Strange Windows: Ha, ha, ha, Moooo…! (Ligne Claire 1)

“Allow me to shelter you under my umbrella!”

France is well-known for its strong comic-strip tradition, la bande dessinée;  deeply linked to this is an equally strong  tradition of children’s books –a wondrous one. Much of this literature has crossed over into English; think of Babar and The Little Prince;  or go back two centuries, to when France gave England Mother Goose  (from Les Contes de ma mère l’Oye, by Charles Perrault.) Many of the most beloved fairy tales in the English-speaking world were translated from  French authors’ versions, either invented or re-told: ‘ Puss in Boots’, ‘Sleeping Beauty’, ‘Bluebeard’, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, ‘Beauty and the Beast’.

Alongside these books grew an army of fine artists to illuminate them, and today I wish to spotlight perhaps the most successful –and charming– of French illustrators  for children: Benjamin Rabier.

“Well! Another earthquake.”

Rabier (1864-1939) was the author of dozens of children’s books, mostly featuring animals;  he was also an early pioneer of both the comic strip and the animated cartoon; he was a successful playwright; but his greatest claim to international fame derives from a single image of commercial art, as we shall see. Benjamin Rabier: artistic polymath!

Portrait of Benjamin Rabier

He came up from La Roche-sur-Yonne in 1899 to Paris, where he was employed as an accountant (a job which, despite his vast success as an artist, he kept until 1910, quitting for medical reasons alone.) At the same time, he started contributing to various humorous and satirical magazines such as  La Chronique Amusante , Le Gil Blas Illustré, Le Rire, L’Assiètte au Beurre in France, Scraps in Britain, and Puck in the United States;  in all he’d contribute to over fifty magazines and newspapers over his long career.

However, arguably Rabier’s most important contributions of that time –in light of his subsequent fame– were to the children’s publications of Arthème Fayard (La Jeunesse Illustrée and Les Belles Images). These were weekly anthologies of child-oriented prose and drawings; their success provided the template for the traditional French and Belgian comics magazines. In 1898, he produced his first book, about the adventures of a mischievous boy: Tintin-Lutin:

(If the title seems familiar…wait and see.) It was the first book of many.

In the 1890s, France introduced compulsory free education for all. Thus, millions of children learned how to read– creating a true mass market for children’s literature.

Add to this strong innovations in printing techniques– such as photo–engraving, linotype, and the introduction of cheap, vivid aniline dye-based color inks, and it is obvious that Rabier came along at the ideal time in history for an illustrator: a golden age.

He quickly became sought after for his anthropomorphic depictions of animals; his beasts showed the full range of human passions and emotions, from merriment to sorrow to rage– and yet remained recognisably animals.

He illustrated some of the great classics of animal tales, such as the medieval adventures of the trickster Reynard the Fox– collected in 13th century France under the title Le Roman du Renard:

He also illuminated at length the works of the 18th century father of zoology, Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon:

…showing he could be a most competent ‘straight’ animal illustrator, as shown in this scene of a farmyard:

…or this  drawing of an anteater:

Yet even his ‘straight’ illustrations show liveliness and emotion– witness the quiet anger expressed in this show of bearbaiting:

In 1906, he undertook a gigantic new piece of work: He illustrated all 240 of the rhymed fables of Jean de La Fontaine (1621–1695),  perennial classics known and loved by French children for over three centuries:

Some of these he drew in a comics-style sequence, as shown in these “collapsed” examples:

..and others in a ‘picto-fiction’ blend of text and art, such as this version of ‘The Tortoise and the Hare’:

…or of  ‘The Frog that would be as Big as an Ox’: Mark the merry expression on that bovine face: it prefigures Rabier’s most famous creation, to which we’ll turn shortly.

Note that Rabier was also a highly successful advertising artist, as can be seen from the below samples that parody La Fontaine to sell toothpaste, cough medecine, and shotgun shells:

In 1923, Rabier introduced his most enduring creation, Gédeon the Duck, who would go on to star in 16 picture-books and several animated shorts:

As we’ve seen, Rabier was also an early adopter of the new art of the comic strip. This one is titled ‘The Phono-Trap’:

Panel 4: ‘Come, Medor, I’m caught!’ Panel 5: ‘Lunch is served!’

