I’m sorry: I tried and I tried, but there’s just too much to deal with! I intended to devote a single installment of this column to each of my four days at Comic-Con International last month, but I attended so many panels on Friday and Saturday, seven on each day, that it’s going to take longer to cover everything in this column than I had anticipated. What a surprise that all of these notes that I scribbled onto a tiny pad at those panels end up taking up so many pages when transcribed onto my computer. (Note to self: All these panelists talk too fast. Next time, bring a tape recorder.)
My hope is that devoting more columns to the Con is a blessing in disguise, for the majority of you who did not attend the Con, for those of you who did go but did not attend the same panels I did, and even for those of you who did attend some of these panels, and whose memories of what was said might already be getting fuzzy. In my columns on Comic-Con, I am first of all reporting what I saw and heard, but I’m not just out to deliver the simple facts; I’m also offering commentary when appropriate, and hoping to convey a sense of the speakers’ personalities and what it felt like being in attendance. Most of these panels also served as previews of forthcoming movies, TV shows and comics I intend to review in future installments of this column.
To recap, for those who came in late, I was attending this year’s Comic-Con primarily to be present at the screening of the documentary I worked on, Sex, Lies and Superheroes, along with director/producer Constantine Valhouli, cameraman/editor Ben Jackendorf, and Lyman the intern. After we all arrived on Friday, and the others got their registration badges, I began by showing the rest of my filmmaking colleagues around the convention’s main floor, pointing out the various exhibitors’ booths. I wanted to show them the Marvel booth, since surely it would be the biggest and the best, but none of them could see the Marvel booth any more than I could.
But it makes no sense for Marvel not to have a booth here in American comic books’ leading trade show. One person discussing the absence of a Marvel booth said, “How could Marvel show that little respect to the rest of the comics industry?” The other person replied, “How could Marvel show that little respect to its audience?”
To look for the Marvel booth at Comic-Con nowadays is to get a sense of what it must be like looking for those weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Just like with the WMDs in Iraq, we all know that the San Diego Marvel booth USED to be there years ago. So where is it now? But now it was 11:30 AM, and those who wanted to celebrate one of the men most responsible for the greatness in Marvel’s long history gathered in Room 8 for an annual tribute.
LEGENDS OF THE KING
“The Annual Jack Kirby Tribute Panel” honors the man who was the most important and most influential artist in mainstream American comic books, and surely the most creative figure in the history of the super hero genre. Kirby was the co-creator of the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, the X-Men, Thor, the Avengers, and so many more Marvel characters; in effect he and Stan Lee were the principal co-creators of the Marvel Universe. (And it was a pleasure to see “Created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby” in the Hulk movie, even if it was buried in the closing credits. Now, X-Men movie producers, what’s your excuse for not doing the same?) Moreover, Kirby was sole creator of Marvel’s Silver Surfer, Darkseid and the New Gods for DC, and a host of more characters. In his own lifetime, then, Kirby was a legend, and he was a legend that one could meet. He was a fixture at the San Diego Comic-Con for its first twenty-four years, given special guest status year after year.
The highlight of all my years of attending the San Diego Comic-Con must certainly be the surprise party given for Kirby one year, packed with comics professionals wishing him well. The sense of a community united in good feelings was so palpable that my fellow comics commentator Heidi MacDonald aptly called the event “a comics Woodstock.”
As Kirby’s former assistant and longtime friend Mark Evanier said at the start of this year’s tribute panel, next year Jack Kirby will have been dead ten years. Since his passing, Evanier has presented tribute panels to Kirby virtually every year at the San Diego Con, and sometimes takes the show on the road to other conventions around the country as well. I recall that one year the Powers That Be at Comic-Con decreed no Kirby panel; this was a mistake, corrected the following year, and the Kirby panel is now an annual tradition.
I was struck at this year’s panel, the first I’ve attended in a half decade, how the stories about Kirby continue to accumulate. Some express admiration and awe of the man’s achievements; others are humorous and humanizing, yet reinforce the legend in their own way. By all accounts I’ve read and heard, Kirby was a genuinely good man, just as one would hope that a man whose work provided such happiness and wonder to so many of us growing up would prove to be in reality.
The panelists on the dais included Wendy Pini, co-creator of the comics series Elfquest, marking its 25th anniversary this year; Michael Chabon, author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the early days of American comic books; Kirby’s longtime inker Mike Royer; artist Stan Goldberg, who colored most of Kirby’s work at Marvel in the 1960s; Sal Buscema, longtime Marvel artist who never met Kirby but was greatly influenced by his work; and Larry Lieber, who scripted much of Kirby’s early 1960s Marvel work, including monster stories like Fin Fan Foom and the earliest Thor tales.
