In part two of our interview with cartoon art historian Craig Yoe. We discuss the roles that Fredrick Wertham, a Brooklyn-based gang of Jewish Nazis, and the Supreme Court judge who helped found the ACLU played in Joe Shuster’s post-Superman SM drawings.

[Part One]

Shuster’s name was kept entirely off of the original pamplets.

It was illegal, so he didn’t sign it, but I immediately recognized that it was his style and confirmed it with all of my buddies who are Siegel and Shuster historians and they all agreed that it was Joe’s work.

What specifically tipped it off?

It’s like a detective looking at fingerprints. You can tell. I’ve made a career of studying the work of cartoonists, and I just knew Joe’s style. There are little ticks about his work—the way he shaded it. Few comic book artists used pencil for shading and the little small hands he drew, and the squint of the eye, and the three-quarters back view, and just all of these kinds of things add up to where you can say, “holy shit, it’s Joe Shuster.” Not the least of which are that the characters look like Superman, and Clark Kent, and Lex Luther, and Lois Lane, and Lana Lang. You’ve got this alternate universe to the citizens of Metropolis—what happened between the panels.

It’s really an early version of fan-fiction.

Oh, yeah, right.

Except that it’s actually drawn by the artist himself.

Yeah, this time it’s no fan. It’s actually the creator of Superman drawing these pictures and it’s like the citizens of Metropolis gone wild.

What does the book’s supplementary text tackle?

I have the whole history behind the story. When I sold the book, it was just on the basis of being this erotic S&M artwork by Joe Shuster, the creator of Superman, but after falling into this and discovering this work, I fell into the story behind it. Tthis was part of one of the most important censorship cases probably ever in the history of our country. Eventually the case against he Times Square booksellers went all the way to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court ruled against these booklets and ordered them destroyed. It was a sad day in our country for freedom of the press. And actually, the judge who delivered the summary was one of the founders of the ACLU. He had a secret identity! By day, he was all for civil rights, and then he rules against these booklets.

And also, four Jewish Nazi juvenile delinquents that eventually became tagged the “Brooklyn Thrill Killers,” got a  hold of these booklets and used them as inspiration to commit their crimes, flogging girls in the park and torturing and murdering bums. They were arrested and brought to trial, but the judge of that case called in a psychiatrist who was very familiar with children and teenagers, by the name of Dr. Fredrick Wertham, who we of course know as the author of Seduction of the Innocent and the main figure behind the censorship of comic books.

Wertham entered to interview the leader of the Thrill Killers, who was this Jewish Nazi kid who would yell “sieg heil” and “heil Hitler” during the Pledge of Alliance and sported a Hitler moustache and led his buddies on these crime sprees. The judge ordered Wertham to interview the leader of the Thrill Killers, Jack Koslow, in his cell and found out Koslow was reading comic books and these booklets that Joe Shuster illustrated, and that he was using the text and illustrations from the Shuster books as inspiration for the crimes.

This pre-dates Seduction of the Innocent?

No, it was right around the same.

Do you feel it had a bearing on the introduction of the Comics Code?

Yes it did, because the Senate investigation was about juvenile delinquency, comic books, and pornography. It was called by Senator [Estes] Kefauver, who was trying to make a name through those hearings in his bid for the presidency. Wertham spent his time during those hearings talking about the Nights of Horror booklets and the Brooklyn Thrill Killers. When the Code did start, it was self-censorship on part of the publishers, but Wertham testified that it was ineffectual, because the Brooklyn Thrill Killers got their whips from ads in the back of Code-approved comic books.

They were selling whips out of the backs of comic books?

Yeah. So Wertham used the Brooklyn Thrill Killers to make the publishers be much more strict about the Comics Code. Because he was telling the Senate investigation that the code was really a whitewashing of comics. So this all did figure in. And newspapers and places like Reader’s Digest would report about comic books, Nights of Horror, and the Brooklyn Thrill Killers all in the same articles. It was all kind of tied in. But no one ever knew this portion of the history of comics and how this affected the comics of the time.

Do you know of any other comics artist who followed any similar career paths, later in life?

