Category: Comic books & strips

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Licensing Expo of the Weird!

Back in 1996, I was the associate editor of a magazine called Juvenile Merchandising.

(It was double-duty; I was also associate editor of Auto Laundry News, the car wash industry trade magazine. People always laugh when I tell them that. “There’s a trade magazine for the car wash industry?” they ask, and I tell them, “Actually, there were three trade magazines for the car wash industry.” See, the immutable law of trade magazines is that once a journal manages to make a dime in any industry, at least two more publishers will try to chisel in. Stick around for more valuable lessons from the working world.)

That June, one of my assignments at the magazine was to cover the Licensing Expo in New York City. The exhibitors at the expo were license-holders, that is, the companies that owned the rights to various characters and properties, like Godzilla and Winnie-the-Pooh. The attendees were people who wanted to license characters for pens, videogames, bags, and, well, a bazillion other pieces of merchandise.

I had interviews set up with a number of major exhibitors like Sony and Paramount, mainly to talk about how their various characters were being used for different kid’s products, but also to try to get some of their neat giveaways, like Simpsons T-shirts from the Fox pavilion. Those companies had giant exhibit-space to show off their properties, but I also made time to wander among the smaller exhibitors and their lesser-known characters.

On the afternoon of my first day at the show, I was walking down one aisle of minor exhibitors when I saw a small booth displaying Pee-wee Herman dolls and toys, as well as some hyper-grotesque cartoons of Jimbo Comics on the counter. I was floored to discover that one of my favorite cartoonists had a stand at the expo, and I blurted out, “Holy shit! Gary Panter!”

The gentleman behind the counter started with fright. “Do I know you?” he asked.

“No, but I love your comics!” I told him. Gary smiled, relieved. I was 25, and I don’t think I’d ever met a published cartoonist. Plenty of campus comics geeks, sure, and That Guy Who Tried To Draw Like Frank Frazetta, but no one who had made an actual career out of comics.

We talked. About comics. For hours. I cleared out of his booth whenever attendees stopped by. Gary had designed the sets for Pee-Wee Herman’s old stage act, as well as the set of the Pee-Wee’s Playhouse TV show, but I don’t remember what he was trying to license. I guess since he was Brooklyn-based and the exhibit space didn’t cost too much, he gave it a shot.

I was elated both that a great cartoonist would make the time to shoot the breeze with me, and that a great cartoonist was so personable and easy-going. He was the first guy who really impressed upon me the economics of making comics while raising a family. Now that I’m middle-aged and have seen most of my idols take time to do better-paying non-comics work, I think back on that part of our conversation quite a bit.

At one point, I noted how few “mainstream” comics I was reading. “Really,” I said, “the only Marvel books I bought this decade were those monster and horror reprints they did a couple of years ago.”

“The what now?” he asked, a little surprised.

I told him that around 1994, Marvel had reprinted a bunch of old monster comics from the ’50’s in a pair of 4-issue series called Curse of the Weird and Monster Menace. “They’re great! All these old strips by Kirby and Ditko and Heath and even some Wolverton.”

“Really?”

“Yeah! I’ll bring ’em in for you tomorrow, if you want to see!”

And I did (along with my copy of Jimbo, so he could draw a sketch for me). He looked over the comics and asked, “Can I hold onto these?”

“Sure!”

He thanked me, then said, “One thing: you may not get them back for a little while. I, um, have a pathological thing about the post office.”

“. . . Sure . . .”

And then we went back to another 3-hour conversation about comics, Matt Groening, married life, Brooklyn, and whatever else a 25-year-old indie comics geek and a 46-year-old punk-rock cartooning icon have to talk about.

Months and months passed, and I forgot about the comics. Then, one January day, I opened my mailbox and blurted out, “Holy shit! It’s Gary Panter’s envelope!”

(okay, maybe not)

He had decorated just about every inch of the envelope with pastiches of panels from the comics. His style was more suited for the Kirby drawings, but he threw in some good Ditko ones, too. I guess it was a fun, throwaway thing for him, but of course I’ve held onto it for a dozen years.

So that’s my story about meeting Gary Panter. I met him again in 2005 at the Comic-Con in San Diego, but I don’t think he remembered me. I should’ve mentioned the monster comics.

For more conversations and other encounters with cartoonists, writers and artists, visit The Virtual Memories Show podcast!

