IN

in

Cra ig Yoe
P r e s i d e nt o f t he L ewis Ca rroll Socie t y o f No rt h Ame rica

M a rk Bu rst e in

Int r o d uct ion by

Char le s Schulz Alex Toth Harvey Kurtz man Walt K e lly Dan D eCarlo Dave B erg Jack Dav is Geo rg e Carls o n and mo re!

IN

in
Cra ig Yoe
Pr e sident of t he Lew is Ca rrol l Socie t y of North A me rica

M ark Burste in

Introdu ction by

IDW PUBLISHING
SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA

Ta-da! Dedicated to my friend

Ted Adams
who conceived the idea of this book!

If you like this book, please blog; post on Facebook, Tumblr, Amazon, and Goodreads; podcast; and tweet about it! Visit the International Team of Comics Historians blog www.TheITCHblog.com. Become a fan of YOE Books on Facebook! Friend Craig Yoe on Facebook! Visit YouTube.com/TheYoeTube
Deep thanks to Mark Burstein and the Lewis Carroll Society of North America for all their ideas, help, and support. Visit them at www.LewisCarroll.org. Gratitude to Giovanna Anzaldi, who scanned and restored many of the materials in this book, Andrew Ogus, and David Schaefer; our proofreaders Mark Lerer, Peter Sanderson, Robert Schaad, and Steven Thompson; lenders of art Alan Kaplan, Frank Pauer, Bud Plant, Alan Tannenbaum, and Doug Wheeler; art experts Mark Arnold, Jerry Beck, Tillmann Courth, Jim Engel, Steven Rowe, Jim Vadeboncoeur Jr., and Richard West. Our heartfelt gratitude to Scott Daley and OGPI, Nina Fairles, Greg Goldstein, Jon Goldwater, Victor Gorelick, Heritage Auctions, Corry Kanzenberg, and Jean F. Schulz. Under the direction of Joe Woos, the esteemed ToonSeum in Pittsburgh is preparing an exhibit based on this book. Please visit toonseum.org for the dates for this and their other great exhibits. Deep thanks to the following people who helped promote this book: Ellen S. Abramowitz; Mark Arnold; Jeff Barnes; Ric Best; Steve Biasi; Ed Bode; Jim Brenneman; Lloyd Chesley; Kent Cordray; Edward R. Cox; The Cultural Gutter; Randall Cyrenne; Brian Dick; Benjamin Dickow; Michael Dooley; J. Emmanuel Dubois; Michael K. Earls; Fester Faceplant; Andrew Farago; Aiden Fowler; Bryan Fowler (Buck Edward); Philip Frey; Stephan Friedt; Frederic Gleach; Jim Gray; Diana Green; Jonathan Green; Karen Green; Scooter Harris; Ted Haycraft; Peyton Holden; Dan Hoskins; Kerry Huffman; Jukka Issakainen; Stephanie Johnson; Tim Johnson; Chuck Johnston; Donovan Slinus Jones; Gene Kannenberg, Jr.; Sean Kleefeld; Harlan Krissoff; Kate Laity; Lawrence Laney Loftin; Robin Lynn; Roger McKenzie; Dan Merritt; Jerry Moore; Dean Motter; Nicholas John Pozega; Michael Price; Neal Retke; Wallace Ryan; Annika Schaad; Bridgette Schaad; Brian Schaaf; David Scroggy; Rebecca Sevrin; Walter Simonson; Jonathan Sloman; Anthony F. Smith; Rev. Sam Smith; Tom Stein; Lew Stringer; Rene Thompson; Tara Thompson; Michele Witchipoo; Joe Wos. Peanuts Sunday strip artwork courtesy of the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center, Santa Rosa, California. Photographer Skylark Images. PEANUTS Peanuts Worldwide LLC. Dist. By UNIVERSAL UCLICK. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. Peanuts Cheshire Beagle 1973 drawing 2014 Peanuts Worldwide LLC. Archie in Wonderland TM & 2014 Archie Comic Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. Used with kind permission. The individual ARCHIE characters names and likenesses are the exclusive trademarks of Archie Comic Publications, Inc. ARCHIE characters created by John L. Goldwater. The likenesses of the original Archie characters were created by Bob Montana. Archie in Wonderland was previously published in Mad House and copyrighted by Archie Comic Publications, Inc. in magazine form in 1960. This comic can not be reprinted in whole or part without written permission from Archie Comics Publications, Inc. Alice in Wonderland! from Mad #18, December 1954, is William M. Gaines Agent, Inc. Reprinted with permission. From Superman #41 DC Comics. Used with Permission. The illustration by Walt Kelly on the title page and this page are reproduced from the original art in the collection of Mark Burstein. Imagine 2014 Mark Burstein. YoeBooks.com Craig Yoe & Clizia Gussoni, Chief Executive Officers and Creative Directors Sandy Schechter, VP of Research Media Associates: Steve Bennett, David Burd, Steven Thompson, and Doug Wheeler. IDW Publishing Ted Adams, CEO & Publisher Greg Goldstein, President & COO Robbie Robbins, EVP/Sr. Graphic Artist Chris Ryall, Chief Creative Officer/ Editor-in-Chief Matthew Ruzicka, CPA, Chief Financial Officer Alan Payne, VP of Sales Dirk Wood, VP of Marketing Lorelei Bunjes, VP of Digital Services. ISBN: 978-1-61377-913-2 17 16 15 14 1234 April 2014. First printing. Alice in Comicland is 2014 Gussoni-Yoe Studio, Inc. All Rights Reserved, including the digital remastering of the material not held by copyright owners. Yoe Books is a trademark of Gussoni-Yoe Studio, Inc. Yoe is a registered trademark of Gussoni-Yoe Studio, Inc. IDW Publishing, a division of Idea and Design Works, LLC. Editorial offices: 5080 Santa Fe Street, San Diego, CA 92109. Any similarities to persons living or dead are purely coincidental. With the exception of artwork used for review purposes, none of the contents of this publication may be reprinted without the permission of Idea and Design Works, LLC. Printed in Korea. IDW Publishing does not read or accept unsolicited submissions of ideas, stories, or artwork.

