Since “Watchmen” opens the same day as the show, I’d like to use this space to talk about other books that are related to comics, but aren’t graphic novels, because you shouldn’t be wasting your time with those or movies based on them, and instead involving yourselves in things related to me. Here are some works, either made of comics themselves or based on them, that I think are pretty interesting.

Archy and Mehitabel – by Don Marquis

Don Marquis was a column writer for the New York Sun when he introduced the title characters of what later became a book. His creations are Archy, a cockroach with the soul of a vers-libre poet, and Mehitabel the alley cat, who believes she is Cleopatra reincarnated. Archy spends his nights painstakingly jumping on a typewriter to produce poems, log the exploits of Mehitabel, and retell stories he’s over heard from other gutter critters. Inserted are little bits of philosophy, much of which focused on the insignificance of the significant, and visa-versa. Oh, and since we’re talking about cartoons, nearly every page is illustrated. Also, it takes place during prohibition, which is fun to read about.

Here’s a little passage I just found that I really like. Archy has just met a moth who is about to fly into a light bulb, and Archy demands to know why moths insist on doing this. Don’t you have any sense? he asks. The moth replies:

plenty of it he answered
but at times we get tired
of using it
we get bored with the routine
and crave beauty
and excitement
fire is beautiful
and we know if we get
too close it will kill us
but what does that matter
it is better to be happy
for a moment
and be burned up by beauty

- – - -

If that isn’t a statement about The Artist, I don’t know what is. I love that, and could discus it endlessly.

(note: Archy, being a little bug, cannot use puncuation or capitol letters, because it would require jumping on two keys at once)

Pogo – by Walt Kelly

Pogo was a long running (nearly 30 years) newspaper comic that Alex introduced me to, and is apparently very hard to find. Also, Kelly coincidentally got his start at the short lived New York Star as well. The main character is a opossum named Pogo, who plays ‘the everyman.’ He is surrounded by a cast of other animals, who assume the roles of professors, deacons, scapegoats, and so on.  Kelly got into legal trouble when his already political strip made some unsubtle allusions to McCarthyism.

Krazy Kat – by Jay Cantor

Krazy Kat is a comic strip written by George Herriman, started in 1913. Krazy Kat is a novel by Jay Cantor. I’ll explain by unapologeticly quoting from the back of the book. “using George Herriman’s old comic characters to explore the psychosexual underpinnings of the atomic age and the bomb’s effects on personality and culture. Cantor turns the novel’s central difficulty how to create complex characters from cartoon images into its central metaphor, using their two-dimensionality as a reflection of the contemporary psyche” (Lawrence Rungren). I also took three classes from Cantor in college and am using this as an opportunity to name drop.

Calvin and Hobbes – by Bill Waterson

Do I really need to explain?

But back to the main question; is it literature?
It is.

-Dan