Poor Mojo's Newswire

Longtime readers of these posts on the Superman case may recall what happened after I posted the stripts & scripts from the previously unpublished 1934 collaboration between Jerry Siegel & Russell Keaton. As Judge Stephen Larson recounts in a new opinion issued today (p.36), this post led the Siegels’ lawyer, Marc Toberoff, to contact pioneering publisher Denis Kitchen regarding Kitchen’s comment noting the existence of additional unpublished Siegel-Keaton material, and the correspondence led to the plaintiffs’ discovering a script for a Superman story that Siegel and Shuster would later adapt for Action Comics #4:... Judge Stephen Larson has just issued his ruling on this claim, and while they didn’t get everything, the result is another notable victory for the plaintiffs: the Siegel heirs are now co-owners of the Superman material in Action Comics #4 as well as certain other key early pages & newspaper strips.

I've always noticed a cinematic flow with your comics. When I'm doing the comics, I don't think in terms of cinematic flow. Great comics have their own rhythm − that's what they're all about. It's the beat to the storytelling that makes them come alive. Look at "Peanuts." Charles Schulz had a perfect rhythm in every single strip. Each of those strips had their own beats, and they always worked. Robert Crumb also has that talent, as did Harvey Kurtzman. If you really want to succeed as a cartoonist, you have to do more than create cool eyeball kicks. What does "eyeball kicks" mean? If you're drawing detailed, tricked-out images and your only concern is how they look, then that only goes so far in telling a story in comic form. It's just a series of kick-ass images. How does one learn to create rhythm that's appropriate to comics? You have to get to the point where the rhythm is in your head. You can't over think it, because if you do the comic becomes fussy and stupid. It has to appear to arrive with no effort at all. Do you recognize your own rhythm when you read your comics? Not so much with my own work, but I can see it with other people's. I can also see when another cartoonist has been inspired by something I've done − not so much by the drawing style, but in the way the story is told. I'm not implying that this a bad thing, necessarily, but I do see it. It might be very subtle, and they might not even know they've done it. It can just be a way a punch line is delivered. We all do this. There are a million places where I've found inspiration − a movie, a Robert Crumb comic, anywhere. Really, in the end, each cartoonist has to develop their own rhythm − as well as their own reality. How do you capture your own reality? For me personally, I have to be mindful of my own way of seeing the world. I'm not trying to reproduce the way the world actually looks as much as the way I imagine that it looks. Years ago, cartoonists would have a "morgue file," which contained photos of every imaginable reference: cars, radio sets, boats, buildings. But I don't want anything like that. To me, it's much more valid to remember what something looks like. For instance, if I wanted to draw a Starbucks store, I could take a photo and then trace it. But what I really want is an internal impression of what a Starbucks feels like.