BY JENNIFER M. CONTINO Checker Book Publishing has been involved in a lot of exciting comic book projects. They've reintroduced the masses to the works of Winsor McKay and Theodor Seuss Geisel. The adventures of Steve Canyon and comedy of B.C. have a home at Checker. Sci-fi thrillers and icons like X-Files and Star Trek are reprinted under their label. Among other projects, they've also have collected some of the CrossGen stories. There's always something different at Checker, which is why we thought now might be a good time to check in with editor Cammie Ledbetter about some of their recent and upcoming works that she's been involved with since joining the team.
THE PULSE: When you were working on your degree in English and Fine Arts, was working in the comic book industry a job you had in mind or were you thinking of a career as something else?
CAMMIE LEDBETTER: Writing was my first love, but I figured that I could write anytime - in fact, it was a compulsion - but I had to have another career to fall back on. I fell into computers in high school, at a time when most industry standard software was in its first or second release, graphic art was the next logical choice. It took me quite a while to finish college. I was disappointed at the time that I had to quit and go to work after only three years, but now I appreciate that a few years in the real world really deepened my perspective, especially on pop art and culture. By the time I finished, it had morphed into a degree that was tailor-made for the publishing industry.
I don't think the comic industry was specifically a conscious choice, although I'm sure it sat at the back of my mind as one of the many dream jobs an artist could imagine. I was very aware that the opportunities for the dream jobs were few and far between in my area, and I had no desire at all to pack up the hubby and kids and run off to the big city.
THE PULSE: If you weren't a comic book fan or thinking about a career in comics, how did you come to work with Checker Book Publishing?
LEDBETTER: I sent out resumes for months and got few replies. It has been my habit since high school to spend hours at a local greasy spoon, reading/writing/sketching and sipping bad coffee. It was there that I met a young man who told me about the company. I e-mailed a resume the next day.
THE PULSE: If you weren't familiar with comic books other than reading a few in passing as a child, how did you get acquainted with your new surroundings? If you were a big comic book fan, what were some of the things, currently not in publication, you thought Checker should try to acquire?
LEDBETTER: There wasn't too much to adjust to. Certainly it is easy to get caught up in comics, I hover online wish-listing my must-haves all the time. I learn more every day, but I still don't understand the widespread idea that comics are so completely different from other forms of art. In fact, comics address issues with a high level of aggression, they say what needs to be said and they don't apologize for any of it. I can draw parallels all day long to history, sociology, psychology, religion, politics, hell, just humanity in general. I love the complexity of it.
I am constantly amazed at the influence that graphic novels have over our culture. Most of my favorite movies were adapted from comics, and I see the comic frame intertwined in the cinematography, lighting and color. Comic art and its influence is everywhere.
I would like to look at a wider variety of the earliest artists, especially editorial art. I was a satire lover from the minute I discovered Lewis Carroll with footnotes. Tad Dorgan would be great because he appeals to sports fans and coined so many figures of speech. Of course Thomas Nast was responsible for bringing down the corrupt Tweed Ring. There weren't, and still aren't many women in the industry, but I would like to do a book about Rose O'Neill, the radical suffragette illustrator. Speaking in terms of graphic novels I would have to say that I am crazy for the Tick (Spo-o-o-on!) and I really enjoyed the Pocket Classics as a kid.
THE PULSE: I know you work on getting the images ready for print for a lot of the Checker collections, when you find something that really is in horrible shape, how do you restore the original so that it is true to the other images, but usable?
LEDBETTER: I'm happy to say that we rarely have to restore a piece that badly damaged. Many people might look at a piece and say it's impossible to fix, but Andrew (the art director) and I usually just figure out a way. Each page is assessed individually. First, get the best quality originals you can, if it means rescanning, re-photographing or even looking for another copy that has the missing area intact but is damaged elsewhere. It helps to have really advanced equipment. Second, If you have to rebuild areas, try to use as much of the artists actual work as possible: i.e. don't draw in an element, such as a missing foot, if you can find it somewhere else and adjust it to fit. Thirdly, remember not to clean it up too much. If a newspaper press printed a few rough lines one hundred years ago, that is as much a part of the artwork as the design. The artist knew it would happen and had already included it in his design. My rule of thumb is to clean up things that distract from the overall page.
