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That, as you may know, is a quote from Indiana Jones, and it can be applied to more sorts of things than one might at first think. It’s not just great paintings and ancient dinosaur skeletons that get put into museums nowadays. There are museums of film history (like New York’s American Museum of the Moving Image), of television (the Museum of Television & Radio, in New York and Los Angeles), of rock music (in Cleveland and Seattle), of photography, of fashion, and much more. In Europe there are even museums of comics art. But here in the United States? Ah, that’s a different story.

Even as the comics industry is still in its slump, I keep feeling that recognition of comics as a serious artform is on the rise. Entertainment Weekly and Publishers Weekly keep running reviews of graphic novels.. This year The New York Times has increasingly been running articles on comics, including, in recent months, a profile of Jack Kirby marking the tenth anniversary of his death, and one on Alex Ross, who luckily has not had to wait ten years after his death for the Newspaper of Record to take note of his achievements. I’ve been informed that the publishing world’s BookExpo trade show this year devoted a full day to graphic novels.

Then there was the annual “New York Is Book Country” street fair on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue back in September. This year an entire block was devoted solely to comics and graphic novels. There were booths for local comics stores, and for DC Comics and Mad, and ““ could it be!? There was a Marvel booth!

Yes!

Now, I know this surprises all of you who followed my columns on this year’s San Diego Con, where the Marvel booth was missing in action. I found it hard to believe myself, and made a point of touching the Marvel booth at the street fair to assure myself it was real. Of course, one could point out that since Marvel is based in New York City, it didn’t have to actually spend money to travel to set up a booth here.

The Marvel booth also had the distinction of being the first place where I ever saw copies of the notorious Bad Girls and Fan Boys: Bill and Joe’s Marvelous Adventure book, extolling the achievements of the Jemas-Quesada Marvel administration, for sale. It was Stan Lee who originated the cult of personality around the people running Marvel editorial. It worked and still works for Stan. But, you know, various subsequent individuals have also plastered their names and images in Marvel books, and when that individual falls from power, well, let’s say that the great fanfare made over him becomes dated very quickly.

I was more impressed by the DC booth, where not only free comics but even CDs of DC Comics artwork were being handed out. Marvel had one real star doing a signing, Peter David, but DC and its subsidiary Mad had plenty, including Neil Gaiman, promoting that weekend’s publication of Sandman: Endless Nights, Kyle Baker, Jim Lee, Doug Moench, Peter Kuper and Drew Friedman. Gaiman did a signing at what the book fair trumpeted as the Graphic Novels Stage, though it was really just a table out in the middle of the street, and so did Art Spiegleman and Francoise Mouly, promoting their new Little Lit anthology. Even the poster for this year’s “New York Is Book Country” acknowledged the rising importance of graphic novels: it was a painting of Superman and Batman by Alex Ross.

Appropriately, albeit coincidentally, one needed only to take a short walk to look down into Rockefeller Center Plaza, where there was a temporary installation of an immense sculpture by Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, Reversed Double Helix, which, despite its mundane title, was actually heavily influenced by Japanese cartoons. I also took advantage of being in the vicinity to make my first visit to the nearby Museum of Arts and Design, whose exhibition US Design 1975-2000 turned out to include book covers designed by Chip Kidd, who has likewise designed books devoted to comics and cartoon art, such as Alex Ross’s new Mythologies. Sometimes, it seems, cartoon art is everywhere.

So, after over a hundred years of comic strips, a hundred years of American animation, and over sixty years of comic books, shouldn’t there be more than just a tiny number of American museums that exhibit great works in the field of cartoon art?

No established museum in New York City has committed itself to taking comics seriously, but sometimes one of them comes close. Earlier this year the city’s oldest museum, the New-York Historical Society (that’s right: originally “New York” was hyphenated) ran a superb retrospective, Julz Rulz: Inside the Mind of Jules Feiffer, which not only featured a large amount of original artwork for his own strips, but also original art by cartoonists who influenced Feiffer, such as E. C. Segar (Thimble Theatre, which starred Popeye) and George Herriman (Krazy Kat) but also contemporary cartoonists influenced by Feiffer, including Kuper and Spiegelman. Still, I suspect that the New-York Historical Society honored Feiffer with this retrospective as recognition of his stature as a satirist in many media, not out of a specific interest in the comics medium.

