Back To Darkest Los Angeles

Discovering James Ellroy some thirty-seven years ago was a big deal for me. Starting with The Black Dahlia , in quick succession, I read his seven extant books in a couple of weeks. I picked up, by chance, LA Confidential on my last day in Albany during my first year in grad school and finished half of it on the train ride home. I quickly became an Ellroy proselytizer, pushing his books on anyone I could. I remember my friend, George, got his wife to read them. She was furious with him, and by extension me, for convincing her to read The Big Nowhere and witness the fate of one of its main characters. I got her outrage. To this day, that character's fate remains one of the most emotionally brutal fictional ends as I've ever read.

White Jazz, the final book in the original LA Quartet blew me away, but American Tabloid, the first part of the Underworld USA trilogy, broke me from reading him for years. I ended up giving my hardcover original of the book and the short story collection, Hollywood Nocturnes, to my cousing.

I've dipped my toes back in here or there over the decades, but I just started Perfidia, the first book in a new LA Quartet, set five years before The Black Dahlia. So far, I'm digging it, but even by Ellroy standards, it's bonkers. It's not as sharp as the original books were, but it's fascinating, giving the reader insight into the rise of the main characters in Dahlia, as well as glimpses of numerous others who show up in the later volumes.

Ellroy is a fascinating character. His public persona is intense, over-the-top, and wildly self-promoting. It's a shtick, but a brilliant one. I don't know if still shows up on tv anymore, but he seemed everywhere back in the nineties. He's definitely still doing plenty of print interviews, and he remains the crazed, wild-eyed guy who wrote things like "Cougar Blood Boil!" on a friend's balloon at New York Is Book Country. He's an arch reactionary, but one who claims he doesn't pay attention to politics. He doesn't own a computer or smart phone and exists deeply ensconced in his fictional pre-Watergate America.

Ellroy's biography is a tough one, from the murder of his mother to his own criminal and misspent youth. Along the way, not surprisingly, he became an intense moralist. None of his main characters are free of sin and corruption, but many of them are still able to stand against the darker, true evil that permeates his vision of America. Going back to the Lloyd Hopkins trilogy, a series he's essentially disowned, you have a racist, reactionary character, but is driven to enforce some sort of justice.

If he's able to finish the books he has planned, Ellroy will have created a massive  thirteen-volume secret history of Los Angeles and postwar America, from Dec 6, 1941 through 1973. Along the way, he'll have exposed the 'truth' behind such terrible real life events as the Sleepy Lagoon murder, the murder of Elizabeth Short (aka, the Black Dahlia), the death of Marilyn Monroe, and the assassination of JFK. For a man who loves this country, Ellroy has a despairing view of what it's become and who its citizens are.

When I first read Ellroy, his way-beyond-cynical attitude appealed to me. As a know-it-all grad student, it seemed to match my view of the world. Later, as I aged and began to dismiss cynicism as lazy, I soured on him. It's definitely part of my antipathy to the majority of grimdark fantasy. Now, I find myself coming back to Ellroy, because I've changed again, as much as some nostalgic memories of how much I liked his books. I'm still no longer sold on easy cynicism, but as the corruption in this nation, the loss of standards, the loss of redemption, the loss of civic virtue, have all increased in the past thirty years, I find his mix of reaction and outrage appealing. 

I also love his psychotic style, his lunatic plots, his monstrous villains and sin-tarnished heroes. As long as it's been since I've reread the entire LA Quartet, there are scenes and characters that have been scorched into my brain, never to fade. These are crime books like no other crime books. Andrew Vachss' vision of the world might have been as dark, but his books are essentially Doc Savage as hardboiled fiction. Chandler is far more poetic. Hammett is probably the closest, but never crosses into savagery like Ellroy. Forgetting any questions of literary merit, his best books are wild, mind blowing reads.

If someone actually tried to do a straight translation of his work to film, it would be closer to to David Lynch than John Huston or Roman Polanski. Brian DePalma tried, but his effort to convert The Black Dahlia to film was ruined by his own stylistic weaknesses and some bad casting. In the end, it probably can't be done. The film LA Confidential succeeded by dropping most of the book's narrative in exchange for a story about three hard men finding some sort of redemption. It's a great movie, as a recent rewatch reiterated, but it's only a portion of the novel. 