Or consider this oddly touching adventure of a fly: Rabier’s comics begin to take on a familiar look for aficionados of la bande dessinee. With their strong, simple linework trapping flat pastel colors, they seem obvious precursors of the Franco-Belgian school of cartooning known as la ligne claire, the  ‘clear line’, notably exemplified by Hergé, the creator of Tintin.

Hergé freely acknowledged the influence of Rabier:

«His drawings were very simple. Very simple, but sturdy, fresh, joyful and perfectly readable. In a few well-carpentered lines, everything was said: the setting was shown, the actors were in place; the comedy could start (…) And it’s for sure from this encounter that I date my taste for a clear and simple drawing, a drawing to be understood instantaneously. It is, before anything else, this readability that I myself have never ceased to seek”. –Herge, foreword to Rabier’s Fables de La Fontaine (tr:AB)

This influence went as far as stealing gags!

Rabier, 1920: Herge (in Tintin au Congo), 1930:

(Scroll quickly down the Rabier boa cartoon, and you’ll get a great simulation of animation. It demonstrates Rabier’s skill in panel-to-panel design.)

Some say Herge took the name of his hero from Rabier. I suppose it’s possible, though ‘Tintin’ wasn’t that rare a nickname (for ‘Augustin’).

 

The two Tintins

From 1917, Rabier collaborated with the father of the animated cartoon, Emile Cohl (1857–1938), in a series of cartoon short films. However, animation was to be dominated in the 20th century by a different style:

…a style that would come to dominate “funny animal” comics, as well.  Rabier’s work was to have little influence: another tantalysing possibility shoved aside by the brute force of Hollywood.

Note the smiling cow below. What would you get if, instead of smiling, the cow were laughing?

Why, you’d get a processed-cheese famous the world over, of course!


In 1921, Léon Bel introduced a new melted cheese packaged in individual, foil-wrapped wedges: La Vache qui Rit, ‘The Laughing Cow’. It was, and remains, an international hit product.

Two years later, Rabier designed the definite image of the hilarious bovine, and it remains– with few adjustments– the one used today:

2011

The origins of the laughing cow are obscure; it’s claimed that Bel’s wife coined the word ‘Wachkyrie” as a mockery of Wagner’s ‘Die Walküre‘. (‘W’ is pronounced like ‘V’ in both French and German.) There subsequently came out a successful dance by that name:

 

Naturally there were many imitators, and Bel fought numerous lawsuits against cheesemakers who introduced ‘the reading cow’, the smiling cow’, and many others: the Serious Cow (below) lasted as late as 1959.

Even Rabier got into the copycat act, with his Crying Cow:

Fun fact: in Indian restaurants, the fillings for cheese nans are almost always Vache qui Rit!

Over a century after Benjamin Rabier started drawing children’s books, not a single one of them has gone out of print.

Isn’t that a precious sort of immortality for an author– making generation after generation of kids laugh and smile?

 

 

Ad for Rabier-based toys:

 

 

A Gédéon figurine:

A laughing dog pull-scooter:

 

Rabier-designed cutlery holders:

 

A video clip in French about Rabier, with extracts from his animated cartoons.

Too Much Toth

During our ominously metastasizing roundtable on R. Crumb’s Genesis, one of the big questions that kept coming up was about whether you should compare comics to other things. Is it fair to set comics next to your meatloaf and say, “You know — comics. Not so tasty”? Is it okay to put them on the wall next to a crucified copy of Kierkegaard and then complain because your cloned angst-ridden philosopher is dripping blood all over a perfectly good Walt Kelly original, and you can’t appreciate the witty swamp patois because of the agonized ratiocinating?

In any case, I was thinking about these issues (more or less) while reading this piece by Matt Seneca. The post focuses on a single panel from Green Lantern #171, drawn by Alex Toth.

Cartooning is a white-knuckle walk down a tightrope with no end. The point of departure is illustrative drawing — the presentation of images from life, as observed in life. Plenty of artists never make it out of that realm, and as far as comics go there’s no reason why that has to be a problem. From Hal Foster to Jim Steranko, this medium has seen some fine realist artwork. But the realists ignore a fundamental challenge of the comics form: the creation of true picture-writing. Making the visuals simple and iconic enough that they carry instant meaning for the reader, with no contemplation required and no illustrative details slowing down the story. This hieroglyphic ideal is one of the more frequently stated goals of comics, I’d imagine because it separates the form from its two closest cousins, prose and illustration. Pictures that tell stories without words put comics outside the realm of the literary; and images used to inform rather than immerse fall beyond the illustrative.

