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By the time you read this, King Features Syndicate should have debuted their new comic strip. "Inside Woody Allen." The strip is written by Allen and drawn by New York artist Joe Marthen,
Allen, the accomplished comedian, has done plays, movies, and short stories and, according to King Features publicist. Ted Hannah, comic strips are the last area for Allen to move into. The strip deals directly with Allen and according to Hannah, "I am told his entire life will appear" in the strip.
The strip is not ghost written, says Hannah, "Mr. Allen is stickler for details. When he undertakes a project, he takes charge of it."
"Inside Woody Allen" has the largest prepublication list of markets of any strip in the history of comics, said Hannah. Approximately 200 newspapers around the world will initially carry the strip. The strip's US debut is scheduled for October 4.
GROTH: You drew the Ben Casey newspaper strip for quite a while. What's the difference in approaching a daily strip and a 17-page comic book story?
ADAMS: For one thing you have to retell your story every three panels, which is really ridiculous. You also have to create enough interest in three panels to sustain an audience, which is very hard to do. Most of the strips that come from comic books don't do that, and that's why most of the strips that come from comic books are destined for failure. I consider myself a partial expert in the field because I took a strip that was not destined to do well and took it up to 265 papers and kept it at that level until the strip ended. There are all kinds of other standards that have to be in comic strips. The one thing that's most important about comic strips is that they're dead, and they should remain dead as much as possible.
GROTH: How do you mean?
ADAMS: Comic strips are waste of time. Who needs a three panel story? A joke, maybe, a three panel joke, but not a story. Not when you can watch Star Wars, or watch television shows or read comic books. They're a big waste of time.
GROTH: You're saying the newspaper strip is totally...
ADAMS: ...Out of date. When things die they should be left to die. They just ought to die. All things ought to die. Just die! Goodbye! They died ten years ago, maybe longer ago than that. I don't why I did mine. The Marvel magazines is a lot more the direction that comic books should be going in. Is The Hulk in color or in black and white?
GROTH: In color.
ADAMS: That's where it's gonna be at. A change in format [to full-color magazine comics] will happen because it is economically feasible and marketable. It is economically feasible from a distribution and retail point of view. With one drop of the cash register you've made 35¢. Beyond that, it's a package that will last longer. It's a package that people are used to handling.
YRONWODE: ...So your art has been variously described as cinematographic ard your writing as short stories. Were you much influenced by films and literature?
EISNER: That's absolutely true. Both films and short stories- particularly the highly specialized short story writers like O. Henry and Bierce, de Maupassant -- here was a whole period in the 30s during which the short story was an art form unto itself. Today, people are still writing short stories, but it doesn't command the writing market as it did once before. I had only two... well, actually three major influences: the motion pictures I saw -- and I saw lots of 'em -- short stories I read, which nurtured my own imagination, and my own Life experience, which figured heavily in the things I did.
...
YRONWODE: Your work has been compared to Fritz Lang...
EISNER: Yes, Feiffer's said that... people say that...
YRONWODE: ...and Orson Welles...
EISNER: I saw every one of those the early experimental Man Ray films and others. I felt a very strong kinship to Orson Welles in those days. The old Fritz Lang movies were around. I saw every movie I could. I didn't always cataloque them by director because in those days, with the exception of Orson Welles, I was not as conscious of directors as I am now. Movies were like our television -- we consumed 'em at about the same rate of speed that you consume television today. Movies became part of one's life experience. This is something which perhaps sociologists should someday explore -- Jules Feiffer touched on it in his writings and I think he's aware of it because he grew up in somewhat the same environment that I did. Movies were part of our life experiences just as television is for the people who stay home and watch it every day of the week. To many people, moving picture characters and television characters are real people -- when the actors die they get very upset.
Well, movies were part of my life and so they had an influence. As far as ídeas and so forth, movies were their medium and comics was my med1um. I saw comics as an art form, legitimate within itself and, just as movies borrow from comics and are influenced by comics, so I was influenced by movies. And the theatre, by the way. I had strong interest in theatre and I often tell my students [at the School of Visual Arts] to see in terms of lighting and stage sets. Theatre was very strong; my father did stage sets when he first came to this country -- that is, scenery and backdrop paintings. Among my first experiences is the memory of visiting Second Avenue Jewish theatres where I could see the men working on backdrops. I have a feeling for theatrics. I did some in high school too -- some stage design. In fact I did a play with Adolph Green where I did all the stage sets in a very modern form and he did the music and the words.
...
YRONNODE: What comics did you Like as a kid?
EISNER: There were lots of comic strips. Of course one of the comic strips I was influenced by was Popeye. That will probably surprise you.
YRONWODE: Really?!
EISNER: You know, a year ago I guess, somebody wrote a book showing all the early comic artwork of comic artists and I unearthed some stuff I did when I was 15 or 16 and it looks just like Popeye - a cold imitation of Segar's work. I was terribly influenced by that. was very fond of Alex Raymond's work, and Caniff's Terry and the Pirates. Fortunately, when I was a kid, strips proliferated in this city. We had tremendous numbers of 'em so I was exposed to wide range. There was Krazy Kat -- Herriman influenced me tremendously. I remember the tremendous impact his crazy backgrounds had on me. I recognized it as art, and that is exactly what it was. I don't think he even thought of it as art to the extent that I did.
...
EISNER: ...Unfortunately, you see, letterers in this business never had a real chance to make creative contribution for two reasons. First, economically it didn't pay them -- at $3.00 a page they've really got to grind it out in order to make a living -- and second, a lot of cartoonists don't regard the balloons, the lettering itself, as anything other than a major nuisance. The letterer is probably lower down the totem pole than the eraser. I think that's a shame because I think the lettering is very important.
Incidentally, in A Contract with God I did all my own lettering because I regarded it as integral to the art. I should add that you'll find more creativity in lettering among the "gag" or humor comics than in the so-called realistic strips. Walt Kelly's Pogo had very creative lettering.
...
YRONWODE: Who did the coloring?
EISNER: I would do the color guides. Jules Feiffer would do a lot of the coloring. That's why I was so amused when he said [in The Great Comic Book Heroes] that The Spirit never had any socks. (Laughter] We had problem -- we never knew what color the socks were. You see, if you made the socks red that would look too ridiculous, but red or yellow would be the only colors that did not clash with or disappear with the brown shoes or the blue pants. He couldn't have blue socks 'cause that would look like an extension of his pants and he couldn't have black ones "cause that would look real weird, and he couldn't have yellow socks 'cause it would look like an error and so we would invariably try to fudge it and of course the engraver would just color 'em flesh... [Laughter]... so he would never have socks! I didn't realize this until Feiffer pointed it out many years later when he said, "Do you realize that The Spirit never has any socks?" I said, "You're crazy!" and he showed me couple of panels -- and by God, he's right! Also, by the way Feiffer signed the artwork; that was his job: to sign "Will Eisner" on it. [Laughter]
...
