By Glenn Fleishman
Published by Andrews McMeel Publishing
Back around 1980, I was working as a night janitor at a local newspaper office.
One night, as I was emptying trash cans, I noticed a pair of curved metal printing plates the size of full newspaper pages. And they had comics, in reverse!
In fact, the comics were from 15 years earlier and included Pogo, Peanuts and a couple of dozen more familiar favorites.
I had no idea what this type of thing was for at that time, nor did I have a clue how it came to turn up there all those years later.
I just thought they were neat and was hoping they’d get thrown out so I could keep them! Sadly, they were gone after a few days, but NOT thrown out, as that would have been my department. I suspect one of the daytime employees may have thought they were neat, too. Ah, well.
Cut to today, yet another 45 years on, and thanks to Glenn Fleishman’s astonishingly detailed new book, How Comics Are Made (actually a second edition), I now have a pretty full and complete understanding of just what it was I held in my hands that day. By way of full disclosure, the book, smartly designed by Mark Kaufman, is edited by my longtime Internet pal, Harry McCracken.
In a way, How Comics Are Made is reminiscent of Paul Karasik’s amazing How to Read Nancy, which takes one single, specific comic strip and overanalyzes it to the Nth degree. Fleishman here does pretty much the same thing only less specifically and without the earlier book’s tongue in cheek.
No, this one is serious, insightful, and scholarly, and as such, it’s not so much about comics as it is a history of printing and reproduction in newspapers for mass audiences! I saw a newspaper yesterday. It was only maybe the third one I’ve even seen in the past five years. With the slow death of newspapers, and certainly the fact that they are no longer a part of the average American’s daily life, I question whether this book, no matter how well done, even has much of an audience.
And it IS well done! Starting off with some words from the estimable author Michael Chabon (who I just learned here co-wrote a song on the Monkees’ last album!). Chabon reminds me of Jules Feiffer in that he has had a clear, life-long, love for comics, and yet somehow seems “above” them.
After that, though, it gets pretty complex pretty quickly, as we have to learn a whole new list of terms like “flong” in order to understand the development of newspaper printing through the decades. Apparently, the plates I found all those years ago were called “Full Page Stereo” plates. The book has an example of one on the back cover!
There’s a little bit about the cartoonists but mainly just to show where the work originated. This is followed by page after page of rare photos of printing from such original sources as Popular Mechanics or Popular Science.
One of the most interesting sections is the Ben Day section, explaining screens and how millions of little dots were used to color the comics. Another fun section offers a complete annotated reprint of a weird 1957 8-page comic featuring the cast of Peanuts visiting the real-world Register and Tribune offices. Another surprising section is about people of color in black and white strips.
There are, in fact, quite a number of Peanuts strips in various stages of completion used as examples in the book. There’s a section on Doonesbury, as well.
By the time you get to the end of How Comics Are Made, you’ve got information overload, I’m afraid.
As appealing and simple to understand as Fleishman makes the details, there is just too much to remember. All the specifics of both antiquated and modern printing styles, the tools, the methods, the preferences, are all there, and Glenn is a painless teacher, but your chances of remembering them all from this book are likely pretty low.
Still, How Comics Are Made is a genuinely engrossing book, and one that couldn’t have been written before now, detailing as it does more than a full century of important aspects of comics history that are glossed over by all the other wonderful histories of comic strips.
Booksteve recommends.