But for all the hypothetical advantages of this “ideal” mode of comics, there’s an aspect of the medium it fails to consider: the sheer beauty of illustrative artwork. Charles Schulz and Jules Feiffer, to name the two artists who’ve perhaps gotten closest to a pure-iconographic realm of comics, read better, more smoothly, than pretty much any illustrative artist you care to name. However, I personally have always found something to be missing from the experience of their work as compared to that of Alex Toth, a devoted minimalist who nonetheless took pains to keep an inoculation level of illustrative information in his panels. All three of these artists searched relentlessly to strip excess pieces from their staging, excess lines from their rendering, excess detail from their shaping of forms. But where Feiffer typically dropped his backgrounds altogether, where Schulz indicated setting with sections of rigid fence post or bits of scrubby grass, and where both essentially drew everything with the same lineweight, Toth (along with the rest of his ilk, Mignola, Crane, Yokoyama) put just enough illustrative variation into devices like line and camera angles to give his version of iconographic minimalism the added verve of pretty pictures, of the visual world’s beauty.

Seneca goes on to argue that the split here between iconic/illustrative can be mapped onto that old standby, mind/body:

Schulz and Feiffer’s works (and those of R.O. Blechman and Ernie Bushmiller and, at times, Chris Ware) are comics of the mind, whether they be emotionally-based wanderings or dialectic ideas or even simple sight gags. But Toth drew action comics — comics of the body, of landscapes, of things that wouldn’t make sense if we couldn’t see them. This was his reason for shying away from the final pare-downs that the great strip cartoonists made: without the scraps of illustrative-comics grammar Toth employed, the environmental richness and kinetic cutting and hyperbolic figurework and variated lines, the material he drew simply wouldn’t have worked.

So, at first glance, you might say that this is an example of comparing comics to other things — specifically, the illustrative tradition.

The initial sentence, though, leads one to doubt. “Cartooning is a white-knuckle walk down a tightrope with no end.” That’s a statement of comics exceptionalism which, to me, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense unless you’re trying fairly hard not to think about other artforms. Cartooning is more white-knuckle than, say video art, which is poised between film on the one hand and the drop into television on the other? Or more of a tightrope than doom metal, poised between easy-listening fluff and the tectonic obliteration of your worthless soul? Or than performance art, poised between buckets of cow urine and tragic self parody? Any art involves difference — not that choice but this one, not this one but that one. That’s because communication and meaning are made out of difference. You might as well say asking for peas at the dinner table is a white knuckle walk, since you might slip and ask for corn or intimate sex acts instead. Indeed, Freud would actually say that (the bit about asking for peas being a white-knuckle ride, I mean, not the intimate sex acts. Though perhaps that as well, on second thought.)

Seneca then, is seeing comics as special. To do that, you need to don certain kinds of blinkers. In this case, those blinkers prevent Seneca from seeing illustration except in its relation to comics. Specifically, he argues that “The point of departure [for cartooning] is illustrative drawing — the presentation of images from life, as observed in life.” Illustration here, then, is realistic drawings meant to capture the look of life. This makes sense if you are talking about the pulp illustration that is important to the kinds of drawing Alex Toth does. It makes less sense, though, if you look at, say, this.

That’s an ink painting by Jiun Onko, an 18th century Buddhist priest. I wrote about it at length here. In this context, though, my point is simple…that’s an illustration.

Not only is it an illustration, but it’s a kind of illustration that is by no means marginal to the mainstream illustrative tradition. As you can see if you look at the below.

That’s Ooops! by Toulouse Lautrec, an artist who was consciously influenced by Japanese ink paintings…and whose drawings and posters, in turn, certainly seem to have been a forerunner of Toth’s style, even if they weren’t a direct influence.

So, if these are illustrations, then what does that do to the binaries Seneca has constructed?

First of all, it clearly calls into question the connection Seneca is making between illustration and realism. More than that, though, it upends the argument about the rationale for iconographic cartoons. Seneca is arguing that illustrative work is realistic and beautiful, but that cartoonists have to abandon that to make their pictures more readable. For Seneca, minimalism is chosen for ease of reading.

