A Visit to the Footbinders

From Chris Wright's blog, Grapes of Wrath: The Maunderings of Percival Peregrine Oatenshaw, itinerant wine critic and bon viveur. Chris himself is neither an itinerant nor a wine critic but, as he describes himself, "an Englishman of a different stripe, a humorist, and a dedicated repurposer of other people's titles."

Mr. Cornelius Clinch emerging from the back of the shop, neat and impeccably shod, an expression of conspiratorial expectation etched upon his features.

Owner of ‘The Footbinder,’ purveyor of shoes and hand tooled suitcases to the gentry of Muswell Hill and the surrounding countryside, Cornelius had plied his trade in my father’s day and, it is rumoured, his father’s day. His real age was the subject of earnest debate and it was thought that at some stage in the august establishment’s life, proprietorship had passed from father to son – nobody could say for sure when.

“I can recommend a Jeffrey West for a gentleman such as yourself – not a shoe for everyone, but a man of your bearing…”

“Thank you Cornelius, I was rather thinking a brogue, perhaps Loake’s?”

“A brogue sir? For you sir? Loake is a very traditional house, a good shoe, one of the best – suspect temperament on occasion…”

“Good god man! I’m purchasing a pair of shoes, not a wife!”

“Sir...”

The smell of new leather, reminding me of childhood, my father’s shoes laid out in the scullery, Jackson, the butler, shirt sleeves rolled up, applying the polish with vigorous strokes of the brush. Molly, giggling in the pantry, rosy cheeked and rumpled clothing.

“Elbow grease…”

“Sir?”

Cornelius at my elbow, a box, tissue paper spilling over the sides, a pair of outstanding brogues, unsullied and factory fresh.

“If Sir would observe, the storm welt, a shoe for the big occasion, a shoe that will guide sir through the dismal passages, a shoe that will roar in the face of adversity and …”

“Really Clinch, please try and exercise a modicum of restraint – I want to purchase a shoe that I can walk in, not one that will pick a fight…”

“Sir.”

This good fellow, sorrowfully disappearing behind the curtain at the back of the shop, the creak and groan of a stepladder and the slow climb of an old man. The sudden curse, the slow collapse, curtain bulging outwards then billowing as Clinch’s descent, more rapid and less deliberate than the climb ends. Clinch emerging, one collar awry, dust besmirching the impeccable black jacket, long strand of hair escaping the crown, creeping down across the shoulder.

“For Sir, the last pair, Church’s, a prince amongst men sir. The cobbler of choice for your father sir…”

Seated now, the silver handled shoehorn, the loosened laces.

“The 73 last sir, welted leather sole…”

The chestnut brogue the same colour as Hermione’s soft curls, the leather embracing my feet. I stand, observe my stance in the mirror – the shoes, perfect and the knife edge crease of my trousers breaking at the front, settling at the heel behind.

“Clinch, I’ll take the Church’s, have them sent to the Mews, this afternoon.”

“A most excellent choice sir – and how will sir be settling his account?”

“Cash, Clinch. Cash”.

Outside, the world a poorer place, a shell suited urchin racing past on shoes that light up - I spin the umbrella, a swift jab, a hook and natural order is restored. Justice is done. I stride on, briskly up the street, hail a cab.

As the cabbie performs his turn, I lean forward and in the pale yellow light of the early evening sun, Cornelius Clinch holding a Samuel Windsor to his aquiline nose, his nostrils flare and a little point of colour appears on each pale cheek as he breathes in the sumptuous perfume of the hand crafted split welt shoe.

Me Draw Pretty Some Day

A reminiscence by Tim Hamilton, an illustrator and cartoonist who has been published in the New York Times, MAD Magazine, Nickelodeon Magazine, assorted DC and Marvel Comics, and a lot of other places. He adapted Stevenson's Treasure Island for Puffin Books and John Marquand's (one of Will and Gerry's favorite writers!) Mr. Moto for Moonstone Books. He is now writing and drawing the stunning Adventures of the Floating Elephant for the webcomics collective Act-I-Vate.


Imagine it if you can. Way, way back before Star Wars Prequels, before the internet, back around the time a strange new “fourth network” entity known as the “Fox Television Network” was just a pool of swirling, congealing peptides. It was 1987 and I was a poor artist in Pittsburgh, PA fresh out of a two-year art program looking for work. At this time, the comic book industry was going through a period known as the “Black and White Explosion.” There were many small companies popping up and publishing alternatives to Marvel and DC’s mainstream super hero lines.

