{"id":115489,"date":"2017-09-20T13:00:36","date_gmt":"2017-09-20T17:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=115489"},"modified":"2017-09-21T12:39:09","modified_gmt":"2017-09-21T16:39:09","slug":"neil-horse-rides","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/20\/neil-horse-rides\/","title":{"rendered":"Neil the Horse<\/em> Rides Again"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

The 1980s was the decade of the black-and-white comic boom\u2014and the inevitable bust. The boom was started in part by three successful self-published comics: Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird\u2019s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles<\/em>, Wendy and Richard Pini\u2019s Elfquest<\/em>, and Dave Sim\u2019s Cerebus the Aardvark<\/em>. A comic-reading public that wanted something besides the same tired superhero formula or the sex-and-drugs heavy (and often misogynist) underground comics snapped them up. The black-and-white pages were cheaper to print than color, and soon new publishers with new titles were springing up like toadstools after a rainstorm.<\/p>\n

At first it seemed as though any black-and-white comic book would sell (and at first they did), and there were some pretty bizarre but briefly successful books with titles, like Cold Blooded Chameleon Commandos<\/em> or The\u00a0Pre-Teen Dirty-Gene Kung-Fu Kangaroos<\/em>, riding on the armored coattails of Ninja Turtles<\/em>, but along with the silliness came some good comics that are still with us, like Bob Burden\u2019s\u00a0Flaming Carrot<\/em>, Stan Sakai\u2019s Usagi\u00a0Yojimbo<\/em>, Max Collins and Terry Beatty\u2019s Ms. Tree<\/em>, and Joshua Quagmire\u2019s Cutey Bunny<\/em>, and some good comics that unfortunately didn\u2019t last, like Bill Messner-Loebs\u2019s Journey<\/em>, and the subject of this essay.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the midst of the hysteria of the black-and-white boom, along came Neil the Horse, tap dancing his way into the hearts of America. (Well, mine, anyway, and enough others to keep the comic going for fifteen issues.) Five parts Donald Duck artist Carl Barks, five parts Fred Astaire, and a hundred percent Arn Saba, the banana-chomping, rubber-legged equine\u2019s comics were a refreshing change from the dark, grim and gritty, ultraviolent mainstream comics that seemed almost de rigueur during the eighties. His Art\u00a0Deco\u2013looking characters sang and danced their way through some pretty wacky adventures: inspired by the manic adventures of Donald Duck and Scrooge McDuck, along with a healthy dose of surrealism \u00e0 la Winsor McCay\u2019s Little Nemo<\/em>, Neil got caught in a photocopier, producing hundreds of Neil clones; he met Mr. Coffee Nerves and consumed a gallon of the stuff, with expected rubber-legged results, and he and his cigar-chomping pal, Soapy the Cat, went to Hell (not as a result of drinking all that coffee!).<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/a>

From 1975.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

From issue no. 1, in the manner of old comics that had always included at least two pages of prose and other features, Arn\u2019s comics featured prose stories along with paper dolls, crossword puzzles, and enthusiastic letter columns. One prose story, \u201cNeil the Horse in Old New France,\u201d begins in the first book and runs for six issues, for a total of thirty-one pages, a small book in itself.<\/p>\n

Neil had already been syndicated in thirty small-town Canadian weekly newspapers (and one American paper, the Menomonee Falls Guardian<\/em>, an all-comics weekly) when Cerebus<\/em> creator Dave Sim saw Arn\u2019s art in an exhibition. Sim and his wife and publisher, Deni Loubert, had been talking about doing a backup to Cerebus<\/em> to give other Canadian artists some exposure and were looking for the right material. He decided Arn\u2019s fanciful comic art was just what he wanted to showcase in the back of Cerebus<\/em>. It took another year before Neil\u2014and Arn\u2014got his own title.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

From \u201cNeil the Horse Goes to Hell,\u201d 1979.<\/p><\/div>\n

From the beginning, Arn exhibited a magnificent disregard for deadlines. In order to get the comics out on time, he relied on a little help from his friends, especially David Roman, who contributed backgrounds and with whom he collaborated on plotting and development of concepts and characters; and Barb Rausch, who had emerged from Katy Keene<\/em> fandom and who, in the true spirit of that interactive comic book from the 1950s, supplied Mam\u2019selle Poup\u00e9e paper dolls and fashions in every issue. But on the whole, the book reflects Arn\u2019s personal vision.<\/p>\n

Although the stories starring Neil and his tough-talking sidekick, Soapy, differ dramatically from the romantic stories starring the zaftig French doll, they all represent aspects of their creator. Arn, who had gender-reassignment surgery in 1994, and is now Katherine Collins, explains in an email interview with me:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

I realized, after maybe ten years of doing NEIL, that Neil, Soapy, and Poup\u00e9e quite perfectly represent the three main active ingredients of my personality: <\/span><\/p>\n

\u2022 Neil himself is the fun-loving child, trusting and guileless, able to find joy in almost everything, and totally lacking in a dark side. My \u201cinner child\u201d is still very alive, and not very inner.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2022 Soapy is the worldly business sharpie, very happy to break laws\u2014in fact, eager to\u2014and tinged with a world-weariness. But he has a heart of gold and is too generous for his own good.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2022 Poup\u00e9e is, of course, my female self, but more importantly (and more consciously, at the time) my lovelorn, heartbroken, and ever-yearning self. Poup\u00e9e is still yearning, and wishing upon a star.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

