REALLY GOOD SHEPARD

In the R. Crumb interview conducted by Ted Widner in the Summer 2010 issue of the Paris Review, the artist mentions in passing being impressed by the drawings of Ernest Shepard. There’ve been a few major interviews with Crumb over the years. This is the first time he’s mentioned Shepard, to my knowledge. You may well wonder what he sees in the guy who designed and delineated Winnie the Pooh, illustrated Now We are Six, and other collaborations with A.A. Milne. (I’m exaggerating a little to call them “collaborations,” but when his work becomes the cornerstone of a billion-dollar industry –and that’s “billion” with a capital “billion” – I think I can afford to be a little grand.)

What’s to admire about Shepard? These examples from Punch are all from 1923, when the Hundred Acre Wood was still seeds and saplings. It’s also a time when cartoon captions were often dialogues, and editors felt obligated to tell you which character in the panel was speaking. Ponderous, but Shepard makes it sing.

Draftsmanship is the foundation of all of these, but what really brings them to life is his pen technique. There’s no big fetish for crisp outlines or attempts to keep it “tight.” His sketchy lines define the characters accurately while still being loose enough to maintain the drawing's rough vitality, keeping the figures in motion! He strives for long lines only for the most streamlined forms (a flapper’s legs, for example). It's rare that his line weights get much thicker than what's represented here, and they do so only to convey the extreme foreground.

A History of Punch by R.G.G. Price celebrates the cartoonist: “Shepard’s work was distinguished by movement. Compare any of his drawings of any period with the usual Punch drawing. He does not seem to have depended upon a studio pose or a diagrammatic composition. One feels the studies for the pictures were made on a wind-ruffled sketching-block…Above all he was thinking in terms of the dance. With Shepard the rest of Punch began to look static...Even when the scene in Shepard was a conversation one feels that there was a wind in the room and that someone had just moved and that someone else was about to move.”

Let’s go further into the Jazz Age. It’s 1927, and Shepard has been working on Winnie for about a year.

As you can see from “Emancipation of the Young” in the earlier section, Shepard had a real flair for historical costume and settings. In 1926, he provided almost sixty pages of illustrations for an abridged version of The Diary of Samuel Pepys, released under the unlikely title of Everybody’s Pepys. (Sounds like a companion volume to Taro Gomi’s Everyone Poops, doesn’t it?) In anyone else’s hands, the project might seem a little musty…but that “wind in the room” is a breath of fresh air, and makes the book seem almost breezy.

Lame name or not, it was successful enough to be followed by Everybody’s Boswell and Everybody’s Lamb.

Shepard earned a full page of his own in Punch. First, these were traditional political cartoons, but as times changed, his pages were devoted to the lightest of light verse.

I feel funny explaining these to anybody who’s my age or older, but: Ages ago, the first two "numbers" one dialed to make a call were actually letters, referred to as the "telephone exchange" -- MU. EX. AS. -- with mnemonic words that completed them -- MUrray Hill, EXeter, AStoria. (Even the phony movie number that everyone knows had its own exchange: KLondike!) You can see that there are still vestigial letters printed on any keypad. British exchanges happened to be three letters.

The conceit behind these flights of poetic fantasy was that these mundane exchanges instilled in the dialer some wistful memory or Howard Pyle-inspired adventure, solely by dint of digit dialing. These particular verses, written by Jan Struther, were collected in her book Sycamore Square.

His biographer, Rawle Knox, wrote in The Work of E.H. Shepard that his subject’s “disadvantage was that he was just about the last artist left on the paper who drew the classical line. It is true, as Price wrote, that when [Shepard] started to draw for Punch he made everyone else look static; by 1953 everyone around him was moving in oddly comic directions, and he was left looking beautifully still…The new editor was going to make changes. One of his first was to sack Shepard.”