The Brooklyn Museum of Art ventured close to comics with its exhibition this year, Pulp Art: Vamps, Villains and Victors from the Robert Lesser Collection, consisting of over 100 cover paintings for the pulp magazines of the 1930s and 1940s. Seeing all of this artwork, alongside actual printed covers, made it clearer to me than before how the pulps were the forebears of American comic books, even in some cases dealing with forebears of comics superheroes, like Doc Savage and the Shadow. The show even acknowledged how the artwork for pulp magazine covers foreshadowed comic books: too bad the Museum did not see fit to include some comics covers as examples.

Then in October the Gallery at Lincoln Center held an exhibition of caricatures of opera singers, mostly from the 1970s and 1980s, by the late Al Hirschfeld. I have read in the past that Hirschfeld did not consider himself a cartoonist, though, of course, his illustrations are cartoons. Presumably he felt he would be taken more seriously in cultural circles if he didn’t call his work “cartooning.” It worked: the Museum of the City of New York held a Hirschfeld retrospective last year, and you would be amazed at the prices (five figures) the Gallery was charging for those opera caricatures.

And then the grandest of all New York’s art museums, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, recently opened a retrospective of the works of the late Philip Guston. I first became aware of Guston two decades ago, when the Whitney Museum of American Art held a landmark exhibition of original animation art from the Disney studio from the late 1920s through the early 1940s. (Perhaps embarrassed by delving into cartoon art, the Whitney has never ventured into the field again.) Simultaneously with the Disney exhibit, the Whitney held a retrospective of the work of Guston, who had only recently died. In the last fifteen years of his life, Guston had radically altered his style, becoming consciously “cartoonier.” For example, he painted odd, cartoonish hooded figures, looking like Klansmen drawn by Robert Crumb, or perhaps like characters in a Max Fleischer cartoon, wearing gloves recognizable to anyone who’s seen Mickey Mouse. (Could the cartoon Klansmen even have been in part an allusion to the Phantom Blot in Floyd Gustavson’s Mickey Mouse comic strip?) At the time of the Whitney show I thought it appropriate that the museum was doing retrospective of Disney animation art and Guston’s late work simultaneously, although the Museum itself seemed not to notice it was effectively doing two cartoon art shows at the same time.

The opening wall text to the Metropolitan’s new Guston show observes that Guston once enrolled in a Cleveland correspondence school for cartoonists. The narrator on the show’s audio guide states that the young Guston was “obsessed” with comics, leading me to wonder why the Met calls his interest in comics an obsession, but thinks his interest in the Old Master paintings, which also influenced him, was not. The narrator sounds relieved when he informs us that Guston quickly quit the cartooning correspondence school. Whew! What a narrow escape! He might have become a (shudder!) cartoonist! As the audio guide covers Guston’s late work, the narrators refer to it as his “figurative period.” Well, actually, it’d be more precise to call it his cartoon period, but they don’t. Both the opening wall text and the audio guide state that Guston was influenced by Herriman’s Krazy Kat and Bud Fisher’s Mutt and Jeff comic strip. Now, visitors to the Met can easily see paintings by the Old Masters who influenced Guston simply by strolling into another part of the museum. I found myself wondering if 99.9% of the visitors to this exhibition have any idea what Herriman’s or Fisher’s comics work looks like. How hard would it have been for the Met to put up some reproductions of sample strips in the exhibit?

