Focus 580; Cartoons

By calling and making a pledge if you have never supported the station before financially in the past we hope that you would take the opportunity right now to do that. The number for you to call is 2 4 4 9 4 5 5. There are some very nice volunteers who are waiting to take the call. It will take a moment or two and it is very important to the future of the station. I was happy to be listening over the weekend to the program This American Life and Ira the host of the show was talking with somebody who is an expert on public radio fundraising and he said that they had discovered that it took between five and seven years of public radio listening before someone was willing to support the station. Now I know there are people who are listening this morning who have been listening for more than five years or seven years maybe even more if they've been listening for a long time and you're not a friend or a supporter. We hope that you would right now give us a call 2 4 4 9 4 5 5 and show your support for this radio station because after all that's where they are. The energy as it were in a manner of speaking that's where the energy comes that keeps the place strong.

Well we're also pleased to welcome back here to the program a fellow who's been with us before. His name is Robert Harvey. He is a cartoon historian also has been a cartoonist himself. He's the author of a number of books one the art of the funnies and aesthetic history another the art of the comic book. And there are others besides that books that take a look at the history of the newspaper comic strip history of the comic book as an art form. He's also written some books about particular cartoonists. And if you're interested in cartoons and cartooning you should go out to the bookstore to the library and look for Bob's books because I think that you will find the very interesting and he is a guy that knows an awful lot about both these subjects more than anybody I've ever met. So if you're interested in asking questions you want to talk about your favorites or whatever you'd like to talk about that has to do with cartoons and cartooning you can call in and come here to the show.

No one will grab you on the way and shake you down for a pledge of course we hope people will pledge but you don't have to do that to call. If you want to call in. It's the same as always Same deal as always. 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 and toll free 800 to 2 2 9 4 5. Well thanks very much for being here again. Well I'm glad to be here David thank you for having me aboard. And I guess part of the reason is you call up the other day and said Hey you guys it's cartoon Appreciation Week. There you go. Wouldn't it be a good time to talk about that as I said well yeah in fact now I'm sure this is something that some cartoonist cooked up. Yes or you know Brianna there's no question that the cartoon is scripted up in fact it was cooked up by the National Cartoonist Society probably about 10 years ago and they picked what is roughly the first week in May because in the middle of that week. Or sometime in that period is May 5th May 5th is cartoonist day and they pick May 5th this cartoonist day because that's the day in 1895

that the first full color cartoon of the yellow kid appeared in The New York World and the yellow kid is often cited as the first American comic strip the Yellow Kid was not the first American comic strip it wasn't a comic strip it was a big humorous drawing didn't take the strip form at all and it wasn't first but it was very successful commercially. It sold newspapers on the corners of New York streets like nobody's business. And so it established. The newspaper cartoon as a commercial entity that newspaper editors should take advantage of in order to increase their circulation. So any the week of the weekend in May that embraces May 5th is cartoon appreciation week and that year it is this year it is the second today through Sunday. And as it happens for the first time. It also

embraces what's called Free Comic Book Day on Saturday. You can go to either one of the local comic bookstores and they have a vast supply of comic books that they're going to give away for free. Pretty good deal. It's a way of introducing a new reading public to a literary form that has matured a great deal in the past 10 or 15 years and about which most people still think is sort of juvenile trash but it's actually achieved a great deal of maturity in recent years and is worth a look. That's that is something that might surprise people if what they're thinking of is the comics of their youth. But the fact is that that now we even have a new term for it we call it now a graphic novel. Yes. To perhaps get across the idea that the the the the verbal content the story part is more advanced. And also the quality of the artwork is missed.

Yeah advanced the term graphic novel actually applies to. What some people call that the long form comic book and a typical comic book is a thirty two or forty pages something like that and the story is about 20 or 22 pages long rest of it's advertising but so that's the comic book but if you take and quadruple the number of pages so you're looking at 100 pages or 300 pages. Then they prefer to use the term graphic novel. The term was actually invented in the 60s by a fan of comics who felt that comic book was not an adequate term. And of course he was right because Comic books are very often not comic they're not humorous and they're not books. So what are they. And he decided graphic novel was a good a good alternative. Originally he applied it to comic books because there were no long form comic books at that time. And then later on 10 years or so later we

