This week marks the 100th anniversary of the start of the comic strip Little Orphan Annie-- a prodigious cultural achievement that lasted over 40 years. Such milestones should not pass by unnoticed.
The creator, Harold Gray, was a combination of Charles Dickens, Raymond Chandler and Scheherazade. His gritty, spellbinding tales of life during the Depression and World War II kept a huge segment of the population transfixed; his characters inflamed the emotions of his readers as he led them through one winding story after another.
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| Gray was a consummate storyteller |
Gray's weird art was the perfect complement to his stories. Viewed in a vacuum, his linework might seem crude but his drawings were exactly what the art form called for. His overworked cross hatching, distorted figures and heavy line would later serve as a precedent for popular artists such as R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman and Chester Brown, but in my view Gray was better than all of them.
His political views sometimes bordered on loony, but that only contributed to the powerful noir feel of his strip, and the ominous tone that pervaded many of his stories.
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| More prescience from Gray, 80 years ago |
Mr. Gray, I salute your accomplishment and your marvelous contribution to American culture.
7 comments:
Each time I see some of the comics, I think I should read some. It was never published in France, so I never had the chance to read it.
LOA was awesome. There's nothing today in comics or grahic novels as good.
I don’t follow your logic David. You say that Gray’s seemingly crude style was ‘exactly what the art form called for’, and paved the way for Crumb, Spiegelman and Brown, yet you usually disparage those artists as mediocre draughtsmen.
Can you expand on your ‘exactly what the art form called for’ statement ?
Laurence John-- I like to think I'm capable of enjoying a wide variety of drawing styles. On this blog I've lauded the thick, bold lines of Harold von Schmidt's pictures for Death Comes for the Archbishop, the thin wispy lines of Blechman, the simplified drawings of Alex Toth, the childlike lines of Dubuffet, the solid carpentry of Dean Cornwell's drawings and the liquid lines of Rodin. The lush charcoal stylings of Fuchs and Briggs, the sleek fine line crosshatching of Neal Adams. Many lines that appear "crude" on their face are really the result of very deliberate and sophisticated thinking.
Unfortunately, I think the majority of graphic novels feature mediocre art which serves primarily as a crutch for a generation that doesn’t like to read much. Rather than fulfill the great potential of drawing, it seems to me that many of these pictures are filler to create lots of space between the words. I look at the dreary drawings of Chester Brown or the raw drawings of Spiegelman and I have trouble seeing exactly what they contribute. The same with famous graphic novelists like Alison Bechdel. Some of their stories are wonderful but I often wonder what the drawings contribute to the words, and why a visual medium was necessary. I put Crumb in a different category because, although his drawing looks unschooled, his drawing expresses his genuine weirdness and his love of drawing is so pure he draws all the time and can do no other. Say what you will, Crumb has paid his dues.
When it comes to Harold Gray, his 40 year tale took a child through the gritty world of the Great Depression, through train yards where derelicts paused and told their stories before changing trains to nowhere, through urban slums and rough hewn small towns. The kind of sharp, crisp, slick drawing that I enjoy from Alex Raymond, Leonard Starr or Stan Drake would be out of place. Gray sees these environments through a child's eyes the way Mark Twain takes Huckleberry Finn through the adult experiences down the Mississippi; visual sophistication would, I think, be out of place. So the anatomy isn't quite right, the adults are kind of blunt and bulky like trees, not at all dynamic, yet they aren't wooden like Chester Brown's. If you watch carefully I think the drawings are nevertheless smart, the movements are subtle and the exact right facial expressions emerge on cue when needed,. Beyond that, I think the stagecraft is excellent, Gray's tone is just right for shadowy stories like the one I've shown here with Annie and Punjab in a rowboat.
David,
Thanks … oddly enough we can see exactly what a more 'sophisticated' artist would do with the same material, since Leonard Starr took over the strip in 1979. What do you (or anyone else reading) think of his version ?
I was unimpressed with Starr's version of Annie. As comic strips declined and squeezed out the artistic qualities that Starr most loved-- the space for details and complex compositions, facial expressions and sensitive brushwork (at which he excelled); the large readership that followed and cared about his mature plots; the compensation that made it worthwhile for Starr to use models and photographs and hire an assistant. So we witnessed the decline of On Stage over its last several years, and when Starr took over Annie it began at that reduced level and continued its descent. Starr didn't have to work hard to produce Annie, and I think it shows.
I stumbled upon this blog, please keep it alive.
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