That editor was a gentleman named Malcolm Muggeridge, a television pundit who had the task of adapting Punch to perceived changes in public taste. Ironic, then that public taste would take to Shepard’s (and Disney’s) work on Pooh so well as to guarantee it would outlive nearly everybody else’s on the magazine. The first possible exception that springs to mind might be Sir John Tenniel, who brought Alice to life…and didn’t Disney have a go at that, too?

IT DOESN'T RUIN YOUR VISION LIKE A TV SHOW

You’ve cracked open a few histories of science fiction if you’re familiar with the name Hugo Gernsback. He’s usually Chapter One, unless Jules Verne, H.G. Wells and Albert Robida have pushed him into Chapter Two. He once climbed out of Chapter Eleven with nothing but a subscription list and a promise to his faithful readers to re-enter the field with two new periodicals.

Gernsback, the father of “scientifiction” edited the magazines pictured here as well, and as an engineer, writer, and former radio station owner, he was uniquely qualified to do so. Everyday Science and Mechanics wasn’t above publishing the occasional speculative piece about what wonders we could expect centuries hence, but mostly it trafficked in touting technical advances and project proposals for the do-it-yourself set that we’ve come to associate with Popular Mechanics and the like. There were articles on helpful household repairs, little science experiments, work for idle hands (“$500.00 Cigar Boxcraft Contest”) and a section each month devoted to radio.

More than a box that sat on the floor, more than a medium that wafted The Green Hornet, the Jack Benny Program and ads for Jell-O into the air, radio carried a participatory vibe. What boy experimenter of the period hadn’t built a crystal set, or strung an antenna to pick up stations in other cities? He could graduate to amateur radio, short wave, citizens’ band, stocking his ham shack with the store-bought and the jerry-built.

This wasn’t new. Young Tom Edison was obsessed with telegraphy when he wasn’t extinguishing the fires from his chemistry experiments gone awry. You could draw a straight line from this impulse to the Homebrew Computer Club of the 70s, guys who likewise had great hopes – and envisioned endless applications -- for the boxes they were building. Did they think computers would unite people over long distances? Dream even then of interconnectivity and a wired nation, united by a sense of community? Make everybody a part of something larger while still enjoying the comforts of home?

Frank R. Paul was the cover artist on both of these. They show restraint, for him, since the magazine was meant to inspire the guy with the garage full of tools, the weekend handyman. More often, Paul’s illustrations depicted “The Man from Mars” or “The City of the Future.” Calling his work on Amazing Stories and Wonder Stories visionary would not be overstating it. His draftsmanship at first seems cruder or more naïve than that of his contemporaries, but reveals a breadth of imagination that leaves one dissatisfied with the heroic and glamorous figures everyone else purveyed. The timeline of the best of his output runs oddly parallel with the glory days of the Surrealists, and Paul would have no reason to be abashed in their presence. He was trippy before trippy was the rage. These contraptions defy gravity, safety regulations, and common sense.

Paul is known for the cover painting for the issue of Amazing Stories that featured the debut of Philip Nowlan’s Buck Rogers. Google around for the image. It’s actually meant for E.E. Smith’s “The Skylark of Space,” another groundbreaking sf story in the same issue, and shows our hero, in what looks like a leatherhead football helmet, levitating with the help of a device he may have launched from his garage in the picture’s background. When he wasn’t serving up aliens that looked like spaghetti and meatballs, Paul’s oeuvre was sometimes earmarked by little haimish touches to bring them down to Earth. Just as there’s a woman flagging down the protagonist in his backyard on the Amazing cover, the flying cycle cover depicts houses with smoky chimneys, hearths ablaze providing a backdrop to the inventor’s exploit.

Another kind of domesticity is in order in WLS Family Album 1931, from which these pictures are excerpted.

“We have worked always to have WLS with its cheery voice bring good, clean entertainment into your home.

“But behind every song and laughter there is deep and serious purpose. Our country today needs right-thinking citizens in solid support of institutions our forefathers gave their lives to build. Throughout the world is disturbance, ideals being lowered, false standards advanced. We thank God for the stability and unyielding conscience of the American farmer and of every right-thinking and square-dealing American citizen.