It was not always quite this bad: the New York City area used to have quite a good museum of comics. In the 1980s I repeatedly visited the Museum of Cartoon Art, founded by Mort Walker, the creator of the comic strip Beetle Bailey, which was then located in the town of Rye, New York. The museum was easily accessible from New York City: one need only take a short trip by train and a brief jaunt by cab. In addition to the permanent collection, mostly of original art for classic comic strips, there were several different temporary exhibitions per year, some quite interesting: my favorite was a retrospective of Winsor McCay’s early 20th century editorial cartoons. Leading figures in the comics world would appear there: I saw Terry and the Pirates creator Milton Caniff speak there, and went on various occasions when my own contemporaries gave talks. There were parties for the comics community, and I recall going to the all day “Marvel Day” celebration. The Museum also had a homey feel, based as it was in an old, small mansion with a tower that was dubbed the “Castle”: the storybook look of the place seemed appropriate. Even the public restrooms were a delight, with their walls covered with cartoons drawn by visiting comics professionals. I really liked this place, and visited several times a year.

And then the Museum went away.

Understandably, Walker and company wanted to expand into a larger building, with more exhibition space, room for a library, and more. Apparently they considered various locations ““ New York City, Boston, even Orlando ““ and instead settled on (wait for it) Boca Raton, Florida. Walker denied that this was because he now lived down there, as did other cartoonists of his generation, and said that Boca had offered the Museum the best deal. And the Museum did build a big, magnificent new building there. As if to make clear that they were overreaching, Walker and his colleagues renamed their institution “the International Museum of Cartoon Art,” although the overwhelming majority of the collected art was American.

And within a handful of years the Museum closed.

It’s not hard to figure out why. For one thing, comics and cartoon art traditionally have great appeal for the young ““ children, teens, adults under 40 ““ and anyone who pays attention to comic books can see how new generations of writers and artists are continually coming along to revitalize the medium. There are plenty of young people to be found in New York City, or Boston with its numerous colleges, or Orlando, with its theme parks. But not in quiet Boca Raton, home of the wealthy and the retired. Moreover, despite the rise of the independents around the country, the New York area still has the largest concentration of comics professionals, who could be invited to speak at the Museum.

Despite its name, the International Museum of Cartoon Art was not as encyclopedic as its name suggested. Understandably for comic strip professionals of my father’s generation, Walker and company had built a collection that was mostly devoted to the history of the American comic strip. That certainly is an area of cartoon art worth studying and honoring. As Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon’s Stan Lee biography, recently reviewed in this column, points out, from the 1930s through the 1950s comic strip artists looked down on people who worked in comic books. The conventional wisdom was that cartoonists went into comic books if they couldn’t get work doing comic strips, that comic books were inferior material for kids whereas comic strips could produce sophisticated work that attracted an audience of all ages. The Golden Age of the American comic strip was winding down in my early childhood. Old Masters of the medium like Milton Caniff, Walt Kelly, Hal Foster, Chester Gould, Al Capp, and Harold Gray were still active; even Rudolph Dirks, creator of one of the first comic strips, still had his name on The Captain and the Kids, though whether he was actually working on it, despite his advanced age, I do not know. I can still recall Foster’s Prince Valiant taking up an entire full-size (non-tabloid) newspaper page.

But the Golden Age of the comic strip has been over for decades; newspapers severely cut down on the amount of space given to strips, and the strips done in grand illustrative styles gave way to humor strips with minimalist drawing styles, such as reign in newspaper comics sections today. The real action in the cartoon art medium shifted into comic books from the 1960s on, not to mention new waves of animation. The modern comic book ““ whether Marvel-influenced superheroes or the undergrounds ““ has been around now for over 40 years, and the American graphic novel for 25, but the Museum of Cartoon Art never fully got hold of either of these new movements. On the one time I visited the Museum at its Boca Raton location, I was, as always, impressed by the scope of its collection of original comic strip art. But its temporary exhibit on “Super Heroes” barely scratched the surface of the subject, and I can’t imagine any contemporary superhero enthusiast being satisfied by the paltry selection on display. At least when it had been located in the New York area, the Museum could attract many of the locally based artists for contemporary comics to make appearances there.