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Classic Comics Criticism: Langridge Barrier

In honor of the trade paperback release of the most entertaining all-ages comic I’ve read in forever, The Muppet Show: Meet the Muppets (as well as the 2nd ish of The Muppet Show: The Treasure of Peg-Leg Wilson), this week’s Classic Comics Criticism celebrates Muppets writer/artist Roger Langridge!

This is a review I’m kinda proud of. As I mentioned in a few weeks back, I actually got a message from one of the Langridges (Roger, as I recall) about how happy they were to find out that someone actually “got it”. I think this led to my receiving a bunch of Rogers’ mini-comics (like this one) later on, which I’m sure survived my last move in 2003.

If you’re trying to get kids into comics and you were a fan of The Muppet Show, you’ll do just fine by starting ’em off with Roger’s Muppet book. Zoot Suite? Wait till they’re a little older.

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Zoot! Suite • Roger and Andrew Langridge • Fantagraphics Books

Is there something perverse about waiting for the conclusion of a story based on Zeno’s Paradox? If so, then label me a pervert. The story in question, “The Journey Halfway,” from the Langridge Brothers’ Zoot!, began as a relatively light jab at the Kafkaesque workings of the DMV. Over the course of six issues, as Zoot! grew increasingly bizarre (and, one presumes, unsaleable), the story evolved into a traipse through Beckett’s theater, then launched into a near-death experience culled out of Finnegans Wake. And then Zoot! was canceled.

I held out a minor hope that there would be a wrap-up of some kind, a final installment of the Langridge Bros.’ criminally underappreciated comic. That idle optimism faded just around the time the brothers’ work began appearing in various comics from DC. I wrote off Zoot! and “The Journey Halfway” as another casualty of the comics marketplace, buried in the graveyard with Puma Blues and Big Numbers.

Coming across Zoot! Suite, then, was like Hanukkah in March for me. This 80-page collection includes several short humor strips from Zoot! and a previously unpublished coda of sorts, but its main attraction is the “conclusion” to “The Journey Halfway.” After four long years, would Mr. Bodkin at last find out what had become of his impounded and possibly demolished car? Would the meaning of his unnamed friend’s Joycean trip to the afterlife be made clear/ Would the actor playing the lead in Waiting for Godot ever show up at the theater?

Ultimately, of course, no questions are answered. Though Bodkin and his friend seek a shortcut home (through a graveyard, naturally), they never get more than halfway. Despite this pre-set limitation — Bodkin’s friend describes the paradox on the second page of the story — Andrew Langridge (the writer) manages to make this odd story work remarkably well by playing off the absurdity of the premise. The brothers’ work in Art D’Ecco achieved the same trick, beginning with absurdist humor and somehow bringing on authentic, if existential, human feeling.

This is a difficult feat, not only given the logical premises of the story, but also because of Roger Langridge’s strange artwork. It would seem that his cartoonish, at times Muppet-like figures would be suited for the collection’s gag strips but not its 50-page serial. Somehow, Roger manages a full range of expression with these seemingly limited figures, while managing to play up their physical appearance for several sight-gags. Further, with its mixture of tones and ross-hatchings, Zoot! Suite‘s artwork gives its ludicrous figures weight, bringing them into a more arresting visual context.

Besides concluding “The Journey Halfway,” Zoot! Suite also has another previously unpublished work by the Langridges. “I Dreamt I Was In Heaven,” which closes out the book, is a double treat, albeit a befuddling one. Visually, it ties together each of the strange (and, one presumes, unsaleable) cover illustrations for Zoot!. A “roving eye” carries the reader from one absurd setting to the next. For someone who bought the whole run off the shelf, it’s a nice, asbsurdist form of nostalgia, but it would be completely baffling for the (ha-ha) new reader who decides to give this strange comic a shot. Forget I wrote that.

The written story doesn’t pertain in the slightest to the visual one. Instead, it relates the narrator’s dream about an “entrance exam” to get into heaven. The prose is quite graceful and the overall story, in its meandering way, is a delight. In all, the collection showcases bizarre humor (“A Dictionary of Oubliettes” is one of the strangest joke ideas in history) and apparent existential dread via cartooning that would make E.C. Segar proud. While several other strips from Zoot! should have been included (“The Answer,” and “Short Story,” to name a pair), Zoot! Suite comprises a fine survey of a fantastically inventive comic that no one ever read.

