Tracklist:
1 The Bee Gees: More Than A Woman
2 Fenix TX: Abba Zabba
3 Eminem: Not Afraid
4 Keni Burke: Keep Rising to the Top
5 Beyonce: Smash Into You
6 LCD Soundsystem: Dance Yrself Clean
7 The Black Keys: Too Afraid To Love You
8 Kanye West: Blame Game
9 Kinky: Mas
10 Lil Wayne: Lollipop
11 Oasis: What’s the Story Morning Glory
12 Frank Sinatra: The Best Is Yet To Come
13 Korn: Counting on Me1
14 Britney Spears: How I Roll
15 Panic! At the Disco: From A Mountain In The Middle Of The Cabins
16 Kid Cudi: Day ‘n’ Night
17 Bob Marley: Buffalo Solider
18 Wiz Khalifa: Black & Yellow
19 Big Punisher: Still Not A Player
20 NPR2
21 Tub Ring: No One Wants To Play
22 Lady Gaga: Just Dance

The book like so many began as a dissertation. When I first went shopping for a publisher I took it to a leading academic press in my area. I made this choice partially on the advise of my advisor who knew one of the editors, who had recently been promoted to a more senior position at the press. At the time this press had the manuscript of a graduate school friend of mine and I sent mine to the same editor. The press eventually rejected my friend’s manuscript on one reader’s recommendation. About a year after my submission I received a reader’s report that suggested some areas of the manuscript needed revision and perhaps I needed to recast my ideas somewhat. I sought clarification from the editor, but received no reply. I was a tad annoyed that on one reader’s report they had seemingly rejected the work after being so positive about it. [Some fifteen years later I heard from a colleague that her book too had suffered this fate at that press from that editor. It is hearsay to be sure but she told me that the acquisition editor in question was suffering a good deal of personal trauma at the time from a marriage breakup and perhaps a dose or two too many from the self medication bottle. Both of my friends have tenure and solid academic careers and one of their books won a prize. The press in question has long since parted with this editor and I would love to have a book published with them.]

I took this setback a little hard, but at the same time I had options since the Smithsonian Institution Press was keen for the book particularly given that I had been a pre-doctoral fellow at the Institution. The University Press of Mississippi was also interested, but I went with the Smithsonian because to my mind I owed them. The Press duly sent the manuscript to two readers and in 1994 I received a contract. I had returned to Australia from the USA by this stage and since I wanted to add a chapter I needed to do some extra research. With a full time job teaching three courses a week and a huge administration load running a degree program in a design college this proved rather tough and  I finished the book by getting up at 4am every morning to write before work and of course working at the weekend. I delivered the manuscript in person to the Press in December 1996 and Comic Strips and Consumer Culture appeared in hardback May 1998.

On the evening of Sunday July 26, 1998 I received a phone call from my brother-in-law. He told me he had just read a review of a very interesting book online at the Washington Post. I got online and at speed’s astonishingly slow I discovered that the Post had reviewed Comic Strips and Consumer Culture. Not only that but the review appeared on the front page of the Sunday Book World section.  Given the time differences I saw the review online before most people would have seen the print edition. (Review reproduced here.)

No doubt the review helped sales, but had a paperback edition been available I suspect the Press would have sold more copies. Time passed and I received an email in 2001  from an editor at another Press who inquired about the paperback rights to the book. With his help I prompted the Smithsonian to publish a paperback edition. I should note that the acquisition editor at the Smithsonian was a joy to work with and he constantly championed the book. The paperback edition came out in 2002 and sold about half of its 1000 copy print run by 2004. On October 16 that year I received an innocuous email from the Press stating that they wished to reduce inventory and I could purchase stock of my book at $2 for the hard back and $1 for the paperback. I bought 40 of the paperback. As it turned out this offer was a prelude to the Press shutting its doors and selling part of its catalogue to HarperCollins and after two years striking a distribution deal with Rowman and Littlefield for some other works. My book fell into the latter category. If I had been in the USA I might have seen this coming since the Chronicle of Higher Education ran an article July 3, 2003 on the Press’s cutbacks. But at the time I was mostly unaware of all this activity.

As it was I eventually started reading the Chronicle on a regular basis and alarm bells went off went I saw a story about Gregory M. Pfitzer, a fellow Press author, that unpacked the fate of the Press and his book and I realized that my book had entered some sort of publishing limbo.

I then began to track the status of the book on Amazon on a fairly regular basis. For much of 2006 the book remained available at Amazon so I did not worry overly. But in 2007 I noticed that Amazon was unable to provide new copies. In the latter half of 2007 I was in the USA around the time my edited volume Film and Comic Books came out. Looking at Amazon and other sites like Barnes and Noble and Borders I realized that Comic Strips and Consumer Culture was unavailable and listed as out of print. I checked at a Barnes and Noble store and they confirmed they could not order the book. On the Rowman and Littlefield site, however, if you looked carefully you could still get a new copy, but web searches mostly did not locate my book in their online catalogue. I contacted the Smithsonian and eventually received a reply that although the trade publication Books in Print and its online database no longer listed my book the Smithsonian still regarded the book as in print since copies were available to purchase on a web site. I am not sure what was going on between the Smithsonian and Rowman and Littlefield at this stage (I suspect miscommunication and certainly not any ill intention), but to my mind my book was out of print and I reminded the Smithsonian of the clause in my contract that reverted the rights to me if it was out of print for six months and on my request they did not return it to print. It took about a year and some exchanges about what constituted in print at the time I signed the contract (a fine legal point that since the web barely existed when I signed the contract “in print” meant listed in Books in Print to my mind and so that was the contractual obligation). I was so annoying they gave me back the copyright. This seemed a grand victory since other books continued to be unavailable for some time after that except at the Rowman and Littlefield website.