began having these long form books drawn as as comics. And the term graphic novel began to be applied to almost any kind of comic book that had hard covers. Well there are some places where they have real big comic cultures and I guess the place that I really think of first and foremost is Japan where there where a wide range of comics is the Japanese where are produced. And there are some that clearly are for children there are some that clearly are adults because they have high levels of violence and some of them are in fact flat out pornographic. So there's a very wide ranging range of stuff and so that there is a fairly significant adult readership of these kind of things and in Japan. Yeah and they the manga in Japan they look like New York City phone books I mean they're huge voluminous tomes. People read I'm going on a high speed trains back and forth to wherever their

place of work is and they read them very rapidly there isn't much verbal content in these things. And they can read. And I read a statistic on it one time which I've forgotten but in order in order for this statistic to be true you have to imagine somebody holding this book in his hand and turning the pages almost as fast as he can. That's how quickly they read them. That may be why they're so big and why they have so many pages. I have to have that as comic reading in the United States penetrated that much into the older age ranges or is that pretty much still we're talking about people who are under say 18 years old. Well and I think that there are now a good deal more people over 18 who are reading comic books and graphic novels than there used to be. And in fact you can find American English translations of these manga books in bookstores. Borders and

Barnes and Noble places like that they have now. Twenty or thirty or forty feet of book shelves devoted to these. One of the things that the publishers the American publishers of Japanese manga have discovered is that manga translated into English. There's a particular genre of manga in in Japan. It's written with a teenage girl in mind as a reader and those have been translated into marketed in this country with great success reaching a female audience that for the most part has ignored comic books throughout most of the history of that medium. I guess that's true I suppose I would think of a primal. Maybe this is my childhood experience that that was a coloring book or a boy's thing. Yeah and that I suppose that there are comics that have been created here in my state there are comics that have been created with the idea that girls would read them but it's it never it doesn't strike me as being something that

particularly would have been a thing that girls would have done. No and I don't know why that is. Back in the 50s and maybe in the 40s there was a comic book called Katie Keene. And the big feature in Katy Keene was that the costumes that this girl wore were designed by the readers of the comic book and you'd read in the fine print under each picture of her different costume. Who designed it and where they lived. It was a big exciting thing but I don't think it started a big readership of the comics comic books by teenage girls. Not even the Archie comics my girls when they were growing up they read Archie comics but that was about the only ones they were interested in. Well questions are certainly welcome here in this part of focus 580 Our guest is Robert Harvey he's a cartoon historian and has authored a number of books looking at the history of the comic book and of the comic strip as published in the newspaper. He's also written about particular cartoonists and knows an awful lot about the subject to both.

The State of the art as it is and what has been in the past so questions are certainly welcome. The number if you'd like to call in 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 we do also have that toll free line and that is good anywhere that you can hear us 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5. One of the things I thought you might have a little something to say about is the maybe generally is the comic book or comic strip as inspiration for film and you know we've we've talked about this before and this is the kind of thing that this is this is not new. This is not new at at all. I guess I think about it though just because recently there has been yet another movie based on I think probably what deserves the status of the graphic novel. Frank Miller's Sin City where in fact the person who created the movie went to some links to try to reproduce the look of the comic in the film. So it's so it has a very

stark. It's mostly black and white yes with some very bold swatches of color. You know yeah paste it in and really tried and tried pretty hard I guess to make the movie look like the economic. He was he was I think they were very successful. What was his name. ROBERT RODRIGUEZ I think yes. And he forfeited his membership in the Director's Guild because he wanted Frank Miller the cartoonist who created the the graphic novels that the movie is based on wanted him is given credit is co-director and the cartoon or the Director's Guild didn't approve of that so Rodriguez just dropped his membership and made Frank Miller co director anyway. The comic book or the graphic novel that Miller did was used virtually as a storyboard for the movie and it was a startling success. If you are to measure the success by the extent by the fidelity of the movie to the visual images of the comic book Frank