So, the Museum mostly missed the boat on the changes in the medium. It’s not really a surprise that, as comic strips’ Golden Age falls ever further back into the past, that the Museum had trouble drawing in even baby boomers, much less members of younger generations.

Then there was Kevin Eastman’s Words and Pictures Museum, founded by Kevin Eastman, co-creator of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which primarily housed his personal collection of cartoon art. This museum went in the opposite direction from Mort Walker’s: it did not try to be encyclopedic or cover all areas of cartoon art, but instead focused on comic book artwork from the 1970s onward, and, even more narrowly, on the particular group of artists whose work Eastman collected, including Jack Kirby, Frank Miller, Bill Sienkiewicz (with virtually all the artwork from his Elektra: Assassin), and more. By all accounts, the Museum was a fine, well designed place with intelligently conceived exhibits.

I long wanted to go to this museum, but I never did. For a New York City resident without a car, it was hard to get to. The Words and Pictures Museum was in Northampton, Massachusetts, where Eastman lives. (Ah, do we begin to see a pattern with regard to the location of comics museums?) There is no direct train service between New York City and Northampton; I would have had to take a lengthy bus ride, and never did.

Here it would be relevant to mention a similar situation in the fine art world. This is the case of the Barnes Collection, an immense, world-class collection of artwork, mostly Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and early modern work, assembled in the first half of the 20th century by the late Dr. Albert Barnes, who lived in the Philadelphia area. Barnes, an eccentric to begin with, despised the Philadelphia art establishment, which looked down on his tastes in art, though, of course, now many of the artists whose works he collected ““ Matisse, Seurat, Cezanne ““ are recognized as giants. So, when Barnes died, his will stipulated that his collection was to remain in the small town of Merian, Pennsylvania, and severely limited access to seeing the works, or even to reproducing them in books. Now the Barnes Collection hovers on the brink of bankruptcy, and attempts are being made to break the will, so that the Collection can be moved to a new building in Philadelphia. Why? Because, despite the universally recognized importance of the collection, very few people ever get to see it, because it is based in a small town most people have never heard of. If it was located in Philadelphia, it would receive the same wide attendance that the Philadelphia Museum of Art does.

So, what this has to do with the Words and Pictures Museum, not to mention the International Museum of Cartoon Art, should be obvious. Northampton is better known than Merion, but nonetheless the Words and Pictures Museum likewise closed.

I have been to the last of America’s three comics museums, and the only survivor of the lot: the San Francisco Museum of Cartoon Art. When I visited it some years back, it was in a small space, and it was rumored to have had financial problems, but it is still there. One difference between it and the other two museums is that it is located in a major city. Major cities have large populations of potential attendees, young and old; a city like San Francisco also attracts large numbers of tourists. Large cities also have major media outlets through which museums and their special exhibitions can be publicized. It also makes sense that San Francisco, the center of the underground comics movement of the 1960s, and still the home to numerous cartoonists, should have a museum devoted to comics. Of course, it would make even more sense for New York City to have such a museum, as the city most associated with comics: it’s the home of Marvel and DC, along with smaller companies, as well as newspaper syndicates like King Features that have carried comic strips for a century.

Moreover, this is the center of the media world, enabling not just exhibits on comics but the importance of comics art itself to be publicized, if only one can get the attention of newspapers and magazines and TV. Furthermore, New York is the center of America’s art world: if only critics from the fine art world could be enticed to attend and review exhibits of comics and cartoon artwork, and start taking the best of it seriously.

Then, in the 1990s there was a gallery in downtown Manhattan, Four Color Images. This was not a nonprofit museum, but a gallery that sold art, but its particular niche was comics artwork. It held wonderful shows, often tied to the release of a high profile comics project, such as the original art for Alex Ross’s Kingdom Come, or for Jon J Muth’s issue of Sandman, and the receptions for the openings of such shows provided wonderful social occasions for the New York City comics community. But then the gallery owners shut the place down and moved to California, and nobody opened a new comics gallery to fill the niche they had vacated.