Now if they could just get to work wrapping up “The Derek Seals Story” . . .

–Gil Roth, originally published in The Comics Journal #204, May, 1998

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What It Is: 8/24/09

What I’m reading: Moby Dick and The Jew of New York.

What I’m listening to: The Lexicon of Love, by ABC, and Give Up, by The Postal Service.

What I’m watching: Inglourious Basterds at a 1:30 p.m. matinee on opening day. I enjoyed the heck out of it, but it really wasn’t about the Basterds and the baseball-bat-to-the-head marketing of it. I don’t really get the spelling thing, but “Variations on Interrogations” probably wasn’t commercial enough. And, yeah, Christoph Waltz’s performance is fantastic.

What I’m drinking: Cascade Mountain Gin & Q Tonic.

What Rufus is up to: Meeting his cousins in New England! (pictures to come)

Where I’m going: Up to Wappingers Falls next weekend for my friends’ 10th anniversary bash. Rufus will have to deal with another longish car ride (as in, over an hour).

What I’m happy about: Having dinner with an old pal from grad school, getting to see my cousins in CT, and seeing an old college friend, all in the span of 65 (or so) hours.

What I’m sad about: That the position at which I lie on my loveseat in order to rub Rufus’ belly and still read from my laptop is wreaking havoc on my neck/shoulders.

What I’m worried about: That realism isn’t realism.

What I’m pondering: What it means that the only book I’m interested in from either of these previews (1, 2) of next season’s releases is R. Crumb’s Book of Genesis.

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Classic Comics Criticism: Catch as Katchor Can

It’s time for the first official installment of Classic Comics Criticism! By “Classic,” I mean this consists of the reviews I wrote for The Comics Journal back in 1998. Sure, it may sound like a cheap-ass way to make a new recurring feature, but I challenge you, dear reader, to go back to what you wrote 11 years ago and try not to wince!

In that spirit, I’ve only cleaned up typos. I promise I haven’t done anything to rectify my utter lack of critical apparatus (esp. since I doubt I’ve improved on that front in the intervening decade).

Our first CCC isn’t a review of a comic. Rather, it’s a writeup about a lecture/slideshow delivered by Ben Katchor, genius cartoonist. He won a MacArthur grant, so it’s okay to call him a genius. I haven’t seen new comics from him in a while, and I’m hoping he didn’t go the Caden Cotard route and begin working on a mammoth theater piece encompassing his entire life.

(UPDATE: Apparently, he’s gotten into staging opera and “musical tragicomedy,” which may be a worse fate. Oh, and he’s doing a monthly color one-pager for Metropolis magazine! Yay!)

Anyway: I’ve adored Ben Katchor’s work since I first saw it in some alt-paper in the early ’90s, so I was happy to be a TCJ correspondent for his lecture, esp. since it gave me the opportunity to meet him and get a sketch of Julius Knipl and an autograph in my copy of Cheap Novelties: The Pleasures of Urban Decay.

* * *

From TCJ #201, January, 1998:

The Deliberate Tourist

“It’s useless. He doesn’t understand. We speak two different languages which happen to share many of the same words.”

Attending Ben Katchor’s slideshow and lecture, “Cities of the Mind: Street Navigation and Carfare City,” is like taking an extended journey through the cartoonist’s Julius Knipl comic strips. While it’s typically quite difficult to life a comic off the page, Katchor achieves this feat with relative ease. This is a credit to the strength, profundity and humor of Katchor’s writing, which loses nothing in spoken form. The program, approximately 45 minutes in length, includes a monologue on the hidden meaning of the travel industry, an audio-recording of one of Katchor’s “radio-comics” for National Public Radio, plans for a new city in which private and public life become inextricably merged, and an accumulation of place and proper names that seems to have been shaken free from the pages of a Yiddish-to-Greek lexicon. Katchor begins the show with an invocation of sorts, welcoming his audience to Trampoline Hall, a location that crops up infrequently in his strips. The attendees are invited to remember their childhood visit to the hall; Katchor reminds the audience of the sand in the cigarette ashtrays and the indelible impression it made upon them. With accompanying panels from his strips continuously projected behind him, he immediately draws the audience into his fictive city, which is always New York, no matter how different the names are.