There are a number of cartoonists that were doing comics by day and pornography at night, but none of them of the stature of the creator of Superman and really the comic industry.

–Brian Heater

Given the breadth and diversity of Craig Yoe’s career, from My Little Pony employee to creative director of the Muppets to self-made comics historian, it might be easier to define him by those seemingly few things he hasn’t done in the entertainment industry. Or better yet, we’ll simply focus on those aspects of Yoe’s career that are particularly important to us, at the moment, beginning with the 2005 publication of Modern Arf.

The first in the Fantagraphic series—which now includes Art Museum and Arf Forum—the anthology helped established Yoe a first-class documenter of sequential art’s secret history, a position echoed in the near simultaneous publication of Boody, the Fantagraphics-published love letter largely forgotten master, Boody Rogers and Abrams’ Secret Identity.

We sat down with Yoe at the recent MoCCA Festival in midtown Manhattan for a conversation that largely revolved around the latter, a book devoted to the long lost SM drawings of Superman artist, Joe Shuster, which Yoe happened to stumble upon at a rare art sale.

Were the Shuster pictures fairly well-known in certain circles before the book was published?

No, they were totally unknown. I discovered one of the booklets at a rare antique book sale, and what made it so rare was that they probably only printed about a thousand copies of these. The mayor of New York assigned 80 detectives who descended on the Times Square bookstores who were selling these under the counter. They arrested the owners, and the case eventually went to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court, in a sad day for freedom of the press, banned these and ordered the copies destroyed. As a result, these are very, very rare and unknown to students of comic history.

Was it difficult to secure the rights to them, in light of that history?

Well, there was a whole thing behind that that I had to work through…but as you can see, it all worked out.

Was Shuster’s family involved at all with the creation of the book?

No. I kind of wanted to keep things objective while I was writing it, though eventually Joe Shuster’s sister wrote me. I sent her a copy of the book, after it was published, and she wrote me a very nice letter saying that she thought the work showed how much Joe loved to draw figures and that they were beautiful, though she felt that while he was doing them he probably detested the content. But she thought I did a good job on the book and complimented me on it. I appreciated her honesty. She told me what was going on in Joe’s life at the time, that she was pretty desperate. So that was her perspective. I appreciated her sharing that.

So the feeling what that he hated the work while he was creating it?

That was her feeling. That wasn’t necessarily my feeling.

What was your take?

Well, I look at the work and I’m not of the mindset that the work offends me in any way, so I don’t have that barrier. I look at it and it seems like he actually enjoyed working on this sexual fantasy material. At the time it was illegal to do it, so he didn’t sign his name. But I don’t know, if he were alive today, that he would necessarily be ashamed of it. I think he would welcome the fact that the book shows him to have a lot of breadth and shows him to be a mature artist. Because, really, pretty much the only work we ever saw by him, he did as a teenager.

People tend to criticize his Superman-era work.

Yeah, and I love his earlier work. It had lot of slam-bang action and gusto. It had an immediacy to it, but it was still the work of a teenager—a young man. Even when Superman took off, he immediately had assistants drawing stuff and inking stuff. There’s no pure Joe Shuster stuff out there, except for this material. I think he would be glad that a major chapter of his life has been shown. It has strong, beautiful figure work, and it’s actually very progressive.

There’s still some people that would be against this portrayal being published, but I think, as a country, we’re a little more open. He was a groundbreaker in the world of superheroes—he really invented the first, and his writer pal Jerry Siegel really started the whole comic book industry. And then he was progressive enough to portray a frank sexual fantasy. The guy was an amazing innovator, and I think this shows that off. So I was proud to do the book, and I think that people who love Joe and Joe’s work should not disparage it. they should be proud of it, too.

What was the format for the original books?

Kind of small, primatively printed 8.5 x 5.5.

So a folded sheet of paper.

Well, they did have binding. These were printed by a printer in Brooklyn who had a secret identity, too. By day he was doing wedding invitations and business cards and stationary, and at night he was doing these S&M pornographic books in the basement.

It’s an interesting parallel—you’ve got the nice married couples on one end during the day, and then their activities after dark on the other.