Evanier began “Every single person who went to Jack Kirby with artwork got encouragement.” But, Evanier continued, Kirby would indicate privately to him that some people whose work he saw were better artists than most people who came to him to show art. Evanier then reintroduced Wendy Pini as a member of that upper echelon. But Kirby did not make his higher regard for her work clear when they first met, and thereby hangs a tale.
Wendy said she considers Kirby to be “my first mentor in comics, though he didn’t know it”: she studied his work on Fantastic Four to incorporate “more solidity” and “more masculinity” into her art.
She actually first met her unknowing mentor when she was 18 or 19 and a college student, working on an animated film based on the work of fantasy writer Michael Moorcock. On meeting Kirby she showed him watercolors she had done for the project. Wendy said that Kirby, was clearly “not a misogynist,” pointing to his creation of Big Barda, the woman warrior who was the female lead in his Mister Miracle series. Nonetheless, Kirby told Wendy, “Kid, if I ever catch you in comics, I’m going to spank you,” in what she called “his Ben Grimm voice” (referring to Kirby’s comically grumpy character, the Thing, in Fantastic Four).
Wendy didn’t get out of comics, turned professional, and years later attended a comics convention, where her table was next to Kirby’s. She kidded him, saying, “Jack, I’m still waiting for my spanking,” and, she recalled, “He blushed.”
But there’s more to this story of the empowered woman artist tweaking the dominant male. Wendy recounted that someone brought her carnations, so she stuck one behind Kirby’s ear while his concentration was focused on advising someone about his artwork. For the next fifteen minutes, Wendy recalled, Kirby wondered why people around him were laughing, until her husband Richard finally pointed to what had happened. Wendy said Kirby “whipped around and said, ‘I’ll kill you.'”
Wendy told the story in a delightful manner, beaming merrily at the audience, so clearly her practical joke had no serious effects on her relationship with her “mentor.” After her story was done, Evanier explained that the “spank” comment was really Kirby’s way of telling her that her artwork was so good. Wendy agreed, and went further, saying she thought Kirby felt that comics artwork should be “down and dirty,” for boys, whereas hers was more in the style of “fine art.”
Moreover, Evanier said that at that time, in 1969, Kirby was “down on comics as a way to make a living” and was in his way telling her, “don’t make a career in comics.” Wendy happily replied she was glad she “didn’t listen.” (1969 was around the time he left Marvel, so, I presume, he was pessimistic about the stability of a comics career. This reminds me of a remark that Evanier made in introducing the panel: that as he gets “older and older,” he understands more of the things that Kirby used to tell him in decades past.)
Acknowledging Kirby’s strong influence, Wendy declared that the “power” and “force” in her work “comes from him,” and she pronounced him “a true mythic visualizer.” She called Kirby “a mythmaker of Joseph Campbell proportions,” saying that he “always had a larger vision,” and that “He saw Valhalla while the rest of us see Sunset Boulevard.”
Michael Chabon was next, whose story began around the same time that Wendy first met Kirby. Chabon confessed that he had never heard of Jack Kirby when he was seven or eight years old, and DC began running ad copy, “Kirby Is Coming.” “The words meant nothing to me,” Chabon said. Was Kirby a “person” or a “character,” he wondered. Or was he “a new form of energy?” Chabon asked, adding, “which, in fact, it turned out to be.”
Later, Chabon was bedridden with a fever when his father, obviously an enlightened individual, brought him a stack of comics to read. Among them was Mister Miracle #8, featuring a shapeshifting creature called the Lump. Chabon thought that the Lump, when it grew “bristles” and “spikes,” expressed in visual form the way he was feeling in his fever. Looking at this artwork, he “realized this must be Kirby,” and then realized he had seen this art style before. Chabon began paying attention to this particular artist, and a turning point was a two-page spread of Kirby’s Female Furies in The New Gods. From that time on, Chabon said, Kirby was his “favorite artist, writer, and conceptualizer.”
Chabon’s fascination with Kirby’s work led him to his past work on Fantastic Four and Thor, and when Kirby returned to Marvel, Chabon “really liked The Eternals” (marking him, I think, as a more perceptive Kirby aficionado than most Marvel fans at the time).
However, Chabon said, the “most important book” to him was KAMANDI, a statement that won applause from the audience. Terming this series about “the Last Boy on Earth” “unjustly neglected,” Chabon speculated that many readers probably dismissed it as a “Planet of the Apes ripoff”: it was about a future Earth in which talking animals had supplanted humankind as the world’s masters, and even had the Statue of Liberty on the first issue’s cover. For Chabon, though, “it went far beyond that,” and that it was “important to me as a child that it was so open-ended.” Kamandi was continually traveling to different lands, different civilizations composed of a different species of animal with human-level intellect. This was “The kind of things that fire a child’s imagination,” the sense that “there’s more you haven’t seen,” “more stories to be told,” and that perhaps you yourself can tell them.