Miller's Sin City Comic book when it first started it looked to me as if he was having just a great deal of fun. Trying to obliterate as much of every one of his drawings as he could with heavy black solid ink so that you would look at a picture in his graphic novel and you would see White's highlights. Instead of seeing the whole figure you would see a figure that would be almost solid black because it was standing with its back to the light source for example an end for the first two or three issues of this graphic novel. He just got progressively darker and darker or blacker and blacker as he ladled in the ink. It was a kind of a fun game. To see just how much he could obliterate and still have enough visual left to tell the story. Well he subsequently backed away a little bit from that and he's varied the texture of his drawings a little bit and so

on but in the meantime he still has produced a startling black and white imagery and it was that which Rodriguez and he reproduced on the screen. And it was very successful in that respect. And of course that's what the reviewers landed on. They they regarded the movie as a work of art rather than as a narrative. Adventure and expect that there were some of that who who actually failed at that point you said well it may be interesting to look at and maybe faithful to the style of the artist who created it but aside from that I think a lot of people said I don't think is a particularly great movie. Yeah I agree I don't think I mean I think that there were a lot of people who thought that it was a very fragmented narrative because it was pieced together out of three separate stories from Frank Miller's work. We I think we have a caller here we're getting ready to include in the program again I just want to make sure the people who are

listening know that here on focus we welcome your questions and comments like always. The number here in Champaign Urbana 3 3 3 9 4 5 5. That's for champagne Urbana. Folks we do also have a toll free line and that means it would be a long distance call for you. Use that number and we'll pay for the call that is eight hundred to 2 2 9 4 5 5. And I think we have someone here in our band on line number one. Well you know you go ahead with a question. Yes sure. I know. A question about Classics Illustrated comics you know they used to have them years ago and they were just wonderful. But they they went out of print and they would come back as little booklets. And I'm trying to get them because they teach Spanish and they they were in many different languages. They're just wonderful for teaching foreign languages. I suppose you're right they're not published anymore of course. Well and if you if you try to find them you can probably find them individual titles for

sale on the Internet one way or another but they're very expensive. Yes you're going to pay a collectors fee for them. There was a comic book publishing company about 15 years ago that tried to produce modern versions of classic comics trying to remember the name of the company I think is called first publishing or something like that. And they did four or five of them. They were very good. And they were much the production values were much higher than the classic comics of the or classic illustrated I think they were called of the 1940s. They were produced on slick paper with high production values and the coloring was painted rather than flat overlay like the Sunday funnies. But they don't they're not out there anymore. You know unfortunately where do one find out information about the history of them. You know when I was in Norway I used them to learn weeds. Oh right. Yes. Well it's funny you mention that. When I was in the

Navy 40 years ago. It was a good constituent of the Navy. They came from the Philippines and because of the special relationship between the United States in the Philippines at the time way they could serve in the in the Navy and they all served in the officers ward rooms and they studied for advancement. They were given because they didn't speak English all that way there. Their textbooks for studying for advancement were all comic books. The irony is that when they took tests the tests were regular multiple choice tests they weren't comic books at all. So. So basically you just cannot give me a reference on history of the Classics Illustrated who the guys were did it really well. Yeah great. But you don't have any reference. You know I think the best thing is to check the Internet. There is no well there are probably a couple of books out there on Classics Illustrated and the comic book What's it called Price

Guide which is a fat paperback that comes out once a year it has a section on Classics Illustrated. Well thanks a lot. All right well thanks for the call. I guess here we're talking about things like comic book versions of The Three Musketeers elastics of world of Moby Dick I don't know if that lame is I don't know if those things were made in the comic but but that sort of thing. Yeah probably if you're the right age you indeed will remember these things and so that they don't exist anymore. No no and I'd you'd think there'd be a market and of course this first comics outfit gambled on that didn't make it. I was talking about the quality of the reproduction of comic books are all much higher now than they were back in the 30s 40s and 50s. When they were for color pulp magazines they're now almost all printed on slick paper. The color is applied either by water coloring. So that it's like a painting or it's done by computer. So you have a shaded

color with a tonal variations and different hues of the same colors and so has a very elegant coloring. Sometimes the quality of the artwork exceeds the quality of the stories. But that's maybe the way it should be in a visual medium I don't know. Let's talk with someone else in Champaign this is line two. Oh yes and subject. Two quick questions. You know I did get up. The old Mandrake the Magician comic strips used to be in the Sunday News Gazette. Yeah. Oh boy. No I don't. There was there was a lot in the sixties Somebody produced a little magazine that reprinted a few sequence of Mandrake the Magician but he hasn't been widely reprinted and apart from getting you know newspaper clips of the strips