Yeah, yeah. Joe Shuster, he created the most wholesome force for moral good—a red, yellow, and blue boy scout. A superhero. The printer was printing wedding invitations by day and pornographic materials at night. And the publisher is the real mafia kingpin behind this, Edward Mishkin. He lived out in the suburbs and went to temple every week and gave money to the temple. But by day, he was probably the biggest pornographer in the country.

And this sort of thing was the bulk of his material?

Well, Edward Mishkin had four or five bookstores. It wasn’t so set up like a publishing house. This was all covert activity and it was very illegal. He eventually got three years for publishing this kind of material. Now all of the sudden this is a coffee table book.

[Concluded in Part Two]

–Brian Heater

The Laugh-out-Loud Cats Sell Out
By A. Koford
Abrams

For better or worse, we live in the age of the meme. In some form or other, the concept has existed since the beginning of recorded history, but, given the modern ubiquity of the Internet, culture is being disseminated at a dizzying pace, spread through blogs and Websites and e-mail, becoming ever more fragmented and ephemeral.  In fact, it should be regarded as something of a marked success for those pop-cultural Internet touchstones capable of remaining in the public conscious for longer than a week or two.

By that measure, the Lolcat is downright canonical. One of the most persuasive Internet memes of the decade, the concept is something of a critical mass the Web’s love of silly animal pictures with its devotion to forced misspellings and malapropism, marrying the two into works that seem to imply, among other things, that if cats could indeed speak, they would likely do so poorly. Love it or hate it, the Lolcat shows no sign of slowing. In fact, if one can indeed predict the meme’s downfall, it will likely be from cannibalization on the part of the many sub-memes it’s spawned.
This, however, is not a category in which I would lump Adam Koford’s Laugh-out-Loud Cats. While he strip was unquestionably born out of a riff on the popular meme, in doing so, the artist has managed create something that seems ever increasingly rare in this age of instantly disposable expression: a piece of art that possesses self-contained merits, which, arguably surpass the meme from which it was initially born.

In the creation of the strip, Koford, an artist clearly intimately familiar with the golden age of the Sunday funnies, hit upon a genuinely inspired idea, a marriage of Lolcats’ grammatical atrocities with that original misspoken feline, George Herriman’s Krazy Kat. Koford carried the conceit to its logical conclusion, constructing a false history for the popular Lolcats as the Internet-era descendent of an early 20th century syndicated strip, The Laugh-out-Loud Cats.

The strip, oft championed by the always meme-hungry weblog, Boing Boing, began to tackle Internet phenomenon on a panel-by-panel basis, grounding each concept in the constructed reality, in much the same way that the original Lolcats were, in his mind, two tongue-tied hobo cats named Kitteh and Pip. The felines play with threads, cook rams, and reboot their footwear. It’s a variety of humor often based on fairly simple puns, but Koford’s abilities as a gag writer keep the concept fresh for most of this collection’s 150-odd pages, occasionally deviating from Web-based humor, such as with one strip’s particularly inspired homage to E.C. Segar, another clear influence on Koford’s work.

The strip is also kept afloat by Koford’s clear talents as an artist, drawing with a style that simultaneously channels some of the aforementioned comics pioneers, whilst staying decidedly modern. It’s a style that lends itself particularly well to the train-hopping exploits of the strip’s hobo cats. Koford clearly derives joy from drawing adorable anthropomorphic animals sporting elbow batches and plaid bindles.

Ultimately, however, memes have inherently short shelf-lives. It’s a side effect, for better or worse, of the culture which first spawned them. With that in mind, it’s hard to imagine most of the strips contained in The Laugh-out-Loud Cats Sell Out remaining relevant—or even comprehensible—to readers too far down the line. It also begs the question of how much longer Koford will be able to utilize Kitteh and Pip, at least in their current form.

This ephemeral nature begs the same question raised by the recent spate of blogs-turned-books—is this manner of work best confined to the Web where it originated? This beautifully packaged volume, complete with an intro by the ever-hilarious comedian, John Hodgman, makes a pretty strong case for a spot on your bookshelf as well.

–Brian Heater