“Without self-seeking, we have demanded and held a place on the air for The Voice of Agriculture.”

“Charlie Stookey presides over the Dinner Bell Program…To the left is Charlie with the famous Dinner Bell that you hear every day…”

“Jim Poole, whose voice comes to you several times every day, direct from the Union Stock Yards in Chicago, is the most experienced live stock market reporter in America…He has been in the Chicago Stock Yards so many years that only the old timers can remember when he started…and brings to the market quotations each day, experience and insight which make this service of immeasurable value to live stock producers.”

“The Swift Rangers who take part in the Swift Roundup each day over WLS.”

“Here’s ‘Speed’ Freeman, our southern ‘blues’ singer of Merry-Go-Round fame. Her brothers named her ‘Speed’ because she was so slow. There’s lots of melody when she starts strumming her ‘uke’.”

“Marian Syndergaard of Iowa and William Bodenhamer of Missouri, 1930 4-H Club Health Champions at the International Live Stock Exhibition.”

“Ever since the post-man delivered the first bag of ‘fan’ letters to WLS back in April, 1924, we’ve looked upon reading the daily mail as one of the most important duties at the studio. It’s a pleasant task. We get the ‘pulse’ of our audience through these letters and cards. If a certain program brings an extraordinarily large response, we know it is pleasing you. A broadcast that fails to bring the expected letters is carefully analyzed to determine its faults.”

Interconnectivity? A sense of community? Of something larger? This is the 1931 model of our wired nation.

WLS still broadcasts, and you can stream it. I’ll leave it to you to discover if they still ring the Dinner Bell.

That any household appliance in any century would carry the cure for society’s ills, or even just for loneliness is another kind of a science fiction, a change anybody can believe in.

I leave you with these words of encouragement. They’re from The Radio Boys at Ocean Point or the Message That Saved the Ship by Allen Chapman, author of The Radio Boys at Mountain Pass, and The Radio Boys’ First Wireless, all published by Grosset & Dunlap, copyright 1922:

“But valuable as radio was in war,” Brandon went on, “I believe it is going to be still more valuable in the matter of maintaining peace. I think, in fact, that it may do away with war altogether.”

“I don’t quite get you,” said Bob, with a puzzled air.

“In this way,” explained Brandon. “It’s going to make all the people of the world neighbors. And when people are neighbors they’re usually more or less friends. They have to a large extent the same interests and they understand each other.

“Now, most wars have been due to exclusiveness and misunderstandings. Each nation has dwelt in its own borders, behind its own mountains or its own rivers, and they’ve shut out of their minds and interests all people outside of themselves. They’ve grown to think that a stranger must necessarily be an enemy. Some little thing happens that makes them mad and they’re ready to fight.

“But the radio is going to break down all those barriers of exclusiveness and remove these misunderstandings. When people get to talking together each finds that the other isn’t such a bad fellow after all. When a man in Paris picks up his telephone and has a chat with one man in England and then another man in Spain and still another in Italy he finds that they are all human beings and very much like himself. If he had the Englishman, the Spaniard, the Italian in his office together, he’d probably invite them out to dinner and they’d all have a good time. When the time comes that in every country in South America men can tune in on the radio and listen to the inaugural address of the President of the United States coming from his own lips, they’ll know that we have no unfriendly designs on their country and are only anxious to see them happy and prosperous. We’ll hear the same speeches, we’ll listen to the same concerts, and gradually we’ll come to feel that we’re all neighbors. That’s why I say that the radio may in the course of time make all wars impossible, or at least, very improbable.”

“It sounds reasonable,” commented Bob. “I only hope that you’re right.”

FAMOUS MONSTERS OF DEUTSCHLAND

Cigarette manufacturers expect repeat business for good reason. They just can’t count on brand loyalty. To keep customers coming back, different series of collectible cards were included, one with every pack, creating an OCD delivery system.