THE PULSE: What have been some of the hardest images to track down since you began working at Checker?
LEDBETTER: By far the hardest to lay my hands on was the 1924-1926 run of "Little Nemo in Slumberland". This is the story that everyone wants to hear...
I rue the day microfilm was invented. The quality is poor, you have to squint through a magnifying loop to locate the panels that might or might not be what you are looking for. Not to mention that all of the beautiful color is reduced to a muddy gray. Of course microfilm made storing back-issues of newspapers more economical, but it also provided an excuse to dispose of the originals. It takes a huge amount of climate-controlled storage space to preserve the bound volumes, and most have been purchased in bulk, disassembled and sold off piecemeal to collectors.
At first we were going to find what dates we could in color and print the rest from microfilm. Looking for a page count, I started making a calendar based on the supposed run dates for the 1924-1926 run of Little Nemo and making preparations to order the microfilm. At about that same time, I did some research on the web to find some syndicate newspapers and stumbled across a collection of bound volumes at a major west coast university. When I corresponded with the librarian, I was told that the collection had not been catalogued, they could not say when or if it would be catalogued in the future, and they either could not or would not drive over to the storage facility and take a quick look, now quit bugging them and let them get back to shushing insomniac, hung over college students.
Then I discovered the originals at another university, this time a southern big ten school. Sure we could use the art, they said, as long as we paid their reproduction fees and usage fees, (on public domain art, mind you) promise them our first born children, a human kidney from each of us, a year's supply of Skyline Chili and Mikesell's Potato Chips and the cleaning lady's gold-capped tooth. Oh, and a couple copies of the book when its published.
Things were looking pretty bleak. The company purchased a few Nemos here and there, but we did not have time it would take to find and buy all the missing pages. Then one day, as I was scanning one of these new Nemos I noticed that it had come from the Roswell Daily Record. Yes, that Roswell. So I shot off an email to the Historical Society in Roswell, where (thank goodness) Elvis was working, and pointed me to the County Clerk's office and finally I had found my Nemos. We would be the first to print the comprehensive collection in full color. Andrew and I grabbed the camera and hopped a plane for Albuquerque, which is nowhere near Roswell, as it turns out. The people there were wonderful and courteous. They fed us homemade tamals and gave us directions to the best local restaurants. I also have to thank Bruce Jones for letting us scan several pieces of his personal collection.
THE PULSE: When Checker approaches a rights owner about reprinting or collecting original works, will you only do it if a certain percentage of the original art is available or do they have to supply all of the originals for consideration?
LEDBETTER: The first concern is usually demand. What would the fans like to see? As for acquiring the art, where there are rights owners there is usually art. Sometimes we get disks with the scans already done and sometimes we get sent original pieces of art or the previous publishers proofs or camera ready art. Sometimes we are provided with original digital documents. Then, as I've already said, sometimes we have to go hunting.
THE PULSE: How is working on a newer property like CrossGen different from an older property like Little Nemo?
LEDBETTER: The CrossGen material was sort of my introduction to comics, and the art is spectacular with a lot of movement and mood. The colors are so clear and the characters original. Graphically, they are just a dream to read, study and write about. Nemo is another kind of incredible. Speaking as an artist, Nemo was an excuse to draw the most fanciful and imaginative things a mind could conceive and share it all with the world.
THE PULSE: What are some of the biggest challenges of getting any kind of collection ready for print?