The first half of the lecture discusses the importance of remaining a tourist in one’s own city. The speaker raises to epiphany the moment of approaching an intersection from an unfamiliar direction, a concept that informed the entire evening. Progress and man’s reaction to it are the basis for most of the jokes and the false histories.

I don’t mean to treat the program as a serious lecture. Still less do I want the speaker to be mistaken (necessarily) for Ben Katchor; the man who vigorously inveighed against the travel industry and the Golyak Travel Agency in particular that evening bore little resemblance to the soft-spoken, perpetually rumpled individual who afterward signed copies of his books and drew head-shots of Julius Knipl looking at something in the middle distance. First and foremost, the lecture is an entertainment, filled with Katchor’s strange characters, places and products. Harold Alms, impromptu speaker, is mentioned, as is the American Tapeworm Sanctuary over on Purkinje Island. And Katchor’s delivery on most of his jokes was impeccable; attendees belly-laughed during much of the lecture.

katch

I’m curious, though, as to how the lecture has been received elsewhere in the country. Katchor has performed the lecture for more than a year in such locations as the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., the National Yiddish Book Center near Amherst, MA, the St. Louis History Museum, the KGB Bar in New York and several bookstores around the city. Its humor seems particularly New York-oriented, but perhaps it transcends this through its ties to Yiddish culture. The flagship of the “Julius Knipl Syndicate” is the Forward, a Jewish weekly formerly published in Yiddish, and both Amherst and St. Louis have strong Jewish populations.

The funniest part of the lecture is its “intermission.” Before the second half of the lecture, Katchor plays an audio-recording of “The Directory of the Alimentary Canal,” a strip he adapted for NPR. The “radio-strip” revolves around a defunct weekly directory that enumerated the gastrointestinal condition of every resident of the city. The strip’s narrator discusses the importance of such a directory, how restaurant and theater openings hinged on this information. During the strip, Julius Knipl attempts to reach various leads over the phone, only to learn that each of them is “indisposed” at present. Throughout, a voice-over reads from the directory: “Eagle, M. 104 Moly . . . Aerophagy, colitis, sluggish bowel . . . Eaglet, T. 36 Samson . . . Proctalgia, fugax, gas, diarrhea . . .” Voicer were provided by Jerry Stiller, “Professor” Irwin Corey, and others. Evidently, this was the last Julius Knipl “radio-strip” that was produced. Some listeners sent outraged e-mails to NPR, protesting the gastric extravaganza. Still, Katchor reported that the network received a record number of e-mails calling for more episodes when the series ended.

The second half of the lecture is adapted more or less from “The Evening Combinator” serial from Katchor’s most recent collection. The speaker presents his plans for a city designed to resemble the area around an elevated subway line. However, in Carfare City, the electric streetcar will run directly through residents’ apartments at 15-minute intervals. This combination of transit and private life creates a state of “transportational flux,” in which “modern man never has to go home . . . he can travel between ‘home’ and the ‘world,’ but never have to reach either end point.” By running a streetcar through the apartments, says the speaker, “the mysteries of private life become the details of a passing landscape.

Carfare City’s raison d’etre is the moment in which a commuter returns home and fails to recognize it. “For a moment,” says the speaker, “you’re happy to  be in this strangely familiar place with its enamel sign bearing your name in two-foot-high letters.” It is the epiphany of the deliberate tourist. The silly but strangely evocative place-names in the city serve the same purpose for Katchor; though the settings are derived from reality, the act of renaming allows the artist himself to remain a tourist.

In all, Katchor’s lecture is a profoundly entertaining program. While it probably has little appeal to those who aren’t fans of Julius Knipl, it might make Katchor’s weekly strips a bit more comprehensible. Katchor himself is a delightful speaker and his question-and-answer session following the program revealed interesting facets of Katchor’s work process without wrecking one’s enjoyment of the strips.

One further note: as enjoyable as the lecture was, the audience was a story in itself. As opposed to a traditional comics-related event, Katchor’s lecture was attended by elderly couples, orthodox Jews, middle-aged men in suits, and only the occasional twenty-something comics reader (like your humble correspondent). Prior to the lecture, a number of attendees discussed the significance of the Julius Knipl comics in their lives. Several recounted their “first time,” reciting the text of the strips verbatim. The reverence in their voices offered up some (although probably deluded) hope for a mature comics readership.

–Gil Roth © 1998

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Seeya next week with more Classic Comics Criticism!