which is the only way I can think of other then to find a book that reprints some substantial portion of the continuity. Apart from that that's I don't know of any any other way to lay your hands on it and I don't know if either any sources of comic strip clippings. Let's see there's an outfit in California called Star land and you could look that up on the computer I think. Or on the Internet. And they have quite a library of a clipped comic strips an old newspaper comic sections and they probably have some Mandrake the Magician. Well that'd be fun I'll try that second question is any possibility that Calvin will ever come back. The the syndicate that sold Calvin and Hobbes Universal Press they periodically I suppose once every six months they ask. Bill Waterson if he's going

to come back and he steadfastly refuses you might be interested to know though that in September they're going to publish the complete Calvin and Hobbes. They're going to they're going to reprint all 10 years of the strip in a two or three volume slipcase Edition like they did to the far side a year or so ago. Well that's good to know Appreciate it. All right thanks for the call well we'll be happy to take some other questions here for a guest cartoonist Henri and Bob Harvey in a second here. Jack Brighton has slipped back into the studio and once again we want to take a moment here to remind you just how important your financial support is for W while radio. As I think I said a little bit earlier one of the things that I really enjoy about doing the program here on public radio is I can have these long luxurious conversations with people and don't have to take any breaks not not breaks for commercials not breaks for anything and that is really a great luxury and only in public radio do

you get a chance to do it. Certainly you can't do that commercial radio. But if we can't do that if not for the support of listeners that sort of the bottom line check Brighton is our producer emeritus focused 580 still substituting as host and as a guy nowadays who is really in charge of our presence on the Internet. I guess I'll mention the phone number to begin with. Good idea ledge please call with your pledge right now that's what we have to get you to do this week 2 4 4 9 4 5 5 2 right now on this Monday morning to make us feel really good and get things really rolling too. And you know it's funny because you used the word luxury in describing the time that you have to spend talking with guess it's really true there's really nowhere else on the dial on television on radio I mean where else can you actually do that. I mean public radio is the only place where that happens. And the public radio model is that you know we ask people to voluntarily chip in instead of sending you a bill we don't send you the

cable bill or the phone bill we don't have a bill that we can just send you. But we do have to come on the year every once in a while couple times a year and ask you to make a phone call 2 1 7 2 4 4 9 4 5 5 to make a pledge to help us keep this thing going. Because after all it is it's only a luxury if you know there is no way to pay for it I mean we have to pay the bills. So please do your part right now you're listening to the show. We ask you to keep it going to 1 7 2 4 4 9 4 5 5 and maybe Riley as our panel's editor in our pledge center. We had a few calls earlier but what's going on now. Well the phones are a little bit quiet right now so we like to hear from a few folks let me give you a suggested level to give us a call at about $40 that's our basic membership level that entitles you to patterns our monthly programming guide and also helps provide support for these great programs like focus 580. And we also have a special going on now if you're a student or on a fixed income. You can chip in. 12:50 that's

half of the senior student membership in the McDonnell chip in the other 12 50 and then you'll become offended every while and get the program goes well so give us a call 2 1 7 2 4 4 9 4 5 5. All right thanks very much we'll talk with you both again at the end of the program. Once again I should introduce our guest Robert Harvey. He's a cartoon historian he's been writing about cartooning ever since the early nineteen seventies has been a freelance cartoonist himself and has worked in all of the cartooning venues comic strips editorial cartoons comic books and magazine cartoons He's member of a lot of the cartooning societies including the National Cartoonists Society. He's authored several books that look at the history of cartoons and cartooning. And let me just mention three titles the art of the funniest and aesthetic history the art of the comic book. Same subtitle and also one children of the yellow kid. So one way or another the books look at the history of the comic strip as it appears in the newspaper. Also of the comic

book and he has a website as well if you're a comic afficionado or you're interested in keeping up on what's happening with this art form you can take a look at his website which is RC Harvey dot com. And I mean yes yes it's going to have another color. We do have a couple callers. And let me give you the telephone number again 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 for Champaign Urbana toll free 800 to 2 2 9 4 5. To the phones here once again we have someone in champagne. They are next in line one. Oh yeah I did a little bit late so I'm not sure if you mentioned it but have you ever seen a copy of the miraculous journey of Muhammad the Mirage nama. Don't say that again. This is ever seen a copy of the miraculous journey of Muhammad also known as the Mirage nominate. No I haven't. It's like an eastern Turkish comic book that came out and like I think of the 14 hundreds propensity based on the translation there was a

