| Title | : | The Someday Funnies |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0810996189 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780810996182 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 216 |
| Publication | : | First published November 1, 2011 |
The Someday Funnies is the long-awaited collection of comic strips created in the early 1970s by world-famous artists and writers such as C. C. Beck, René Goscinny, Harvey Kurtzman, Jack Kirby, Moebius, Art Spiegelman, and Gahan Wilson. What started out as a special insert for Rolling Stone took on a life—and mythology—of its own as writer/editor Michel Choquette traveled the world, commissioning this visual chronicle of the 1960s, only to find himself without a publishing partner or the financial support to continue. Forty years later, readers finally get to experience this legendary anthology as Choquette celebrates the birth, death, and resurrection of The Someday Funnies—129 previously unpublished strips by 169 writers and artists.
Praise for The Someday Funnies:
“In 1970, National Lampoon contributor Choquette was asked by Jann Wenner to edit a special comics insert for Rolling Stone that would allow prominent cartoonists and writers to survey the 1960s. That collection, “The Someday Funnies,” transformed over the next few years into a never-published book featuring the work of 169 writers and artists, and then—when Wenner pulled the plug—into the great lost project of comics history, a “Pet Sounds” of mainstream, underground, and European sensibilities existing only in Choquette’s Montreal storage space. Thirty-one years later, it’s finally seeing print and it’s a doozy, featuring work from luminaries like Art Spiegelman, Joost Swarte, Jack Kirby, and Will Eisner. There are also comics written by Harlan Ellison and William S. Burroughs, and illustrations from such unlikely suspects as Tom Wolfe and Federico Fellini. What sticks with a reader now is the way the ’60s had already begun to curdle in the memory even for those who had just lived them; more than one of these comics posits wild-eyed alternate histories of the ’60s, including the book’s kicker, a great Captain Marvel strip that ties the decade’s woes to Billy Batson’s mid-century silence. Though the collection is, by its nature, a mixed bag, it’s a priceless time capsule of comics history, presented handsomely by Abrams in the large tabloid size Choquette always envisioned."
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“[A] treasure trove of sixties cartooning finally hits print. . . . This graphic time capsule reveals that “the sixties” still define modern America’s contradictory heart.” —Village Voice
“Where else can you see previously unpublished works by great artists like Kirby, Bode, and Beck, who have since passed on to that great bull pen in the sky?” —Cleveland Plain Dealer
“As a portrait of the state of the medium of comics in the early 1970s in the U.S. and Europe, a yeasty blend of old and new that was poised to make a jump to the forefront of artistic endeavors in the twenty-first century, The Someday Funnies is a five-star publication all the way.” —Tom Flinn, ICV2.com
“Choquette was . . . reaching out beyond the insular underground comics circles, and filling in a bigger picture of where the world’s collective head was at as the temper of the times changed. . . . Because Choquette recruited globally, The Someday Funnies avoids the usual American baby-boomer mythology, in which the sixties were born in Greenwich Village, nurtured at Berkeley, and killed at Altamont. Instead, the book reports just as much on the youth revolution in Europe, from the perspective of people who’d just lived through it.” —Onion’s A.V. Club
“There’s page after page after page of unique and exciting comics art in this incredible book. . . . Forty years after it was first organized, the legendary Someday Funnies has finally been published at long last. It [wa]s worth the wait. We never really knew what we were missing.” —Comics Bulletin
“The Someday Funnies is a wonderfully colorful, fascinating book with an incredible backstory.” —Oregonian
The Someday Funnies Reviews
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Like most anthologies this is hit or miss but worth a look just to see such a wide range of talents from an interesting time in comics history.
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I've been wanting to read this for years, but it's humongous so a pain in the ass to take out of the library- I feel guilty ordering it on inter-library loan, so I've only been able to check it out of the one library in my state that has it when I'm in the neighborhood. But eventually I sat down and read it through, even amassing .45 in fines to finish the job.
Despite my begrudging, it's the format that drew me in- its huge, tabloid-on-steroids size and nifty coloring. I didn't even know what it was about until relatively recently, always thinking from the title it was comic book concepts of the future (which might've been more interesting?).
I feel like the three introductions are in reverse order, because Choquette (the last one) seems exhausted on the subject and doesn't do a good job of explaining what it's all about, so the reader might as well slog through his intro first. Ya really gotta read between the lines of his procedural recitation of events to find a juicy story- what was going on with him and Henriette Garnett, for example??? I guess he expects the only reason anyone would pick up this massive tome is because they read the Comic Journal's massive article on it so he figured why try repeating it. Well, I didn't, so I could've used a little encouragement.