YPONWODE: You don't see color as an essential part of comics...
EISNER: No, I don't think color is essential. Color can kill certain effects. I see the entertainment side of comics divided again into two kinds -- there's the comic that's sensory experience, visually sensual experience, and there's the comic that tells a story utilizing pictures as a language. In those a very delicate balance exists between story, or text and the art. To me, comic or sequential art is a language and the use of color is like putting print in 24 point type as opposed to doing it in 10 point type - I don't think it will enhance the value of the story, although it may add another dimension. And then, very often, enormously powerful, full color art swamps the story. About the only ones whose work seems to be able to survive thing like that are men like Corben and Giraud, or Moebius as he's called. Both men, particularly Giraud, seem to be able to do a feature whose color is compatible with the story. Occasionally Corben will overwhelm the reader with a powerful work of full color art that really knocks you off your chair -- and you almost forget what the story's about. Well, anyway, that's how I see it. I think the story is paramount... I have to work in terms of what I'm trying to do -- and at this time I have no intention of trying to be anything but a story teller. I see comics as a form of literature for the future.
YRONWODE: And then there's the book...
EISNER: Ah yes, that's the other project. I worked on that for two years and it's also out now -- the book is called A Contract with God. This is what I've devoted my major serious efforts of the last few years to. It's something that I've wanted to do for a long time. In the foreword of the book I explain why I did it and how it came to be, so there's really no sense in repeating that - hopefully people will buy the book and read the foreword and then they'll know what my reasons were. For the purpose of this interview I must say that I am still the same Will Eisner of 1942-43, trying to expand the horizons of my medium, my medium being a sequence of pictures on paper. I believe that sequential art is the oldest communicating art form, I think it has the validity of any other art form -- and while it may not have the breadth and dimension of motion pictures and it may not have the ability to cover abstracts the way lines of words do, and it may not be able to do a lot of things -- it has served humanity since early man because it has the ability to transmit a story. So I am at work now, hopefully not singlehandedly -- I'd like to be joined by other artists -- in an effort to produce literature in sequential art form, or what you would call "comic art." I've been struggling with the word "comic book" for 30 years now...
YRONWODE: It's a bad word...
EISNER: It's a terrible word - but every time I try to change it, I find that people force me back into it. I had finally settled on the term "graphic novel," thinking that would be an adequate euphemism, but the class I teach is called "sequential art" -- and of course that's what it is -- a sequence of pictures arranged to tell a story.
...
YRONWODE: The style of inking you use in A Contract with God is quite different from what you did in The Spirit - you're not using the coarse brush that you used to use - there lot of fine pen lines. In fact, and this is sort of off-the-wall, I don't know if you're into Winsor McCay at all...
EISNER: Of course I know his stuff very well.
YRONWODE: ...Well, he started off with a relatively simple inking style in Little Nemo in 1905, but when he got older and began to do those editorial cartoons during the last 10 years of his life, he got into an extremely fine crosshatching style -- he avoided solid blacks altogether at that point...
EISNER: Yeah, sure- we all seem to go that route. Michelangelo too - in his later years he began to have a looser approach to his carving. The unfinished statues that you find in Plorence are an example of that. And Milton Caniff - look at the change in his work over the years. As one gets older, as one matures, the tight line, the finely constructed line, loses its value. Perhaps one gets more interested in the theme than in the technique.
People don't remain the same, they change over the years. The only features that never altered their structural line are features like Mickey Mouse. Even Al Capp changed - although he never loosened up to the point of sketchiness. When you have a strip that's very very personal to the artist, a strip which isn't drawn by formula, you'll find that the art will change. Usually it will tend to get looser. There's a lack of patience with having to retain that heavy line. In The Spirit that heavy, very controlled line was an effort to retain color, color which had to be applied after all by someone else. We had to give them what we used to call "trap arcas." Now that's not necessary- the technology has advanced, color can be applied in other ways. Besides, I like that loose line I think it looks nicer... more expressive.
...
YRONWODE: ...I want to know what you see as the cutting edge between humor and tragedy and I want to know why you seek that balance, why you carry it to those extremes. On one page innocent victims may be littering the landscape and on another page you may be parodying a singing commercial. You take it from extremes of really gut-wrenching despair on the one hand and then you turn around and just yuk it up.
EISNER: Aren't those two things really the very essence of life? Really between extreme tragedy and extreme humor what is there? I suppose I never think about it that way until I'm interviewed, I've never really sat down and analyzed it, but think satire is a form of rage, an expression perhaps of anger. There is kindly humor and there is bitter humor. There's kindly tragedy and there's bitter tragedy. There is a relationship between the two in my mind -I can't keep them separate. Every time I do a very tragic scene, I can see humorous scene within the same frame and it can be converted. A man walking down the street and falling into manhole can be very tragic thing -- or it could be very funny. So much depends on what else is involved. I see humor as an incongruity. There are lots of definitions of what humor is- some think it's man's inhumanity to man, some think people laugh because they're glad it isn't happening to them, some people laugh because of happiness, or kindness, or even fear -- but I see humor as a kind of incongruity.
...
YRONWODE: And do you think that scenes like that like could damage youngster's minds?
EISNER: No, I don't agree with Dr. Wertham. Well, actually, I believe that all literature "damages" the mind in that it influences the mind. I think you can't say that comics depicting violence and mayhem should not be shown to children because once you start doing that you're setting up a literary and intellectual diet for somebody. And who can set up a diet for society? I don't believe that censorship can be administered -- countries have tried it over and over again and it just doesn't function well. I'm against it, against any form of censorship other than the restrictions imposed by the creators' own taste, or sense of responsibility to moral values.
GROTH: I always found the adventure strip in the newspaper format a little unsatisfying because you summarize the plot every day and you only have several panels to tell the story. I always found it a little unsatisfactory, more suited to a humor strip.