translation of the Raj Nama which was translated into Latin and French and which is probably the source of Dantes Divine Comedy. My goodness you know I haven't heard of it. I wish I had. Well you probably can still get on the used book market. It's called the miraculous journey about how it can give the ISBN if you want what you know. Yeah we didn't owe 8 0 7 6 0 8 6 8 8. OK thank you very much. Well that's that gives it one of the questions I was thinking about asking earlier was what what would anybody say was the earliest example of a comic book. It sounds like maybe that might be yet. Well. That's. What is it. The answer to that question always depends on how you define a comic book. And I.

You can you can start almost endless discussions with people like me by approaching it from the point of view of oh well what is it you know and define it and so on. I think of cartooning or comics generally as being a species of pictorial narrative. And. A lot of children's books are pictorial narrative pictorial narrative can be wordless. Pictures that tell stories. They can be pictures that are accompanied by a text beneath them which describes most children's books. But in my view pictorial narratives do not become comics until the words move into the picture frame. And usually that happens when the words when speech balloons appear and words start appearing in speech balloons. But generally speaking in my view

comics are those pictorial narratives which blend words and pictures to make a kind of sense that neither the words nor the pictures make alone without the other. And that distinguishes comics from other kinds of pictorial narratives Now this miraculous journey of Muhammad is that the name of that. I think that's with OK. I haven't seen that so I have no idea but it sounds like it's very old. There are a lot of pictorial narratives that go back hundreds and thousands of years. So the medium is scarcely new. If you think of pictorial narrative as the as the general category under which comics fall. Well when was the first speech below and when does the first speech balloon appear. Oh my. I don't know. They have appeared as early as well you could find them in the cartoons of James Gilray 1780s or 1790s in that in that period you can find them before

then I'm sure. In isolated instances. The modern use of the speech balloon in which the balloon appeared is a little bit more elaborately constructed visual device than just a puff of smoke coming out of somebody's mouth started about 1500 in a comic strip called Happy Hooligan. And I like to think that's the the first modern use of the speech balloon. It's a matter of convenience it's like saying the first motion picture is the one that they charged admission prices for. I mean there are our film students who say that you know I mean that's it's a convenient benchmark to distinguish movies as a experimental phenomenon from movies as a commercial enterprise. So by the same token I say the modern comic strip began with Happy Hooligan and speech balloons.

Well let's talk with some other people here let's talk with somebody in Indiana on our toll free line line for right here. Hello. When City come on I've sort of reminiscing I stopped reading comic books I think it's around 8 so this means that the comic book I'm asking about is from the 40s for sure and all I can remember is the fellow would recites a formula and what's in the formula and it was a square root sign but at the time I was six and seven I did know that and really mesmerized me. I remember going outside to sneakily and trying to repeat it to see if all of a sudden I could run six thousand miles an hour and I was wondering if you have to know the name of that character. I don't know if it was a full comic book maybe in one of the comic books they had two or three different stories within it you know. I just thought perhaps you might be able to come off topic that way. Well sounds like the flash. I think he achieved high speed by reciting a

formula. Yeah OK well thanks. Doesn't ring any bells at all but that's the fellow undoubtedly remember what he looked like did he have a kind of a Mercury uniform. No I just vaguely remember him you know and it just sort of like anecdotal information I vaguely remember him having regular clothes then when he said the formula he had a different set of clothes you know. I guess Fleiss. Yeah well he was he was a high speed superhero that was his power was fast it was speed. Yeah you could you know. Or Superman could outrun boats but he could go faster. Oh yeah yeah. OK well thanks I'll try to look up on the internet cause I just sort of bring back some old memories. Oh yeah days for sure. And. That's about it. OK well thanks for the go. Let's go on here we have someone listening in Flora Illinois line number one. Hello. Well Mr. Harvey it's a pleasure to talk to you. Well thank you. I wonder if you would comment on one of my very favorite artists relatively new

and one of the works that he did that I just think blows me away and that is Alex Ross and the work that he did called Kingdom Come. Alex Ross Alex Ross Yes OK he's the guy that does full painted comics if I remember exactly. Yeah. I don't know very much about him except that he's probably the most successful of the people who try to paint comics. The difficulty with painting comics is that you don't use outlining the black lines to contain the color so you have to be a very accomplished artist in order to draw pictures with full color and no outlines and still have the smallest versions of these pictures be decipherable by a reader. But he's awfully good at it and he's done for five. The graphic novel kinds of things are. Two or three of them or one was about