It is if anything a testament of how jaded (mostly) leftists were in the 70's about the 60's. No surprises there though, so how else is it interesting? Well, a lot of the art is pretty groovy (nifty) and it's cool to see two people you wouldn't imagine collaborating on something, or a serious commentary piece by the likes of Sergio Argones. I was surprised there wasn't much that spoke to the Civil Rights movement, as that was obviously a pretty significant thing going on. But I'm gonna contradict myself immediately and say my favorites were the ones that focused on some esoterica of the age, or commented on Big Thing in a way that made your head spin, like JFK assassination conspiracies in the Windsor Smith drawn "The Barbarian and the Super Sleuth." And I liked all the ones by kids. I also appreciated the "worldliness" of the comics and seeing what the 60's meant to people of other nations, even though to be honest a lot of foreign cartoonist styles back then all just sort of look like Red Bull ads. But maybe that has to do with this being a pseudo-Canadian production that drew heavily from the talent pool of National Lampoon .
It's a pretty overwhelming collection and I would really recommend it more as a coffee table book you sorta flip through when you're bored than something to read sequentially, as ya can get pretty sick of the usual topics 3/4s of the way in. Especially if you're like me and are also keeping tabs on the overly explanatory end notes written for space aliens who have never heard of Richard Nixon and whatnot. There's also these pretty distracting panels of Choquette in a lot of the comics that initially I really hated but eventually sort of grew on me (mostly every other reviewer was less sympathetic to them).
I think this whole thing would be cooler if it was a huge faded paperback on shitty paper and stitched together like the Last Whole Earth Catalog , but maybe that's just me. -
This is a whole that is perhaps somewhat less than the sum of its parts. It began as a comics-format retrospective on the 1960s for Rolling Stone, but as Choquette's vision and ambition grew, so did the project, until it became a projected book . . . and ulmitately nothing more than that, when the publisher pulled out and funding dried up. The strips Choquette had gathered, from an impressive array of contemporary comics talent, non comics talent, upcoming talent, and nobodies (two strips are by people who were then teenagers and who seem never to have gone to have careers in art), ended up languishing for literally decades, before an article on this lost Holy Grail of comics prompted a revisitation to the stored strips and, ultimately, to this publication. It falls considerably short of Choquette's projected number of strips (at 129, fewer than half the number he originally aimed for). It falls considerably short of its ambitions as well.
The idea of getting an array of folk from inside and outside the comics world to use the comics format to look back at and comment on the 1960s was a fascinating one and certainly radical at the time Choquette began work. Even the idea of having mainstream and alternate cartoonists rubbing metaphorical shoulders in the same book was, if not unique, certainly unusual, but the idea of bringing in non-comics figures, or folk not really associated with comics (Tom Wolfe, Fellini, Frank Zappa, William S. Burroughs etc.) certainly was unique and potentially inspired. Choquette's further notion of each strip leaving a blank space into which Robert Crumb would insert art that would create a through line for the book was also interesting. Sadly, first off, not all the artists left such a space, and second, Crumb declined to be involved. Even more sadly, Choquette chose to fill the bank spaces that did appear with art documenting his process of reassembling the book--a choice that fails to achieve the original intent and also fails to achieve a worthwhile alternative thereto. The added art rarely fits well into the original context. It might have been better to leave the blank spaces blank.
It is certainly interesting to see all these strips, especially ones by cartoonists I like, as they have (afaik) not been seen before. "New" work by great cartoonists is always worth a look. In many instances, though, these strips just don't stand up that well. What might have seemed innovative or daring forty years ago all too often seems trite, dated, or even offensive today. To be sure, there are some noteworthy strips, and not always by those one would expect. Tom Wolfe's for instance, is one of the high points. Aragones does a lovely piece, laid out innovatively with comics panels inside a silhouette of an Olympic athlete, while the content of the strip proper fairly mercilessly satirizes the Olympics. On the other hand, many strips are, if not necessarily bad, merely decent, or pedestrian. I had a pervasive sense of disappointment reading through all these supposedly lost treasures (comics Holy Grail and all) but finding few that really provided a visual or intellectual wow.
Probably of interest to serious comics fans and completists, but not really a must-have, sadly. -
Bought at Feldman's Books, a completely overlooked used book store in Menlo Park. They have a great selection of graphic novels/comic books way in the back. This book was in the armful that I got that day, along with some books by B. Kliban that might have been a wee bit too old 10 year old.
