I don't think I've read Animal Crackers since the late 1980s. It ran in The Plain Dealer, which my parents got, and I'd read Bollen's strip along with whatever else was on the page. I don't especially recall any strips in particular, but it just kind of rolled in the background with Hagar the Horrible and Beetle Bailey. I was more interested in Garfield when I was younger, and Calvin & Hobbes and The Far Side once those strips debuted.

I did, however, have a small, heart-shaped box with a relief of Lyle Lion under the phrase, "Love is the answer." Lyle was shown asking, "What was the question?" I got it as a Valentine's Day gift from my parents one year. I have no idea what happened to it -- it probably got thrown out around the time I went to college -- but it was on my desk in my bedroom for probably around a decade. And so that box stands out as a stronger memory of the strip to me than any of the actual strips themselves.

When I heard of Roger Bollen's passing a few years back, my first thought was, "He was still alive?" Then, having read some pieces that noted he passed the strip on to Fred Wagner in the 1990s who then passed it on to Mike Osbun when he died in 2016, I thought, "The strip's still published?" I have thought about the strip periodically since I last actually read it, but I never mustered enough interest to see if it was still around.

I don't say that as a means to knock Bollen's or Wagner's or Osbun's work. (Hell, I've never even read Wagner's or Osbun's versions!) But it strikes me as everything problematic with newspaper strips relative to webcomics.

First, the strip is almost entirely reliant on Tribune Content Agency for marketing and general promotion. But they're dropped or cancelled most of their strips and, they're down to only sixteen, most of which are legacy strips like Dick Tracy and Gasoline Alley. They see to put more of their focus on other newspaper filler like horoscopes, advice columns, and card games. (Including TWO different columns on Bridge. Do people still play Bridge? I can't recall the last time I heard someone even mention Bridge!) As far as I can tell, Animal Crackers hasn't gotten into a book since 1982.

Related to that are licensing deals. As I mentioned, I did have that small box, but with a cast of anthropomorphic animals, you'd think it'd be easier to sell plush dolls and such. I think there are more licensing deals with Andy Capp right now than Animal Crackers. Now, to be fair, that may have been some kind of issue with Bollen himself -- Bill Watterson famously refused to let his creations be turned into stuffed animals. But that there have been at least some licensed pieces over the years, it would seem that's not the case.

Then there's the name itself. It was actually the third newspaper strip to use the name "Animal Crackers" and it's in such common useage thanks to both the cookies and the Marx Brothers film (which both predate the strip by several decades) that internet searches on the comic strip are more difficult than other comics. Even if you know precisely the name of the strip, you have to manually filter out loads of unrelated information if you're trying to get to something about Bollen's strip. This obviously was not an issue or concern when Bollen first launched his strip in 1967, but it can be insanely problematic today. Even the Wikipedia entry for the actual strip not only notes the two predecessors, but the image is from one of those as well with no visual reference to Bollen's or Wagner's or Osbun's work.

Animal Crackers was never a bad comic to my recollection. Very much on par with much of what was in the funny pages throughout the 1970s and '80s. But several factors unrelated to the strip's actual contents have kept it stuck as a vague memory from 30+ years ago, instead of a part of the contemporary comics scene. Which is unfortunate. But it's also why I think the traditional newspaper syndicate model needs to change in order to be relevant in the 21st century.

When I was a teenager, I saw the movie Nothing in Common with Tom Hanks and Jackie Gleason. I don't remember exactly when I first saw it -- sometime after it had started showing up regularly on cable, so probably when I was in the back half of high school when I was starting to give serious consideration to a career. The movie mostly revolves around Hanks' character reconciling and getting along with his retiring and recently divorced father, played by Gleason. But the backdrop of it has Hanks as goofy, wise-cracking executive at an ad agency. He got to be creative and have fun all day, and he got paid some big money. That sounded like a fantastic job to me! It by no means was a primary motivator, but I'd be lying if I said it wasn't in the back of my mind when I went to school to get a degree in graphic design.

