From time to time when I was a boy, growing up in Maryland in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I would be sent to spend the weekend with my father’s parents down in Washington. They lived in the Seville, a grim new apartment house at 11th and N Streets with a beauty salon on the ground floor and a swimming pool on the roof. My grandmother was a tiny, restless, intelligent, embittered alarmist who loved me flagrantly and relentlessly, and feared for my life. My world, as she mapped it, was a fragile atoll of safety in a vast alluring sea of harm (that rooftop swimming pool, for instance, diabolically combining two forms of peril in one). She was one of those Jewish women who find eloquence in anxiety, and she spoke her mind without mincing words—okay, she was rude—especially to people who disappointed her (my father, for example). If you spent time in her company you came away knowing what she valued and what she thought was trash, and which of those categories you belonged in.
My grandfather was more of a mystery. Small, portly, mild-mannered, soft-spoken, he had little to say on the subject of other people’s shortcomings. He had pale blue eyes that as a child I saw as warm and affectionate, though research and hindsight have tinged them with grief: forgiving eyes. As for the things that mattered to him, these had to be inferred from the amount of time and energy he devoted to them. Conserving his energy mattered to him; he was a slow-moving man. On a hot D.C. summer day, a cold slice of watermelon, sprinkled with salt, mattered to him. Whiling away an afternoon in a deep armchair by the window of the apartment’s only bedroom, with his feet up on what he called a “hassock,” reading the Post or Newsweek, or listening to a ballgame on a pocket-size Sylvania transistor radio: all these things had their value. And he liked to solve the daily Jumble that appeared in what he called the “funnies” and—fittingly, I see now—the cryptogram in Potomac, the Post’s Sunday magazine. He taught me how one cracked a cryptogram: start with any singletons, which had to be I or A, and then deploy a mnemonic for a run of twelve letters, pronounced “eh-tao-in sherd-loo” as though they spelled the first and last name of a man named ETAOIN SHRDLU (as though that could ever be anyone’s name!). And Etaoin Shrdlu, in his way, was a clue to the profoundest mystery of all.
That particular arrangement of letters, by descending order of their frequency in printed American English, reflected the first two columns of keys on a Linotype machine’s keyboard, configured thus to increase an operator’s speed. My grandfather was a printer, a “Fifty-Year Man” in the International Typographical Union. He had worked in New York and D.C., printing film and theatrical posters, campaign pins and placards, and newspapers; at the end of his life, when I knew him, he was employed at the old Washington Star. He worked the graveyard shift.
I remember the modest double bed beside the armchair in my grandparents’ bedroom; it was, as far as I ever observed, uninhabited. I inferred that my grandfather slept in it, because when it was time for me to brush my teeth and put my pajamas on—I was lavishly endowed by my grandmother with dapper pajama sets—he would retreat to the bedroom, closing the door behind him. Then my grandmother would sit on the edge of the daybed she had made up for me in the living room, reciting poems—Longfellow, Bryant, Tennyson, Kipling—that she, an immigrant from the Pale of Settlement in the first decades of that century, had been obliged by the New York City public school system to memorize by the dozen. At some point in her recitation—her favorite was Evangeline—I would drop off to sleep. When I woke in the morning she would be there beside me. I have no idea of where, or if, she ever actually slept.
What I remember most clearly from those visits now—with a poignancy sharpened, deepened, and, in a curious way, made whole by Glenn Fleishman’s magnificent book How Comics Were Made—is being roused from the midnight depths of sleep to witness a scene of mystery at once simple and profound, like all true mysteries: my grandfather by the front door, pulling an overcoat over his suit jacket, my grandmother giving him an umbrella or a tug to the knot of his necktie and then—wondrously—a quick hard peck on the cheek. Then he would go out the door into the night, and the darkness, and the unimaginable techniques and machinery of his lifelong trade.
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Once or twice he showed me how to fold a newsprint page into a trim little hat, a sort of square kepi, that he said he and his coworkers wore on the job (a stereo press operator sports one on page 84 of Fleishman’s book). Apart from that I have no memory of his talking to me about the work he did, or the methods and machines he used to do it. He never took me to see his workplace; if he had wanted to—and I don’t know that he wanted to—my grandmother might well have forbidden it as too noisy, too dirty, too dangerous.