MARSCHALL: I can see where some people would feel that way, but I don't think so. It's just that it's a little different than if you didn't have those demands. But that's like saying you would find Saturday morning movie serials unsatisfactory, and you know what makes for satisfaction? Sometimes the very devices that are forced upon you to cope with the day-to-day situation can work to a charming end. Harold Gray for instance, who I think is the greatest storyteller in the history of comics -- strips or books -- dealt with that in a very novel way, For most of the run of the Orphan Annie strip every day's strip would be a different day's action. That was very hard to do, but he pulled it off very well; I don't know anyone else who's attempted it. Another thing is, he would recap a story, not by a simple caption -- he would very seldom use captions -- but he would have characters go into soliloquies or dialogues. My favorite story of his, from '36-'37, lasted 14 months; by the time the whole story ran, you'd see it from the angle of every character, either through a soliloquy or a dialogue, but every character through the course of the story had recapped the action: it was a fascinating insight into the story almost like what Wilkie Collins did in The Moonstone, only not that heavy-handed. So there was a case where a guy had the restrictions of having the story chopped into seven pieces each week and overcame it beautifully. Not everyone can do it.
...
GROTH: You don't think it might be that we're living in more impatient times. We're getting films like Close Encounters and Apocalypse Now, which overwhelm newspaper strips in a way.
MARSCHALL: Well, they do, but you're talking about apples and oranges. It seems axiomatic to me that if you're willing to read a story broken up in panels or to wait one day to read the continuation of a strip, you should be willing to wait 13 weeks for the whole story. Why not? If you accept the format of the continued strip you don't sit there and wish "Oh, why can't I read this for an hour and a half straight, like I sit in the movie theatre for an hour and a half?" People don't think that way. They've accepted the cliches of the form -- not the content, the form -- and then it doesn't bother you. You only hear that argument used as an apology by the story artists and writers who don't have confidence in their own work and the syndicate managers who are at a loss to explain the unpopularity of continuity strips. I'm really convinced it's just because they're badly done. They're boring.
"Peanuts is a great strip, but no one has ever said, publicly, that they don't like Peanuts. But then no one has ever said they don't like motherhood or the Bill of Rights. I'm sure there are such people in the country, but they keep it quiet; it would take guts to say those things publicly- especially about Peanuts. In America you must like Peanuts, even if you really don't."
...
"I really don't think my politics changed. You see, I've always been for those who are being shamed, disgraced, ignored by other people. That group has changed. Now it's the poor bastard who's rich -- well, I don't mean rich, and of course I always had Bullmoose -- but the poor son-of-a- bitch who worked, who was being denounced by the liberals. For Chrissake, these people are keeping the country afloat. They were denounced, and it got me damn mad. So talked about it, and I continued to talk, because one of the things found was that when was all for the liberal attitudes -- and I believed in them -- the conservatives showed me only icy contempt. I never got a letter from them. They just hated me. When I began attacking the liberals, the conservatives maintained their icy silence, but the liberals began denouncing me by the thousands of letters every week!
"I started asking myself, with these letters, 'How could a girl from Smith know this language?' and 'How the hell did a clergyman learn that expression?' They denounced me in the foulest terms. And I must say that it convinced me that if this is what attracted liberals, I'd better keep at it." [in other words, his politics of only looking out for himself and getting enjoyment out of being mean to people never changed a bit. I can agree with this]
...
"Modern art is the revelation of disordered minds. It is created by the untalented, sold by the unscrupulous and bought by the uninformed. Genuine art today is found only in auto ads, fashion drawings, and comic strips. And comic strips are the best art being produced in America today. I judge them by the same standards I apply to Daumier and Michelangelo. And by those standards comic strip art is damn good.'
That the drawing in Blondie fluctuated not a stroke when Chic Young died is remarkable only because we may not have realized that Jim Raymond had been drawing the strip since Chic's eyes went bad in 1950. Sharing a byline since 1974, Raymond has been with Blondie since 1935. And in 1937, Raymond both wrote and drew the strip for a year while Young, recovering from the shock of his first son's death, escaped to Europe. (At the time, the strip was loaded with jokes featuring Baby Dumpling, the Bumstead's first-born-a too painful coincidence.)
Jim Raymond's more well-known brother, Alexander, also worked on Blondie for the first three years of the strip, leaving to create Flash Gordon, Jungle Jim, Secret Agent X-9, and, later, Rip Kirby. (When Baby Dumpling was eventually given name, he was named after the elder Ray- mond brother.)
"You don't set out (to be national institution)," Caniff said; "you set out to stay on the payroll. When you get into syndication, you are there to sell tomorrow's newspaper-not today's because the reader already has today's-but tomorrow's, to sell tomorrow's newspaper, endlessly.'
ADAMS: Remember that when Herriman did Krazy Kat, the complexion of the world was very different. There wasn't that much entertainment, so when you were doing a syndicated strip, the newspaper asked you to be entertaining. In other words, that's how you could sell newspapers: by being entertaining. If it were true now- if all the televisions, radios, and movies were destroyed, or our economy got in such a slump that all we could do was buy the newspaper-then it would be the job of the newspaper to be entertaining. Since we have all those other things, it's ridiculous for the syndicated strip to be entertaining because it's outclassed everywhere it turns. There's no way to be entertaining except to make a laugh. You can make a laugh, but even then there are comedians on television every night telling jokes. It's just all over the place. So, if that is taken away -- and it is taken away -- if the ability to entertain is taken away by other media competing, then what is there left to do? Krazy Kat would never be done now. It's just not as entertaining as Saturday morning television for kids or the television shows or movies are for adults. That's why it would never be done. We're in a different time.
In 1952, three years after the national syndication of Pogo began, Kelly ran Pogo for President against Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson. Pogo lost (as you may have noticed), but the popularity of his campaign showed Kelly that the time was ripe to enter a whole new field of com- edy.
"It was the sort of period," Kelly wrote, "in which the naive boy cartoonist began to examine the gift horse's feet. He looked to see if they were straw or clay... Crime investigations, a political campaign directed by PR men, real and fancied traitors in gov- ernment …made the believer count all his beans to see if a few had stuck to the pot. I finally came to understand that if I were looking for comic material, I would not ever have to look long. We people manufacture it every day in a hundred ways. The news of the day would be good enough. Perhaps the complexion of the strip changed a little in that direction after 1951. After all, it is pretty hard to walk past an unguarded gold mine and remain emptyhanded."
COLLINS: ...The last week that I wrote a couple of days ago, there was essentially a gag in every day. And in fact, the only way that a story strip can be effectively written these days is to write it essentially as a gag strip. You have to write adventure strips toward the gag strip mentality and by that I mean that with the restrictive space we have for both pictures and words, it has to be constructed in such a way that it can be read at a glance-it has to have the impact of a gag. It doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be a set-up and a punch line every single day, although usually a cliff-hanger of sorts is at least a parallel to the punch line or a joke.
...
