I always recommend that modern-day readers go back and read early comics. And I mean early, the kind of stuff they made when the 20th century was still new, the kind of stuff before the existence of the graphic novel or the comic book as a theoretical concept, the kind of stuff before many people had electricity. There are many hurdles to jump when reading these early works. Some are slight, such as the heavy pacing that makes a single page a whole storytelling unit. Some are extreme, there is so much racism in many of these works (including stereotypes I wasn’t even aware of). But if you are a fan of the form, never mind a critic or a scholar (self-proclaimed), you owe it to yourself. “The past is a foreign country, they do things differently1.”
These works, from before some things became standardized, before some forms of expression (the speech bubble, the nine-panel grid) became codified into regularity, are often fantastic, bizarre, and wonderful to behold because they differ from the norm. Because there was no ‘norm.2’ People tried anything and everything. Collections such as Forgotten Fantasy – Sunday Comics, 1900-19153, even in their weakest moments, show some techniques are storytelling chops that are so buried they become innovative again. One of these early pioneers of comics was one Gustave Verbeek (1867-1931), a man with a truly global background (parents are of Dutch origin, born and lived his early life in Japan, studied art in France, spent most of his working career in America) who did things that almost nobody would do today. Certainly not on a weekly basis.
The center point of this collection is The Upside Downs of Little Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo (from hence – The Upside Downs), a weekly strip with an extremely demanding central gimmick: each story is composed of twelve panels in two lines. Once one reads these panels, the strip is to be rotated and read upside down, which offers the second half of the story. The concept is, by itself, not without precedent, or continuation; even the glowing articles within the collection admit that Verbeek is continuing a tradition of reversible art that existed both in Europe and Japan. Still, the scale of it all is impressive, to think of one variation after another. Likewise the timescale – week after week for than a year.
There are shortcuts evident, the two main characters, Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo, are drawn as clear reversals of one another – which means the Lady Lovekins is saddled with a truly unfortunate choice of clothes4. Some of the perspective choices can only be excused because the reversal trick wouldn’t work otherwise. Yet these are all forgivable. We wouldn’t begrudge an Al Jaffee Mad Fold-In for straining the image in order to fit the joke. No, the problem with The Upside-Downs is sadly bigger: Verbeek quickly becomes a prisoner of his own format.
The stories in The Upside-Down are oft repetitive, with the pair going to some pre-arranged scenery, the river is extremely popular, and ending encountering some threatening beast (which is reversed into a friendlier beast in the other half of the story). The story would end with the beast either dispatched or the pair escaping into the safety of their home. Lather, rinse, repeat. Many a-comics strip made do with a repetitive structure, from Krazy Kat to Peanuts, and would often repeat plots and gags. The best of them, however, could turn this receptiveness into strength, straining the creativity of the writer in an attempt to find new variations on old gags – how many times did Charlie Brown fail to kick that football? How many times did Snoopy try to write his novel? Yet readers were charmed, rather than insulted, at the repeat of another take.
This is because Snoopy and Charlie Brown (and Nancy, and Ignatz Mouse, and Popeye etc.) are fully realized characters. The gags, and the more dramatic storytelling beats, arose from within them. We don’t just want to see any child missing that football, we want to see Charlie Brown – because Charlie Brown is defined as the kind of person who would keep trying to kick it even while knowing (deep within his heart) it was hopeless. Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo are not so well defined. After reading the complete run of the strip I really couldn’t tell you much about either – for a long while one isn’t even sure if they are meant to be father and daughter, husband and wife, a pair of friends, or any other option.
Because it’s early 20th century Lady Lovekins is the more timid one and Old Man Muffaroo is more likely to take action against whatever offending beast that appears, but that’s about it: there is no ‘there’ there. I don’t know them so I don’t care for them. The characters need to be reversible, which means that there can’t be anything truly unique about them. Everything about them is made, first and foremost, with the thought of the mechanical necessity of the strip – that it would be read in two ways. So everything else, from body language to unique design sense, has to go.
Likewise, much of the storytelling moves in stops and starts, with narrative shortcuts taking the characters from one moment to another; the word “suddenly” works overtime. As is “Suddenly, a great duck comes along.” (October 11, 1903) and “Suddenly Chased by a lion.” (November 8, 1903). “Suddenly he hears a cry” (June 12, 1904). Any attempt to gain an understanding of how this world works, even something as simple as the scale of the protagonists5 or the time period6 is doomed to fail. The strip doesn’t need to have clear rules to work, the world of Krazy Kat was as liquidly-shifting as its backgrounds, but it needs to have a sense of its own reality. The Upside-Downs reality is only dictated by the need of its main gimmick, everything else is suborned to it. The Upside-Downs is impressive, certainly, but it’s only impressive. It’s not funny or touching. It’s a marvel of innovation but a failure of a story.
