She predated Kathleen Kennedy as a Hollywood boss and produced a show that was remade by Tina Fey. Stefanie Cragg also made one solid comic book.
There are some voices that just grab you. Or ground you, at the very least.
I was an easy mark. I had just moved to LA and was in that first-month haze; you walk the streets and feel like so much is going to happen, while not at all preparing for the years of nothing that could actually happen. During one of these walks I came to Secret Headquarters. This was on a hip block on Sunset, a place where coffee cost as much as a burger. I felt out of place going into a shop that had gold trim on bay windows and leather seats; most comic shops where I come from just had drop ceiling tiles and farts.
Then I spotted a cover with a grouchy lady and a cup of coffee: “I actually lived through all this stuff. If you don’t like it, why doncha just go buy Green Lantern.” Sold. I didn’t even crack the cover. I found the dirt clod in all the gold.
Despite the title, Midcentury Modern Vol. 1 is not about design or architecture, but a bio comic about the author’s past lives. In a way, it all works in how the moments inside built up the foundations of the woman herself.
‘The Audition’ follows a young Stef trying out for a touring company of the musical South Pacific. We see the rigors of having a can-do mom: endless rehearsals, ditching her glasses and dying her hair black to give her a “Polynesian look”, all just to land a bit part. While the little miss makes the first round of callbacks, an argument between mother and daughter gets them sent home. It’s a simple story about the faith that her mother had in her, but also the weight that she piled onto a child who stood alone on that stage. It also speaks to a simpler time when musicals were still a major medium and a viable foothold to stardom.
‘The Wizard’ gives us a glimpse into home life without a father. Max Staffin was a travelling salesman, so he would constantly call back to his family from the road. On special occasions, the call would begin with a request to speak to “The Wizard”, and mom would run to the phone to declare which playing card her husband had picked from a loaded deck. This scam made Max some side cash when drinking on the road. At one point, a young Stefanie finds herself home alone and must deliver the spellbinding words “Five of Spades” so her dad can pull his next score. It’s a defining moment, like Miyazaki by way of Bukowski, of a little girl on the north side of Chicago taking her first step into the hustle of adulthood.
Both of these stories reveal a middle class grind, a bygone era in America when families could still rise out of the raw brick housing and into a higher tax bracket, or at the very least, Evanston. Such was the case with the elder Staffin, who went on to become a successful entrepreneur in the mattress industry. “When World War II started,” Stefanie’s former partner Stephen Cragg says over a call, “the government needed a lot of foam rubber, they had to go to him because he had it all.” (laughs.) Max Staffin’s foam rubber empire was later bought out by Sears, giving his daughter a financial cushion from which she could propel.
Not that she needed it. The pages of this comic give us the makings of an intrepid and cunning woman. Stef Staffin could have very well taken the glide path of a rich kid, attending Northwestern or Bard and setting up shop in a bougie town along the coast of Rhode Island. Instead, she attended art school and followed a husband up to Canada during the Vietnam War. She became a marionettist in Montreal. According to the last short in Midcentury Modern, she protested the war at the Montreal Expo ’67 in a pair of knee-high Christian Dior patent leather boots: “They were real shit-kickers…with those boots I could rule the world.”
Television came along. It had to. They made TV shows about spunky, powerful women in the 70’s, all brass and bluster: Rhoda, Mary Tyler Moore, Laverne & Shirley. But on the other side of the camera, way back in the production offices, Stef Kowal was the real thing. She made the jump to a local show called A.M. Chicago, which earned her an Emmy in 1976. Her name started to buzz around the high towers of Hollywood.
One fateful day, she got the call. Stephen Cragg, still just her co-worker at the time, remembers it well:
“I was working in the office with her and all of a sudden we see Stefanie climb onto her chair, and from her chair, climb onto the top of her desk. She had this big, broad smile, ‘Yes, yeah I can do that. Yeahhhh.’ (laughs) And we’re all looking at each other like, ‘Oh my God, it must be something good.’ Sure enough, they started sending her their next batch of scripts they were going to shoot for their next development season, to give notes on each one. After that, they called her up and said, ‘Come on out, we gotta talk to you.’ They offered her a job on the spot.”
She sat down with ABC, but someone told her that Universal Television was interested, and well, thisisthe daughter of Max Staffin we’re talking about, The Wizard herself. She met Frank Price, who was charmed to the teeth and offered her a better deal. By 1979, she was named VP of long-form programming at Universal, the youngest woman to ever do so at the network.
