Comics at the EMERGEncy Room

Robert Boyd

Tomorrow I will be opening a small exhibit of comics art from my personal collection at the EMERGEncy Room gallery at Rice University (it's on the fourth floor of Sewell Hall, one floor up from where the Rice Gallery is). I've hastily assembled a website for it--please excuse the typos and badly color-corrected images!

I will have a lot more to say in my talk at 7 pm, and the website I've assembled has a lot of information on individual artists. But briefly, I want to say that this is another small tap on the wall that surrounds the art world when it comes to recognizing comics art as a visual art worth considering--and collecting. It's why I curated the exhibit of Jim Woodring and Marc Bell art at Lawndale Art Center a few years back. It's why I occasionally write about comics for this blog. I invite all  readers of Pan will come by tomorrow evening for the opening, and if you can't make it, the show will remain up until April 11.

Here are a few pieces that are included in the exhibit:


Chester Gould, Dick Tracy, February 2, 1947


Gene Ahern, Room and Board, June 19, 1938


Alison Bechdel, Dykes to Watch Out For “Boy Trouble,” March 4, 1999


Jaime Hernandez, Love & Rockets “Locas vs Locos” p. 6,  1986

This exhibit would not have been possible without Christopher Sperandio, assitant professor of painting and drawing at Rice University and himself a bona fide Kartoon King.

New Acquisitions--Milton Caniff and Gene Ahern

I love Terry & the Pirates, Milton Caniff's comic strip that ran from the mid-30s to the mid-40s. (See here and here.) So I am please to have been able to buy two minor examples of Caniff's masterpiece.

This one is from a point relatively early in the run.



Milton Caniff, Terry and the Pirates 11-11-1936, ink and blue pencil on board

This is a high-contrast black and white reproduction of the piece. Compare it to the color reproduction.



Milton Caniff, Terry and the Pirates 11-11-1936, ink and blue pencil on board

Hmmmm, there is a lot of blue here. What is it for? It's purpose will be obvious when you see the printed version of the strip (reproduced here from The Complete Terry and the Pirates volume 1).



Caniff used blue to indicate to someone in the newspaper production department where he wanted half-tones. Caniff was very much influenced by studio-mate Noel Sickles. Sickles used a high-contrast chiaroscuro drawing style, and Caniff did the same--using half-tones to add some grey to the mix.

But by 1945 (and all through his subsequent strip, Steve Canyon), Caniff abandoned that. He just used pen and ink with no mechanical halftones.



Milton Caniff, Terry and the Pirates 10-3-1945, ink on board

Notice the line across the bottom of the panels and across the top of the first panel. I have no idea what those are all about. They don't appear in the printed version, of course.

The third piece I got is a Sunday strip from what was a one-panel comic, Room and Board by Gene Ahern. On Sunday's he got to try a little sequential storytelling (although he did tell stories in the daily strips--he just told them one panel at a time).



Gene Ahern, Our Boarding House 6-19-1938, ink on board

Here is a slightly more readable, high-contrast black and white version.



Gene Ahern, Our Boarding House 6-19-1938, ink on board

Ahern was a wonderful artist for depicting the lives of sometimes pompous but usually fun-loving working-class America. This strip is almost a carbon copy of his earlier (and more successful) strip Our Boarding House. The reason that Room and Board exists is that Ahern was offered a better deal from a new syndicate in 1936, but the old syndicate owned Our Boarding House. So he just cloned it and renamed it, no doubt thumbing his nose at the old syndicate as he did.