GOLD: In the past five years we've seen, in terms of the continuity strips, we've seen dozens of tie-in strips, most of them...
COLLINS: If you haven't blinked, you've seen them.
GOLD: Yeah, that's true. Well, most of it seemed to disappear in a couple of years. I mean even highly merchandisable strips like Star Wars Superman and Conan to a certain extent.
COLLINS: There's two reasons for that. They're often poorly done (but not always). Spin-offs are a bad idea. Name one classic strip, with the possible exception of Tarzan, which has not had a history as a popular strip-
GOLD: It's never been in hundreds and hundreds of papers.
COLLINS: Syndicates always make the mistake of trying to take super-stars from other media and transferring them to comics. I mean, who the hell wants to see a kind of mediocre, photo-realistic drawing of Larry Hagman in a little, 1½-inch by 1½-inch box with a balloon floating over his head? When they can turn on their TV and see him in the flesh being a lot nastier than you can get away with in a family newspaper.
[I just find this interesting because in later in 1989 Collins would do the Batman movie tie-in strip that lasted for a couple of years]
...
COLLINS: Now prior to Mickey Spillane, private detectives were dicks and they knew it. Phillip Marlowe was embarrassingly chaste. Chandler badmouthed Spillane really terribly in the early '50s. He dismissed Spillane as a comic book writer; it was one of the worst things you could call anybody, right?
GOLD: Chandler said that?
COLLINS: Right. Spillane should have punched him in the mouth.
GOLD: Wonder how he felt about Hammett?
COLLINS: Chandler probably didn't know that Hammett had written comics.
[or that Spillane had not only written comics but that his entire original goal was to be a comic book writer, and that Mike Hammer was originally conceived as a comic book character. Far from punching Chandler in the mouth, I think Spillane would have taken it as a compliment]
...
COLLINS: I just got back from a Mystery Writers of America meeting, where I've been working behind the scenes with people I know within the MWA for the last two years to get Chester Gould an Edgar. I wanted to get him the Grand Master Edgar. I won't say they laughed at me, but they very much pooh-poohed it even as at the same time they admit that Dick Tracy is the second-most famous fictional detective of all time, next to Sherlock Holmes. But there again, there's the prejudice against cartoonists and comic strips, and the fact that Chester Gould is living in Illinois -- out of sight, out of mind again. There are certain cliques within the Mystery Writers of America-the New York clique, the California clique. It's somewhat understandable and I will excuse it to a degree because after all, these are the people that are in the organization who are very, very active. I've been trying to get Mickey Spillane a Grand Master Edgar and that is almost impossible.
GOLD: It's bad for their image.
COLLINS: They think it's bad for their image, which is ridiculous. The other thing is, they say he's not a member of the MWA. It seems to me that if an organization like the NCS or the MWA represents the field, you honor excellence in the field, you honor contributions to the field. You do not say, "Is the guy a card-carrying member?" That's just bullshit.
GOLD: Right. Absolutely. That's just being childish. But even though you were treated in this fashion to a certain extent, through your efforts Chester Gould did get an Edgar.
COLLINS: He did, oh yes, and it was very sincere. The comments that I got about Chet from the mystery writers there were very sincere. They awarded him a special Edgar. Donald E. Westlake, a very well-known mystery writer, was presented the award for Chet because he was ill and couldn't come get it. Westlake's speech was just incredible. He pointed out to the mystery writers assembled that no private eye wore a trenchcoat before Dick Tracy, which in itself is contribution worthy of an Edgar. In fact, Westlake said he didn't think Gould should get one Edgar, he said he should get an Edgar in every conceivable category, he said he should get 15 Edgars. And pointed out in my speech-I said, "I know there is somewhat of a condescending attitude toward cartoonists," because they think, Chester Gould, well, "He's just a cartoonist." I said that when a mystery writer, "like you or me," since I'm a mystery writer myself, when we say, "The detective got into the Buick," we're done-but the cartoonist has to draw the Buick!
[NO private eye wore a trenchcoat before Dick Tracy? I'm skeptical of that]
...
GOLD: ...I think there's something else we have to understand, certainly about Dick Tracy and also about Alfred Hitchcock and Jack Webb. Without these folks, a lot of people would not be motivated to pick up a mystery book. If they didn't grow up with Dick Tracy, they wouldn't be interested in it. If they didn't go to a Hitchcock movie for whatever reasons, they wouldn't say, "Hey, that's great-I want more of it."
COLLINS: Hey, do the people who laugh at Jack Webb know that every cop show in history is derived from Dragnet? Every cop show. I'm not talking Adam-12, I'm talking Baretta, Kojak, you name it. Anything that's on the air now. Dragnet, that's where it was born. Nobody talks about it. You know, I'm someone who's into a very reflective attitude towards the past. I like to look at the people who are important, particularly the ones who are ignored like Spillane, Jack Webb, and even someone like Gould. Even with all the accolades he's gotten, his impact on popular culture has not begun to have been recognized. This is a man that in 1931 gave America its image of the tough detective. Period. It's like inventing the cowboy.
GOLD: The private eye was not as well developed in the pulps-
COLLINS: No, and the private eye took Dick Tracy's props. The private eye took the snapbrim hat and the trenchcoat and the tough manner.
GOLD: And the procedure.
COLLINS: Well, also remember that Dick Tracy was a guy in 1931 who fed it back to the bad guys, which is basically what the tough private eyes did. Dick Tracy, even though he represents law and order, in a sense was taking the law into his own hands. He had that famous line, "I'm gonna shoot first and investigate afterwards.'
GOLD: In the beginning, he wasn't a cop.
COLLINS: True. A lot of people don't know that.
GOLD: In the very beginning, that whole Batman vengeance angle came up in Dick Tracy eight years earlier.
...
COLLINS: I think that there are a hell of a lot of fans that are very ignorant about comics, where the comics of today came from, and they're very ignorant about them and about the newspaper strips. I can't imagine someone considering themselves a fan or a buff in an area and not taking the time to go back and look at the history, and look at the contributions of these people.
...
As I said before, not all of these artists are entirely at fault, and what I see in some of those pages-not to set myself up as some kind of expert: I'm a writer, not an artist-but what I see is talent gone down the wrong road, which may come out of what you said before, about not having the influences. You have somebody imitating somebody who's imitating Alex Raymond, and the person who's imitating the guy who's imitating Alex Raymond doesn't know who Alex Raymond is. That's a problem. And Alex Raymond was imitating other people. How much water can you add to the lemonade until there's no more lemon left? It goes away eventually, and there's no point. There's just water.
