The Menomonee Falls Gazette

It would be possible for me to fill up an entire blog just musing about one old comic I pulled out of my collection after another, interspersed with posts on comics I wish I had. For the most part I resist the impulse because it would hover between flaccid analysis and embarrassing self-disclosure, and have all the cachet of regular columns in local Pennysavers entitled 'Dusty Sweepings' or something similar. The word 'Nostalgia' actually means 'pain of the past," and the etymology is true in the sense that, if the exposure is sufficiently sharp and brief, it's invigorating, but is dreadful if it goes on for too long.

Moreover, comics deserve serious treatment that they still don't get, and there's a positive value to not glogging up the Intertubes with idiosyncratic and anecdotal treatment of same.

I'm going to make an exception in this case, though. I just came across a pile of old Menomonee Falls Gazettes, and I've been reading them. The Gazette was a wonderful and a clever idea, a magnificent resource, and a window into a lost world in more ways than one.

The idea behind the Gazette was simple: it was a weekly newspaper that only printed comics. Two big tabloid sections on good white paper. It got the comics the way other newspapers got theirs: by paying the syndicates for them. and Menomonee Falls Wisconsin was a sufficiently small place that no restrictions on not allowing more than one paper to print a strip in an area. It concentrated on adventure and continuity strips: interior pages printed a whole week's worth of dailies and the Sundays were on the covers or the centerfold. Big and in black and white. 75¢, which wasn't exactly cheap in the 1972-77 lifespan, but not too bad.

It had the feel of being an archive, but wasn't: there were some classic strips (Batman, The Spirit, Milton Caniff's Male Call) but was instead a window into an unguessable contemporary world. By the 70's, the adventure/continuity strip was dying or nearly dead, and at the time, unless your local paper carried it, you would , page after page go 'They're still doing that?' Not just Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, but Brick Bradford? You may not have even known there was a comic-strip spin-off to Dr. Kildare, but it had survived the TV show by a decade? And the James Bond comic strip? WTF?

All of this is now 30 years dead ,and two levels of lost wonder is a bit hard to get through, but the Gazette was a revelation. It was also a picture that nobody had, except the folks at the syndicates and the newspaper managing editors who determined what comics their paper would carry. As we get more and more used to the universal access of the Net, it seems more and more incredible that this grreat current of popular culture should be so hidden and partial, the funnies that were so much a part of growing up, should be in a form that, while being produced, was almost completely invisible, filtered out totally except for this curious little venture out of Wisconsin.

It was, for anyone who paid attention, a genre that was being put to death by the newspapers, who had adopted the conventional wisdom that joke-a-day strips were what people wanted, and especially joke-a-day strips done in the clean style of a Mort Walker or a Charles Schulz that could be shrunk almost to nothing and still be readable. Whether or not this was a shift in preference on the readers part, it had been decreed , and, short of screaming angry protests and boycotts of the paper (which happened) it was done. And whether this in turn just alienated the public more and more from their newspapers is hard to determine--but you can probably guess what I think.

But much of this stuff is just splendid, an orgy of beautiful illustrative line work--Tarzan Sunday pages by Russ Manning, the crisp beauties of Leonard Starr's Mary Perkins On Stage, or the elegant modeling of Jorge Luis Salinas, who did the Cisco Kid to such brilliant effect but who was here represented by the soccer (!) strip Gunner. It is true that a daily strip is an uncommonly cramped medium, and by the Seventies it was almost all facial closeups (except for such past masters as Caniff. But these were A-List guys, and they're on their best display here.

They are simply treasures now of a Lost World, but back then they were a window, cobbled together by a bunch of amateurs, to a world which, though almost lost, was till alive and marvelous in its invisibility. 

Things have gotten better:various labors of love have created hardbound archives of the masterworks of the medium, from Winsor McCay to Alex Raymond to MiltonCaniff--and you can find some stuff of just about everybody if you know the names--like everything else on the net. But will we ever get the proper treatments--well-reproduced long blocks of continuiity--of the likes of Elliott Caplin (Al Capp's brother) and Stan Drake's The Heart  of Juliet Jones? Oh, evetually, perhaps, I hope, but until then, these ragged edged folded tabloid papers remain valuable.

There's aclassic tradeoff that is one of the most important aspects of mass culture: that the less attention that gets paid to a medium, and the less respect, the more the aartists have a chance to do something wonderful. It was true in my comics career: being handed books at Marvel that were in danger of cancellation--like the Defenders and Micronauts--that were off in a (relatively) unnoticed cornerwas wonderful in that I could get away with things I couldn't if I were doing highly scrutinized books like Spider-Man or the Avengers. It allowed me to stretch and have a lot more fun--even as my industry clout never got very high on the Industry-Clout-O-Meter, and I left the business where, if I had been more of a golden boy, I might (might) have stayed. 

But the trade off was writ a lot larger with the continuity comic strip: Hollywood and Television are all right in its way, but are far too managed and worried over. For all the focus on serious literature shepherded earnestly by serious publishing houses, some of the most incandescent fiction came out of the Phillip K. Dicks and Algis Budrys's of the SF ghetto. And Alex Raymond with his pen and brush made adventures than rang and shone with beauty and elegance, while a much vaster operation created a clunky hokey movie serial with bored extras in embarrssing costumes and spaceships whose exhausts trailed lazily upward--and whose major-studio epic project managed to make the serial look classy and intelligent.

Ultimately though, the danger is that, despite it all, the strip does get cancelled, the medium doesn't support itself, and some new owner comes in and cleans house and it comes to an end. Sometimes the star tht arises from the margins is bright enough to eclipse everythingelse and complete that sentimental narrative--but when it's not quite as overwhelming, the ending is less glorious. Artists don't always toil in obscurity, and the academic darlings re quite often worth all that scrutiny: LLeo Tolstoy and Thomas Mann really are what they're cracked up to be, and Tennessee Williams really could write a play. No, the only real danger that the critical establishment occurs is when they start accepting and establishing narratives that don't deal with actual works by actual artists: High Art versus Low, or, even better, Art vs. Not-Art. That's when you start losing your way, and walking right by that taboid-sized paper window into a word filled with wonders.