At the time, if I’d had any curiosity about the intricacies of newspaper printing—and I don’t know that I did—it might well never have occurred to me that my grandfather could satisfy it. His job was the whole midnight world beyond that front door, not a place one could visit. As a kid I failed even to take him and his life—the town and country of his birth, his journey to New York, his work as a printer, his inner existence as a man, husband, and father—for granted: I did not “take” them at all. By the time, decades later, when in my efforts to understand myself—to fill in the many remaining blanks in that cryptogram—I was ready at last to reach beyond my parents for answers, the people who might have provided them were long gone.
I have personal reasons, therefore, to be grateful to Fleishman and How Comics Were Made, his deeply researched and splendidly designed new history of that great American art form, the newspaper comic strip. Unlike previous historians of the form, who have tended to concentrate on its social, political, cultural, and artistic aspects, Fleishman considers its inception and development over the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a product of rapid innovation and change in the technologies of printing, in particular of mechanical image reproduction, and his book is therefore, necessarily, a history of mechanized printing itself. It’s the history of the mass industrialization of printing over that period, of how that process gave rise to the modern newspaper and the numerous crafts and specializations—all of which required skill if not outright artistry—that rapid technological development, driven by fierce competition for vast readerships, demanded. But it’s also, accidentally, a history of my grandfather.
Irving L. Chabon (1900–1974) was, as far as I know, primarily a typesetter; but even if he never worked directly in comic strip production, deploying one of the many surprisingly baroque, no doubt tedious processes expounded by Fleishman with such affection and verve, the world limned here—a world of weird alchemies of acid and metal and light, of intimate bullpens where talented colorists and gamboge adepts wielded fine brushes and X-Acto knives, of block-long plants that roared night and day rolling a thousand Möbius miles of newsprint through the works, of Ben Day, Craftint, Zip-A-Tone, and flongs—was my grandfather’s world. Reading How Comics Were Made, the fruit of long devotion, insightful scholarship, and dogged sleuthing, vividly restored that world and that history to me, half a century after my grandfather’s death and a century, more or less, since his taking up the printer’s trade.
My personal loss—the loss of a strand of family history—and its partial, bright recovery in How Comics Were Made merely reflects in miniature the far more severe loss that Fleishman has so resolutely staved off for all of us. He gives a good, illuminating account of the state of comic strip production in the post-newsprint age. But his title acknowledges the poignant, past-tense truth of the newspaper strip, an American art form that began as an experiment in raucous urban satire; ascended swiftly to technical and artistic brilliance and a kind of mass narrative dominance that both presaged and, for a long time, rivaled radio and Hollywood for what would later be called market saturation; then entered a second period of creative experimentation that (in hindsight) reached its peak with Calvin and Hobbes—only to die suddenly, with the death of the physical newspaper, almost exactly a century after its birth.
The greatness of the newspaper strip in its prime was never a secret or in dispute. Numerous excellent histories of the form and its masters have been and will, I’m sure, continue to be written, though they will not be so numerous. But to my knowledge no one, before now, has written a history of the comic strip as a technological artifact—not, at least, in such depth and on such a sound foundation of research. It took long years, a detective’s persistence, a scientist’s curiosity, and a fan’s obsessiveness to carry out the work: tracking down an ever-dwindling number of descendants; searching in archives and junk shops and weird corners of the Internet for production materials that were not seen as having value or scholarly interest until most of them (including of course original artwork) had been thrown out, recycled, or destroyed; salvaging old brochures and manuals, guides and technical documents, most of them equally fragile and subject to violent disregard.
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It takes a rare kind of mind to care so deeply, for so long, with such discernment, about something whose worth and significance have been so thoroughly neglected, and then to persevere in the piecemeal, painstaking work of ending, at a stroke, that neglect. When I think that without Glenn Fleishman and his solitary, quixotic quest to gather together all the fascinating bits of this history—of our history—so many of which might otherwise have been lost, I shudder. And then I stop and think about a man who, in spite of the enduring pain of losses and setbacks, always managed, sprinkling a little salt onto his watermelon, to be grateful for what he had.
This essay will appear, in somewhat different form, as the foreword to a new edition of Glenn Fleishman’s How Comics Were Made, to be published by Andrews McMeel in June.