"Beginning near the turn of the century, The Outbursts of Everett True... features the exploits of a portly, middle-aged gentleman who seems to have originated the contemporary battle cry usually attributed to Network's Howard Beale: 'I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more!'"
[Not sure if he's being serious here. I couldn't find anything that indicated this was true.]
EISNER: Well, again, you must understand that the comic strip, the comic book in its finest form, in its most honest form, reflects the thinking, the culture, and the background of the artist and the writer who created it. My background, up until that time, was rather closeted. After four years in the army, I had a chance to get a new perspective. When I came back, I could see the city suddenly as it really was. Up until then, I'd only seen it from a curbstone view. Now I had the chance to see it as it was. It gave me a chance to develop with more confidence what I had really wanted to do.
...
EISNER: ...Lighting is very revealing. Lighting, for an artist, generally depends on how he sees something, his sense of perspective. Those artists-if you look at comic books, you'll see them-those artists who come from the far west, or outside of major cities, think in terms of horizons. Their lighting generally is flat-maybe not flat so much as solid. They see lots of sky. I grew up in the city. Most of the light I saw came from a lamplight, vertically, or light coming through tall buildings. I either saw things sharply up or sharply down, coming down the stairwell in my apartment house, or walking up a stairwell in my apartment house, I saw light; I still do, even to this day, sharply' and directly, and people coming from the West or from farms and places like that see light as diffused. This is an example of what I mean by cultural input.
GROTH: Let me ask Rick something. In the old newspaper strips, how much did the editor impose his vision? In other words, on some of the great cartoonists like McCay, Sterrett, Segar, and so forth.
MARSCHALL: Quite a bit, oftentimes. Hearst had a strong hand in the strips themselves, and his people did-Arthur Brisbane as editor, and Rudolph Block as comic editor. Block fashioned the comics page, came up with themes that he wanted to-it was almost like a quota system for a while in the '20s. He would search for certain kinds of artists to do certain kinds of strips. And my favorite story about how strong editors used to be, when they had good vision, is with the creation of the Blondie strip. Chic Young had been doing Dumb Dora, and he wanted to own that strip. He threatened to quit, they called his bluff, and he did quit. They got him back, and they got Paul Funk to do it in the meantime-and they said, Create a new strip and it was Blondie. And they gave it a big sendoff. They sent suitcases of lingerie to every major newspaper editor in the country, followed by a telegram signed by Blondie: "Has my stuff arrived yet?" All this expensive hype, and the strip still did not take off. There was a flurry of activity for a while, but it pretty much bombed. They didn't let it die. Joe Conway, who had been appointed editor and general manager of King, dreamed up some other things, a new boyfriend, but nothing really worked, and then the gimmick was, in 1933, get them married and have them go on a hunger strike. The Hearst press made a whole news story out of this. They arranged for famous people to send telegrams, "Don't let Dagwood starve" and all this business, phony people sent these, but they had photographs on the wire services of Chic Young deluged by 100,000 telegrams. Just direction all along the way, and it was not just pure promotion; they changed the theme of the strip and tried to work in different things and all that. It was a big splash when they got married, and it still didn't work. Then they had a baby- first time a baby was really born in a strip, and jokes about pregnancy, and recovering from pregnancy, and all of a sudden it was very real to people in the Depression era. And all of a sudden gags turned on things like meeting bills, and it was so real in a humor strip that that's when it caught on. But the reason it's so remarkable when you juxtapose the 1980s is that syndicates wouldn't do that today. If it didn't make in the first six months, the salesman would bring out a new strip, or they'd put it in the can or let it dribble on for a while but it would be ignored. This happens with syndicates today. It stays on list of 40 papers, but they just don't try, in an editorial or a sales way. So syndicates had more faith in features and artists, and they just worked with them, and it paid off. Popeye, for instance. Thimble Theatre was a very marginal feature for 10 years. It didn't make King Features any money; it was mostly just in the Hearst papers. But they saw something there, and they wanted to keep it. They worked with Segar on new themes and adventures and all this, and finally Popeye came, and Popeye is still King Features' biggest licensing property. So that type of editorial interest is an investment.
[This is all fine and good for Blondie and Popeye, but we should keep in mind the large number of strips that also only ran for a very short amount of time even in the 30s and 40s and all of the syndicate editors that passed on famous strips like L'il Abner before they got picked up. Further, it's not always the editors' fault. The business was just so much more crowded in the 80s that if a strip didn't take off after a short amount of time there was always someone else waiting in the wings to give it a go. They didn't have time to "give it a chance." Not so much anymore, but *everything* changed once the Web came around]
[Mort] Walker himself said that the reason the strip was dropped for one day from the Sentinel, and the reason why the character of Miss Buxley has been receiving so much criticism is because of the influx of career women into high-level jobs on newspapers. "There are a lot of young women getting jobs on newspapers, and it's partly due to them that the editors are under pressure," Walker said. "There's what they call a 'heightened awareness' among women that I haven't achieved yet." Walker said he would employ his daughter as a barometer of current social tastes. "I'm going to have my daughter check out the strips before I send them in," he said. "She's a career woman in New York City, and she tells me she knows people of such heightened awareness." The 60-year-old Walker added that he resented having others tell him what was fit and proper for the public reading. "I don't know how people appoint themselves arbiters of taste," he said.
...
Walker's deas: Walker put forth some of his own ideas regarding Miss Buxley in his book ["Miss Buxley: Sexism in 'Beetle Bailey'?"]. 'A few readers suggested that my portrayal of the General condones a rape mentality," the book says. "I can't see how they can make that big a jump from an affectionate, appreciative attitude to a criminal activity. Would they consider giving a child a pat on the head as encouragement to child molestation? Does monogamy encourage polygamy? I think it's a big tempest in a teapot. They've taken a simple little comic strip designed to entertain readers and have read too much into it. I introduced Miss Buxley over 11 years ago. She was intended to be a one-time performer but people liked her and demanded more...In all this time I didn't receive a single complaint. Then last year (1981) the trouble started. It's probably symptomatic of the times. Women are making the great thrust for new status and they see threats behind every tree."