So, is there never to be another cartoon museum in a major American city east of San Francisco, and more specifically, in New York, the historical center of the comics business?

Lately, two new rival organizations have emerged in New York trying to do just that, the New York City Comic Book Museum and the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art. Neither one has its own gallery space (much less a building) yet, and, of course, the current state of the economy has created trying times even for major established cultural institutions, much more so for newcomers trying to get off the ground. But both these museums-in-waiting have organized exhibits in the New York City area and held fundraisers, and the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA) organizes its annual summer Manhattan “Art Festival” for alternative cartoonists to display their work.

By sheer chance, I found out about a recent MoCCA exhibit just in time to attend its final day. This was “Living Masters of Comic and Cartoon Art,” held at the Forbes Magazine Galleries, whose principal purpose is to display the late publisher Malcolm Forbes’ collections of such things as jeweled Faberge eggs from Imperial Russia (which are recognized as high art), and model ships and toy soldiers (which decidedly are not). Yes, it’s true: New York City has a museum of the history of toy soldiers, but not a permanent museum space for the works of the giants of comics art.

The “Living Masters” show was confined to one small room in the galleries, but it was astonishing to see how much work of high artistic quality was gathered together in such a tiny space. One aspect of the show that most pleased me was its wide, genuinely encyclopedic sweep through the different areas of cartoon art. Though virtually all the artists represented were American, the artwork ranged from mainstream comic books to alternative graphic novels to New Yorker and Village Voice cartoons to comic strips to animation to advertising.

There are a number of pieces and creators I wish to single out.

Steve Ditko was represented by the original art for a page from The Amazing Spider-Man #9, featuring Peter Parker, Aunt May, and Electro. I am always astonished when I see a page of original art for one of Ditko’s early Marvel stories; these boards were considerably larger than the paper comics artists draw on today. I am always impressed by seeing Ditko’s delicacy of line, and how it subtly evokes the emotions of the characters, an effect obscured in the actual comics by reduction in size, coloring, and poor printing. And however much recent artists insist on giving Electro a different costume, it is Ditko’s version, with the electrical bolt motifs (reminiscent of the decoration on the old General Electric building in Manhattan) that remains the most striking and the only iconic version.

For Will Eisner, there was the 1987 cover of Kitchen Sink’s The Spirit #27, with a typically Eisnerian sultry blonde watching as the Spirit is hit with a kitchen sink, presumably as a joke on the publisher’s name. The femme fatale here is at once a humorously obvious cliche and an effectively archetypal figure. Similarly, the Spirit is pictured in a dynamic position, caught as if in mid-leap, while at the same time he is clearly the butt of the gag. He is simultaneously funny and bursting with power. In fact, the kinetic pose reminds me simultaneously of Jack Kirby (in its power) and Tex Avery (in its comedic exaggeration).

Eisner’s former assistant, Jules Feiffer, was represented by the May 25, 1975 installment of his Feiffer comic strip. This example demonstrated the minimalist aesthetic of contemporary comic strips: it shows only a single face in profile, which does not alter position from panel to panel. Yet it also follows a technique resembling a sequence of animator’s drawings. The profile and the “camera” do not move, but the character’s facial expressions alter slightly from panel to panel, as his rage builds as he speaks. Then, the minimalist treatment suddenly, explosively, gives way in the final panel as the character’s emotion shifts unexpectedly: his jaw drops low and his eyes widening in bewildered surprise, reinforcing the impact of Feiffer’s concluding punch line.

It was an unexpected pleasure to find Dave Gibbons’ cover for Watchmen #1, both the original art and a colored version. It pictures the river of blood washing down on the murdered Comedian’s smiley-face button. Somehow the original art, without the dull red color of the blood, was even more spooky, perhaps because the lines depicting the rivulets within the pool of blood now stood out more. This disturbing cover image not only captures the inciting incident of the first issue and the series, but also symbolizes the dark take Watchmen has on the superhero genre, which are no longer necessarily happy fantasies for kids.

