Buckingham Palace has no press gang around these parts. You can’t enlist in its Guard at a Times Square recruitment center or answer an ad on craigslist. Just as well. You’re not allowed to laugh on that job, despite their funny hats and silly walks. I’m such an easy crack-up that I’m given to see the funny side of flowerpots and mailboxes and looseleaf binders.
Professionalism and a cold, forensic interest in my field enables me to keep a straight face in most cartooning classes, though, dissecting that frog till it begs for a Christian burial.
But I was reduced to giggles twice in Art Spiegelman’s “Language of Comics” class. Once was during his presentation of the Kurtzman/Elder/Krigstein Mad parody “Bringing Back Father.” Now, if it had been “Batboy and Rubin” or “Superduperman,” I was familiar with them to the point of having inspected every sight gag with a magnifying glass, so I could pretty much keep deadpan. But the Jiggs and Maggie send-up had never been reprinted in any of Mad’s paperback editions, so all the jokes were new – and therefore lethal – to me.
Similarly, I was unprepared for his introduction to “History of Holy Russia.”
Gustave Dore, its author, hadn’t yet become the Norman Rockwell of his day. He’d been engaged by his editor at the humor magazine “Journal pour Rire,” the caricaturist Philipon, to do a number of cartoon books with just one target, er, topic each. Essentially, he had him writing and drawing comic books.
“History of Holy Russia” is an extended parody of scholarly treatises, from their headings to their footnotes.
It's also a prolonged ethnic joke that make Boris and Natasha seem like diplomatic envoys.
Dore did the 600-odd illustrations that comprise this book in 1854, putting him in contention for “first graphic novelist” as well.
Here’s what Dore discovered about comic books:
1.) Making them is hard work.
2.) They’re not very respectable.
Dore didn’t care much about the former. But the latter stung. He soon fled the funny book business to gain worldwide respect by illustrating everything. And I mean everything. Dore illuminated the Bible, Don Quixote, Edgar Allen Poe, Rabelais, the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the Divine Comedy, Lolita, the Necronomicon, and Gravity’s Rainbow. Okay, I lied about the last two. All right, the last three.