[I do not have the physical capacity to roll my eyes as far as these comments warrant]
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Trudeau's complaint: It turns out that Miss Buxley has been a real catalyst of outrage lately. Partly due to her depiction, and the attendant attitudes, Garry Trudeau quit the National Cartoonists Society. Trudeau is best known as the creator of Doonesbury, which will return to newspapers nationwide on Sept. 30 (see story elsewhere in "Newswatch"). Every April, the NCS holds a Reuben Award dinner, where they honor various practitioners of their craft. Accompanying the dinner is The Cartoonist, an NCS-published magazine. The theme of both the magazine and the dinner was a "salute" to women cartoonists. In The Cartoonist were two drawings that particularly raised Trudeau's ire. There was a picture of a nude Miss Buxley, and a picture of a nude "Fat Broad" character, from Johnny Hart's B.C. In response to the pictures in that magazine, Trudeau wrote a letter to the NCS on April 26th. "I'm sure that Mort thought that his drawing of Miss Buxley was all in good fun, but simply because a large part of his audience applauds his leering portrayal of Buxley doesn't make it any less reprehensible," the letter said. "I don't mean to single Mort or Johnny out-I happen to enjoy their company-but I no longer feel I can remain a member of an organization which consistently condones this kind of puerile, patronizing attitude towards 'gals.' While publishing drawings of naked female cartoon characters may be the Society's idea of a 'salute' to women, it certainly isn't mine..." "With that letter, Trudeau resigned. The day after Trudeau's letter, the vice-president and editorial director of Universal Press Syndicate, which distributes Doonesbury, wrote a letter to the NCS. Lee Salem said that their attitude was not "so much belittling as it was anachronistic," he said. "This particular meeting (of the NCS) was to honor women in cartooning, and that seemed to be an inappropriate way of doing it." Walker said he now feels contrite about his contribution to The Cartoonist, saying, "maybe it was an oversight in taste."
But Beetle Bailey is not really a strip about Army life. As Walker says, "The truth is, it isn't military strip. It's a strip about a bunch of funny guys. They could be policemen, factory workers, college students, whatever. The Army is just a convenient setting that everyone understands. The pecking order doesn't have to be explained, and the role of the poor guy at the bottomn of the ladder classic in literature."
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Writing in his 1975 book, Backstage at the Strips (still probably the best book around about the life of a cartoonist), Walker discusses his attitude toward humor. He disagrees with Jules Feiffer, who says "you have to hate to be funny. Humor, Feiffer says, comes from dissatisfaction with things; you attack, ridicule, and destroy what you don't like with humor.' Some humorists do. But Walker says he's more comfortable with Leo Rosten's notion that "humor is an affectionate insight into the affairs of man. Affectionate is the word that won me," says Walker. "I like people. I like their absurdities, their aberrations, their pretensions. If you catch a guy exaggerating, you don't ridicule him: you understand him."
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"An editor told me a long time ago," Walker writes, "that if you could cover up the drawing and still get the gag by reading the caption, then you were a writer and not a cartoonist. With that advice, I've always tried to get as many funny pictures into my work as possible."
MARSCHALL:...Complete works of great writers like Dickens and Twain are in every
library, and every home library, but some day, there will be complete works of Segar and DeBeck, Caniff, people like that. There should be, and there will be.
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MARSCHALL: Talking about newspaper strips, there are a number of times I've heard it said by writers, by artists, by syndicate people, "Why are strips so lousy these days?" A lot of people are in a position to do something about it. Yet they sit there and complain, and it gets worse and worse...why is it? I can't explain it. Doonesbury isn't drawn well, but the writing is strong. So you can say that. But 99 percent of the strips coming out are drawn poorly, are written just horribly, edited poorly, and there's no excuse for it. The quality's gone out the window. No one seems to care. Merchandising has taken over. And as far as management goes, they look at pajama contracts instead of editorial quality. And if they can sign a contract for a t-shirt over a drink, and if some litle creature looks cute to a guy who doesn't know good writing from bad, well, all of a sudden, the bottom line makes the whole thing look like a success, and then it snowballs. Chickens will come home to roost. The stuff still is crap. It's embarrassing.
MacDONALD: Do you see any kind of shake-ups-coming?
MARSCHALL: No, I don't. Things are being done by prescription. I use the description of the comic strip syndication business becoming a Newsweek coverstory industry. Newsweek will do a story on the baby boom, and then it seems like three months later, every syndicate has come out with two strips on the baby boom. Or working mothers, or cats, or something. It's worse that the sitcom situation on television, where one moderate success spawns a dozen execrable imitators. It's just shameful.
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MARSCHALL: One thing that strikes me about a lot a of the early strips, and a lot of the early great strips, is that a lot of them were one-premise strips. Jiggs and Maggie--she's a social climber, he wanted to play cards with the boys. That's it. Katzenjammer Kids was a one-premise strip. Take Flash Gordon, one of the all-time classics--it had probably about the worst-written script you could imagine. If you really get down to it, Dale Arden was a twit, the stories were insipid, but why were these strips praised, even in retrospect? Why were they popular? There are a lot of reasons. One is that the artist's syndicate itself respected the strip. They took a lot of time, they took a lot of care, the artwork had a lot of detail, the Sundays were full-paged, the colors were great, they were in-register, the paper was better, and whether the strips were one-premise or complicated, you had a situation where on Sunday morning, people bought the paper just to get those comics. They fought over the comics section. When they opened it, this darned thing was larger-than-life, full-paged, gorgeous color, it popped out at them, and they could get lost in a single comic for 10 minutes. Just enjoying it, whether it was funny, whether it was an adventure. They got into it--it was part of their lives, and they were part of the strip's life. How much can you say that about strips today? I don't want to name any names, but a lot of the humor strips are badly drawn, and the ones that are well-drawn are so streamlined and simplified that they're sterile.
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But the onus is not on the cartoonists alone. It's on the local editors, and mainly the syndicates. They're too willing to compromise, and not view the comics as something unique. It's one of the few things that newspapers can offer that television or radio can't. It's almost like they're embarrassed by the comics, so they make them smaller.
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But the fact remains that total readership is down, total percentage of readership is down, and the polls bear this out. There are fewer strips being introduced, and fewer strips running these days. Syndicates are cutting from the bottom. In 10 years, we're getting to the point where every syndicate will have a very small list of very strong strips. King Features used to have 40 or 50 features, and some may have only been in 100 papers, but with an incredible variety of offerings, and a real fabric of flavors of types of strips, to satisfy all types of readers. We're rapidly getting to the point where they're going to look at the top of the list, see what's strongest, and chop from the bottom. It's happening. It's a very sad thing.
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I dislike 95 percent of what is in RAW, but I wish there were 20 magazines like it, because that would indicate that there was more of what Art Spiegelman is doing--searching, experimenting, innovating. That's what gave birth to the newspaper strip industry, the comic-book industry, and it's practically absent today. I think that lost sense of excitement is what is tragic, not only as a critic, as a historian, I don't think that's my point of view at all. I think it's a tragedy for the future of the medium. It it's bad now, it'll be worse later, because the people who could now be giving us thrills with the potential of the comics medium, as they are in Europe, are not.