The well-known Honus Wagner baseball card came from a pack of Piedmont or Sweet Caporal, the cancerstick of choice for James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan. While one story goes that Wagner was holding out for more pay, another version says Wagner didn’t appreciate having his portrait promote tobacco use to young folks. The card was withdrawn, and that, not merely its age, accounts for its supreme scarcity.

These weren’t meant to be consigned to a cigar box or wrapped in a rubber band, exiled to a bureau drawer. To further enhance collectibility, they were glad to provide you with an album into which you'd paste them, a way to keep track of your three-pack-a-day habit.

I came across a two-volume album, entitled Vom Wedren Deutscher Filmkunst, from 1935. It's a proud history of German cinema, complete with elaborate text and captions. Glossy, bright cigarette cards provide the illustrations. The text would be tough going even if I were fluent in German: it’s set in a blackletter font better suited for the Spinal Tap logo.

Okay, it's not on a level with finding lost films or still more footage from "Metropolis," but I was pleased to see that many of the "stills" were not the same ones I'd seen repeatedly in film histories, monster magazines and old Perry Rhodan science-fiction paperbacks.

Unfortunately, because they’re a product of their time, the march of cinema starts goosestepping. There are synopses of propaganda films about Hitler Youth, and 8” x 10”s of a rising young starlet named Leni Riefenstahl.

But there are also shots of what’s purportedly the UFA studio, and many films and actors you may only know by reputation. I’ll share more soon.

You’re welcome, Google.

Brigitte Helm, the “Vamp” of German cinema, in “Metropolis.”

Paul Wegener as the Golem.

“The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.”

Hans Albers in “F.P. 1 antwortet nicht” or “F.P. 1 Does Not Answer.”

“F.P.” stands for “Flugzeugplattform” or “Flying Platform,” if I remember my science fiction history correctly.

“Frau im Mond” or “The Woman in the Moon.”

“Hilde Warren und der Tod.”

THE ZEN OF SKEEZIX

Collectors of original comics art cringe at a piece in this condition.
It’s got some issues. I keep staring at this memento mori, set in Gasoline Alley, trying to figure the exact nature of them.
Each of the four panels of this strip were drawn on separate pieces of art board, then pasted on thinner paper in a row to comprise that day’s continuity. As a result, the full piece feels slightly “scored” at each panel border. It wants to fold itself up in four. The shaded area seems to be a light blue watercolor. Is the brown stain rubber cement on the reverse side of the board asserting itself on the front, some shading film that’s fallen off and discolored the paper, or something else altogether?

Would it have troubled Frank King to see how the art materials of his heyday deteriorated his hard day’s work? I’d be foolish to say it wouldn’t annoy him or any proud craftsman. But check the trail in the rear view mirror: By the publication date of this strip, he would have been creating daily installments for about two and a half decades. If they were all returned to him, if he’d kept them all, his studio would be piled with -- ballpark -- over seven thousand of them. I imagine he’d want them, but it’s tough to visualize a stack of seven thousand of anything, or see how it would keep from impeding the manufacture of the next seven thousand. There was not an established secondary market for these. What’s happened to the artwork of his era’s cartoonists is the source of many a bad anecdote. It was given away for the asking, it was thrown away, it was lost, strayed, swiped, sent to fans or maybe traded to other cartoonists.
However, this is not a lecture on creators’ rights, nor the enlightened times we enjoy today, nor is it an essay on art conservation.

Cartoonists set great store by their work’s reproduction. Their art, handcrafted down to the lettering, was almost of secondary importance. No matter how proud one was of a strip, no matter how pretty it was on the drawing board, no matter how much filigree was in the linework, the goal was to have it roll off the press and stick to newsprint, a grade of paper specifically chosen for its cheapness. Chosen? It was the default option: publishers would buy worse paper, if only they could.
So slap on the Pro White, carve away with the X-Acto and daub on the Best Test as liberally as you like, since the condition of the original is not what matters, it’s all about the quality of its reproduction, and on porous paper that soaks up muddy ink like a ShamWow. Joe Morning Coffee doesn’t see the white-out over the smudgy fingerprints or smell the glue covering the dismal first draft, or know if you can swing a mean Windsor Newton brush, or care. Make him laugh or advance the story.
King’s aim was to provide another tiny advancement of the current story he was telling, as well as a much larger one built by accretion and sheer perseverance.