No matter how high she climbed, Kowal never lost the grounded voice. She often dodged the executive suite and hung out with creatives in the production offices. “The writers loved her,” Stephen Cragg continues, “because she had a way of giving them notes without speaking down to them.” This tracks with the narrator walking us through the pages of Midcentury Modern; from the front cover to the interstitials, our guide slouches in baggy clothing and tousled hair. She grunts while trying to move chairs and laments the dog hair on her clothes. These are not the musings of your token Hollywood exec out for another pound of flesh.
Stephen Cragg agrees. “She had a pure spirit, which is why I think she just lost her appetite for the Hollywood thing.” By 1986, Kowal walked away from a producing career that had helmed an adaptation of Little Women, an E.T. special with Robin Williams and the original version of The Four Seasons that would later be remade by Tina Fey. She became a consultant, and then the wife, of TV director and producer Stephen Cragg.
She returned to art school, studying the facets of architecture and design that had inspired her back in the 60’s. It took a while to stick. There were years of exploration in various projects: haute furniture, children’s books, and finally, comics.
The most amazing thing about Midcentury Modern is that it serves as a confluence of all of these disciplines, which shines through in the ink work. The front cover is an homage to Julius Schulman’s famous photo of the Stahl House, a marvel of LA architecture. Cragg has rendered the beams and shadows here line by line; her mother and younger self sit perched within. An honorable framing, given the context.
The comic book feels more like a program for a legit art exhibit, labelled by “StefCo” throughout. There is a handcrafted red stamp of certification along the inner cover, with a unique number out of 100 editions. Mine is number 81.
Cragg takes on the smallest details with zeal, wearing out boxes of Micron markers along the way. I mean, justlookingat these panels makes my hands sore. And this was done by a woman well into her 60’s:
She never used pencils, but inked straight onto a blank page using only thumbnails as a reference. Cragg was as meticulous as she was stubborn; if a mistake was made, she would often toss out the entire page and start again.
Her former partner confirms this, through the lens of Robert Crumb. “We had gone to the Hammer Museum to see the original art from his Book of Genesis. When we left, Stefanie said ‘Did you see what hedoes?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, he’s great, I love him.’ ‘No, he usesWhite-out! I saw White-out!’ (laughs). So she now felt she had permission and was authorized to use white-out.”
Beyond the influence of Crumb, Cragg kept a framed sketch of Too Much Coffee Man over her desk, a totem of her love for caffeine and composition.
The last page of Midcentury Modern previews the stories for Volume 2, with titles like “The Last Virgin” and “Legend of the Raven”. Cragg finished the interiors for the new book just as Volume 1 was hitting the shelves.
It was not to be. After releasing her first comic, Stefanie Cragg came down with pneumonia. “Four weeks later,” Stephen Cragg says, “it turned out she had a lot of cancer in her body. She didn’t know she was sick until way late.” She refused treatment, telling her husband she didn’t want to be kept alive by “the medical vortex.” The artist, producer, mentor, daughter, sister and friend died two weeks later in her own bed.
Those finished pages for Midcentury Modern Vol. 2 have yet to be released. Stephen Cragg, who had worked in television for years, put his head down and got back to work. Life moved on. He remarried, got more gigs and just never quite got around to putting out the second issue. “It’s even funnier than this one,” he muses. “I’d love to put it out if we can get it together.”
This is the part, if I had the clout, where I’d jump on social media and beg Caitlin McGurk at The Billy Ireland Museum or Joe Biel at Microcosm Publishing to print Vol. 2. Hell, they could reprint Vol. 1 and any concept art and the book would be a gem; it would have the author’s grounded voice throughout.
There are still little pieces of Stefanie Staffin, Stefanie Kowal and Stefanie Cragg out there if you know where to look. I found alistingfor Midcentury Modern at the library of Michigan State University, within the catalogue of “New Wave Comic Books, Strips, Etc.”, just waiting for fresh eyes to find it. And there’sthisWLS segment on Chicago transplants living in Hollywood in ’82. The sax solos are corny, but we get to see Stefanie at 4:10 and 7:31 between clips of Shelley Long and William Friedkin:
There was no media she could not master. In her lifetime, newspapers, radio, television and comics all fell under her Dior boots.ured in the thousands of lives that she entertained