Contents

IMAGiNE!

73

Mark Burstein

SUPERMAN: A MODERN ALiCE iN WONDERLAND!

141

17

Jerry Siegel & Joe Shuster

THROUGH THE LOOKiNG GLASS!

Stephen Kirkel

WONDER!
Craig Yoe

86 91

ALiCE iN TERRORLAND
Alex Toth

147 151

ARCHiE iN WONDERLAND
Dan DeCarlo

22

ALiCE iN CARTOONLAND
K.L. Roberts

ALEC iN FUMBLELAND
George Carlson

ALiCE iN FLYiNG SAUCERS

Dave Berg

25

ALiCE iN FUNNYLAND

97

33 41

GLORY

156

Walt Kelly

LiTTLE MAX MEETS ALiCE iN WONDERLAND

Artist Unknown

ALiCE COVER GiRL!

103

LEwiS CARROLL
Artist Unknown

MOTHERS GOOSEBERRY RiNDS

Walt Kelly

164

Harvey Kurtzman & Jack Davis

ALiCE iN WONDERLAND!

44

ALiCE THROUGH THE LOOKiNG-GLASS

Artist Unknown

109

ALiCE ON MONKEY ISLAND

Serge S. Sabarsky & George O. Muhlfield

Imagine!

et us imagine two pieces side by side. The first is Lewis Carrolls handwritten and self-illustrated manuscript of Alices Adventures under Ground that he presented to his infant patron, Miss Alice Liddell, in November of 1864, which later

replace or greatly enhance the narrative and descriptions of the text, the medium itself is often looked down upon by the soi-disant intelligentsia, yet is guaranteed to outlast their effete ramblings by many millennia. 9

was reworked, expanded, and professionally illustrated to become the classic Alices Adventures in Wonderland. The second is the first issue of Pogo comics by Walt Kelly, published in 1942.

