The Origins of RAW and a Lost Lynch is Discovered

Lost Jay Lynch Painting Featured on Roadside Antiques

The inaugural Cartoon Crossroads Columbus event (CXC), held mostly on the campus of Ohio State University in early October 2015, was a terrific time and one that gave historians of the field ample material to digest. In a piece for The Comics Journal I focused on the keynote event of CXC, a panel in which the co-founders of the influential RAW magazine– cartoonist Art Spiegelman and his wife, The New Yorker Art Editor Françoise Mouly–discussed the early days of the magazine with cartoonist Jeff Smith.

The column also looks at “lost” early painting by cartoonist Jay Lynch that was recently appraised on the PBS TV show Roadside Antiques:  

The Origins of RAW and a Lost Lynch is Discovered

Alt-Weeklies Finally Get Their Day at the Society Of Illustrators

It was the Wild West. Unlike comic books, or even traditional newspapers, for the most part you didn’t buy an alt-weekly newspaper, much less hold on to it. You picked them up from a pile somewhere, read them or didn’t, and then threw them out. And just how many were there? In the years before the Internet how was it even possible to have any idea who was publishing where, especially with papers starting and folding, merging with others, changing names and moving? The industry’s own national trade association kept poor membership records and was (and still is) very selective about who it admits into its ranks. And what counts as an alt-weekly anyway? Some of these papers ran comic strips, but many didn’t. Some of these papers just ran comic strips without letting the artists know and didn’t pay them.

Read the whole story in The Comics Journal.

Comics at Columbia

Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Collection, which includes such items as an 9^th (or 8^th) century papyrus fragment of Homer’s “Odyssey,” Galileo’s “The Starry Messenger,” Arthur Rackham’s sketchbook for “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” René Descartes’ “Compendium” and Tennessee Williams’ eye glasses, is also drawing the attention of scholars whose interests lie in researching the world of comics. A selection of these comics related items from the University’s collection, including a Red Sonja outfit cartoonist Wendy Pini once wore on the Mike Douglas Show in the 1970s, are currently on display at an exhibit, Comics at Columbia: Past, Present, Future, at the University’s Butler Library.

The Columbia collection was not always so robust; in 2005, when librarian for Ancient & Medieval History and Graphic Novels Karen Green initiated Butler Library’s graphic novels collection, it consisted of three books often used in curricular offerings—Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, and Joe Sacco’s Palestine.  It now consists of more than 4,300 titles. Since 2011, the collection has grown to also include the life work of artists as diverse as mainstream superhero legends Jerry Robinson and Chris Claremont, Mad’s Al Jaffe, Elfquest’s Wendy and Richard Pini, and Denis Kitchen’s Kitchen Sink Press archive.  In addition to original artwork, the Columbia collection contains vast amounts of letters and correspondence, contracts, editorial and business files, mechanicals, draft art and mock-ups, and other original materials for researchers that chronicle, as Green says, “the process behind the finished product.”  These materials, Green adds, are proof that the comics medium “is worthy of academic study…these are the materials that bring a creator’s career into focus and provide context.”

“The year after we acquired the Claremont archives,” Green says, “that collection became the most requested collection in the entire Rare Book and Manuscript Collection…One of the things I love so much about libraries is that our core philosophy is grounded in organization, preservation and access.  Not to trash talk museums, but generally a visitor sees no more than 10 percent of a museum’s collection and the rest is stored away where very few people can find it.  Our Rare Book and Manuscript Library is open to a global community of scholars.  Anyone conducting a research project can come and request something in the collection and it will be brought to them.  This keeps the legacy of our creators alive. “

   

Columbia’s libraries contain more than 12 million volumes and draws four million visitors a year.  Among the materials in the Columbia collection on display are:

Wendy Pini’s 1970s comic con Red Sonja costume (below), as well as her painstaking sketches of its creation–View the Youtube clip here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9wRii6aiUk

Letters between Denis Kitchen and Stan Lee about the possibility of an approved, underground version of Spider-Man (above);

The sketches and final art from Al Jaffee’s Mad/Batman fold-in alternative;

Bill Finger original script for “Punch and Judy!,” a 12-page story that appeared in Batman #31 (1940), drawn by Jerry Robinson (listed as Bob Kane);

And psychologist and Wonder Woman creator William Moulton Marston’s contract to teach at Columbia.

The exhibit also includes an ancient strip discovered in the Butler Library’s archives that dates back to the 1700s, when Columbia was know as Kings College.

“The real star of the show is a comic that was confiscated from undergraduates who had made this extremely rude comic strip making fun of a professor whom they hated in 1766, when we were still King’s College,” Green told the Columbia Spectator.

The strip, shown below, “College Intrigues, or the Amors of Patrick Pagan,” tells the tale of a student who is seduced with “spruce” beer and impregnated by a professor who then pays for her abortion.  Images from the strip serve as the promotional materials for the exhibit.

Speakers at the opening included Jaffee and Claremont.  In his remarks, Claremont thanked Jaffee for his help in getting his start in the industry.  Jaffee was a family friend of Claremont’s parents, and when while on break from Bard College in the 1960s, Claremont asked for Jaffee’s help in securing an internship at Mad Magazine. Jaffee instead put him in touch with Stan Lee at Marvel.

“Al called Stan Lee, Stan called me, and I told Stan Lee that I would work for nothing…so I was hired,” Claremont said.  “So it is my privilege that my stuff is exhibited in the same place as Al’s.  You should look at his.  It’s a lot more fun at mine.”

The exhibition will be on display through January 23, 2015 in Columbia’s Kempner Gallery, Rare Book & Manuscript Library (Butler Library, 6th Floor).