Readers of Chabon’s Adventures of Kavalier & Clay with knowledge of comics history probably assume that the principal inspirations for the title characters are Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. But, it seems, Kirby was also a major influence on the book. Chabon said that it was in reading Kirby’s obituary that he learned that he lived close to Kirby – Chabon was based in Los Angeles at the time – and that hence “I could have met him.” But he didn’t, and the “realization I never would” helped “urge” him to write Kavalier & Clay, which Chabon began a year after Kirby’s death.
Evanier interrupted Chabon’s story at this point because a “surprise guest” was on his way. And then, to the applause of the assemblage, in walked Stan Lee, very much in the manner of the late Bob Hope doing one of his surprise walk-ons on The Tonight Show. (In fact, maybe Stan should have theme music just as Hope did.)
Now, I thought this was a wonderful gesture. It is widely known that Lee and Kirby had a falling out at the end of the 1960s, leading to Kirby’s departure for DC Comics. But here was Stan Lee, coming to the Kirby tribute panel, to pay homage to the greatest of his collaborators in comics.
The panel resumed, and now it was Larry Lieber, who is Stan’s brother (and draws the Spider-Man newspaper strip that Stan writes) who had the floor. Evanier asked Lieber to talk about what may have been “the first fan sketch” in the history of super hero comics. Lieber recounted how as a boy he visited the offices of Timely Comics (Marvel’s former name), where he received a sketch of Captain America and his sidekick Bucky, signed, “Your friend, Joe Simon & Jack Kirby” (the two artists worked as a team in the 1940s and 1950s). Years later, Lieber, who clearly treasured the gift, mounted it in a frame. Stan reacted with – real? mock? – disbelief. “Sell it!” he said. Turning to the audience, Stan asked, “Can you believe he’s related to me?” Lieber believed that Kirby had drawn the sketch, but later Evanier reproduced the sketch somewhere, and someone attributed the drawing to Simon. Evanier thought they both worked on the sketch, “half and half.” Serious now, Stan said he “couldn’t tell the difference” between Simon’s work and Kirby’s, and didn’t know which one “imitated” the other or whether they “both just drew the same way.”
Talking about scripting the first Thor story, Lieber revealed that he came up with the name for Thor’s human identity, Don Blake. Stan joked that you can tell he didn’t come up with it because it’s “not alliterative.” Lieber said he also invented the name of the mystic metal of which Thor’s hammer is composed, “uru.” It was “something that wasn’t long to letter,” Lieber explained.
Astounded, Wendy Pini asked if Lieber didn’t know that the Nordic word “uros” means “strength and power”? Nope, he didn’t. “Another difference between us,” observed Stan; “I would have taken credit.”
Lieber’s creation of “uru” was so convincing that later Marvel writer Roy Thomas, Lieber said, thought it was “a true thing in legend” but couldn’t find any reference to it. So Thomas asked Lieber where he found the word, and Lieber said he made it up. But, Lieber added, it was Thomas who gave Thor’s hammer in the comics its real name from the Norse myths: Mjolnir. This surprised Stan on the panel, who thought THAT name had been made up, too. As befits a surprise walk-on, Stan soon had to leave. Before he left, he effusively praised Evanier, asserting that “If Mark Evanier isn’t the head of it a convention panel, don’t have it, because it’s a waste of time!” Yes, it’s hyperbole in the Stan Lee manner, but Mark deserved it nonetheless.
Evanier declared a pause in the proceedings so that Stan could pose with the other panelists for group shots by the photographers in the audience. Thrilled, Wendy asked the audience, “Isn’t this fun?” and it was. We snapped our photos, and, despite the lack of theme music, Stan said his goodbyes and was gone! And, you know, it was the Jack Kirby tribute panel and he really hadn’t said much about Jack Kirby. But Stan had greatly entertained the audience, bantered amusingly with his brother, and stolen the show, and somehow I suspect that’s exactly what Kirby would have expected. (And, by the way, Larry Lieber got a solo panel hosted by Evanier on Sunday, in a long overdue honor.)
And now the whirlwind had passed. Mark Evanier turned to his right: “So, Michael, you were saying–”
And Chabon continued where he had left off, expounding on the “somewhat nebulous connection” between Jack Kirby and his fictional characters Kavalier and Clay. Chabon had a photograph of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby together, with Kirby drawing. Chabon liked the image of a “little guy” (Kirby) and “big guy,” “one sort of refined, the other looks kind of tough” (Kirby again), working as a “collaborative team.” Chabon put that picture up on his wall as a visual inspiration for Kavalier and Clay, though, he said, he “didn’t draw very much on biographical details” of Simon and Kirby’s lives.