Given the intense similarities of the worlds of the Alice books and the comic or cartoon media, that this paragraph applies equally to both should not be surprising. Carroll (Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) was very much alive during the time of the development

Behold here a work of art, written and illustrated by the same person, a product of acknowledged genius aimed somewhere between the child and the child within, an sopian fairy tale set in a magical realm where a youth wanders amidst animals that can talk. Here the illustrations and the text are intentionally and inextricably intertwined; simple enough for a child to read, yet capable of great profundities and subversive paradigms; innocent and fragile-looking, but canny, deep, and enormously popular. Mixing images and dialog with flights of fancy, verse, and loving commentary on the foibles of the human condition, rejoicing in the multilayered meanings of words, and delighting the eye with sumptuous illustrations that

of proto-comics, and can himself be considered a progenitor. Comicslike another art form flowering in America in the early years of the twentieth century, jazz musicare colorful, wide-ranging, and slightly seditious. The genres range from the swing of Dixieland and Peanuts through the conventional stylings of Marsalis and Marvel to the revolutionary avant-garde of Miles Davis or Robert Crumb. Both media are capable of crossovers, mixings, and adaptations of classics. And, unlike Athena, emerging full-blown from the forehead of Zeus, both media are strongly rooted in their ancestry. Without belaboring the analogy too much further, another commonality they share is the constant fight for respectability. When asked to consider great composers, how many of us would

ALICE IN COMICLAND

name Duke Ellington, though certainly he was? Or asked the same of writers would respond Walt Kelly, or of artists would think of Winsor McCay? Al Capp, who wrote and drew Lil Abner, remarked on the superiority of cartoonists over writers who cant draw and artists who cant writetwo classes who are respected more than we are. Or as Art Spiegelman, creator of Maus, said, A writer can write, A man caught a fish; a comics artist has to know what the tackle looked like. This lack of regard is probably a holdover from the Victorian era in England when the quality newspapers associated any graphic representation with illiteracy and vulgarity, haughtily leaving such things to the Illustrated London News and Punch.

Greek pottery; in ancient Sumerian, Egyptian (Book of the Dead), and Japanese scrolls; in pre-Columbian stone carvings; and in Renaissance tapestries, such as the Bayeux. After the invention of printing, their story goes from medieval religious tracts up through the etchings and narrative picture stories of William Hogarth and Thomas Rowlandson. (Dodgson himself bought a set of 117 Hogarth prints in 1882.) Thomas Rowlandson and William Combes Dr. Syntax was a regularly appearing cartoon character starting in 1809. Word balloons were brought into prominence by the satirical cartoonist James Gillray around the year 1800, although examples can be found as far back as 1680. The political and humorous cartoons published in Punch, founded in 1841, also must be considered progenitors.

The idea of telling a story in pictorial form goes way, way back. Such works appear in cave paintings; 10

Typical of this period, the cartoon The Scanty Meal is from the hand of young C. L. Dodgson, circa 1850, from his family magazine The Rectory Umbrella. The father of modern cartooning is often acknowledged to be Rodolphe Tpffer (1799 1846), a French-speaking Swiss artist, playwright, novelist, and teacher whose cartoons (drleries) used panel borders and interdepen1 His first dent words and pictures.

graphic novel appeared in 1837, five years after Carroll was born. Sir John Tenniel, the original illustrator for Carrolls two Alice books, Alices Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, was himself doing sequential comics in Punch, as shown in Mr. Spoonbills Experience in the Art of

Skating, 1855.

ALICE IN COMICLAND

11

Nineteenth-century (now classified as Victorian Age) comics almost never used word balloons: narration and dialog were beneath the panels. So: what was the first comic? The Germans would point proudly to the work of Wilhelm Busch in the 1860s, who produced Bilderbogen among whose characters were these
2 William Randolph little imps, Max and Moritz.

The British would proudly counter with their comic magazines, such as Chips and especially Ally
3 which was pubSlopers Half-Holiday from 1867,

lished, by the way, by the Dalziel Brothers, engravers of the Tenniel illustrations for Carrolls Alice masterpieces. Arthur B. Frost, the American illustrator of Carrolls Phanstasmagoria and A Tangled Tale, was also drawing comics throughout the 1880s and 1890s. In America, Joseph Pulitzers New York World began publishing a Sunday comic supplement in 1889, to great success. In 1894, the World purchased a new color printing press and began

Lewis Carroll, 1857, and a John Tenniel self-portrait, circa 1889. The Scanty Meal, circa 1850. Young Charlie Dodgson makes fun of the then-famous J.F. Herrings painting by drawing a cartoon with speech balloons. Mr. Spoonbill, 1855. John Tenniel draws a comic strip! (From the collection of Doug Wheeler.)