Superman one about Batman want about Wonder Woman and forgot the names of the individual ones but I mean the individual titles but each one of them celebrates that character. He's awfully good he uses real models for these characters so that he can draw them draw the faces in different from different points of view and still retain the recognizable features. Well I'm kind of an amateur artist and what amazes me is I look at one of the panels on just one of the pages and I think my gosh it takes me a month right to sit down and do this. And this guy is doing basically a full volume of work that you know is page after page after page. And what I was wondering is how long does it take somebody with his type of talent. A graphic novel which is affectively for books. Yeah well I don't know I can estimate of course. But I would think that he probably works on two or three pages at the same time bringing each one of them up to various stages

of completion as he goes. So it's a real. Production conscious effort. He has to produce this material over a period of very short time relatively speaking. But I don't know how how long he takes. I know that he does it faster than you think because he couldn't produce this kind of work if if every individual panel were being treated like the Mona Lisa or something. Well I often said that if I had his talent without his speed I probably would spend a lifetime trying to put together just what one of his works is because it just it blows me away. Yeah that. And if you're aware of any of it that the attention to detail and some of the panels It almost looks like a photograph especially when it works in the light in the shade. And you just you look at it and you say my gosh it almost looks like somebody did photography. Yes right. That's right. Exactly. Well thank you very much. You're welcome. Well thank you other questions are welcome we're talking here this morning in this part of focus with

cartoon historian Robert Harvey. You have questions. The number here in Champaign Urbana 3 3 3 9 4 5 5. We do also have a toll free line good anywhere that you can hear us 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5. I might say a word or two about editorial cartooning which is undergoing one of its periodic A. Periods of crisis. There are well editorial cartoonists generally speaking believe that they're an endangered species and that their number is steadily decreasing and in fact that's probably true. At one time the turn of the last century that is when we got to be in 1900 there were a lot more daily newspapers and most of them many of them had a staff editorial cartoonist. In fact they had several artists on staff because half tone photography had not or have tone pictures had not

achieved any kind of universal representation in newspapers and so the only visuals were produced by artists and frequently those visuals included editorial cartooning or political cartoons. So there were probably. Well there are at at the turn of the century there were something like twenty two hundred daily newspapers and there were probably at least every other one of them had a staff cartoonist who did editorial cartooning but that was in a in an environment that was quite different. When you get to the 1950s. Many authorities believe there were somewhere around 270 or 300 editorial cartoonists. That is people who work full time drawing editorial cartoons for the editorial page of a newspaper in the 19 in the late 1990s. Someone did a careful count and came up with about one hundred fifty And today we're down to about 100. The reason for this evaporation there are a couple of them one of them is that the number of daily newspapers is steadily shrinking. And the other one is

that editorial cartoonists many of them are now syndicated so an editorial page editor in a newspaper like it the News Gazette can subscribe to a syndicate service and get five or six editorial cartoons every day from which he can pick ones to run in his paper. If he had a staff editorial cartoonist he'd have to take whatever that guy did and he be paying him more than he pays the weekly fee for the syndicated service. So it was a combination of. Of. Happenings. Many of them essentially economic that has resulted in the steady decline of this particular breed of cartoonist which is too bad when you consider that we are in many respects in the most visual oriented age that we've been in. And yet one of the principal practitioners of a visual art the editorial cartoonist finds himself on the verge of extinction.

I'm sure there are people find a lot of things in the newspaper that irks them. And cartoons can be one of them actually even people can get annoyed by the Daily the joke today strips depending on what what those people do. But editorial cartoons by their nature are designed to provoke. They're designed to be irksome. And I wonder if this is something that you have some thoughts about. How many complaints newspapers get about their editorial cartoons and does that influence whether or not editors say you know do I want to have cartoons at all. Yeah I think it does. Editors get more complaints about editorial cartoons. If the cartoons are about local topics. So they even if they have a full time cartoonist on board they discourage that cartoonist from drawing on local topics because that just makes the telephone ring. So if they don't want cartoons on local topics they may as well be taking syndicated cartoonist because they always draw just on national topics.