Ellroy's books are overwhelming, ridiculous, monstrous, sentimental, terrifying, hopeful, and often moving. In a interview in The Guardian when Perfidia was released, he said he wanted to write for America like Tolstoy and Balzac had written for their homelands. I've only read a little Tolstoy and no Balzac, but I suspect he's nothing like them stylistically or even thematically. Nonetheless, I suspect a century from now he might be seen as getting as close to the dark side of our shadowed soul as anybody ever will.

The LA Quartet

The Black Dahlia

The Big Nowhere

L.A. Confidential

White Jazz

Underworld USA Trilogy

American Tabloid

The Cold Six Thousand

Bloods A Rover

LA Quintet

Perfidia

This Storm

The Enchanters (see below)

Red Sheet (see below)

Fred Otash

Widespread Panic

The Enchanters (see above)

Red Sheet (see above)

Previous Ellroy Posts

James Ellroy: Grimmer Than Grim, Darker Than Dark

COUGAR BLOOD BOIL! James Ellroy's First L.A. Quartet

Daily Comics

I grew up surrounded by daily comics. My dad had boxes full of Wizard of Id by Brant Parker and Johnny Hart, Beetle Bailey by Mort Walker, The Family Circus by Bill Keane, Dennis the Menace by Hank Ketcham, and Andy Capp by Reg Smythe, along with tons of other paperback collections. Of those, The Wizard of Id and Dennis the Menace hold up the best, but I still have a soft spot for the rest.

He also had some Peanuts books. Charles Schulz' strip was one that seemed to have transcended the medium. Beyond the daily strips and the animated specials, there was Peanuts merchandise everywhere when I was a kid. I had a friend who loved anything with Snoopy in his aviator gear. The luminous Mrs. V's mom got her a Peanuts lunchbox. There was even a Peanuts telephone. It was only as an adult that I learned how much the strip had drifted from a somewhat bleaker setup to what it became in the seventies with its emphasis on Snoopy.

the first Peanuts

At the same time, newspapers printed comics daily, and on Sundays there were whole comics sections, printed in glorious color. In my house, that meant the Staten Island Advance and the New York Daily News. Mostly, there were funny strips like the ones above, some soap opera strips such as Mary Worth, and a few lingering-on adventure strips like Brenda Starr and Steve Roper and Mike Nomad. I devoured those daily strips for decades. 

Daily humor strips tend to be three- and four-panel gag-a-day strips. Continuity, back then, except in the broadest sense, was not a thing. Characters had a shtick and stuck with it. Decades, and decades (and decades) later, most of these strips haven't changed very much. A lot of them weren't the work of a single artist, but a dedicated team of artists, draftsmen, and gag writers. Most of them slipped into irrelevance a long time ago, and it speaks well of later artists who knew when it was time to close up shop, no matter how successful they were.

My dad also had a large collection of magazine cartoon collections, including most of Charles Addams' books. There were also numerous books filled with ones from The New Yorker, Look Magazine, and assorted artists like Peter Arno and William Steig. These are a very different sort of beast and would require their own article. Suffice it to say, though, I grew up surrounded by cartoons, from the idiotic to the sublime.

William Steig's Small Fry: juvenile urban warfare

When I started college in 1984, I started buying my own collections. That was right in the midst of a daily comics renaissance. Bloom County and The Far Side started in 1980, and, for me, more importantly, Calvin and Hobbes debuted in 1985. I saw my first Far Side comic taped to the side of a cash register in Jim Hanley's Universe. Looking back on it some forty years later, I think it was up there as much because it was funny as because there was a guy who worked there who till this day greets people with "Howdy, howdy, howdy." Still, it made me laugh, and it still does. Walking a line between traditional and outrageousness (see the one with a daycare center built next door to a dingo ranch)

Calvin and Hobbes, though, was something else. For the uninitiated, the strip's conceit is a boy and his stuffed tiger have adventures. The boy, Calvin, is self-centered, reckless, and insanely imaginative. In his eyes, his tiger, Hobbes, isn't a stuffed toy, but a fully alive companion. Hobbes, is the realist of the pair, with a jaundiced view of humanity, seemingly justified by Calvin's actions.

the first Calvin and Hobbes, 11/18/85

As the strip went on, becoming increasingly popular, Calvin and Hobbes evolved into something wondrous. Inspired by classic newspaper strips like Little Nemo, the Sunday comics became elaborate and wilder than anything else. When the newspapers began reducing the space for comics, he refused to back down and let some papers drop the strip instead.  He also rejected almost any merchandising of his creation save a few calendars and a book for teachers. All those pissing Calvins you see on cars just made money for crooks.