My first few graphic design jobs out of school were not for agencies, however, but companies' in-house design departments. Those weren't nearly as cool, but I'd understood that agency jobs aren't as common and generally required a high level of expertise that I hadn't quite mastered yet. Nonetheless, every time I went job hunting, I'd send my resume and portfolio samples off to various agencies. And eventually, about five years after graduating, I got in. An actual agency gig.

I was excited. It looked like it had that same free-spirited atmosphere that I saw in Nothing in Common. One of the co-owners had a giant Three Stooges print hanging in his office, and there were two Razor scooters that employees could use to zip from one side of the office to the other. Plenty of the creative work hung around the studios, some of it actual projects they were paid for, some of it just personal stuff people did for fun. It seemed like what I'd been looking for in an employer since high school.

From the fact that I'm telling you all this, I'm sure you no doubt expect the "But..." that's inevitably coming.

It turned out to be a very uncomfortable job. Partially because the job I was apparently hired for didn't exactly mesh with the job I was told I was hired for, but also because the atmosphere itself was very uncomfortable for me (and I suspect others too). It was uncomfortable because it very much felt like a stereotypical frat house. There was a very strong sense of a dude-bro culture (well before "dude-bro" was an actual term) and it wasn't uncommon for jokes to go around that were more... explicit than is warranted in a corporate office with many having a misogynistic leaning. As far as I know, there was no overt sexual harassment that took place there (reported or not) -- as far as I saw/heard, those jokes only seemed to crop up when no women were present -- but for as uncomfortable as it made me feel as someone who was decidedly not on the butt end of those jokes, I can't help but believe that every woman there cringed every time they thought about dealing with those attitudes in the office.

After about a year, I was let go, along with about half a dozen others. All of whom happened to have worked on a project that one of the owners micro-managed to the point of it failing. I haven't worked at an agency in the two decades since then. If agency life was like that, I will absolutely pass.

I tell this story in relation to the announcement of Warren Ellis' return to comics after word of his... problematic behavior to female "proteges" five years ago. I'm wondering how many women were pushed out of comics because of that kind of thing. Beyond the stories of overt sexual harassment. Not to diminish those, certainly, but the number of times women just felt deeply uncomfortable working in a misogynistic, dude-bro climate like I did undoubtedly exceeds the number of explicit acts of harassment. How many women got a taste of that culture and said, "No, thanks"?

My point is that many of the stories we tend to hear about are the worst of the worst. And they need to be treated as such. But just because women aren't being groped on a daily basis doesn't mean that the environment isn't toxic. And even if you're an asshole and don't care about women as people, does it even make sense from a business perspective to actively turn away talented individuals just because you think you're better than them? That seems to me a recipe for problems. If you allow this bullshit to continue, much less encourage it, you're going to be outed at some point, and your business is going to suffer. Like I said, even if you're an asshole with no moral compunctions (and that moral dimension is indeed the way you should be looking at this) it's just bad business.

Speaking of which, that ad agency I was telling you about? They were later bought out for their client list. The agency was less than half the size than when I worked there. The original owners were initially promised leadership positions in the larger company, but were pushed out soon after. You reap what you sow.

A little while back, I was digging around for information on the old Everett True comic strip and stumbled across Barnacle Press where they're housing a huge number of old comic strips. Scanned at pretty decent resolution and cleaned up (a bit) for all the world to see. Obviously, it's all public domain stuff but there's famous works like Barney Google and Katzenjammer Kids to more obscure titles like Diana Dillpickles and Soosie the Shopper (which apparently only lasted a couple months). Lots of great comics to find and enjoy there, although it doesn't seem to have been updated in a few years.