Gasoline Alley, as its title suggests, began when the automobile was still remarkable and novel. It was mostly devoted to camaraderie among car mechanics. But with the arrival of a foundling on the doorstep of the main protagonist, Walt, who named the baby boy Skeezix, the strip took a step closer to domestic comedy.
Yet King found a way to distinguish Gasoline Alley from the work of his contemporaries.
He set himself the challenge of allowing his characters to age. The Peanuts gang remained in elementary school from start to finish. Little Orphan Annie ran over 85 years without its nominal heroine becoming old enough to buy a brew or get a learner’s permit.
Moreover, no comic strip ever concerned itself with money the way Gasoline Alley did. Even a strip called “Tillie the Toiler” didn’t discuss the working week with the same vigor. Dagwood was a millionaire’s boy who threw it all away to marry chorus girl Blondie and spent the rest of his life slaving for Mr. Dithers, but that and other “workplace comedies” just didn’t have striving for the American Dream in its DNA.
In Gasoline Alley, much is made of earning a living, how to make a buck and keep it, and what needs to be done to stay afloat. Can it just be coincidence that Walt and Skeezix’s surname is Wallet?




Skeezix gets an office job and works on a newspaper for a time. His brother Corky opens a diner. Skeezix, no stranger to entrepreneurship, opens a new firm with his business partner, Wilmer Bobble. In a great Sunday episode from 1945, Wallet & Bobble discuss their work ethic and their aspirations. “We’ll work like heck with our heads and with our hands,” says Skeezix.
“Right you are,” replies Wilmer, “An’ no job will be too hard for us.”
Counters Skeezix, “We’ll live up to our motto – ‘We Tackle Anything.’”
They keep this up, actually living inside their fantasy of the firm growing more prosperous, expanding in size and staff, and its assignments becoming all the more outrageous, like figuring out how to get a locomotive out of the side of a building. They conjure up the eventuality of having to build a new plant, hire an office staff, and have so much work that they’ll have to take the wives and children they don’t yet have on vacations in Panama and Peru to get away from it all.
Finally, reality sets in. Surveying their tiny quarters, Skeezix rubs his chin the way people only do in comic strips and admits, “On second thought, Wilmer, it’s really a little dump we have here after all.”



John Dos Passos wrote the novels that comprise the U.S.A. Trilogy. Throughout their pages, he traces the beginnings of several young men and women, most of them from impoverished backgrounds. He picks up their narrative when they’ve just about had enough of their provincial small towns and farm communities (and when said towns have had just about enough of them in kind), when they’re ready to shove off and grow up, eager to see what the world has to offer them. They have plans or at least dreams of escaping the destinies of their birth circumstances, and that usually involves a train trip to New York or Washington, or a voyage abroad, voluntary or not. Dos Passos often takes inventory of their finances right down to the change in their pockets. The characters muse about whether it’s enough to get them breakfast, or just coffee, or a flop, of maybe a room at the Y. He often weaves these threads together, allowing his characters to cross paths as they embrace the future, become successful, grow in society’s esteem. Advancing one protagonist’s fortunes to a certain height, he will drop his or her story and begin anew in another locale. Not unlike a cartoonist who’s in it for the long haul.
Scarcely a conventional novelist, Dos Passos surrounds these chunks of story with biographies of the great (Edison, Bryan, Debs, Veblen) and what he terms “The Camera Eye” as well as “Newsreels.” They’re scattershot through the text, with snippets of song lyrics and slogans, clippings and headlines of news accounts to provide some context for his pilgrims’ progress.
Would I be torturing a metaphor to draw a parallel between this technique and the context a comic strip enjoys, surrounded and enveloped in the current events and editorials and advertising slogans of that day’s newspaper? Okay, maybe I am.
But as avant-garde as Dos Passos can be, his m.o. is perfectly traditional in an important respect: he knows what the future holds for his characters. The Great War looms ahead of them, and they’re all about to be pulled into the vortex of Nineteen Nineteen. The drumbeat of the marching band and the flag flying from every skyscraper window prove inexorable, as
small-town boys become soldiers and sailors, and hope for trysts with small-town girls who drive ambulances for the Red Cross. And if Dos Passos didn’t know this was going to transpire in these books, he wouldn’t have started writing.