But if you look at the Jiun Onko and Toulouse-Lautrec drawings, it’s pretty clear that this is not a sufficient explanation. Jiun Onko, in particular, is more relentlessly iconographic than Schulz or Bushmiller; he provides less information. Indeed, he almost turns his image into a Japanese letter, or character. In that sense, his drawing is there to be “read” as Seneca suggests — but not in the interest of the sequential ease of information transmission. Rather, the image makes a connection between words, pictures, and reality — it’s an image which demands the reader/viewer/supplicant actively participate in constructing all three. Thus, the choice of an icon here is not utilitarian, but aesthetically meaningful. To draw iconically is not a default failure to incorporate the illustrative tradition. It’s an integral part of that tradition.

Drawings such as Toulouse-Lautrec’s and Jiun Onko’s also strongly call into question Seneca’s effort to make Schulz/Toth equivalent to mind/body. Look at this example of iconic artwork.

That’s a drawing by the wonderful children’s author and illustrator Mo Willems from Pigs Make Me Sneeze! Willems, as you see here, often includes dashed motion lines as part of his iconic, legible style. And what do you think my son often does when I’m reading him the book and he sees those lines?

It’s not hard to figure out; he traces them with his finger. If you look at the Toth panel up at the top there, though, nobody is going to trace that with your finger, because why would you? On the other hand, the Jiun Ito drawing or the Toulouse-Lautrec — you could see running your hand across those curves, in part because you can see the artist’s hand running across those curves. The same is true with a lot of early Peanuts; because the illustration is pared back and the linework is so instantly visible, you have the feeling of interacting directly with the hand of the creator.

On the other hand, slick illustrational work tends to place the viewer as an onlooker, rather than pulling you in for interaction. Take a drawing like Frazetta’s Cat Girl:

You are placed as voyeur; the flesh is on display. The image is a window, the surface the line between two separate worlds rather than the place where the creator and the viewer meet. In this sense, realism can be seen not as body, but rather as body exiled to mind, while the more iconic illustrational style can be seen as mind manifested, or embodied.

The point here isn’t that Schulz and Bushmiller are better artists than Toth, or that iconic is better than realism in illustration or cartoons. Realism can be great; I like Vermeer excessively, as just one for instance. But…well, here’s Seneca’s conclusion.

What’s illustrative is how much of this environment Toth sees, the amount of visual information packed into the panel borders, the panoramic shape of the frame itself. Toth gets to his place of realness, of beauty, by piling it on, adding subtraction to subtraction to abstraction until his minimal world holds as much as the real. As much shadow, as much light, as much texture, as much scope. It’s just arranged more subtly, seen more poetically, changed into something both familiar and strikingly different. It’s art, to make it simple.

Obviously, I disagree that illustration must mean a great deal of information. I also question the parallel made in the phrase “his place of realness, of beauty”, as if realness and beauty are one and the same thing. But the real (as it were) disagreement is that Seneca equates art with muchness. What’s great about Toth is that there is “as much shadow, as much light, as much texture, as much scope” as in reality. Moreover, this muchness is arranged even more muchly than in the world — “more subtly…more poetically…both familiar and strikingly different.” Toth’s art is about getting the whole world and magically turning less into more.

Surely, though, art’s beauty is as much about curtailment as replication; as much about emptying creation as filling it. The minimal is not beautiful because it manages to get all the essential and arrange it better; it is beautiful because of its absences. What makes that Toth illustration art is not that it gives us the big world sensitively arranged, nor that it fools the eye by packing in more than can possibly be there. Rather, the art is that it doesn’t fool the eye. Instead, the blocky shapes, the distant silhouettes, encourage us to participate in pulling something out of everything — the pleasurable act of creation, which is also the act of subtraction.

So now, having disagreed with everything Seneca said, I should, in theory, conclude by lambasting him for his too narrow vision; for relating comics only to comics, and so being confused about the nature of comics, of illustration, and of art. I’m not going to do that though because — well, I’ve just been praising subtraction, haven’t I? Seneca takes a small bit of the world, turns it over, cuts it down, and ends up with a panel of flatter, more circumscribed reality. The pleasure or art in his piece is not dependent on that flatter world including the whole of the real world. Rather, the beauty is in watching and engaging with the mind that moves within the arbitrary parameters. As I suspect Seneca would agree, the point is not just what you manage to include within the lines you draw, but how you draw them.