Chabon also got a photograph of John Garfield, a star of movies from the late 1930s into the early 1950s, having “read Jack Kirby fancied he had a resemblance to Garfield.” Chabon agreed that Kirby had a “John Garfield kind of pug face” and used the photo as “visual reference for Sam Clay.” (An addendum: in response to a question at the panel’s end, Chabon revealed he had completed ten drafts of the screenplay for the Kavalier & Clay movie, slated to shoot next year. Chabon told us that “they said I was done,” which he interpreted as meaning either “they” liked the screenplay or were intending to hire somebody else. It is interesting to note that not even winning a Pulitzer Prize means a writer gets civil treatment by the Powers That Be.)
Next up, Stan Goldberg said that at one point at Marvel “we all realized that Jack was carrying the whole company” with his prolific work. Goldberg recalled an appropriate visual image for Kirby’s importance: a time when he walked on one side of Kirby and inker Frank Giacoia walked on Kirby’s other side, “protecting him from the traffic.”
Mike Royer returned to comedic reminiscences. Talk about secondhand smoke: Royer remembered that when he received pages from Kirby to ink they would be “overwhelmed” by the smell of Kirby’s trademark cigars. Royer said he felt as if he were inhaling “six cigars a day” and imitated the hoarse voice he had for “about a month.”
Finally, Sal Buscema spoke as an artist who had never met Kirby, unlike the other panelists except for Chabon. But Buscema felt his strong influence nonetheless, recalling how his brother John Buscema, himself one of Marvel’s leading artists, advised him to study Kirby’s work. John Buscema told him that Kirby was “the best in the business.”
In the previous column I referred to what I termed EvanierCon, the large number of panels – eleven this year – hosted and organized by Mark Evanier, most of which focus on the important creative figures of American comic books’ first four decades, the Golden and Silver Ages. I only attended one (and a third) of the Evanier panels this time, but usually I go to considerably more. (I expect you can find out more about this year’s panels at Evanier’s website, www.POVonline.com). I especially am grateful that five years ago I – along with many other comics professionals – got to attend his interview with John Broome, the great Silver Age DC writer, who was making his first Comic-Con appearance but then died within a year.
Panels like these are so valuable because One cannot count on the corporate mindset at companies to honor, or even remember, creators from their past to whom they owe so much. Too many younger comics readers, and the publications they write for, are uninterested in the artform’s history, much like filmgoers who won’t watch black and white movies. And, in sharp contrast with film or television history, say, there are so few books, museums, publications, critics and historians to keep track of it all. During this panel, Stan Goldberg praised TwoMorrows’ “Jack Kirby Collector” magazine, which finds and prints Kirby art from the past, and said that if not for this magazine this “treasure” would be lost. Indeed.
This really is one of the purpose of events like Comic-Con International: not just to promote the present state of the artform, but to honor and remember its past creators and their achievements. It is up to all of us who attend such panels at these conventions to keep the memories alive, because, as yet, all too few other people are going to do it for us.
GRAPHIC NOVELS: THE FIRST QUARTER CENTURY
It was nearly 1 PM, and I headed down the corridor to Room 7A, to attend the final half hour or so of the panel “25 Years of Graphic Novels.” Graphic novels – self-contained stories told in comics form and published in book format – have long existed in Europe and Japan, and there were some early American examples prior to 1978. But that was the year that the graphic novel in America came of age with the publication of Will Eisner’s A Contract with God.
American comic books have a long history, and yet are still such a young art form that a number of its Founding Fathers are still with us. Jack Kirby may have passed on, but his contemporary Will Eisner is still very active, annually attending the Comic-Con, presiding over its award ceremony named in his honor, and continuing to write and draw graphic novels. In an interview he did for our film, Peter David referred to Eisner’s 1940s comics series, The Spirit, as the Citizen Kane of the comics medium: indeed, it is a dazzling demonstration of comics’ methods of visual storytelling. With A Contract with God, whose lead story is a serious examination of the relationship of man and God, Eisner not only started the graphic novel movement in American comics, but also a new and brilliant phase of his own career. Most careers in comics, I have observed, stay at their height for only ten or twelve years; Eisner has had two great creative periods, and the second is still in progress.