When Frank King embarked on his open-ended domestic comedy, he couldn’t have known the stock market was going to crash. He couldn’t know when Prohibition would be repealed. He couldn’t know that The War to End All Wars would have a sequel.
I suspect he’d always planned to have Skeezix spend some time in uniform, or he might not have sent him to a military academy. But World War II would have been unfathomable from the hazy perspective of the Jazz Age.
Fans of the strip are impressed that the characters “age in real time.” More impressive is that it’s written in “real time.” Anything in the rest of the paper can throw the continuity a curve ball. Now Skeezix is in this man’s Army, stationed in Africa, anxiously awaiting mail call with the rest of the G.I.s.
Imagine you’ve sold your strip about the hilarious happenings of some endearing hipster twentysomethings at a downtown dotcom: how they work, how they play foosball, and how annoying they are to East Village bartenders. Then 9/11 happens. Then some other stuff happens. And keeps happening.


In a casual conversation sometime in the 80’s, I mentioned to comics historian John Benson how much I liked Gasoline Alley. “Yeah. And where would you be reading that?” was his somewhat bemused reply. Sheepishly, I had to admit I was basing my learned opinion on the half dozen Sunday strips reproduced in Bill Blackbeard and Martin Williams’ tome, The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics.
If you were serious about reading Gasoline Alley at all, you would find other aficionados and buy, borrow or trade comic strips clipped from old newspapers, amassed in bulk or catch-as-catch-can; a process, in those pre-Internet days, that was every bit as convenient as it sounds. I didn’t imagine that I had either the resources or the stamina for that literal paper chase. Constructing a time machine sounded vaguely more practical.
But how else could it be read? Where had this fantastically long and elaborate narrative been collected? Where was it stored so that the new reader could get some sense of the backstory of what was becoming a family saga, the Great Forgotten American Novel?
Where? A handful of children’s books, published by Reilly & Lee, a few Whitman Big Little Books, which are illustrated prose adapted from the strip, scant and haphazard appearances in comic books which, if they were radioactive, would barely register on a Geiger counter, and that’s about all.

Prior to the most recent initiative that began to appear in 2007, there has been no prior sustained attempt to collect or reprint the bulk of Gasoline Alley, despite that enjoyment of the strip depends on a deep knowledge of the ever-maturing characters and their relationships.
So let’s review: that’s four drawn panels a day, for decades. The physical art itself is meaningless until printed for an audience that absorbs this continuity four panels at a time, then it is thrown away and never collected satisfactorily in the artist’s lifetime. You’re always involved in the Now, and you never think about the goings-on within it until confronted with it the next day.

Very Zen.

AD MEN

All the industry’s greats are represented in “100 Top Copy Writers and Their Favorite Ads,” edited by Perry Schofield, Printer’s Ink Publishing Company, 1954 (a time when every office must’ve come equipped with a pipe rack.) The roll call reads like a veritable “How to Succeed in Business”: Rosser Reeves, Fairfax Cone, Raymond Rubicam, the ubiquitous David Ogilvy, Bruce Barton (you know, as in “Batten, Barton…”) and – you’ll think I’ve retrofitted this name like an Old London logo into an episode of “Mad Men” – one Draper (Dan) Daniels. Here’s his bio and preferred puff piece.

Glen Jocelyn’s piece wouldn’t have been out of place at Sterling Cooper.

You probably know Henry Slesar best from his science fiction and mysteries. Here’s the –very successful --day job.

Sorry, no ads for Patio Diet Soda this time.

CZARTOONS

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.