By Shaenon K. Garrity
I'm on to you, Sam Kieth, award-winning creator of
The Maxx. I am calling you out. You have totally been ripping off Harvey Comics.
The Cartoon Art Museum has a new show up: "From Richie Rich to Wendy the Witch: The Art of Harvey Comics." Laugh it up, fanboys, but in the modern direct-market-ravaged age it's easy to forget that Harvey was once pandemic across the comics landscape. At his peak, Richie Rich had 32 monthly or bimonthly titles with his name on them. Thirty. Two. Poor Little Rich Boy my ass. And those were just the Richie Rich comics; Casper, Wendy, Hot Stuff the Little Devil (whose comics are just plain weird, and that's all I'm going to say about that), and Little Audrey all had multiple ongoing series. Generations of minds were molded by this stuff. If you've ever thought that people who grew up in the late Sixties and early Seventies, like Wes Anderson and Jonathan Lethem, are a little off, that could be why. Check their parents' attics; they probably got warped by
Richie Rich and Professor Keenbean. Or
Little Dot's Uncles and Aunts.
No, really. Little Dot's uncles and aunts had their own ongoing series.
But I'm not here to wax nostalgic about the days when Richie Rich stood astride the world of comics like a macrocephalic plutocratic Colossus. I'm here to discuss a 1970s Little Dot story currently hanging in the Cartoon Art Museum that just happens to be one of the insanest non-Japanese comics I've ever seen. In the story, Little Dot's father hires her best friend, tough fat girl Little Lotta, to cure his daughter of her bizarre obsession with dots. He has evidently not reflected that, should the plan succeed, Little Dot will be stripped of her one personality trait and the comic will end, leaving him, Dot and the uncles and aunts all out of work.
Little Lotta, incidentally, really needs to be revived, as she's a great role model for plus-size kids, and there are certainly plenty of those around. The more Lotta eats, the stronger she gets, so gaining weight gives her super-strength to defend her smaller, non-super-powered friends, including her diminutive boyfriend who always needs rescuing. I guess nowadays we have Oprah. Anyway, she's quite badass and she wants to be a police officer when she grows up, so I'm all over Lotta.
But not in this story, where Lotta takes Mr. Polka's blood money (did I mention that Dot's last name is Polka? Never mind, you probably could've guessed) and tries to convince Dot to turn her back on dots. What follows is a sequence designed to bend young minds in directions they should not be bent, as Dot, far from submitting to the deprogramming, instead converts Lotta to the Way of the Circle. It's like a Chick Tract. Dot saves Lotta from a series of near-accidents—speeding car, flowerpot falling from an upper-story window—
and claims she was warned by the circular shapes in the threatening objects. For example, she knows about the oncoming car because the tires speak to her. That's right: not only are dots Dot's friends, she can literally communicate with them. In my new favorite panel in the history of comic-book panels, this exchange takes place:
Dot: Dots
talk to me by
mental telepathy!
Lotta:
Their minds warn
your mind, Dot?
I knew you wouldn't believe me, so I provided illustrations.
Rather than concluding that Mr. Polka was right about Dot being in serious need of an intervention, Lotta is won over by Dot's belief system and spends her ill-gotten cash on unspecified round things. The revelation that Dot has a telepathic bond with all circular objects is never challenged.
That's not the amazing part. The amazing part is that this is the exact plot of the 2001 Sam Kieth miniseries
Zero Girl.
In
Zero Girl, teenage outcast Amy Smootster (no worse a surname than "Polka") has a telepathic bond with all circular objects. Circles are her friends and protect her from her enemies, mainly square objects. In one scene, she rescues her guidance counselor from a speeding bus after the tires send her a warning. There's also some stuff about relationships and power-liquid that comes out of her feet, but basically she's Little Dot, only hot and emo.
As final proof, check out the last panels of the Little Dot story, wherein Mr. Polka wears a shirt covered in triangles. Triangles are the shape favored by the undead mom in Keith's sequel series
Zero Girl: Full Circle. Coincidence? Surely not! I don't know how that Little Dot story branded itself on Kieth's unconscious, since it doesn't involve pop psychoanalysis or a romance between people of wildly different ages, but clearly something happened.
In a 2002 episode of "The Simpsons" (specifically, the one with Stan Lee where Homer turns into the Hulk), Bart is trying to invent a cartoon character, and Marge suggests, "Why don't you rip off Little Dot? I mean, who would know?" Little did we as a nation realize that
this had already occurred.
Only two questions remain. Is The Maxx based on Baby Huey? And is there someone out there feverishly working on a postmodern, mature-audiences-oriented Sad Sack? Whatever the answers, I've got my eye on you, Sam Kieth.
Shaenon K. Garrity is a manga editor at Viz Media and is best known for her webcomics Narbonic and Skin Horse.
All the Comics in the World is © Shaenon K. Garrity, 2008
