The Godmother of the Graphic Novel
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Rediscovering Burton
Virginia Lee Burton is best-remembered for her children's books, most notably Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel (1939) and the Caldecott-winning The Little House (1942). I recently took my students from the Center for Cartoon Studies, a two-year boot camp for cartoonists earning MFAs, to visit a Burton retrospective at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art. She's been a favorite of mine for some time, but to most of these young cartoonists was unknown. After seeing her show, I declared Burton the godmother of the modern-day graphic novel.
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Girl in the Clubhouse
Cartooning has historically been a boys' club. Little credit has been given to women for their impact on the medium. In 2006, the "Masters of American Comics," a major exhibition that began in Los Angeles at the Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art, toured the country and helped establish comics as a legitimate art form. All 15 cartoonists represented were men.
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Caniff and Eisner
While Burton was creating her books, master cartoonists Milt Caniff (Terry and the Pirates) and Will Eisner (The Spirit) brought a new level of craft to comics. Caniff's invigorating brushwork is considered some of the finest ever to grace the pages of a newspaper comics section. Eisner, no drawing slouch himself, employed a cinematic flair and nuanced storytelling. Their work is read today primarily by the comic aficionados who appreciate its trendsetting elements. Burton's work of that era is equally well-crafted and innovative, and like all great art has a timeless quality.
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Crafting Perfection
Burton was a perfectionist. In this illustration she created texture and volume by scratching into solid black shapes. The painstaking method would have made it all but impossible to meet the punishing monthly deadlines of the comic book industry in the 1930s and '40s. Even in the slower world of book publishing, Burton was known for having a hard time letting go of a book, according to Barbara Elleman, Burton's biographer and curator of the exhibition.
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Balancing Act
Like other women artists of her time, Burton had children (two sons) and a household to manage on top of her work. Given those domestic responsibilities, it is no wonder that in the '30s and '40s, so many of the great women creating picture stories, like Marie Hall Ets and Margaret Wise Brown, gravitated toward the more flexible schedule of the children's book industry.
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Urban Sprawl
The Little House is a formal masterpiece that uses repetition, design, and color to express strong emotion and make larger political statements concerning urban sprawl. The reader sees a small house in a bucolic setting. Page by page, the landscape around the small house changes until the green pastures are transformed into a bleak urban nightmare. The bright greens and blues give way to grimy grays as the little house becomes as dilapidated as the buildings that surround it.
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Inspiring Crumb?
R. Crumb was born the year after The Little House was published. It's easy to imagine that Burton's book influenced one of his classic comics, A Short History of America. Crumb's panels, like The Little House's spreads, employ a fixed point of view-a technique similar to that of time-lapse photography. The changes in the environment over time become the heart of the story. Burton's tale ends when the little house is eventually moved back to the countryside and restored. Crumb, on the other hand, offers no happy endings.
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"No Shortcuts"
Virginia Lee Burton believed that design was a form of personal expression. As these sketches demonstrate, she labored to find just the right composition for every image she created, knowing that a slight change in proportion or placement would affect her story. "There are no shortcuts in learning design," Burton would tell her students. "It is a slow hard climb, and you never reach the top. The more you learn the more you find there is to learn."
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Steady Hand
The illustrations from Song of Robin Hood (1947), ink drawings scratched with an etching tool, show off Burton's steady hand and skill at conjuring fine and ornate details. This high level of craft, along with the seamless marriage of design and drawing, calls to mind the work of Chris Ware, author of Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, and arguably the finest cartoonist of his generation.
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Laborious? Doesn't Look It
Although the effort that went into each of these drawings is obvious, the drawings themselves don't feel labored. The reader never feels lost in the details since the well-balanced page compositions bring harmony to all the finely wrought elements. Hand-drawn lettering pulls together the text and the art.
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Calico Comics
If Burton had worked in comics instead of children's books, what would her work look like? She credited the comics she read to her kids for inspiring the Calico the Wonder Horse (1941). Calico has all the chills, spills, and action of a classic Western adventure. Her cowboys and horses whip through the panels, taking the reader along for the ride. By comparison, reading the Western comics of that era, full of stiff wooden illustrations coupled with dense blocks of text, is a chore.
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Endurance
Burton once wrote: "Do a book well or don't do it at all." Her work was built to endure. And it has: All 7 of her books are still in print. Her credo could also belong to today's most-celebrated graphic novelists, like Seth, Adriane Tomine, Jason Lutes, Alison Bechdel, Rutu Modan, and Posy Simmonds, who are far closer to her in spirit than to most of the early, deadline-driven cartoonists. Their work shares with Burton's pitch-perfect pacing, superb design, emotionally rich content, and an emphasis on understatement and naturalism.
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13 of 13 Looking Back
As the director of a cartooning school, I make sure our curriculum delivers a proper history. But it's increasingly clear to me, as I watch my students struggle to bring nuance to a medium that has historically lacked it, that they have as much (if not more) in common with children's book artists like Burton as with the men who worked in the sweatshops in the early years of comic books. It is time to stop looking at the history of comics as the history of the comic industry. We need to make room for more masters, Burton among them.