Bill Griffith’s one-page comics story, So You Want to Be a Nationally Syndicated Cartoonist, was less interesting for its art than for its writing. It humorously tracing a cartoonist’s career through all his “mistakes” in dealing with the business world, and then wreaks total surprise when, by refusing to sell out, the cartoonist triumphs nonetheless. This is an interesting lesson, indeed: the cartoonist of the tale did not water down his work for commercial reasons, and, eventually times changed and its worth was recognized and rewarded.

For a historian of superhero comics, there is awe to be found in seeing the actual original artwork for Carmine Infantino’s cover for Flash #123 (1961), featuring the landmark story “Flash of Two Worlds.” This is one of the greatest classics of DC’s Silver Age, the story in which the Golden Age and Silver Age versions of the Flash first met, and which linked the continuities of 1940s DC and 1960s DC Comics. The image is so simple in concept: the two Flashes, each on a different side of a wall, moving in parallel to rescue an endangered person set in the center foreground. The motion is so dynamic, and the simply conceived but powerfully executed image is so genuinely iconic.

Joe Kubert was represented by page 5 of the Hawkman story from Brave and the Bold #35 (1958). Here I was struck by what might seem a throwaway shot in a corner of the page: the married superheroes Hawkman and Hawkgirl ““ Carter and Shiera ““ unmasked, sitting side by side, with their absorbascon headsets on (which they use to monitor information on Earth, as if in a 1950s version of surfing the Internet), smiling in contentment. It’s a wonderfully appealing image of marital happiness, such as one never sees in comics anymore

The example of Patrick McDonnell’s comic strip Mutts that was on display included a series of panels of different characters saying and doing the same thing, creating a sequence of visual parallels. As in the work of earlier cartoonists like Winsor McCay and Cliff Sterrett, this was a Sunday strip whose primary raison d’etre was to serve as an exercise in visual design, while also accomplishing the task of amusing the reader. The target to one side in the strip reminded me of the work of the contemporary artist Jasper Johns. Then, lo and behold, I read the accompanying label with McDonnell’s commentary in which he says he was indeed inspired by Johns. This took me aback. After having interviewed comics artists for over twenty years, it is such a welcome surprise to find one who looks to the fine art world for inspiration, not just previous cartoonists.

Seeing a solitary page from Frank Miller’s recent The Dark Knight Strikes Back focuses attention on the graphic design of the page, rather than on its purpose as part of the overall study. Here Miller presents Superman, as a ravaged figure standing amid ruins, and contrasts him within the same panel with Supergirl, untouched by the destruction, a figure of curves, seemingly surrounded by light, hovering above the desolation of Superman’s world and life.

Animator Bill Plympton sent a familiar and characteristic image from his 1985 film Your Face: a man’s head swollen into the size and shape of a pumpkin. This aptly demonstrated Plympton’s ability to turn everyday things, notably his unprepossessing bourgeois human figures, equivalents of Rene Magritte’s bowler-hatted men, into surreal creatures, sending up their pomposity and complacent ordinariness.

Village Voice cartoonist Ted Rall’s piece in the show, “The Guns of August” from the September 1, 2003 issue, demonstrated unexpected depth. It parallels the images of a soldier leaning over a dying comrade in Iraq, to George W. Bush, who in the final panel imitating the position of both figures to ironic effect, leaning to one side like the living soldier, but lying in a hammock like the dead one. But Bush is relaxing, not dying, evincing his cluelessness about the human costs of his policies. The dramatic impact of the parallel imagery makes up for Rall’s heavy-handedness of giving Bush, as he always does, a Hitlerian mustache.

Then there was an MTV ad from Rolling Stone that was painted by Bill Sienkiewicz, entitled, “Are these the lips that I remember. . .?” What this fantasy of lost love has to do with, say, the immature revels of MTV Spring Break, I have no idea. It is nonetheless, on its own merits, an emotionally evocative work, with repeated images of a woman’s face, as if it were haunting the narrator, a balloon drifting away, and small masks, looking like clowns laughing at the end of love. This was one of the pieces in the exhibition that should raise the question of where “cartoon art” ends and “illustration” begins. If Sienkiewicz was not known for his career in comics, this piece, even though it does tell a story in a sequence of pictures, would probably be regarded by most people as the work of an illustrator. Aside from the masks, it does not look “cartoony” at all.