Foster has said that he used himself as the model for Prince Valiant. "I deleted what I disliked, and he's sort of my body with muscles. He's all the things would have loved to have been." It was also obvious immediately upon meeting her that Mrs. Foster is the model for Val's wife, Queen Aleta of the Misty Isles. I noticed especially the same wide mouth, forever ready to break into a smile.
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In 1935, press baron (and comics fan) William Randolph Hearst took a liking to Foster's work, and King Features, Hearst's newspaper syndicate, offered to create a strip for him. But Foster had been thinking up a story of his own. He chose King Arthur's day, nominally the 5th century. He wrote up six months' worth of plot, and sat down to draw. Again, his craftsmanship intervened. Foster stalled King Features for 18 months while he did research--into the costumes of the period, the weapons, the architecture, the customs, the horses' bridles, even the kitchen utensils. Then, finally, he drew.
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The entire strip is alive with the sense of vigorous outdoor life. The diverse settings are meticulously real. "Every country or area has its own type of geography, trees, and buildings. A tree is individual. You have to draw _a_ tree. The same with architecture."
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SABA: I find it fascinating that you you are so conversant with architectural styles. You obviously know a lot about the different styles, not only of different countries, but different eras as well.
FOSTER: Yes, I've had to study that, because, well, I've seen people make illustrations for books, and illustrations, somehow, unless it's modern, never seems to do anything for the story you're reading, because the story might be of London, but the architecture in the street scene is New York or Brooklyn.
SABA: Uh-huh, it's very wrong, yes.
FOSTER: So I've always, made a point of studying, not only the architecture, and costumers, but the trees. You can tell a picture, you can tell it's Italian or Roman by the square buildings, and the columns, and the trees. These pine trees run up straight and have an umbrella top on them, and the oak trees like you see out here-
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Now, if you'll notice any other illustrator, any other illustration that you see, they'll paint the face, and probably feet, and they'll paint the hands, but the hands are useless, they're not doing anything. They're turned over too much, or they droop too much. Every expression on the face has to be confirmed by the hands.
SABA: That's a very good point.
FOSTER: Yes. If a man is startled...
SABA: His hands will react.
FOSTER: Yes, he'll show it in his hands.
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SABA: Did you write the stories for Tarzan?
FOSTER: Let's say edited it. The first book was, of course, all Burroughs. And the story was so far from natural that I despised it.
SABA: Really?
FOSTER: Yes, even though it was highly praised.
SABA: A best seller.
FOSTER: It was highly praised because it was the first of story illustration. And it was from a writer that was well-known, Burroughs, and of course, that helped it. But, later when I'd finished that one book, Tarzan of the Apes, there was no more Burroughs writing in Tarzan at all after that. They sold the idea to the syndicate, to United Syndicate, and they had a staff writer write the story, and, oh, it was so ridiculous. A lion and an elephant in the same jungle, tigers swimming across the river-of course, things like that are possible, but, it was like, oh, somebody who could build apartment buildings trying to build palace. There's no reality to it.
SABA: I understand exactly what you mean. Very slapdash kind of work, I guess.
FOSTER: So when I handled it, I tried to make the jungle a jungle, and the animals realistic, though I still had to make every monkey a gorilla, because the stories said they were "The Great Apes."
SABA: So after a while you got sick of that sort of thing, I guess, didn't you?
FOSTER: It was tiresome, yes, but that inspired me, because I kept criticizing the writer and the descriptions of the scenes and things, and began to say, "Well, I could do better than that. Why didn't he use those phrases? Why did he try to make it like wording in a dictionary? Why didn't he put more spirit in it?" So, I got sick of it, and in my spare time, I started to dream up a story. By that time Hearst had seen my work on Tarzan, and he said "Get Foster."
...
SABA: Where were you at first, that was Chicago?
FOSTER: Chicago, yes. And there I had plenty of time to do Tarzan, did the daily strip, and I did the Sunday page, and that got me into the cartoon business. And all this time, I was thinking, "I could do it better than that. I could do better." And to prove it wasn't conceit, to prove I was really confident, I started the Prince Valiant story.
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SABA:...Let me ask you if you've ever developed a taste for a totally different kind of cartooning, such as the, say, the Walt Disney style, or that kind of funny cartooning. Have you ever enjoyed that sort of thing?
FOSTER: Yes. Oh, yes.
SABA: It's very different, of course.
FOSTER: I don't know why it is that some fellows can a draw a little kid like, what's his name, Charlie Brown, a little kid like that, with just a round head, round nose, and no particular body, and yet give the thing a personality. I still can't understand that, and see where the little things he says and the funny little illustration seem more real than some of the best-drawn strips, the adventure strips.
SABA: I can't quite figure it out either. Have you ever tried that? Have you ever tried drawing real cartoony-type drawings just to see if you could do it?
FOSTER: Oh, yes, but they finally get too illustrative.
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SABA...Do you see a difference, in your opinion, between the art of illustration and the gallery arts, do think that they are you very different in fact, or it's just a difference in terms of the way they're published?
FOSTER: Well, the fine art. It takes a lot of studies, awful lot of work to finally achieve it.
SABA: The same is true of illustration, though, isn't it?
FOSTER: Illustration, you mean book illustration?
SABA: Or your type of illustration. Just simply that illustration that's somehow looked on as lower-class than gallery art. l don't think it is, myself:
FOSTER: Well, it is, in a way, because I couldn't afford to draw a page every week, and have it called fine art. It'd take too much study, of architecture and costumes, foliage, fashions. All these things have to, that go into a gallery painting, would have to go into...
...
FOSTER: A good painter can put so much feeling, so much atmosphere into his work that an illustrator can't. An illustrator must draw and color for reproduction, and right there, there's a line drawn. You have to use colors that the printer can imitate. They used to be able to, the plate-makers, they used to be artists. I have some proofs that are really masterpieces of their work, but they did every color and every tone and everything, and those are all gone out of business. They're too expensive. Now they have a reproduction system. I've been through a printing place where they print, or make the plates for cartoonists, and a bunch of girls there, with plates in front of them, and one woman, the superintendent, she goes around and marks certain colors, and certain half-colors and certain quarter-colors. Pretty good, but nothing like the old, of course, the old engraver.
SABA: It really would be nice to see the comics still treated the same way, wouldn't it?
FOSTER: Too expensive.
SABA: I guess so.
FOSTER: Everything has to be done cheaper.