I'm sure that the editors are very conscious of the newspaper editors are very conscious of the kinds of disturbance that an editorial cartoon can create. And of course every disturbance is a testimony to the power of the editorial cartoon. We have a couple of callers here and a little time remaining So let's see if we can get everybody in first in line is a caller in Champaign in line one. Hello. Yes my name is Ruben and I come from South America is from body class and to listen to your guys the morning I have a question for you. I don't know if there's actually any cartoon similar to my father that I don't know if you're familiar with my father my father is a very famous So the minicon cartoon drawn by Kino emergent DNA which has a very political kind of test. I haven't been able to find anything like that in America. But I also wanted to ask if you could comment a little bit about that except nobody.

Oh I don't know the cartoons that you're talking about. Would you say the name again is that the name of a cartoonist. No because it is key no. My father is actually the product. He's been from biking or is very famous in South America and I think also in Europe and Southern Europe and then after that it's a novel it is actually French. It can be a French story I think it is would beso who trace it I would bet so I know I'm not familiar with it I'm sorry to say it but basically meant to find something in an American cardinals of the same sort but I haven't been able to find a little something that has a lot of political content and political commentary. My father has a very smart political content and she became kind of a hero for a generation during the dictatorship and afterwards and you comments a lot of political matters from a perspective of a child would as a fix actually doesn't have too many cartoons

but there did they did the cartoon notebooks or the books or that they've gone for the last 20 30 years I really think that they're really probably 13 or 14 copies of them and this period describes a lot of. Adventures of an honest guy. There's there's a South American cartoonist a woman whose name I think is. But Tina something like that. And there have been three volumes of her cartoons that have been published in this country. They're all called women. Women on the edge as women on the edge one women judge two women on the edge three. They're very good in high and highly satirical from a feminine point of view and they're just marvelous things I hadn't seen anything like it for a long long time. And but they're great. Great cartoons very funny and very insightful. She's been urged to capitalize on her popularity and

do animated programs and various other things but she's resisted all of that saying in effect why should I give myself all the extra work I'm having fun now. But I don't know that there anything is being produced now that would be as highly political as you are suggesting unless you talk about a comic strips like the boondocks and Doonesbury which periodically publish collections of the strips in book form. OK. Well thank you but my lawyer will thank you. Let's talk with someone in Charleston there next line number two. Hello. Oh I just heard. Listening so maybe you talked about this earlier but what's the difference between a comic book which I used to read as a kid and what you're calling a graphic novel. Well OK then the definition or the description that I made earlier was that a graphic novel is a long form comic book which means that it's it has more pages than the average comic book and most of them are published between

hardcovers or paperback rather than magazine covers. There you can make other distinctions. But you eventually get defeated by the complexity of the definition. I think a long form comic book is probably good. It implies that the story is longer and that the story was actually drawn for book publication rather then serial publication in a series of comic books do they. A main character that usually the way comic books did well they may not have a main character that continues from one graphic novel to another but within the graphic novel within that particular title they would have a main character. One of them recently for example is called Clyde fans. But Clyde is not the name of the character. And it's about two brothers that don't own and operate a fan and manufacturing

concern in the 50s or 60s it has slowly gone out of business and it's about the personalities of these two characters. OK well thank you very much and thank you. And we'll go see somebody else so fall in line number four. Hello. Question I have is I mean my brother used to collect a lot of comic books when we were still in high school and right about now we're at that age where we're considering selling them. And what I'm looking for is some personal advice on how to go about getting a good value out of comics at Leeds fest. How much time on. Well I guess I'd refer to the Internet as a place that you could go you could sell them individually on e-bay and you'd probably get more money for the mana auction bassists individual titles if you wanted to spend the time then you would trying to sell a collection. Other than that you could take your whole collection or samples of it to a comic book store and ask them if they'd be interested. And if they weren't they could probably