The big deal with this book was that he commissioned a bunch of cartoonists, known and unknown, and even some non-cartoonists, definitely known, to contribute their impression of the 60s in comic form.
Originally this was going to be a quick supplement in Rolling Stone, then maybe a special edition. Some guy from National Lampoon named Michel Choquette was hired to use his contacts to commission the prints.
Eventually Jann Wenner either tired of the project or caught a whiff of the stench of death coming off the project and cut the whole think loose. For almost a decade following Mr. Choquette continued to commission pieces and nearly set up financing several times.
How do I know so much about the history of this book? Because the book rubs your face in it every chance it gets. One must read through (or more wisely skip over) an introduction, forward, and preface before getting to the strips. After that comes a profile of the editor, information about the team that helped with the project, and finally on the last page a compilation of correspondence with editors.
Fair enough. Baby boomers were practically raised on nostalgia and lint from their own belly buttons, so one can forgive six separate pieces on why you should be grateful for the opportunity to spent money to hold this here book in your hands.
But what is far less forgivable are the little caricatures of Mr. Choquette traveling around that have been inserted in the actual cartoons. (Originally the spaces were being held for R. Crumb to draw his Mr. Natural guy, but R. Crumb and Mr. Natural both declined to get involved.) It would have been hilarious and slightly less of a non-sequetor if they put drawings of Maxine from those greeting cards there instead, but once again no one consulted me on how to make something more awesome.
So, in conclusion, summing up, netting this out, anyways, at the end of the day, to bottom line this, judging from the reverence that the six meta-articles instruct us to show for these comics, isn't this the moral equivalent of putting a moustache on the Mona Lisa? Or is a 40-year old story about wheedling art out of people exactly on par with 40-year old art itself?
Now I'm too grumpy to write about the comics except to say that I quite liked a lot of them.
Come over to my house and borrow it so that you don't have to shell out $50 ($25 used) to check this collection out.
I read a Comics Journal that went off on the coloring process in the book, but I'm not knowledgeable enough to comment on that. But if you are the sensitive artist type, be forewarned. -
An excellent anthology and a huge achievement by Michael Choquette and Abrams Comicarts. These comics were shelved, never to see the light of day, for more than 30 years. The range of talents and breadth of imagination on display show what a tragedy it would have been if they had stayed out of our sight forever. There are problems, some strips don't hit or are weaker than others, but the ones that do will stay with you.
If you don't know, Choquette travelled about in the early 70's, getting all kinds of talent - comic artists, writers, artists, film directors - to make short comics about their experience of the 60's. He ran out of money to get them published and some great comic art and social commentary languished for decades.
Abrams finally printed this material last year and it is one hell of a ride. If you like alternative comics, and especially if you enjoy anthology comics that display a range of talent, this one is for you. Pick it up now, while you can grab it at a reasonable price. -
There was no way this book was going to live up to the hype, but it was still enjoyable. There are a lot of fairly pedestrian strips and definitely not the best work of a lot of established artists, who seem to have phoned it in. The other problem is a lot of the topics, while familiar to the intended audience in the seventies, don't quite resonate now. Fortunately, there are helpful annotations in the back that will make you go "so THAT'S what that strip was about. More fun to look at than read, but still an interesting artifact.
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What happens when you ask a bunch of cartoonists, comic makers, and writers to talk about the 1960s? This book happens. This anthology suffers from a theme of weird recollections, and too many flashbacks. Most of the strips should have ran langer. All my favorites were at least two pages, or seemed to be something different than sharing memories. Vaughn Bode's Vietnam soldiers got the 'tude, dude. The other works are more like condensed versions of what you can find in Weirdo, Zap, and other anthologies where artists get more space to explore a variety of different topics.
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The original publisher who pulled out of this made the right decision. All of these pages have a glaring hole where some sort of continuity hook was supposed to go, and from an artistic standpoint this is unforgivable and irreparable.
If you are a longtime comic reader, you have read better stuff from Crumb and others about the 60s. If you are not a comic reader, I beg you to avoid this because it will make you hate comics. -
A anthology first produced in the 70s of an international group of cartoonists reflecting back on the heyday of the 60s, but not actually published until the aughts. I think the tone of it is more 'in the moment' than makes it accessible to me, but there are some rare finds from established creators to make it worth looking through.
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Just didn't get it...had high hopes though.