realized that I was in over my head. Just because I had written a few student plays and had listened to every musical comedy cast album in the Birmingham Public Library record collection didn’t automatically confer mastery of the opera libretto form. Chastened by my clear inadequacy, I begged off, and Jeanne graciously freed me from my commitment.

That could have been the end of it, but it wasn’t. Fifteen years later I popped back into Jeanne Shaffer’s life full of excitement about an entirely different way to tell her story. Our heroic swimmer, I told her, could be the protagonist not of an opera but of a comic book story. A story told with silhouettes.

(Why silhouettes? Maybe I’ll get into that another time; this blog entry is about Jeanne Shaffer.)

Now some practitioners of the "fine arts" (and Jeanne’s many musical compositions certainly placed her within those circles) might have looked down their noses at the comics form had they been approached with such an impertinent suggestion. But Jeanne had an adventurous streak and was unburdened by artistic snobbery. She was instantly intrigued by the radical recasting of her idea that I was proposing. Soon she was a certified enthusiast, and her enthusiasm persisted through the more than twenty additional years it took me to complete my adaptation, which mutated early on from a comic book story into a stand-alone book.

If Jeanne had been a more controlling storyteller she might have kept me on a tighter leash as I added my own touches to her fable and revved up its level of satire. But she rolled with the punches, paying me the compliment of trusting me to pretty much have my way with her tale.

Our only creative disagreement during Swimmer’s germination was resolved almost as soon as it appeared. Between the time of her story’s first telling in 1967 and my re-entry into her life in the mid-’80s, Jeanne’s natural generosity of spirit had led her to attach a slightly more hopeful conclusion to her story. I urged her to reconsider. I wanted to confront readers uncompromisingly with her tale’s darker implications and make them deal with it. Our title character may have been propelled by merciful impulses, I acknowledged, but the book itself needed to be merciless.

Mercilessness doesn’t come easily to gracious southern women, but Jeanne saw my point and let me restore her fable’s original ending.

You’d think that our decades-long marathon of creative cooperation and mutual appreciation would have left me more familiar with all aspects of Jeanne Shaffer’s life and personality than it did. Fact is: the ins and outs of Swimmer dominated most of our conversations, whether in person or on the phone. Anything else I’ve learned about her very interesting life history has been absorbed in chance fragments and on the fly.

I did learn that she was a former child actress in the movies. How cool is that? (As "Jeanne Ellis" she played Jeanette MacDonald’s childhood self in Girl of the Golden West.) She toured for five years with Paul Whiteman’s Orchestra beginning when she was eleven — an unusual entry to find in the résumé of a cultured Montgomery Episcopalian, I would say — and I learned just now from her entry in the online listing Classical Composers that she sang with Grace Moore on the Lux Radio Theater. (Hey, my brother and I used to lie awake at night listening to the Lux Radio Theater in Springville during the ’50s. I gather we were twenty years too late to catch one of Jeanne’s performances, unfortunately.)

Jeanne enjoyed a 35-year career as an educator and for thirteen years headed the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at Huntington. And long after her Lux days she became a radio personality again via the Southeastern Public Radio Network, hosting a weekly program on women’s music called Eine Kleine Frauenmusik.

Years ago I asked Jeanne if recordings of her music existed and she directed me to a CD of organ performances by Frances Norbert called Music She Wrote: Organ compositions by Women , which includes selections composed by Jeanne along with the work of others (most of it downloadable from the link above). I’m listening to her contributions to that CD as I write this.

I gather that late in her career Jeanne must have played an important cheerleading role for female composers through her web site WomensMusic.com — a site that Google apparently thinks is still alive but that I’ve had no luck accessing this week, which makes me think it did not survive its founder. (If you have better luck than I did, let me know.)

It doesn’t surprise me that teaching, mentoring, and helping other creative people was a strain that ran through the long, productive life that Jeanne led, since even though I personally experienced only a small sampling of her many facets, being giving was the tack she reflexively took with me. Who was I, anyway? An openly gay cartoonist who had gained his chops in underground comix whom she had previously experienced only as a green college-age playwriting wannabe who couldn’t get his act together, materializing out of nowhere after a decade-and-a-half of non-contact to announce that Hey, you oughta be in comics!

"OK," she said. "Put me in comics."

She continued her pattern of givingness by allowing me a huge degree of creative latitude as I expanded and reshaped her story into something very different in its details from the one she first imagined, but one that still had the same concerns about human folly that she had originally invested it with. At least I hope it did. Jeanne never hinted that it didn’t.

The Swimmer lady is gone now, and I’ll never get a chance to ask her what Jeanette MacDonald was really like. But we came away from our three decades of glancing interactions with a book to show for it that has both of our names on the cover.

How cool is that?!

While admiration for a job well done is appropriate, the cartoonists among us will inevitably be tempted to do our own inelegant riff on the painting should an opportunity present itself — as exemplified by Laura Weinstein’s promotional graphic (at right above) for Lit Graphic: The World of the Graphic Novel, the exhibition of comics art that opened on November 10 at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

To be fair, snobbery hasn’t always been the culprit. Sometimes it’s just been habits of thought. Various of my perfectly open-minded art-loving friends acknowledge that they’ve never felt called upon to give much thought to Rockwell, thus allowing the widespread condescension toward the man’s accomplishments to go unexamined in their minds. One can’t keep up with everything, after all, and the need to worry about George W. Bush’s presidency has more urgency, perhaps, than any need to reevaluate the artistic legacy of a popular illustrator who, it must be said, never suffered from disdain among everyday folks.

Maybe I’ve got a personal agenda at play here. As the target of much (to my mind undeserved) condescension during my Barefootz years, I’ve always felt an affinity for the underrated Norman Rockwell. We schoolyard outcasts have to stick together.

Fortunately, time seems to be rendering a fairer verdict about Rockwell than have some art critics in the past. Decide for yourself. For sheer pleasure in looking at richly imagined pictures that have interesting stories to tell, the Rockwell Museum is the place to beat. And the Museum is assembling a big Rockwell exhibition that’ll soon be touring around the country as well, so original Rockwell paintings may not be as out of reach as you think, even for people who can’t make the drive to western Massachusetts.

I view the man as a master visual storyteller who knew how to portray characters that made ordinariness fascinating. Cynics may bristle at the unabashed "neighborliness" of those images and personalities made famous in the course of the artist’s long partnership with the SatEvePost, but those of us who like telling stories with pictures and aspire to do it well know when we’re seeing a fellow cartoonist in action.

Even if Rockwell’s stories were told on canvases instead of comic book pages, the man was clearly playing in our ballpark.