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We’ll 0-fer Have Paris

A few weeks ago, I ran the 0-fer test on the first volume of the new Paris Review Interviews series. Since I’m utterly unimaginative, let’s go check out Volume 2 and see which literary titans I’ve managed to avoid completely!

  • Graham Greene (1953) — I think I tried reading The End of the Affair, because it inspired a good album by the Golden Palominos
  • James Thurber (1955) — I’m sure I read something by him, although nothing leaps to mind
  • William Faulkner (1956) — read three of his novels and some short stories. And I saw Barton Fink
  • Robert Lowell (1961) — 0-fer
  • Isaac Bashevis Singer (1968) — 0-fer
  • Eudora Welty (1972) – 0-fer, but I remember she dated Krusty the Klown once on an episode of The Simpsons
  • John Gardner (1979) — read his Grendel and his adaptation of Gilgamesh
  • Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1981) — read him
  • Philip Larkin (1982) — read 1 or 2 of his poems, after Grant Morrison referred to him while promoting a Batman comic book
  • James Baldwin (1984) — 0-fer
  • William Gaddis (1987) — I finished two of his novels, gave up on a third, plan to read another one someday, and once called him before I’d started reading his work, because I managed to find his phone number on a database
  • Harold Bloom (1991) — read a bunch of his criticism, own a copy of his novel, The Flight To Lucifer (but haven’t read it or the book it’s a sequel of, David Lindsay’s A Voyage To Arcturus), and also spoke to him on the phone
  • Toni Morrison (1993) — read her; I oughtta go back and see if I still like Song of Solomon
  • Alice Munro (1994) — 0-fer
  • Peter Carey (2006) — 0-fer
  • Stephen King (2006) — I’ve read one article by him that was adapted from On Writing; otherwise, I’m embarrassed to say that I’ve never read anything by him

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The Blood Club

On Monday, I wrote that I was going to launch a recurring Thursday feature reprinting mean-spirited reviews I wrote for The Comics Journal back in 1998. It was going to be Klassik Komiks Kritikism, but my lawyers have informed me that title could be construed as a sign that I’m a member of the Bloods, like this guy (I thought he was a member of the Inks, but hey):

So beginning next Thursday, get ready for your Classic Comics Criticism Post! Now no one can mistake me for a member of any gang, except maybe the former Soviet Union.

(Alternate title for this series: How To Get Bob Fingerman Pissed Off At Me All Over Again.)

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The Nostalgia Journal

Last week, I mentioned that I once kinda maligned the great cartoonist Richard Sala. A commenter who professed to be a fan of both of us asked me for the story. I was a bit suspicious, given the fact that I don’t believe I have any fans, but hey.

In 1998, I wrote a number of short reviews for The Comics Journal. I’d struck up an e-mail friendship with the editor at the Journal, the oft-mentioned Tom Spurgeon, a few years earlier, and he invited me to contribute to the new short-review section. He probably realized early in our correspondence that my longer-form writing tended to lose its way, contradict itself and otherwise become unintelligible, while my snarkiness, witticisms and occasional insights were best limited to a 150-word maximum. I wish I realized that.

The August 1998 ish of TCJ ran my short review of Mr. Sala’s comic Evil Eye #1:

I was under the impression that this comic was going to be sort of an Eightball to the Lloyd Llewellyn of Sala‘s past work. In fact, after his 17-part, 200-page Chuckling Whatsit serial and subsequent collection, I was sure he’d move in a new direction, that he’d say, “Enough with the conspiracy melodramas. Enough with the mysterious stalkers, ritual killings and overlapping cabals!” Alas, that’s not the case. Evil Eye features a new serial replete with the B-move trappings and labyrinthine plots of The Chuckling Whatsit. Don’t get me wrong: Sala’s expressionistic artwork is more delightfully creepier than ever. It’s just the story is utterly stale. The inside cover of Evil Eye promises “thrills! chills!! and shock!!!,” but Sala’s delivered each of these so unerringly in recent years that I’d love to see him tackle a different milieu.

This was harsh. Not as harsh as some of the things I wrote for TCJ in those days, because it does include my genuine affection for Sala’s art and writing. It’s just that I thought that Mr. Sala had run his course with stories of secret societies, severed hands, fortune-tellers and ape-like killers, and was hoping he’d pursue a new direction with his comics.