refer you to somebody who would be able to help you. I'm one of the other things I noticed is it. Oh when I was actually behind the books when we were still in high school they seem like they actually had a value and you know what the movie's coming out actually said look the values are going down instead of up. Oh I don't I'm not aware of that I think the value is going up. OK thank you. Well thanks and good luck. And probably for anybody who was really interested in finding out what the current state of comic art is and their interest in looking at some graphic novels there are places where they sell them where they specialize in that so you could go and seek that place out and you can go and they probably wouldn't mind if you came in and looked around and looked at what there was and ask them questions. And after all as you mentioned the beginning we're coming up on Free Comic Day Free Comic Book Day Saturday right. Just as as a part of we talked a bit in the beginning about this was was comic Appreciation Week. And they have declared Free Comic Book Day and the deal is

so says Bob that you can go into a comic store and they'll give you a free comic. Well you can measure it you might actually get more than one. There are publishers who produce. Titles expressly for distribution on Free Comic you are right so you can't go in and take any comic book that's in the store. But you can take from the supply of specially produced comics for the occasion. That's the idea. All right well what about the point here where for this time around we will have to stop with the promises that I'm sure Bob will come back maybe a little later this summer and we'll talk some more it's always fun to have you here appreciate it thank you very much. RC Harvey Robert Harvey his cartoon historian if you're interested in sampling some of his work you can look for his books The Art of the funnies the art of the comic book Children of the yellow kid. He also has a website that's devoted to a discussion of comic art. And that is our see Harvey dot com so you can check that out and everyone's while he's here on the program and we talk about comics and. We always have good time programs here on this station are made possible by a grant

from Christopher's fine jewelry design a gallery of imaginative jewelry and gifts in downtown champagne offering one of a kind custom designed gemstone round tables and conflict free diamonds direct from Canada. The broadcast is also made possible by a grant from the grating pasta restaurant serving food from northern Italy. The great and pasta is at 114 West church and champagne and the staff there at the inn pasta encourage you to join them in supporting AM 580 and we hope you will and you can do that right now. It's easy it's quick. It won't take more than a minute or two. And here's what you do. You pick up the telephone and you dial 2 4 4 9 4 5 5 that's the number to call to make a pledge and then someone picks up the phone and says hello there. And then they ask you who you are and what your address is and how much you'd like to give and that's about it. And you come away with a good feeling that comes with knowing that you actually support a service that you value. Jack brightness here in studio with us he's the guy who is our web

guy. People can actually pledge on the website again absolutely right. Yeah. In fact a lot of people have been pledging on the web you know a lot of people listening outside of our you know coverage area on the broadcast channels pledge online and the web address UIUC dot edu. There's a pledge link on the top of every single web page on our website. How'd that happen. And so you just click that and you can pledge by credit card or actually there's a form if you like to you know have payroll deduction or whatever other way that you would prefer. So please use that or you can call the pledge line 2 1 7 2 4 4 9 4 5 5. And you know as we have observed in the past we don't want to become a cartoon character in a cartoon graveyard. You didn't write that did you. No indeed. I just kind of appropriated it for you know perhaps you know inappropriate use here but what I what I'm what I want to find the stuff amusing anymore and that's my problem.

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That's right I like to say thanks to two folks who is giving us a call ready Glenda lane from champagne and Alice Jackson from Urbana. Thanks very much for giving us a call. If you haven't called yet now's the time to do so 2 1 7 2 4 4 9 4 5 5. Make a pledge at the $40 level and receive patterns and feel good about supporting public broadcasting. We also have a mention the member card this morning which is something that you get at the $75 pledge level it's a card that gets you two for one discounts and a whole bunch of restaurants in this area and actually throughout the United States and actually more than just restaurants because there is retail shops that give you discounts and so forth you actually save money if you contribute $75 and get the member card. That's right. And we don't find this stuff amusing anymore. Go to the phone call to one. 2 4 4 9 4 5 5 in support w Iowa. All right well we'll make way here for the staff of the afternoon magazine. There will be news weather sports opportunity calling today with questions about nutrition. Celeste Quinn is the host of the show.

Thank you very much David. Coming up this afternoon in a one o'clock hour of the program we will talk with registered dietitian Susan Kondraty nutrition on the move. She'll join us to talk about diet nutrition and exercise I'll invite your questions for Susan following the 1 o'clock news. Then later this afternoon sound designer composer and Prairie Home Companion performer Fred Newman will join us to tell us how to whistle pop blowing and honk. That will follow the closing market report this afternoon. Let's take a look now at what's happening on the Chicago Board of Trade may wait three 12 down six.