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SABA: ...Do you feel that your upbringing in Canada has had any particular influence on the kind of work that you do, or in any way on your life?
FOSTER: Oh, yes, greatly. It gave me all my backgrounds. I didn't do very well in school. Of course, I always won a prize in drawing, but so many kids in school were better than I was at learning, I suppose that's why I went to the outdoors. Halifax harbor was such a romantic place. Gosh, on a Summer day, look up the harbor, and the harbor is just covered with white canvas.
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SABA: It seems you had a very great sense of romance, even very young, you always were more interested in the world of nature and life as it was being lived, rather than what was being taught in school.
FOSTER: Yes. I was fairly interested in history, because I lived where history was made--in Canada, Newfoundland, and Nova. Scotia. The kind of history that appealed to me.
...
Mrs. FOSTER: ...Once or twice Sylvan Byck complained, because you showed Aleta pregnant, that was in the days you couldn't do those things in the comics, you know, no snakes.
SABA: But you did it anyway.
FOSTER: Yes.
Mrs. FOSTER: Well, he made her coat a little fuller, and that's something I don't know.
FOSTER: I showed her relaxing in the woods, laying on a downed tree.
SABA: I remember that.
FOSTER: The skunk comes along, and, of course, lets her have it, and she falls off the log. Shows that there's no doubt about it that she's pregnant.
Mrs. FOSTER: Well, first they said he should never get married.
FOSTER: Yep.
Mrs. FOSTER: Yes, no comic hero ever got married and survived. So he married Val off, and they shouldn't..
FOSTER: Shouldn't have children, no.
Mrs. FOSTER: Don't make him a family man, you know.
FOSTER: She shouldn't, his wife shouldn't be anything but, follow him around like-what is a hero that, he went through different stars and everything and the girl followed him.
SABA: Flash Gordon?
FOSTER: Flash Gordon, yes, always with a girl.
SABA: Just following around, just sort of hanging on.
FOSTER: Yes. Well I thought that was indecent. No fellow is going to go from planet to planet, and have his girl, especially a good-looking girl, tagging along without having some ideas.
SABA: I think you're right. Very chaste, aren't they?
FOSTER: So, of course, I had Prince Valiant marry the girl, so that she'd be decent, and being a decent girl, and married, she should have children. They told me that a married woman, there's no romance in a married woman and children, but-
SABA: What do they know?
FOSTER: Yes, I found out that people are not exactly what those in power in the comics think.
...
SABA: ...I think that these people who say that there's no romance in a family are just so wrong, and you showed how wrong they could be, because you showed how much a man and wife can love each other, and still be married and have children. It make it so human,-and so nice.
Mrs. FOSTER: Everybody was so delighted when-didn't he throw her in a pond once?
SABA: I remember that one.
Mrs. FOSTER: Well, that was a way to treat a wife, you know, throw her in a pond. He says he's always tried to do that. If he had some violence or anything like that, then for the next story, he'd try to make it light and with humor in it and everything.
SABA: Well, it makes it such a delightful picture of life, instead of a one-sided, just blood and thunder all the time, it shows what life is really all about, which is so many different sides.
FOSTER: Yes, you have to write the story the way you would compose music. You know, high notes and low notes. You have violence one week, and the next story will be the children and home, probably the adventure of one of the children. Then you can get into blood and thunder again.
Mrs. FOSTER: But every so often you have to remember you got two girls in there, you got to weave them into a story. And then we had more comment about the twins and the things, and when she cut her hair, wore the helmet and would be the tomboy and all that sort of thing. People around here, people who had children said, "Oh, that's my daughter all over again, that's just like my daughter."
...
SABA: ...what methods did you use to write the story? How did you settle what it was going to in- volve?
FOSTER: Well, those ideas have to come to you.
Mrs. FOSTER: He just picks them out of thin air, I think.
...
Mrs. FOSTER: Or something that you read.
FOSTER: Yes.
Mrs. FOSTER: It would stick in his mind, or just seeing people. When we were in Paris, and at the restaurant there, a waiter waited on us. Harold kept looking at him, and got his pencil and made a sketch of him, and said, "There's a story in that fellow's face," and he was in the script for long time.
FOSTER: Yes.
Mrs. FOSTER: What did you call him, the, he was the-
FOSTER: I don't know, but he was a fusty-looking guy, never had his hair combed, and nothing fit. So I made him a squire to Sir Gawain, Sir Gawain was always a handsome-
Mrs. FOSTER: Served our soup with his thumb in it, you know [laughter].
SABA: Oh, I see.
Mrs. FOSTER: And then our younger son brought home a series of [photos], he was going in for photography. He's one of those young fellows that goes from one thing to another. He brought home some candid shots that he had taken, and he had an enlargement--a head of a girl, remember her?
FOSTER: Yes.
Mrs. FOSTER: And the minute he looked at her, "Oh, can I have that, Arthur?" he said, "That girl's got a story in her face, well, maybe he didn't know what the story was, but-
SABA: But there's something inspiring.
Mrs. FOSTER: That made him think of something. And he used to write down, you had a little black book that, when you'd get an idea, you'd write it down in, and sometimes, enlarge on it. So when he first did that, evetything reminded him. For instance, one of our friends' mother, the lady-in-waiting-
FOSTER: Oh, yes.
Mrs. FOSTER: Theresa.
FOSTER: Theresa Armstrong.
Mrs. FOSTER: Yes, what did you call her? Oh, she had been a lady-in-waiting, and she became a queen of Spain, queen of Sweden.
FOSTER: Oh, I said she used to come into the room like floundering ship.
SABA: That's great.
FOSTER: She dominated everything.
Mrs. FOSTER: He's used lots of people, but they never knew it.
...
SABA: Do you have a feeling of satisfaction also that you're leaving in the world a great body of very fine work that people for generations are going to look at?
FOSTER: Never thought of that, no.
SABA: You don't think about immortality?
FOSTER: No.
SABA: Or posterity?
FOSTER: No. Because what I've done is what I had to do, what I enjoyed most. And if I've lost the use of one leg, and I can't remember anything, at least I can give up quietly, and...
SABA: You feel...
FOSTER: Yes, I feel repaid.
...
SABA: But as you say, the feeling of what you're going to be leaving behind you for years, for generations afterward, that thought hasn't particularly meant much to you.
FOSTER: No, because when I'm gone, I won't know, and besides, I'm not doing the kind of work that lasts for future generations.
SABA: You don't think so?
FOSTER: No. Mine is a comic, during this decade or this century, and what people like this century might not be popular in the next one, and paper doesn't wear well.