Just a few months later (November 1998), TCJ ran a lengthy interview with Mr. Sala, conducted by Darcy Sullivan. Discussing the recurring “components” (Mr. Sullivan’s word) in his stories, Mr. Sala remarked,

Many artists actually have a specific vocabulary of obsession. Look at Hitchcock: he told very similar stories over and over again, and those are the ones that people love. When he tried to do something different, a screwball comedy or a period piece, people just didn’t accept it. As an artist, your goal should be to recognize your own personal obsessions, your own personal vocabulary, and use it. There was a review of my work where a guy said, “Enough with the mysterious killers and secret societies.” That’s like saying, “I’d sure like Peanuts a lot better if it didn’t have those kids in it.” I mean, that’s what I do. If you don’t like it, read something else.

It’s possible that I wasn’t “a guy,” because of the interval between publication of my review and the interview, but it sure sounds like what I wrote. Now, the point I was trying to make was that Dan Clowes’ Lloyd Llewellyn comic was a young man’s work in a narrow(ish) genre, where the next stage of his career — Eightball — was a quantum leap in terms of sophistication, humor, experimentation, and storytelling. One major difference was Mr. Clowes’ use of stories that directly address/engage the reader — like Art School Confidential, I Hate You Deeply (and its followup, I Love You Tenderly), Chicago, and Grist for the Mill — in which “Dan Clowes” or a stand-in plays the role of (usually irate) narrator. (This wasn’t the only thing I dug about Eightball, but it felt like a significant move away from LlLl.)

What I didn’t really get back then is that not everyone is Dan Clowes (or Pete Bagge). For Mr. Sala, all those recurring themes, locations and components are as direct as he can get. As he put it in that interview, explaining why he’s not interested in characterization:

What I’m writing are fever dreams. One person thrashing about in a world he doesn’t understand. Don’t bother searching for anything resembling a fully-rounded character. Don’t bother looking for any situation that has anything to do with reality. In other words, characterization is subordinate to plot and atmosphere. I’ll sacrifice characterization in a second for atmosphere. I don’t care what the character had for breakfast.

I mean, these stories are basically extensions of my personality. People use to ask me, “Why don’t you do autobiographical comics?” And I would say, “I’ve been doing them. These are my autobiographies.”

A few years after writing my review, I read over my old Sala comics — Thirteen O’Clock, Hypnotic Tales, Black Cat Crossing — and found them much richer than I recalled. Sure, his usual coterie of storytelling elements cropped up again and again, but I saw them now as much subtler symbols, not simply of the mystery-at-hand, but of the roles of mystery and mysticism in the psyche. Of course, I can’t discount the possibility that agents of a secret society had sneaked into my home and replaced the earlier comics with new, stranger ones, but it’s more likely that I’d grown to understand the role of these personal, stylized components to Mr. Sala’s storytelling.

So I realized that my complaint about Mr. Sala’s lack of “development” was like asking Edgar Allan Poe why he didn’t write Last of the Mohicans; it’s not the story he was here to write. Moreover, to continue the cartoonist comparison, Dan Clowes soon outgrew the “personal narrator” device and went on to write some remarkable comics during the past 15 years.

It’s a good thing I didn’t take Mr. Sala’s advice — “If you don’t like it, read something else” — because I’ve gotten a great deal of joy out of his later work. Even if Delphine reads a little too quickly for a book that took almost 4 years to serialize. (I know, I know: Delphine is as much about the textures as it is about the story.)

Now go immerse yourself in some of Mr. Sala’s comics. I’m waiting for Cat Burglar Black.

2D6E7C7C-989A-4463-A9EBA11169DA13DF

Cover art to Richard Sala’s Black Cat Crossing.

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Reading over my old reviews as I prepared to write this post, I realized that they really need their own forum, so I’m planning to run “Klassik Komiks Kritikism” every Thursday, bringing you the best of my 11-years-old meanness. Because you’re worth it.

To be fair, I also wrote some positive reviews. In fact, one of my most gratifying moments came when one of the Langridge Bros. mentioned that my longer review of Zoot Suite meant a lot to them at a time when one of them was ready to get out of comics, because it told them that someone out there “got it.” Sure, it sounded to me like the episode of Cheers where Cliff appears on Jeopardy!, but I was happy for the flattery. So I’ll run my good reviews, too.