Dave Sim’s page from Cerebus #71 showcased another animation-style sequence which proved an interesting contrast with the Feiffer piece. This page contains two rows of panels in which Cerebus’s head and camera keep same the position while his expression changes, measuring the levels of his rising rage. But while Feiffer’s narrator finally burst into open emotion, Cerebus’s building anger culminates in a different kind unexpected shift, into angry exasperation rather than exploding into action.

Marvel’s innovative artist of the late 1960s, Jim Steranko, was honored with a Captain America poster he did in 2001. This collage of images spanned decades, at once evoking 1940s posters and 1960s pop art. The dominant image was a large shot of Captain America’s head. In a nice touch, this image of Cap’s head was repeated in the Red Skull’s binocular lenses; this was at once a clever echoing of imagery and a comment on the Skull’s obsession with his enemy. The waving red and white stripes in the background also filled multiple functions: they were at once the flag, symbol of Cap, an evocation of 1960s Op Art, and a background of pure, rhythmic abstraction.

An example of Bill Watterson’s contemporary classic strip Calvin and Hobbes, from August 8, 1987) demonstrated his variation on a frequent device that Walt Kelly used in his own great strip. Pogo. Kelly would often do scenes of Pogo and his friend Porky drifting in a boat, conversing, as the name on the boat changes from panel to panel, providing a touch of visual whimsy to a dialogue-driven vignette. Watterson took a considerably more active approach to the dilemma of visually dramatizing a talking heads scene. Here, while Calvin and Hobbes engage in conversation, they are simultaneously hurtling through space in a cart (their counterpart to Pogo’s rowboat) as the camera angles and the direction of the movement shift dynamically from panel to panel, creating a mock epic contrast between the quiet conversation and the explosive visual effects.

Then there were a selection of cels and backgrounds from important recent animated series, including Matt Groening’s The Simpsons and Genndy Tartakovsky’s Samurai Jack.. From Batman: The Animated Series came an upper figure shot of Batman, his arm raised, projecting stern determination and power. The Powerpuff Girls were pictured floating above the ruins of a city, their trademark wide eyes here conveying their stunned reactions.

And there was much more, including works by Jessica Abel (La Perdita, 2003), Neal Adams (Batman art), R. O. Blechman, Ruben Bolling (Tom the Dancing Bug: God-Man and Human-Man Team Up, 1996), Richard Corben, Robert Crumb (The Life and Death of Fritz the Cat cover, 1993), Howard Cruse (a page from ‘Stuck Rubber Baby, 1995), Jack Davis, Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird (a page fromTeenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), Frank Frazetta (Johnny Comet comic strip, 1953), Lynn Johnston (an installment of the comic strip For Better or for Worse), Gilbert Hernandez (Love and Rockets #16), Jamie Hernandez (Love and Rockets #24 p. 1), Peter Kuper, Mike Mignola (Hellboy: Box Full of Evil‘ French edition cover), Mike Peters (1983), Arnold Roth, Joe Sacco, Joe Staton (a page from a Scooby Doo comic), and another museum’s founder, Mort Walker (Beetle Bailey, 9/7/03).

A few weeks after the Forbes Galleries show closed, I went to the MoCCA offices to see the museum’s next exhibition. Tarzan: Images of an Icon, a small show that chronicled how an enduring archetypal figure of popular culture has been interpreted over many decades in the comic medium and animation, too (the latter thanks to art from Disney’s wonderful 1999 animated Tarzan film). There were a few major gaps: Hal Foster’s version from the Tarzan comic strip and John Buscema’s from the Marvel comic, while Joe Kubert’s DC Comics version was present only through a copy of a tabloid reprint book. But many other artists were represented by original artwork. I was particularly struck by the balletic grace of Russ Manning’s Tarzan, the refined look of Gil Kane’s version, and the astonishing kinetic power of Burne Hogarth’s figures in his action sequences.