From \u201cNeil the Horse Meets Mr. Coffee Nerves,\u201d 1981.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u2022 I stress that I did not design the characters around my psyche; they simply emerged, and it was to my great surprise when I later realized the concordance.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Unique among the black-and-white comics of the 1980s and, in fact, unique from any comic ever published, Neil the Horse<\/em> is the world\u2019s first and only all-singing, all-dancing comic book. Each issue includes sheet music and lyrics\u2014you can play the songs on your piano!\u2014and along with the lyrics, some evocative poetry that is not set to music, all by Arn, who truly lived up to Neil\u2019s motto: \u201cMaking the World Safe for Musical Comedy.\u201d Not all the poetry is evocative; some is just plain hilarious. My favorite: <\/span><\/p>\n

\n

If all the sky were apple pie
\n<\/span>And all the trees were bread,
\n<\/span>And all the sea were grapefruit juice,
\n<\/span>Then we would all be dead.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Along with the music comes dance. Arn actually manages to choreograph virtual dancing on the printed page, usually starring Mam\u2019selle Poup\u00e9e. Issue no. 13, part 2, of Arn\u2019s Fred Astaire tribute, is almost all song and dance. Using a little gray box called a Thermal Printer, Arn was able to print out Polaroid-sized black-and-white pictures from videotapes of Fred Astaire movies. In the interview, Katherine writes,<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

I would pause videotapes of Fred, print a picture, advance it a split second, print another, and so on. From this, I learned what dance looks like not only when it is moving but also when it is captured. That way, I could devise which exact poses I needed to depict the dances in my stories.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/a>

From \u201cI Was Waiting for You!\u201d 1986.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

About that issue no. 13: Despite reprinting early Neil<\/em> stories, fan mail, and related ephemera, Arn, as usual, totally ignored his deadlines. The first page of that issue shows Neil, Soapy, Mam\u2019selle Poup\u00e9e, and Fred Astaire dancing before neon lights that spell out:<\/p>\n

\n

WE\u2019RE LATE.<\/small> <\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Below, it says:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

The Fred Astaire tribute part two is late by ten months! Here is our pledge to Comic Fandom: We\u2019re never on time!<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

He meant it! Issue no. 14 came out almost a year and a half later. To make up for keeping his pledge to comic fandom, the book was a whopping sixty-four\u00a0pages, reprinting the original newspaper strips and just about everything else that had not yet been reprinted. The last issue of Neil the Horse<\/em>, no. 15, came out only a month later, filled out with model sheets for the hoped-for Neil<\/em> animation project and still more newspaper-strip reprints. Arn\u2019s (and Neil\u2019s and Soapy\u2019s and Mam\u2019selle Poup\u00e9e\u2019s) last words to his readers: \u201cMay the Horse be with you!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

It was time to go. Every boom must have a bust, and the black-and-white comics boom was over. A comic that may have sold six thousand\u00a0copies in 1985 sold half that much by 1988. For five years, Arn Saba had made the world safe for musical comedy. Neil, Soapy, and Mam\u2019selle Poup\u00e9e should have been hoofing and singing their hearts out on a Broadway stage, and perhaps someday they will.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/a>

From chapter 1 of \u201cCanine the Barbarian.\u201d<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Trina Robbins is a comics writer, former comics artist, and a prolific historian and anthologist of women in comics. She is the author, most recently, of the memoir <\/i>Last Girl Standing.\u00a0<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

The Collected Neil the Horse<\/a>, by Arn Saba (now Katherine Collins), is available from Conundrum Press.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The 1980s was the decade of the black-and-white comic boom\u2014and the inevitable bust. The boom was started in part by three successful self-published comics: Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird\u2019s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Wendy and Richard Pini\u2019s Elfquest, and Dave Sim\u2019s Cerebus the Aardvark. A comic-reading public that wanted something besides the same tired superhero […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1247,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[30604,30629,30622,30613,30624,30612,412,131,30621,13317,30611,30628,30627,30625,30607,30616,5369,30620,30631,30630,30610,30626,30617,30619,5335,30623,30605,30608,4963,30614,30606,30618,30603,30615,30609,15927],"class_list":["post-115489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-arn-saba","tag-barb-rausch","tag-bill-messner-loebs","tag-bob-burden","tag-carl-barks","tag-cerebus-the-aardvark","tag-comedy","tag-comics","tag-cutey-bunny","tag-dancing","tag-dave-sim","tag-david-roman","tag-deni-loubert","tag-donald-duck","tag-elfquest","tag-flaming-carrot","tag-fred-astaire","tag-joshua-quagmire","tag-katherine-collins","tag-katy-keene","tag-kevin-eastman","tag-little-nemo","tag-max-collins","tag-ms-tree","tag-musicals","tag-neil-the-horse","tag-peter-laird","tag-richard-pini","tag-self-publishing","tag-stan-sakai","tag-teenage-mutant-ninja-turtles","tag-terry-beaty","tag-trina-robbins","tag-usagi-yojimbo","tag-wendy-pini","tag-winsor-mccay"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n\u2018Neil the Horse\u2019 Rides Again<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Arn Saba\/Katherine Collins\u2019s short-lived comic from the \u201980s is a high-spirited mix of musical comedy, pop culture, and emotional yearning.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/20\/neil-horse-rides\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Neil the Horse Rides Again by Trina Robbins\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"September 20, 2017 \u2013 The 1980s was the decade of the black-and-white comic boom\u2014and the inevitable bust. 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