Left, Top

Left, Bottom

Hearst had spotted them as a child on a trip to Europe with his mother, pretty much stole the idea in 1897, and had his staff cartoonist, German-born Rudolph Dirks, build a strip inspired by them, the Katzenjammer Kids.

Above

13

publishing sequential comic strips as early as January of that year. Soon after that, beginning in May of 1895, a young artist named Richard Felton Outcault evolved his single-panel comic, At the Circus in Hogans Alley, its hero a baldheaded street urchin named Mickey Dugan, who wore an oversize blue nightshirt. A year later a printer mistakenly (and serendipitously) printed his shirt with a bright new ink and The Yellow Kid was born, spawning a rage of toys, cigar boxes, stage plays, and so on. Though it had its precedents, the Yellow Kid is conventionally celebrated as being the beginning of the American newspaper comics features.

In an era before radio and television it is important to remember, comic strips were the mass entertainment of the day. Pulitzers rival paper, William Randolph Hearsts New York Journal, carried a comic section touted as eight pages of polychromatic effulgence that makes a rainbow look like a lead pipe. Part of that rainbow was the Yellow Kid, who Hearst had lured away from Pulitzer.

Punch, Vol. 46, 1864, the first appearance of the Alice character, a year and a half before Wonderland was published. (From the collection of Andrew Ogus.) Punch, March 8, 1899. The original caption reads: Alice in Bumbleland. The Gryphon, City of London; Alice, The Right Hon. A.J. B-lf-r; The Mock Turtle, City of Westminster. What is the use of repeating that stuff, the Mock Turtle interrupted, If you dont explain it as you go on? Its by far the most confusing thing I ever heard! (From the collection of Alan Kaplan.)

Left

Above

Again, let us note that Lewis Carroll was alive in this era. Just three years after his death, the first incursion of his own characters into the comics took place in R. W. Taylors Alices Adventures in Funnyland in the Chicago Sunday Tribune, November 10, 1901,

(Dell Publishing), part of whose fortune was made from such enterprises, later funded the Alice statue in Central Park.

The Alice books must be seen as a precursor, a significant inspiration, to all this, exploring that rich, surreal world of works ostensibly written for children but in fact written for the amusement of all. The Alice books pervasiveness in popular culture is overwhelmingas are their direct infusions into the comics. In Pictures and Conversations: Lewis Carroll in the Comics: An Annotated International Bibliography (Ivory Door, 2003) my colleagues Alan Tannenbaum and Byron Sewell and I listed more than 500 comic books in which the Alice characters have appeared. In the decade since then, there has been a wealth of others as well. As a way of organizing them, I rather arbi14 trarily came up with some categories: direct adaptations or illustrations of the books, from Classics Illustrated onward; parodies, such as by Jack Davis in MAD and Wally Wood in National Screw; exploitations, which includes their use in horror, political satire, humorous adventure stories, manga, and erotica; and the manifold references to, or influences of, the Carrollian mindset on this medium. Iconic Wonderland characters have interacted with everyalthough Alice bears more of a resemblance to a
Alices first comicsoriented cover appearances were on these publications which reprint R.F. Outcaults Buddy Tucker/Alice material. (Cupples and Leon, 1906 and 1907). The printers proof for the cover of MAD #15, September 1954. Artwork, Bill Elder after John Tenniel; concept, Harvey Kurtzman, who autographed this historic piece. (From Heritage Auctions.)

one from the Archie gang to Superman, Batman, Raggedy Ann, Casper the Friendly Ghost, Dorothy Gale (and other Oz characters), The Incredible Hulk, Dr. Strange, The Phantom, The Flash, Bugs Bunny, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, not to mention the characters in the Disney universe.

Above

protoAlfred E. Neuman than to Tenniels protagonist. Very soon after that, in 1905, Richard Outcault himself penned and drew a sequence called Buddy Tucker Meets Alice in Wonderland. The Buddy and Alice sequence was collected into a book, Buddy Tucker and His Friends, and published in 1907, and many hundreds of other such Platinum Age comic books were issued in the first few decades of the 20th century. The first newsstand comic book with all original material was The Funnies #1, 1929, published by George Delacorte

Right

The one-shot allusions to Alice in comic strips and comic books are innumerable, and Carrolls playful influence is also hard to miss in great strip masterpieces such as Little Nemo. Whole genres of nonsense comics abound, such as George Carlsons