In any event, in looking through their archives, I came across this... The brainchild of Al Posen, Them Days Is Gone Forever ran from 1922 until 1925 (sort of). The strip sounds excessively complicated on first glance, but Posen did put some restraints on himself, in theory, to make things more productive. The melody running across the top of the strip was identical every day. So he wasn't creating new music all the time; in fact, the rhythm essentially forced the wording structure of the language in each panel. And the last panel always featured one or some of the characters singing "Them days is gone forever!" There weren't any recurring characters or ongoing plotlines, though, so Posen just had to come up with short vinettes in which people compare the past to the present. Usually mournfully.

He changed the strip in April 1924 to The Jingle Belles to change things up a bit, but that didn't go over very well and he changed it back six months later. That didn't go over so well either, and it was axed completely in early 1925. Although United Feature Syndicate continued to sell it as reprints for several more years.

I believe I've mentioned previously how I spent many of my Saturday mornings as a kid glued to the television watching cartoons, and how most of those were themed around comics or superheroes. There were a few years when that included a Flash Gordon cartoon, that looked exciting and different from just about everything else on TV at the time. It also infuriated me to no end.

The show was put together by Filmation after seeing the immense success of Star Wars. It was for Saturday mornings, though, so they did quite a lot to cut costs. Reusing generic footage, animating characters as silhouettes, that kind of thing. I recall it being noticeable as a kid, but not nearly to the extent that it was on later Filmation projects like He-Man. And they did something that no other American cartoon was doing at the time -- there was one story for the whole season. Each episode was merely a chapter in a broader story, and the credits always started running just as you were really getting into it.

I thought that was fantastic. It seemed a lot more adult than the short, fifteen-minute adventures the Super Friends were getting into. The serial nature, while still fairly simplistic, meant that you had to follow for an extended period. There never seemed to be any condescension towards the audience, and the writers let the action unfold more naturally without a lot of unnecessary exposition.

So why did the show infuriate me?

Because the network never aired the episodes in order. At least not by the time I discovered it. It was very apparent, too, because the title of each episode was given up front with the chapter number.

When I first caught the show, I thought my problem was just getting to watch it every week. It came on at 11:30, I think, and I'd often get called away for lunch before it was over. Sometimes just as it was about to start. But I made a stead-fast determination once to pay close attention and ensure I at least kept track of the chapter numbers and titles for a few weeks, even if I couldn't see the whole episode. Sure enough, it jumped from 6 to 9 to 15 to 3 to...

Oh, there was usually a quick summary of what happened on the previous episode at the start of each one, so it wouldn't take that much to follow along out of order, but I was so irked at that they weren't showing them in order in the first place, I didn't really bother to sort it out. I think I ultimately only watched a handful of episodes in total.

Some decades later, I find the whole series is available for free on YouTube. I have to say that it really was an incredibly well-done series. It's not hard to spot the cost-cutting (not only re-using the rotoscoping from character to character, but I recall some of it being used in Filmation's Tarzan cartoon as well) but much of it was done very creatively to for dramatic effect. The spaceships in particular are fantastic.

(I've since learned that the spaceships were done by creating actual models of the ships, and painting them white with black outlines drawn right along the model's edges. These were then filmed normally against a white background. The frames of the film were then printed onto the animation cells and colored by hand. The effect is that the ship looks like traditional, flat animation, but the changing perspectives and rotations are done much more smoothly than any hand-drawn attempt. Here again, sequences are often reused, but they're creatively cut or jointed with other animations that it's not quite as blatant.)

More significantly, the story holds up very well. It does have a number of those pulp-y plot coincidences -- owing a great deal to creator Alex Raymond's original stories -- but there's some interesting things going on. Character morals are rarely black and white, and the dynamics among them relatively nuanced, especially for a Saturday morning cartoon.

I was happy to find it online to see if it held up as well as my imagination remembered it, and I was even more happy to see that my recollection wasn't even doing the show justice. It's well worth taking a look if you haven't seen it recently.

As I've noted before in a few different places, earlier this year I began using my "media server" (i.e. an old laptop that I've thrown a bunch of music and video files on) to host a local comics database as well as any digital comics I have. And since my prior database died back in 2019, I was not only several years out of date with cataloging of my collection but my data set had developed some problems from my various attempts to reconfigure it for different databases. So for the past month and a half, I've been re-cataloging my entire comics collection.