But, and here is the rub, some 500 copies or so of the paperback edition remained when the rights returned to me and I have no idea what happened to those copies. Rowman and Littlefield stopped listing the book naturally enough, but are the copies still around? I suspect they are sitting in a warehouse somewhere and one day someone will realize they have them and offer them as a job lot to a remainder seller like Edward Hamilton or Daedalus Books. Meantime the Smithsonian reconstituted the Press as the Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press and the books are distributed by Rowman and Littlefield and once again listed on Amazon. See for instance Gregory M. Pfitzer’s excellent Picturing the Past.

So with a potential 500 copies of the book sitting out there I can not in good conscience take the book to another press and see if they want to republish it. I am not sure if it is a good thing or a bad thing that I pushed so hard to get my rights back. Have I limited people’s ability to get a copy? I have other projects on the boil and it will be sometime before I can do a second edition of Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, which updates the argument and reproduces more comics, so for the moment my solution is to let people download it with a minimal gateway of signing in to academia.edu; not exactly freely available, but available free with about five minutes of effort. Oh and yes there is a benefit for me: cite it in published works, please. Oh and one more thing: despite the title there is a whole chapter on comic books during WWII.

Comic Strips and Consumer Culture

Val died last month. The obit in the Sydney Morning Herald described her as Fearless and Fun. Val was a bit of a rough diamond. The girls, and yes the women of the College called themselves girls, referred to her as the short round mound of sound. As Rosemary Annable’s obit states Val was no academic. I remember some of us arriving at the opinion that Val had no depth of knowledge or complexity of thought. Some of the girls found her a tad uncouth. She was certainly an outsider among the many big end of town types at Women’s. Some of this may seem a harsh judgment and arrogant. That Val was where she was simply amazed many folks and it was a tribute to her character that she arrived at the position and made things work. Val was wonderfully generous hosting a Friday evening drinks session on the Principal’s balcony just before dinner. Once when absent over the long weekend she gave some of us the run of her apartment in the College. She worked hard to improve the scholarships the College could offer and a good number of residents would otherwise not have found a place at College.

Male residents at Women’s College and the system of Resident Advisors was upsetting to many traditionalist at the College. The first Val justified on the grounds of trying to have some male presence in the College to thwart the bad behaviour of some boys who habitually wandered in from St Andrew’s and St Paul’s Colleges. Frankly in retrospect I doubt that it worked. The system of Resident Advisors Val borrowed from US Colleges. Traditionally the House Committee comprised of students had been the key body in shaping College life so the Advisors were seen as something of an imposition. Collegiality though reigned with only Val taking the heat for her innovations. I think Val regarded her innovations as necessary to shaping College life and her charges’ futures. She certainly tried to have the girls take responsibility for their own actions, but wanted safeguards in place for when they did not.

I have mixed feelings about Val and my time at Women’s College, but I certainly benefited from living and working there and I have Val to thank.

When I put it aside I had planned to look again at William Appleman Williams’s 1959 book The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, a work that indites the conduct of American foreign policy for serving basically imperialist goals under the name of liberal good fellowship. I haven’t had the time to look at Williams’s book so my characterization of the it here is somewhat rushed and from memory, but that book, now 50 years old, did tell us something about the problems that occur in the world when American notions of their own essential goodness are projected on to the world.

Kazin’s piece does not directly engage with American foreign policy save to note that “since liberals turned against the war in Vietnam 40 years ago, they have struggled to prove that they love their country even while opposing most of the policies of its government.” For Kazin liberals have been able to reclaim the mantle of patriots because of the disaster of the debacle in Iraq. Kazin points to the “immensely attractive and remarkably supple creed” that is Americanism and notes that battles, are fought over just what this means and how America’s founders envisioned the nation.  To a certain point Kazin is simply restating truisms. Political change in America comes when enough people are convinced that American ideals are not being upheld by an existing arrangement of power.

When Kazin reminds liberals though that America must have a “privileged place in their hearts”  I worry somewhat. It seems a fine line between loving American ideals and demanding that the nation live up to its better self, and seeing, as did liberals in the 1950s and 1960s that the nations ideals would be best served by an intervention in Vietnam. Perhaps I read too much into the phrase “privileged place in their hearts,” but to my mind it was an ability to put aside such notions that let some liberals see the wrong of the war in Vietnam. I hope those who do determine they love America can still oppose wrong  policies.

For what it is worth I met Michael Kazin twenty years ago and between 1989 and 1993 had a couple of interactions with him. On those ocassions he was certainly more generous to me than he needed to be.

Jack Johnson became the world heavyweight boxing champion on December 26, 1908 at the Stadium in Rushcutters Bay, Sydney, Australia. In the mid 1990s I lived in Rushcutters Bay. The Stadium was demolished in the early 1970s to make way for a suburban rail line. In the 1964 The Beatles played there on their Australian tour. Occasionally I used to go for a beer at the Rushcutters Bay Hotel. The Hotel, also since demolished,  served the working class population of the nearby area, which had diminished greatly as more and more old properties that were rooming houses were demolished for new apartments. The front bar of the pub was somewhat ill-lit and I remember being staggered on my way to the gents to discover a small corner of the bar was devoted to Jack Johnson and his memorable fight. I wish I had photographed it. I never did find out why the tribute was there, Johnson was not exactly a household name in Australia. Perhaps the pub owner was a fight fan.

The first I knew of Jack Johnson was through a piece by the writer Jack London. London renown as a socialist writer, his most famous book is either The Iron Heel or The Call of the Wild, was a racist; or in his words a white man first and a socialist second. He was in Sydney for the fight and reported on it for the Australian Star and the article also appeared in the New York Herald. Tracing that report was one of the first pieces of original research I did. London’s views made me lose my appetite for his work.