But that’s another story.

In fact, me getting my first job in comics is another story too. This story is about my very first art job out of school. After graduation, my roommates and I had no phone, of course no internet and in fact, no hot water for showers! We took many trips into the job placement office of our school and stunk the place up while we looked through all the terrible art jobs we never heard of while in school. The list included: illustrating the packaging of no-name brand toys, drawing line art for teddy bear coloring books and even testing out new drugs. Yes, drug testing. The woman on the phone at the pharmaceutical company sounded so cute we almost did that for a weekend!

Where were the animation jobs?! Movie and TV set design jobs? Why wouldn’t Marvel Comics hire me??! They must have received my amazing sample packet by now!

In a depressed state, my friends and I often bought as many six packs of Mickey’s Big Mouth as we could afford and drank away our sorrows. It often ended with someone breaking one of our Betamax tapes and me throwing up in the bathtub.

Finally though, after months of self-pity, a ray of hope arrived in the job placement office. A charming fellow, who I’ll call “Ted,” came to our school and recruited artists to help him start a new gaming company. This was something we could sink our teeth into! Illustrating wizards, trolls and creatures who could take 100 hit points before dying! Ted hired me and a few others with starting salaries of 30,000 a year and promises of a new gaming empire! We immediately went out, got ourselves a six-pack of Mickey’s Big Mouth and celebrated until someone broke my Walkman while I threw up in the bathroom sink.

We should have been suspicious of Ted when, to meet with him, we had to take three buses out to rural Pittsburgh (picture that house where Buffalo Bill lived in Silence of the Lambs). Ted seemed to live with his aging mother who sat silent in the living room watching hit shows like Family Ties and St. Elsewhere while we drew characters like White Dust Wizard and Magical Mushroom Monsters. Of course, after a month or so of illustrating fantasy kingdoms and wondering why Ted always seemed to have the sniffles, it became apparent we were not going to get paid. The school looked into his past for us and found that not everything he said was quite true. No he did NOT play for the Dallas cowboys, help in the creation of the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon show or write a proposed spin off of Cheers called “Carla and Kids.” He flipped out when he found out we had looked into his past. He had his mother write us a terse note informing us he could no longer work for people who did not trust him, and who were unwilling to wait a few years for our first pay checks.



My friend Eric, who did quite a bit of writing for this new gaming company, refused to let Ted get off that easy. Without the internet mind you, using only telephones and … well, just telephones, he found out that Ted was actually wanted by the F.B.I! Seems he had been running seminars (the kind that people pay to get into) at hotel conference rooms and then skipping town without paying the hotel among other things. Eric set up a meeting with Ted under the guise of wanting to patch things up and give him all the writing he’d done for the new game they had been creating. They were to meet at Eides Comics in downtown Pittsburgh. When Ted came into the store, undercover F.B.I. agents were milling all about the place pretending to be interested in the latest issue of Watchmen or Dark Horse Presents. Ted was quickly led off in handcuffs as Eric snapped pictures while customers at Eides went back to continually asking the employees if issue four of Frank Miller’s Dark Knight had arrived yet.



As we sat and raised our collective glasses of Jack Daniels (the lure of Mickey’s Big mouth had worn off) to celebrate a lesson well learned, I talked of Malibu/ Eternity Comics, the new comic company I just found out I was going to work for. I was going to do a book called The Trouble with Girls, while classmate and future Spider-Girl artist Pat Olliffe was going to illustrate a book called Strike Force for the same company.



“No more working for undependable people who would not pay!” I exclaimed. “In a few months, after they see my published work, Marvel or DC would be knocking on my door asking me to illustrate Star Brand or Ambush Bug!” You’d think I would have learned my lesson, but that night someone busted our record player as I puked on the bathroom floor slightly to the left of the toilet.

At that moment, some where in New York City, future ACT-I-VATE founder Dean Haspiel and writer Martin Powell approached Malibu/ Eternity comics with an idea called, The Verdict.

But that’s a story for another time.



And just to prove that Tim did indeed learn to draw pretty, here are the first two pages of Adventures of the Floating Elephant—though they look a lot better full-size:

Jew-Jitsu: The Hebrew Hands of Fury

An excerpt from the book of the same name by Paul Kupperberg and Rabbi Daniel Eliezer, coming from Citadel Books in October of this year. Paul is a veteran editor and writer of comic books and author of young adult books whose blog is right here.