The most interesting thing about The Upside-Downs, an element shared with the two other strips collected in this volume, Loony Lyrics of Lulu and The Terrors of the Tiny Tads, is how violent it is. The presentation and the visual style are closer to a children’s storybook, the creatures (human and animal alike) are oft drawn in a charmingly deformed manner, but if it’s any children’s book it’s Max and Moritz. The Upside-Downs, Loony Lyrics and Tiny Tads7 all depict a world awash with violence. The animals that besiege Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo, usually just simple creatures who oft seem to mean no harm, end up beaten and scared off (at best) or dead (at worst). The final strip, showing out and out war8, isn’t as out of place as one would expect: This is just another sign that the world is a place of cruelty and death. The stories usually end with the character returning home because, we are given to understand, home is the only safe place in a world gone mad.
The two other strips in this collection are also based on a gimmick – in both the main characters encounter a new creature in every story, a chance for Verbeek to flex his design muscle to great effect. In Loony Lyrics of Lulu, the protagonists hunt for various beasts while in Terror of the Tiny Tads, they simply encounter them in a random manner. Both strips suffer from the main issue of The Upside-Downs, the protagonists are near-personality free, the story is just a coat hanger on which to drape whatever new design Verbeek came up with this week, but, free from the chains of the upside-down structure, Verbeek allows himself to go hog-wild with the art. I’ve mentioned earlier that the main appeal of turn-of-the-century comics is that they had visual language so foreign to us as to be totally new, which is as true for Tiny Tads as any strip you would care to mention (including the best of Winsor McCay).
Tiny Tads is even more supremely violent than The Upside-Downs, possibly because the forever-mobile Tads have no home to retreat to, with one early strip showing them going to rest in an “Hotelephant,” which they proceed to burn from within. The final panel, with the remains of the creature, a mix of building in ruin and skeleton of a once-living being, is horrifying. It’s horrifying because the story doesn’t treat it as a unique tragedy but just as ‘something that happens’.
The following strips, the short selection we receive here, can be just as brutal – here there be monsters! Yet, at the same time, they offer a glimpse of reality fantastic and bizarre; for every threatening predator, there is another creature whose existence seems nothing short of a miracle. While the Tiny Tads themselves aren’t characters of great depth, there is something about the manner the world is built around them that reminds you of early childhood – it’s not just that they are small and wild, it’s how they don’t understand ‘the rules’ of how things work; the way in which every encounter is an encounter with something new.
We live in a world in which comics have been codified, and , through trial and error, some ‘rules’ have been achieved that might not be written laws but are still universally obeyed. The Tiny Tads didn’t know the rules, that’s why they burned down that poor Hotelephant, Gustave Verbeek didn’t know the rules (there were none) and the world he operated in really was fantastic and terrifying, at least from our point of view, it might not be a place I want to live in, but it is well-worth a visit.
- While my most of my experience, and this piece in particular, is based on American and English comics this advice works on other cultures as well – seek out some pre-WWII manga and enrich yourself ↩︎
- Hayao Miyazaki made a similar point about the history of animation: “I’d say that animation is probably in the jumbo jet era now. But there was also a pre–Wright brothers period of animation history. It was a period when animation often tried to flap its wings to fly and crashed. But in this midst of this, and mainly in the United States, a variety of commercially successful works, such as Mickey Mouse and Betty Boop, among others, did emerge.” (Starting Points, 1979-1996). ↩︎
- Also by Fantagraphics / Sunday Press ↩︎
- The things bumping from her hat eternally might be meant to be ribbons, but their size and shape doesn’t really work. Once one sees them as the legs of the upside-down Old Man Muffaroo it’s impossible to see them as anything else. ↩︎
- In some their scale compared to other animals hints that they are little fairy people in a fantasy land, in others they are shown to be human-sized with compared with animals such as a hippopotamus. ↩︎
- Many of the strips have fantasy elements, dragons and magic and lost castles, but one has an appearance by a Russian torpedo” and the narration refers to the main characters as “Americans.” ↩︎
- This was Verbeek’s greatest success at the time, running for nearly a decade, only a small selection is reprinted. ↩︎
- The Russian-Japan war was raging at the time and Verbeek was obviously cheering for his former home. ↩︎
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I enjoyed the review! I agree that this book is not to be read with expectations for psychologized or even shallowly defined characters – its joy comes from the play with form. As one of the essays in the book says, Verbeek seems to be working in a similar nonsensical tradition as Edward Lear. I think of the Upside-Downs like nonsense poems where rhyme determines events (in this case a kind of visual rhyme), in the way that Lear’s limericks seemed to be more determined by sounds than sense. A tight structure needs to be in place, but as you say perhaps this becomes too restricting for Verbeek.