Broken Frontier

The volumes of Craig Yoe’s Arf series are most aptly compared to burlesque comedy, that late lamented entertainment that propelled you from one funny skit to another with the primary purposes of delighting your senses and cracking you up.  I like to think of Arf as the comic book equivalent of The Carol Burnett Show.  Arf possesses all the goofiness, sparkle, and pizzazz of that greatest of all variety shows.  Yoe presents Arf with the same flair for detail that made each of Burnett’s shows so classy.  And just like Carol Burnett herself, Arf has the humanity that elevated Burnett to the highest echelons of comedy, along with the wink and the nudge that makes all great comedy great.

I’ve been reading the third volume in the series, Arf Forum.  I love the dimensions.  At 12 by 9 inches, it’s ideal, oversized for extra enjoyment, but not too large to carry around, hold, and read.  The quality of the reproductions is impeccable, showing the love and respect that Yoe has for the medium.  It’s a pleasure just to leaf through the pages, allowing the color and clarity of detail to meet my eye.  It makes my brain feel good.

Of course it makes my brain feel even better to actually sit and read this book.  You can get a preview here.  It begins with a section on reading comics, twenty-four pages of comics and commercial art showing both real and cartoon people reading comics (and some funny animals, too).  Included is a 1950s story by Stan Lee about an irate reader confronting a comic book editor. 

The title page proclaims, “Comic Reading is Fundamental.”  Yoe designed the title page to resemble an eye chart printed in his original Arf font.  The implication is sophisticated, the joke a double entendre, and yet like all his other visual jokes, Yoe presents it without calling attention to its ingenuity.  This point fascinates me about Yoe’s cartoons and his designs.  In the very best tradition of so much American humor, it deflects attention away from its sophistication with unswerving self-effacement.

Among other rich treats in Arf Forum are a series of surreal cartoons by Ted Scheel, rescued from the pages of Humorama.  I would love to sit and analyze these drawings one day, each depicting a work-related nightmare that a specific professional such as a doctor or a florist might have.  I’m content right now to point out the flow in each of these single-page drawings, the meaning arising from the connections that exist between the images, with no clear beginning or end.  The flow is nicely complemented and balanced by Yoe’s own original flowing, dream-like contribution, an episode of Jungle Comics starring Eddie Fumetti which, more than any other, illustrates why Animation Magazine dubbed Yoe “Dr. Seuss on acid!”

There is a fascinating piece by guest writer Ken Quattro recounting his quest to learn something – anything! – about mysterious comic book cover artist William Ekgren, which includes a never-before published Ekgren comic cover.  The bold and vibrant drawings by Henry Heath in the third installment of Arf’s “Cartoonists Go to Hell” series are almost dizzying.  I can’t explain how, but every single line of Heath’s is in perpetual motion.  Yoe also springs a major astonishment on us: selections from a 1934 graphic novel produced by Dadaist Max Ernst, featuring a motionless Easter Island watcher engaged in silly melodramas.

Readers will love, and repeatedly reference, the Smokey Stover strips that Yoe includes, along with a sweet story about his visit to Bill Holman just days before the cartoonists’ death.  Yoe mentions a life-long belief that Holman was an iconoclast and anarchist, calling Holman’s strip “Dagwood meets Dada,” and musing about the seemingly irreconcilable statement from Holman’s nephew that “Bill was a great patriot.”  Yoe wonders, can a cartoonist be “at the same time a patriot and a rambunctious rule-breaker”? 

If you look at Holman’s strips, you will understand why Yoe sees Holman as Dadaist and anarchist.  Nonsensical messages appear everywhere.  Ordinary objects have bizarre shapes, and environments change for no reason.  And nuts fly out of everything!  This is a wonderful example of the way in which American artists absorbed surrealism and made it uniquely American.  In the hands of many Americans, surrealism took on a pragmatic quality, the irrational logic of dreams being replaced by a preference for the real world.  Such is the genius, delight, and promise of Holman’s art, reconciling anarchy and the matter of fact, much like Man Ray did.  And yes, that is one way that ever-inventive cartoonists can be both patriot and anarchist!

Yoe includes a brief etymology of Smokey Stover’s famous nonsensical “foo,” which is now most commonly heard in computer programming.  Curious, I looked it up and found an RFC about foo.  An RFC stands for “Request for Comments,” engineering memos about issues related to internet technology.  The authors of RFC 3092 include this about Smokey Stover:

Holman's strip featured a firetruck called the Foomobile that rode on two wheels.  The comic strip was tremendously popular in the late 1930s, and legend has it that a manufacturer in Indiana even produced an operable version of Holman's Foomobile.

Yoe has a photograph of a working Foomobile. (p. 31)

I try to imagine what a visit to the Gussoni-Yoe studio must be like, since the Arf series collects the rare and unusual to an extent that I just haven’t seen anywhere else in comics publishing.  How on earth does the studio organize all this fine and commercial art?  How is it sorted, labeled, and cross-referenced?  Craig Yoe must possess one of the finest reference minds in the industry. 

We get the benefit.  The many themes of the Arf series parse an incredible collection in surprising and illuminating ways.  And best of all, we get to see a lot of comics about art, and art about comics.  Oh, and girls, too.  I wanted to tell you about Kremos, but I’m out of time.  Just trust me on this one.