Graphic novels are mounting in importance in recent years. Eisner’s next, Fagin the Jew, is being published not by a comics company, but by Doubleday. Another panelist, Chip Kidd, is an editor and designer at Pantheon, another mainstream line now publishing graphic novels. Even the Big Two of mainstream comics, Marvel and DC, are increasingly relying on the sales of trade paperbacks – individual issues of comics telling one long story, collected together into a graphic novel format. In fact, trade paperback sales, both in comic shops and mainstream bookstores, seems to be the only part of the comics market that is growing.
Eisner, of course, was seated alongside the other participants who have followed in his path. Among them were Colleen Doran, creator of A Distant Soil; Eric Shanower of the graphic novels based on L. Frank Baum’s Oz mythos; Craig Thompson, creator of the new graphic novel Blankets; the aforementioned Chip Kidd; and Kim Kang Won, an Asian creator of graphic novels, who spoke through a translator. The moderator was Randy Duncan, one of the heads of the Comic Arts Conference, which keeps alight the flame of academic study of comics at each year’s Comic-Con.
When I entered, the panel was engaged in a discussion that enables me to continue pursuing a topic from the previous section of this column. “We need reviews,” said one participant, so that libraries, now that more and more librarians are disposed to purchasing graphic novels, know which ones to get. It seemed that at least in part, the people speaking wanted reviews in order to determine the appropriate age group for particular graphic novels (as Colleen Doran vividly put it, “so you don’t get Grant Morrison’s latest gorefest in elementary school”). Indeed, as if to illustrate the problem, at one point a father wandered into this panel, bringing along his very small daughter, presumably with no idea of what it was about, and they stayed for awhile before it apparently finally sank in on him that this was not an appropriate panel for tiny tots. No gorefest here, it’s true, but, as the saying goes, comics aren’t just for kids anymore.
Randy Duncan proposed “a catalogue to be published to help librarians make distinctions.” Judging the proper age level for a work’s audience can be complex: Eisner said that thirteen and fourteen-year-olds had come up to him with copies of A Contract with God, and he said he once joked that Contract had been “written for a 55-year-old man who just lost his wallet in the subway.”
However, some of the panelists seemed to be saying that reviews were also important in order to alert potential readers that the books are out there and worth buying. “The important thing is to get reviewed,” one said. Eisner addressed the myth that “you get into a bookstore; your book will sell. It’s not true.” He reminisced about how 25 years ago only a small publisher would publish A Contract with God; earlier he had told us how the first printer that had been approached turned the book down because it had (drawn) naked women in it (and this is in the mid-1970s!). But the book was published, and one of the high profile bookstores on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue purchased copies to sell. Enthused, Eisner went down to the bookstore to ask how it was doing. He was told that in its first week it was displayed prominently on the table in front of the store. Then James Michener’s new book came out, so Contract was moved into the inside section on religious books. A woman saw it there and complained, and so it was moved to a section with books full of collected comics (strips, I imagine). Then a man with a five-year-old saw the book there, with its naked women, and complained. So finally, Contract was moved down to the basement: in other words, taken off sale. This story in part grew out of a discussion of the problem of just where to “shelve” graphic novels in bookstores. Eisner’s book was shunted about from one inappropriate spot to another 25 years ago.
And the problem persists today.
A short time ago, I found myself passing by the new location of Coliseum Books, a now legendary independent Manhattan bookstore that closed a few years ago but has now miraculously been resurrected alongside the New York Public Library’s main building. Exploring the new venue, I found the new Ballantine American Splendor anthology in the humor section, and DK’s Hulk book in the children’s section. Don’t the owners realize that times have changed, I wondered. Where’s the graphic novel section?
“I don’t want to be in the graphic novel section,” said Eisner at the panel. The other panelists weren’t happy about it, either. Colleen Doran worried that people who might like “romance novels with pictures” might shy away from the graphic novel section, since it’s usually near the Dungeons & Dragons and Star Trek books. Chip Kidd said that “in a perfect world” there would not be a comics section. Several panelists’ preference was to have their books shelved according to genre, along with prose novels in the same genre. This, I take it, reflects the panelists’ desire to have their works taken seriously by a world beyond comics fandom. And indeed, this panel had the most serious and sedate audience of any of the panels I attended. And it was not an audience – or panel – kindly disposed towards American comics’ best-selling genre. One audience member disparaged super heroes as “steroid cases in tights fighting.” One panelist ventured, “I think super heroes are dying,” replaced by video games and movies for “adolescents,” and I suspect he was hoping that wishing would make it so. Another audience member gloomily contended that “the graphic novel is under the shadow of X-Men 5.” (Actually, the American Splendor movie might prove an indie hit.) At yet another, like a Chekhovian character longing for a happier, distant future he may not live to see, speculated that “in 30 to 40 years” the word comics might mean “good graphic novels” and “not super hero stuff.”