LEDBETTER: Deciding on a format is always difficult. Horizontal or Vertical? Sometimes the art just won't fit the way one would like it to. It's also hard to decide what to leave out. Sometimes there just isn't room for everything we would like to put in. Other times the trouble is working with license holders. People think that working with an artist is hard, but in my experience the difficulty is license holders who were not the original creators, because at some point they paid for the copyright and they want to have complete editorial control, right down to changing the contents of word balloons. They don't always have the preservation of the work in mind. It's hard to make everybody happy all the time
THE PULSE: How do you decide, out of the vast information available about most of the classic collections, what to write as the teaser text on the back covers and inside of the book to tempt folks into getting the works?
LEDBETTER: The most important thing is to actually read and study the material. I can't count the number of times that I have read a book whose cover text was completely and concretely inaccurate.
I don't really have a formula. Like the art restoration, it's on a case-by-case basis. On the newer material I usually write the introduction first. Most of the time its rather conversational, but sometimes I write my own vignette to go with it. For the teaser text, I do some research on the artists and the original publication and then locate the most drastic plot twists and season it with a few references to classic literature and themes. If I disagree with the accepted "truths" and the standard spiel, then I say so.
For the classics it gets more complicated. For Nemo and The Yellow Kid I have done months of research. I have read every book, blog and website I could find that has anything to do with the strip or the era. I pick individual related topics and research those heavily, like 19th century American slang, Tammany politics, the effect of bicycles on the suffrage movement, etcetera. I read what others have written and check their sources and pretty soon inaccuracies begin to surface. I look at the strip's impact on society, what that society was like, what events could have been inspiration, and how I would critique the strip from an artist's point-of-view. Then I get out a pen and write, asking myself what a person who is ignorant of the content in this book would be most intrigued by. As a person who buys a lot of books, I ask myself what would make me buy this book?
THE PULSE: Out of all the collections you've worked on, which one's teaser text has been the easiest to write? Why was it easy? Familiarity or something else ...?
LEDBETTER: Hmm... I think the easiest was the intro to Early Works of Windsor McCay IX (The Early Works have a standard teaser text), because I had been researching prohibition and economics for Nemo and the Yellow Kid and it just flew. Andrew had a hard time getting it to fit in the layout of the page, but I could not find even a single sentence that wasn't totally integral to the setting. Everything was already so compact, there was no dead wood to cut out.
THE PULSE: Which collection has given you the biggest challenge? What made it such a challenge?
LEDBETTER: The biggest challenge has been the upcoming R.F. Outcault's The Yellow Kid. I have been slaving over the research for that book for almost nine months. Now I am writing it. I think any writer that has to become an expert on a historical period in a short amount of time can feel overwhelmed. It's Charles Dickens meets Citizen Kane meets Edith Wharton meets Gangs of New York.
THE PULSE: That sounds insane! But cool! So what's a typical day in the office like for you?
LEDBETTER: Since I do so many different things, every day is different. I come in at nine a.m. gripping my large coffee. Check email; throw some sarcasm into our informal morning meeting. I could be researching online or reading printed books, writing text, proofreading, printing review copies. Periodically I'll check out what the fans are saying, which hints to me what adjustments might be made in the future. I might work on restoration or design covers and chapter breaks. Last summer I wrote and produced our infomercial.
THE PULSE: What upcoming Checker Book Publishing releases are you the most psyched about?
LEDBETTER: I think the Ruse omnibus is going to be fantastic. It was one of CrossGen's best sellers and it has a story line I can really get into. I am looking forward to seeing the completed Nemo 2, especially since so many people have been waiting so patiently to see the 1924-26 run complete for the first time. I think it will be well worth the wait.
The Yellow Kid is my baby, being the first book I have been given writer's credit for. I could have written a great deal more. It was just a fascinating time in American history and knowing the context really adds another level to the art.
We have a few projects in the works in the horror genre that are unlike anything else we have ever published before, and I am a big collector of classic horror stories. Andrew and I might even get to try our hands at being colorists.
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