This has been exceptionally tedious. It's easy enough to tick the box next to Avengers #372 to mark it in my database, but anything that's a little more off the beaten path and isn't already in the database requires a decent amount of data entry. One of the last books I had to manually enter last night was Jason Walz's Homesick, which was an Eisner Award nominee back in 2014! Over a decade and you don't have Eisner nominees included yet?!

Having to input any single issue or graphic novel isn't that big a deal. But you multiply that by hundreds or thousands, and it gets repetitious. And annoying when some of those issues are exceptionally-small-run mini-comics where the creator didn't even bother to include any information on the comic itself besides the URL of their now-several-years-defunct Tumblr. There's been more than a couple instances where literally the only reference I can find anywhere online to the comic is an old blog post I myself made when I first acquired it!

But as tedious as it's been and continues to be -- a month and a half with virtually all of my free time going towards cataloging, and I've logged nearly 20,000 individual pamphlet comics and 2,000 graphic novels with at least a few thousand more to go -- and despite my complaints here, I will say that it's also been very enlightening. By having to go through each book one by one, I'm better familiarizing myself with my collection. Books that I didn't realize were limited editions, autographs I didn't know I had, obscure mini-comics by creators very early in their careers before they got any notoriety... My copy of Hicksville is signed to me personally by Dylan Horrocks and includes a color sketch of the lighthouse, and I don't even remember ever meeting Horrocks! It's like a book from Hicksville itself!

Some of this comes from the volume of books in my collection, some from the passage of time since I picked these up in the first place, and some from the nature of how I acquired other people's collections in a more bulk process. But it's the first time I've really sat down and actually examined my entire collection since the last time I did a full inventory 20 years ago. (I checked; I made a post here on this blog about starting to use ComicBookDB back in June 2006!) Which, on the one hand is bad because I really should be more familiar with my collection, but on the other hand is understandable because it's a good sized collection that would take a much larger, more concerted, more ongoing effort to fully become familiar with. Which takes away from the actual reading and research that I get comics for in the first place!

I had Kurt Busiek once tell me that he's not a comic book collector; he's just a voracious comic book reader who just doesn't get rid of his comics. I feel similarly. I don't get these comics to collect them; I get them to read! This collection angle -- the cataloging of everything -- is more about being able to understand and find things I need/want to revisit when I come across something I need to cross-reference. Whether that's an old story being referenced by a new one, or an old work by a creator who I just re-discovered via their newer work, or part of a general research project I might be working on. The entire point of my setting up my own library was to actively make it a working library; the cataloging is part of that, both by recording what's in the library and by forcing me to become more personally familiar with everything.

Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

Kleefeld on Comics: How to Survive the End of the World Review
https://ift.tt/2VwC7MJ

Kleefeld on Comics: There Will Come Soft Rains
https://ift.tt/i5YvHI1

Kleefeld on Comics: Cave Painting Inches Closer to Comics
https://ift.tt/d3ZT7Vh

Kleefeld on Comics: Ad Populum Is Burning Money
https://ift.tt/ZH7bkCs

Kleefeld on Comics: These Kids Today...
https://ift.tt/60jA5bm

I've happened across more than a few instances recently of comics fans who are out there talking about their favorite hobby online. They've got their own channel/outlet and they're doing their own takes on Jimmy Olsen and Jack Kirby and the Eternals and Wally Wood and any/everything to do with comics. There's nothing new with this, of course; fans have been talking about comics LOOONG before the internet was even a thing, so it makes sense that it would translate online. In fact, many -- if not most -- of my interactions online back in the late '90s centered around talking about comics. I began my own Fantastic Four themed site in 1996, and I spent time discussing characters and creators and issues both past and present on a variety of message boards. Several of the people I talked with back then are still in my circle, and I still talk with them about comics.