There was another audience member who said it was “tragic” that he had not discovered the century-old comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland when he was a child. All right, now I have lost my patience. September 11 = Tragedy. Not discovering the works of Winsor McCay till you’re an adult – as a late 20th century toddler you probably would have preferred Pokemon to Little Nemo, anyway.
Now, I have eclectic tastes, which include intelligent superhero material, as my readers know. As someone with a serious interest in studying the pop culture mythology of superhero comics, indeed, as someone who had just come from the Kirby tribute panel, I was not altogether comfortable with the anti-superhero sentiments. People have different tastes and temperaments, but if you don’t like a genre, you don’t have to read it. You need not wish it destroyed. And even if you reject the idea that the superhero genre can provide intelligent satisfactions for adults, what about the traditional readership – children? I sense a certain puritanical streak at work here. Their attitude seems to be, how dare these people publish comics that give kids pleasure! (And doesn’t one of the panelists do Oz books? Oh, all right, Dorothy actually doesn’t punch the Wicked Witch.)
I suppose that to some degree these people’s intolerance towards the super hero books reflects their own disappointment that “serious” comics do not receive more recognition by the culture at large. It’s easy to blame the abundance of superhero comics. But the larger public thinks of most comic strips as kid stuff, too.
Moreover, lots of people simply are unused to the conventions of comics storytelling. Craig Thompson said that new comics readers have trouble looking at “all these panels.” Eisner countered that “balloons” are the problem. If they don’t see word balloons, he said, people accept the work; if they see the balloons, they consider it comics.
The lack of wider acceptance of comics presumably leads to the economic problems discussed at the panel’s end. Colleen Doran said she had to do her stories in serial magazine form before collecting them into graphic novels, because it takes so long to do them that she’s “starve to death” in the meantime. Kidd said that Pantheon pays advances to its graphic novelists, but admitted they weren’t the size of the advances that go to leading prose novelists. As for me, I think that having bookstores shelve graphic novels with prose novels in the same genre would be like shelving plays and screenplays alongside novels. To do the latter would be to deny that plays and screenplays belong to other media than prose fiction. To want a graphic novel shelved with a prose novel is to subordinate the visual aspect of the book to the literary one. It is to say that the graphic novel is words illustrated by pictures, rather than a form in which words and pictures are equals. And what if one thinks that graphic novels are primarily a visual medium? Then should they be shelved with the art books? Eisner’s Spirit put alongside 1940s figurative artists?
No, I think that in a perfect world graphic novels would not hide among the prose novels. They would have their own section, in any major bookstore. The real key is to foster more critics and reviewers who take comics seriously, and write for major media outlets. That’s the way, ultimately, to change the mindset of the culture’s opinion makers, and the population at large. Virtually every other form of pop culture – movies, television, popular music in its myriad forms – eventually wins critical recognition; I hope it’s only a matter of time for comics.
ANOTHER OPENING, ANOTHER SHOW
Another way to publicize the artistic worth of comics is to do a documentary about them. With the graphic novels panel over, I arrived early at my next stop, the screening of my film, Sex, Lies & Superheroes, which was to begin in Room 4 at 1:45 PM.
I feel a little uneasy about using my column to blow my own horn about my own movie, but I will try to suppress my usual diffidence to tell you this much about it. Sex, Lies and Superheroes is a documentary consisting of interviews with a number of luminaries of American comics – including, in alphabetical order, John Byrne, Chris Claremont, Amanda Conner, Peter David, Colleen Doran, Neil Gaiman, Stan Lee, Scott McCloud, Frank Miller, Jimmy Palmiotti, Bill Sienkiewicz, Louise and Walter Simonson, and more – intercut together, creating a continuous dialogue, intelligent and entertaining, about the comics medium and the iconic characters it portrays. I played a major role in selecting and contacting the interviewees, wrote most of the questions for the interviews, and conducted large portions of the interviews (sometimes half, occasionally all), which usually lasted two hours apiece. Myself; Constantine and Ben thereafter edited the “raw material” down into the smoothly flowing film, nearly an hour long in its current version. And I think it’s one of the best documentaries on comics you’ve never seen! (Just ask FilmForce’s Ken Plume; he’ll back me up on this.)
The title of the movie was not my choice, but I can explain it: obviously, we deal with superhero comics, but also with women who write and draw comics, and how women’s tastes in comics differ from men’s (hence the “sex”), and one of our interviewees, Neil Gaiman, discourses on the idea that fiction, including stories in comics, consists of “lies” that illuminate truths.
