Thirteen Going on Eighteen
Writer/Artist - John Stanley
Publisher - Drawn & Quarterly
Artists come and go, and one can never tell who will have lasting impact and who will drift into obscurity. Those listening to the radio in the early ’90s may be surprised that Rivers Cuomo has long outlasted Alanis Morrissette, and sold more records than Jewel. Sometimes an artist who helped define his age, like Frank Capra, falls out of favor or doesn’t become a major influence on the next generation of artists, while an iconoclast like Nicolas Ray or Samuel Fuller gain more stature as the years go on, picking up champions from the generation after. Maybe 30 years from now, a Mark Waid or Kurt Busiek will have been out so long some young tyro will new inspiration in their work and pass it on for curious audience.
When you’re dead and can’t engineer any sort of comeback or reappraisal on your own, it becomes a matter of luck who will be favored and who favors you. And sometimes it’s a matter of genre. Whereas an author like Dan Nadel has pointed readers back to ’60s genre specialists like Sam Glanzman (war, jungle), Pete Morisi (crime, superheroes) and Pat Boyette (superheroes, horror, Western), their revivals have yet to occur. Perhaps it’s inevitable in this age of reprints, or perhaps it’s that genre work from this period and earlier is still seen as trash by many in the artcomix crowd, or with those with the wherewithal to get this stuff back in print.
Somehow, innocuous humor comics of the ’60s have made the cut, celebrated by respected cartoonists like Los Bros Hernandez and Seth. Naturally, one of the foremost cartoon humorists of that era, John Stanley, was given entrance to the pantheon of the greats, and he’s enjoyed a great deal of his past work being reprinted, starting with Dark Horse’s affordable, pocket-sized collection of Little Lulu, and then in 2008, the beginnings of the Seth-designed John Stanley Library, which presented full-sized reprints of ’60s Dell comics like Melvin Monster and Nancy in lavish hardcovers with covers, endpapers and Introductions by Seth, yet still giving off the look of a crappy newsprint comic one might have read until dog-eared on a long car ride or family vacation.
This volume, published in 2009, is the biggest of the bunch, as it collects nine issues of the twenty-five original issues of the series (29 total issues, the last four reprints). Seth writes in his Introduction (actually an edit of a Comics Journal piece, also recently reprinted in The Best American Comics Criticism) how Thirteen is the Stanley series dearest to him, and it’s such an affecting essay it really builds up a great deal of expectation for the contents to follow.
Unfortunately, the series actually gets off to a slow start with Tony Tallarico’s flat, homely but slick style weighing down what effervescence there is in Stanley’s scripts, and frankly, there isn’t much. There’s some very flat soda pop about a giggling fit in the library and piffle about a girl’s machinations trying to be asked to a dance. It’s like Stanley had made notes on what he wanted to explore—cute, blonde Val is the popular, mercurial teen; her zaftig friend Judy is there for fat jokes; and young version Judy Junior (Seth has the fanciful notion this is an entirely different character) is there for slapstick gags revolving around her being a bully—but he takes a while to find a groove.
It takes a couple issues, but once Stanley starts drawing his scripts, he seems to lose the flopsweat and gain more confidence in what to do with the characters. What’s kind of interesting is that Stanley is so relentless with his gags and able to hone in on the winning formula, abandoning what isn’t working (there’s a dopey teen romance that doesn’t provide much yuks, and it’s gone in a few issues). He’s an odd guy to call for reappraisal of, because there is almost no trace of an auteur there. He’s not using fat Judy (who suddenly gets thinner from issue #4 on) as a vehicle to vent childhood frustrations. It doesn’t seem like he’s trying to understand women or children any better by writing Val and Judy. At least, I hope not—they’re cunts. Ultimately very funny cunts, but cunts all the same, and I say this having close female friends who could be labeled as such at times (I call them The Vinegar Sisters, and they like it). Val is fickle, scatterbrained, scheming, manipulative, completely self-involved and has no idea what love is, while Judy is a cruel pig who rarely misses a chance to use the only weapon she has against her supposed friend Val, her lacerating wisecracks.
But Stanley doesn’t need to understand his characters, exactly. He just has to keep putting them through his familiar comedic rhythms and premises until the ideas start flowing more and more naturally. He’s a ruthless craftsman, and part of a line from H.L. Mencken and W.C. Fields through Ricky Gervais and Larry David that knows how funny an asshole can be. It’s just that in these comics, Stanley is dealing with the female version. A Val who softens and tries to consider the feelings of others, or a Judy Junior who doesn’t push Jimmy Fuzzi around, ain’t funny. To try to character this work as layered or having unseen depth is actually to demean the rich tradition of gag cartooning. Stanley creates a machine in this series containing several premises to not only produce gags but to keep producing them, requiring only that the reader have the basic understanding of human nature that most people, especially teen girls, are selfish and silly but kind of adorable for it. Anything that doesn’t work is out or at least diminished (such as fewer appearances for Val’s mom and sister). It takes a little fine-tuning (and I don’t care as much for the Judy/Wilbur date strips as some) but by the middle of the book, it really hums along and you want more. And hey, there’s a couple more volumes’ worth left to reprint.
—Christopher Allen