But these folks I've come across more recently are a bit different. Beyond the obvious things like their using social media, which wasn't even a thing back in the day, but rather... well, basically that they weren't even there back in the day. I don't mean that as a slight or anything; they're simply too young (probably not even born in some cases) to have been part of the conversations I was having back in 1996. For them, Jack Kirby has always been a legend that already passed away, Chris Claremont has always been a former X-Men writer, Image Comics has always held a significant piece of the comics market, mega-crossover events have always been the norm, Wednesday was always New Comics Day, etc. The people who I've been discussing comics with have obviously aged with me and, while there may be as much 10-15 years between us in age, there was still enough overlap that we saw many of the same comics experiences in real time. We read Watchmen as a monthly serial, we watched as Judge Dredd get juggled from Eagle Comics to Quality Comics to Fleetway Comics, we saw DC run a 1-900 kill-your-partner hotline to vote on Robin's life, we debated whether Marvel Comics would sell off some of their characters to help get them out of bankruptcy, we saw comics drawn on a computer for the very first time... Even there were several years between us, we had those touchstones that were part of our comics background and makeup.

By contrast, I just caught a video providing an overview of the original Secret Wars series. It wasn't a review exactly, it didn't reveal any previously hidden background details, it didn't have any new interviews with the original creators; it was just an overview of what happened and some of the context around it. That's a piece that would never have occured to me to write because... well, why? Everyone I know read it as it came out back in the '80s. More poignently, I would never think to write a piece like that because there's little for me to learn in the process. I read the comics back then, I read articles about the comics back then. From a strictly fact/content basis, I could've dashed off the same info of the video I watched without even doing research.

But then, there's the real key difference. These people I'm talking about? They've got the perspective of someone in their late 20s/early 30s. Meaning a) they're reading these stories in a notably different (post-Y2K, post-9/11, post-comiXology) context, and b) they have a different form and style of communication than we older folks do. The most obvious differences are a much heavier dose of snark and the regular use of (borderline reliance on) cutaway gags. I'm not opposed to these ideas, mind you; I'm conversant enough in their language that I get it, even though it's not engrained nearly enough for me to sound natural or casual with it. Those are both styles that really didn't show up on my radar until I was an adult and had a writing/communicating style already pretty firmly established; they're just not an inherent part of my media background.

That combination of things is what I find striking. That they're talking about comics that are just part of my background growing up, as well as having a better set of language components to speak to a younger crowd. I haven't noticed much of a difference between myself (firmly planted in Gen X) and Millennials, but I do see a much more pronounced break between Millennials and Gen Z. (Well, as pronounced as these type of broad generational classifications allow; I expect several of these people I'm seeing are technically Millennials, albeit ones from the tail end of that period.) There's a markedly different approach they're taking, one that's more media-literate, where digital editing has always been the norm and remixing content is something they've been doing they're whole lives.

To a degree, this has always been how aging works, right? Folks get older and start seeing how younger people are doing things differently? "These kids today..." and so on. I think it's much more noticeable now, though, because younger folks have access to a much wider platform than literally any generation before them. My initial thought when I saw some of these videos were out there was to question why they were doing them; the topics they're spelling out in the titles have been covered to death already. Which they have, but by older people who don't speak Gen Z fluently. These younger folks use a different media language, and it takes someone speaking in that vernacular to connect in a way that an old fart like myself wouldn't.

Ultimately, my point is that, while it's easy to dismiss "these kids today" as being wholly unoriginal and simply re-hashing the discussions we had decades ago, they're actually having different talks. Ones that come from a different media landscape. Ones that come with an entirely different way to unpack its baggage. Ones that still rely on and reference those discussions we had on USENET, but with emojis and memes and Snapchat filters instead of just, you know, Courier.

Maybe it's easier for me since I was never "with it" in any capacity, and no one listened to me even when I was a marketable demographic. But don't dismiss "these kids today" as just covering the same ground you covered decades ago. There's some new and interesting approaches out there, and I'm eager to hear more of what these folks have to say.