It is somewhat odd showing the movie at a comics convention. When we first showed the movie last fall at New York City’s Anthology Film Archives, the audience had come specifically to watch new independent movies including ours. Except for the filmmakers themselves, I doubt if anyone attends Comic-Con primarily to see new indie cinema, and why, for example, should a Neil Gaiman fan attend our film when The Real Neil is simultaneously appearing at the Vertigo 10th Anniversary panel in another convention meeting room? I stood in back during the screening, and was not particularly happy about people who aimlessly wandered in, not knowing what was going on in the room, crinkled their noses and said, “A video!” and left. The audience that stayed throughout the film, however, was very appreciative indeed. When I watched the film with a general audience – in other words, not composed primarily of comics enthusiasts – at Anthology Film Archives, the audience recognized that our interviewees make witty comments all the way through. The Comic-Con audience, perhaps because they are more used to taking comics seriously, took a while to catch on that the film is both serious and consciously amusing. Halfway through one of Neil Gaiman’s witticisms finally broke the ice, and the laughs began to come.
The audience applauded loudly at the film’s proper ending, but Constantine and Ben have broken up the closing credits with further interviewee comments, serving as encores, in effect, and Peter David’s closing anecdote had the audience roaring with laughter.
The only question Constantine got after the film finished was, will this movie be available on DVD? Well, that’s one of the main reasons we came: to try to find a distributor who’ll put the film into limited theatrical distribution and sales on home video and DVD. I will let this column’s readers know if and when Constantine makes a distribution deal. (And I’d love to see transcripts of the complete, two-hour-long interviews see print somewhere.) Meanwhile, if you want to find out more about the movie, and inquire about buying VHS copies, go to his web site, www.sexliessuperheroes.com.
HIS MOVIE PANEL
Producer Ted Hope worked at the production company Good Machine, which co-produced this summer’s Hulk movie. “It was about this kind of nerdy intellectual who couldn’t help but get angry, and when he got angry he became really compelling. Then we took that formula,” Hope said, starting his punch line, “and adapted it to American Splendor.”
Hope made these comments at the next panel on my agenda, “Fine Line Films: American Splendor,” back in Room 6CDEF at 3:30 PM. This panel was intended to promote the new film adaptation of Harvey Pekar’s long-running alternative comic book series. The movie won the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and was set to open in New York, Los Angeles, and the film’s own locale, Cleveland, within a month, on August 15.
The long-running alternative comic series American Splendor is the ongoing real life saga of Harvey Pekar, written by the man himself but drawn by various artists: the story of a seemingly ordinary man in an ordinary job in a less than stellar city, Cleveland, and his coping with the mundane events, small joys, irritating nuisances, and sometimes great sorrows (including cancer) of everyday existence.
Besides Ted Hope, the producer of the American Splendor film, the panel featured the three real-life people on whom the film centers, Harvey Pekar, his wife Joyce Brabner, and their adopted teenage daughter Danielle Batone. Hope’s joke comparing Pekar to the Hulk unintentionally points to one of the ways that American Splendor works. Comics deal well in portraying larger-than-life figures as visual icons, making super heroes so suited to the medium. But American Splendor demonstrates how comics can elevate Pekar’s life, and by extension, anyone’s, into that of an iconic everyman, a survivor of life’s ups and downs.
Storytelling in any medium, through focusing with insight and perceptiveness on an individual and his or her life, can find the drama in anyone’s existence. American Splendor has proved to work in a stage adaptation that was performed in Los Angeles, and that I saw in a special presentation at the 1991 Comic-Con, with The Simpsons Dan Castellaneta starring as Pekar. So, why not a film version as well?
Hope informed the audience that numerous people, including actor/playwright Wallace Shawn, wanted to turn American Splendor into a movie. “I encountered all of them along the way,” said Hope, “and never thought they really understood what American Splendor, the movie, should be. I didn’t know any better myself, but I knew they hadn’t got it.” Hope said it was one of his “life dreams” to make this movie.
Comics artist Dean Haspiel, a mutual friend of Hope and the Pekars, put them in contact. “So one night,” recounted Hope,” I was sitting in my apartment drinking alone, and I got a phone call from some woman who said she heard I was interested in her husband.” This was disconcerting phrasing. The woman was Joyce Brabner, who made it clear that she was talking about the movie rights to American Splendor. According to Hope, she asked for “some amazing fortune” for the rights: Hope said he “was drunk” and “said yes.”
Eventually, Hope went to meet Pekar and Brabner on their home ground in Cleveland, and found the answer he had long sought. “When I met them, it was clear to me that what all the other… attempts to make the movie got wrong was that they didn’t actually include the real Harvey, Joyce and Danielle, and any movie had to have as many different personas of Harvey Pekar that American Splendor itself had, and not do it in a traditional way.”