Chapter 1
Turning the Other Cheek Was a New Testament Concept

The Chosen People of Israel have, across the millennia, been chosen for their fair share of aggravation. From the Egyptians and the rest of the Middle East, the Romans and the Catholics to the Roman Catholics, the Spanish, the Germans, the Russians, the Germans, the Americans, and the Germans again, the British and, at long last, bringing history full circle, the entire Middle East.

Jews are accustomed to misery, to tsurus, which is misery so deep, it transcends the heartbreak of everyday life. Misery is your brother-in-law moving in with you. Tsurus, he brings his whole family and your mother-in-law.

And knowing they were at the top of everyone’s hit lists, Jews learned to take care in the perilous world in which they lived those heartbreaking everyday lives. They formed tight-knit communities, little ghettos in which eyes and ears were ever alert for trouble and lines of communication went off in every direction, from housewife to peddler to shop owner to colleagues and to the rest of the population. Survival was dependent on the Jews knowing what was happening before it happened, leading to a tradition of bareden yenem, or gossip, as practiced by the unsung heroes of this underground struggle, the yenta.

So adept did they become at conveying information from one end of the Jewish community to the next that Rabbi Goodunov of Moscow wrote in his history of the Jewish self-protection movement, Ich vel dir geben a khamalye (Striking Back) that even Tsar Alexander II came to hear of their intelligence gathering prowess:

“How is it the Jews know everything before even we do?” the tsar demanded of his intelligence minister.

“The Jews have an expression in Yiddish,” the minister responded. “One Jew meets another and asks, ‘Vus titzuch?’ which roughly means, ‘What’s happening?’ By this method do they easily identify one another and speed the progress of information.”

In disbelief, the tsar decided to investigate this story personally, so he dressed as an Orthodox Jew and, without telling another living soul, he slipped from the Kremlin and went down among the Jewish people.

Within half an hour, having encountered no one along the way who gave him a second glance, he arrived in the Jewish ghetto where he almost immediately met an old man, shuffling down the street.

The disguised tsar nodded in greeting and whispered, “Vus titzuch?”

The old man glanced conspiratorially about before he whispered back, “The tsar is in the ghetto!”


The Rabbi and the Samurai

But while knowledge is power, it’s no good against a klop on the head by a Cossack’s club. It took an act of kidnapping and one man’s literal and spiritual voyage to bring him to a place where he could discover a way for the victims of choice to fight back.

Chiam Mangawicz was a Polish Jew from the port city of Gdansk. In 1841, the young rabbinical student was waylayed by a press gang and put to sea as a cabin boy. Trapped aboard the Orient-bound trading ship, the devoutly observant lad incurred the wrath of the ship’s captain by refusing to slop the deck, serve swill and grog, and be abused down in the bilge on the Shabbos even though his defiance was rewarded with cruel punishments.

Mangawicz’s courage under the lash won him the admiration of the scurvy crew and, by the time Pesach rolled around on the high seas, he was allowed to put together a makeshift sedar at which all hands celebrated the Hebrew exodus with the shank bone of a coxswain and a milchidik menu.

When the trader dropped anchor at the Ryukyu Islands of southeastern Japan, Chiam jumped ship and swam to safety in the tiny village of Kumentsugast. There, a compassionate farmer named Meshpokha and his family hid the young rabbi in their soy field until the ship sailed on. Stranded, the youth was invited to stay with the family. In exchange for their kindness, he taught them Judaism and Talmud, performing the first bris in Japan on the converted Meshpokha. From them, he learned Japanese and how to roll sushi.

One day, Mangawicz saw what appeared to be the old farmer and his sons fighting in the garden. He ran out, seeking to make peace between the warring family members only to be told that they were merely practicing a fighting technique they called "jujitsu," the "gentle art." Using nothing more than their hands and feet and whatever might be handy to double as a weapon, the practitioners of this Asian art turned a foe’s own strength against him, utilizing no more force than necessary to deter an attacker.

Chiam likened this method to a familiar Jewish tradition: “As the mama will deftly sidestep objection with the gentle application of guilt, so does the student of jujitsu move his opponent with subtle leverage.”

Fascinated by this very Jewish way of thinking, what Rebbe Mangawicz would later call “Japanese yiddishe kop,” he joined their daily exercise routine and found in it not only physical confidence, but spiritual satisfaction as well.