There were tons of other widely syndicated and successful strips in the eighties and nineties. Some, like For Better or Worse, were humorous family dramas. Others, like the largely autobiographical Cathy, by Cathy Guisewite focused on the life and times of young professionals. I do not like Cathy, but I wasn't a young woman in the eighties. It had actually started in the mid-seventies, but really seemed to hit its stride in the eighties. The strip was huge and Guisewite was a guest on late night talk shows. 

There were tons of other strips, including FoxTrot, The Neighborhood, and Rose Is Rose, all of which I enjoyed. Even as newspapers started their death spiral, several new strips came on line in the nineties and aughts, three of which in particular I really like; Mutts by Patrick McDonnell, Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis and Get Fuzzy by Darby Conley. 

Earl, Mooch, Guard Dog, and Shtinky Puddin' (aka, Jules)

For the longest time, Mutts was my favorite comic strip. Largely, it's the lives and adventures of Jack  Russell terrier Earl and housecat Mooch and their owners and friends. It ranged from hilarious to poignant. The art is simple and clean, with McDonnell lavishing his Sunday strips with elaborate title blocks.  

I stopped reading it at some point because it just started spinning its wheels. Sweetly sentimental and
pleasingly drawn wheels, but still spinning wheels. Nonetheless, I think the first decade or so of Mutts remains one of the very best daily strips. I've sold off most of my cartoon books, but I've held onto all of my Mutts books. I've got all ten original annual books, several larger color collections, and, another gift, the over-sized The Art of Patrick McDonnell. The only cartoon art I've ever owned is a print my sister bought me as a present one year and the only characters I've ever had on a t-shirt are Earl and Mooch. When my first shirt wore out, the luminous Mrs. V went out of her way to find a replacement. I even have a set of PVC characters.

Even though the daily strip glory days are long over, two newer strips have caught my eye. The first is Cul de Sac by Richard Thompson. It premiered in 2004, but didn't attain national syndication until 2007. It's a brilliant strip, focused on 4-year Alice Otterloop and her 4-year old brother, Petey. Alice is wild and rambunctious, given to temper tantrums and bossiness as well as moments of kindness and understanding. Petey is afraid of almost everything and, ranked, the 14th pickiest eater in the world. With its focus on how the world is perceived by kids, even though it's very different in feel or style, Cul de Sac is the only comic that feels like a successor to Calvin and Hobbes. Sadly, it ended in 2012. Thompson was earlier diagnosed with Parkinson's and it led to his early death in 2017. The two complete collections of Cul de Sac belong on the same shelf as those early Mutts and Calvin and Hobbes.

The final newer strip I like is Wallace the Brave by Will Henry. It's not as original as either Calvin and Hobbes or Cul de Sac, but its elaborate and fanciful tales of kids adventures is both charming and funny. The fearless Wallace, his fretful best friend Spud, the criminally-minded Amelia, and the prodigy, Rose. It started in 2015, and hasn't shown much evidence of slowing down. 

I love comics. There are about half a dozen daily strips I still read each day, none of them in a newspaper, however. The comic syndicates have online sites carrying their strips to more people than newspapers do anymore. I go to Arcamax.com and GoComics.com. I think it was Berke Breathed of Bloom County who said something along the lines of, 'when I licensed my characters, it was like they drove a dump truck of money up to my house." I can't imagine anything like that happening anymore. Sadly. 

I say sadly, but it's the way of the world and popular culture. It's what happens; it changes. Always has and always will. Still, I'm glad to have grown up with daily comics and that I still have access to some of my favorites. In fact, many classic strips, like Popeye and Dennis the Menace, have been made available in hardcover collections. The medium may be fading, but the best of it is still out there, ready to be enjoyed.

Finally, there's a site called Comics Curmudgeon. The blogger roots thru the best and worst of the legacy comics and adding his own very funny observations on them. Over the years, he's managed to make awful soap strips like Mary Worth and Apartment 3-G hilarious as well as convince me that The Lockhorns is one of the most wonderfully miserable strips of all time.

The Lockhorns, annotated by Comics Curmudgeon