So, while the American Splendor stories in the comics are drawn by different artists, the movie has multiple Pekars: actor Paul Giamatti, portraying Harvey; the real Harvey Pekar, portraying himself; and even an animated version. Brabner is portrayed by two actresses, Hope Davis and Molly Shannon. Post hired a husband and wife team of documentary makers, Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, to direct the movie after dispatching them to Cleveland to get Pekar’s okay.
Still, Hope had no, uh, hope that he could get financing for such an unusual project. Brabner added, “We had no faith at all. We just thought we were fleecing this guy from New York.” But HBO came through, filming started within a year, HBO let the filmmakers alone, and shooting was completed in only 24 days. Not only that, but despite its low $3 million budget, Hope claimed American Splendor contains more and better special effects shots (presumably the animation) than the recent remake of Solaris, which had six times the special effects budget. (For more on the new era of low budget SFX, see my next column on the forthcoming film MirrorMask, another film connected with comics people that was blessed with quick greenlighting and lack of studio interference.)
Pekar and Brabner had been unfamiliar with the past work of actor Paul Giamatti until they stayed at a hotel where, Brabner explained, there was “something we don’t have at home – cable TV.” Brabner continued, “There was this blue orangutan bitching and whining in this movie, Planet of the Apes (the recent remake), and I said, ‘Hey, Harvey. That hairy guy’s going to be you.'” On the panel Pekar praised Giamatti’s performance, saying, “Paul studied me in the comics mainly,” and on tapes of Pekar’s once frequent appearances on David Letterman’s show. “He created a character who was an interpretation of me, and a very interesting one, instead of just trying to imitate me.”
At the end of the movie, a copy of new Pekar comic book titled His Movie Year is shown. Actually, it does not exist yet, but they hope to do it eventually.
I somehow doubt that the American Splendor movie will alter the popular conception of Cleveland as cultural wasteland (despite its art museum and orchestra). Towards the end a questioner from the audience asked for tips for someone going to Cleveland. What should a visitor see there? Danielle had been to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice (which, in a it’s-a-small-world development, has been run by Terry Stewart, head of Marvel in happier times), but Joyce has never gone. “Do what we do,” Brabner said. “Stay inside and read.” How has the movie changed the Pekars’ lives? Does he have qualms about becoming famous? “No, no. I’ll take as much money as I can get,” he said. “I haven’t got nearly enough left. I’m retired now, and I want my old age to be as easy as possible.” Observe, please, that a writer can be read by tens of thousands of readers, and even have his work turned into an independent film, and still not make that much money. Danielle confessed that she has probably already spent the money she got for the film. Yes, I can identify with all of this myself.
One benefit of the movie is that Pekar got to visit France for the first time in his life, for the movie’s screening at the Cannes Film Festival. The French distributors agreed to release the film on the Pekars’ 20th anniversary, a nice gesture, and it is hoped that the film can be linked to other important dates in his life. Danielle said, “We’re looking at the dates for the bar mitzvah.”
In answer to a question from the audience, Pekar said he would also like to go back on David Letterman’s show, on which he appeared many times during Letterman’s NBC years, until he finally angered Letterman by insisting on talking about what he saw as the corporate evils of NBC’s parent company, General Electric. Pekar did visit Letterman on CBS once afterwards, but Fine Line has been trying to get him back on the show for six months with no answer. Now, I think Pekar did go too far on Letterman’s NBC show. It wasn’t Charlie Rose or even Dick Cavett; nor was it a show dealing in political commentary, like Bill Maher’s now. The old Letterman show had a more lightweight agenda: ironically subverting and twisting the conventions of talk shows into entertaining nonsense. But since Sept. 11, 2001, Letterman’s mood has changed, and he has demonstrated his willingness to discuss serious issues, and even to drop the ironic mask when circumstances dictate. Maybe now Letterman and Pekar could meet each other halfway. I’m a fan of both. I want to see a rematch! The time has come!
The Pekars have also ventured into cyberspace, with Harvey, Joyce and Danielle all contributing to the weblog at harveypekar.com (so go check it out).
As for another way that the movie has changed the Pekars’ lives, Brabner said, “We don’t have to go to places like this” to “hustle” for sales. (“Places like this”?) Earlier, she had been discussing the Pekars’ friend Toby, who is, shall we say, rather eccentric. The movie has both an actor playing Toby and the real Toby in it. Brabner said that when you see the real Toby in the movie, you will think, “This young man would be really happy to attend the San Diego Comic-Con.” Hey! I think I’ve been insulted! I think even the serious sorts at the graphic novel panel have been insulted!
No, I don’t really mind (she’s kidding, right?), but maybe it would do us good to turn to a panel where the Comic-Con is celebrated. And you’ll find out about that in the next column.
-Copyright 2003 Peter Sanderson
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