Over the years, when I’ve looked at the best works in exhibitions of comics and cartoon art, their vitality and excellence have seemed so clear to me that I wonder how it is that they do not receive wider recognition. Certainly part of the reason is condescension towards so much of the subject matter ““ the superheroes and funny animals ““ though there is plenty of work in the medium that deals with more “serious” subjects. In reading two recent articles about the arts, I considered another possible reason, as well.

In the November 24, 2003 issue of Time, Lev Grossman writes about the controversy surrounding the National Book Foundation’s awarding Stephen King its Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Grossman notes what he terms America’s “prissily puritanical” attitude whereby readers “have an odd and deeply ingrained habit of dividing books into two mutually exclusive heaps, one high and literary and one low and trashy.” He observes that “as recently as the mid-19th century” this division did not exist: “Dickens wrote best-selling novels, but they weren’t considered ‘commercial” or ‘popular’ or ‘your-euphemism-here.’ They were just novels. No one looked down on Scott and Tennyson and Stowe for being wildly successful.”

Grossman then argues that when the modernist movement began in fiction, people began to define literary fiction as being necessarily more difficult to understand than the more popular sort. “We praise rich, complex, lyrical prose, but we don’t really appreciate the pleasures of a well-paced, gracefully structured plot. Or worse, we appreciate them, but we are embarrassed about it. Somewhere along the line, we learned it associate the deliciousness of a good, crackling yarn. . .with shame, as if literature shouldn’t be this much fun, and if it is, then it isn’t literature.”

Grossman ends by predicting that it is through the vitality of “popular” fiction that “the next literary wave” will be born.

Art critic Peter Schjeldahl makes a similar argument in the November 10, 2003 issue of The New Yorker. He is reviewing a new exhibition at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, Rembrandt’s Journey: Painter, Draftsman, Etcher, and begins by quoting its curator.

“In selecting the works there has been a special emphasis on Rembrandt the storyteller,’ the show’s head curator, Clifford S. Ackley, writes in the catalogue. It is a welcome stress, aimed at a lingering blind spot in modern taste. Pejorative senses of ‘illustration’ (the qualifier ‘mere’ goes without saying) and the ‘literary’ have embarrassed overeducated viewers of Rembrandt for a century.”

Schjeldahl goes on to describe two of Rembrandt’s pictures of Biblical scenes and one of two of his erotic prints, each of which tells a story through pictorial means.

In concluding his piece, Schjeldahl writes, “In saying that Rembrandt’s storytelling has been discounted by modern taste, I don’t mean that the revered Old Master is controversial, only that he should be. After a century in which our cravings for narrative were attenuated if not shamed in high art, his work has a fresh, even radical sparkle. I came out of the Boston show thinking, in effect, Let’s have some more like that. The closest our culture comes is in serious cartooning and, of course, the movies.”

“Serious cartooning,” eh? Of course, by quoting these pieces, I am not saying that any of the comics writers and artists mentioned above are on the level of Dickens or Rembrandt. But it seems to me that Grossman and Schjeldahl have each hit upon an important insight: that the modernist movement in literature and in the visual arts in the twentieth century greatly downplayed the artistic value of narrative, of storytelling.

Similarly, much of modern painting and sculpture veered away from figurative work. However, narrative, and for that matter, figurative representation were highly valued in the arts in previous centuries.

Perhaps it is in large part because of the modernist attitudes towards narrative and figuration that comics and cartoon art have not received sufficient recognition by academia, the museum world, and other opinion makers. Yet through the last century, the art of visual storytelling has nonetheless persisted, finding routes other than the fine arts. Among the forms it has taken are film and television, both of which have achieved growing cultural respectability , especially from the 1960s onward. But in the graphic arts, it is comics and “serious cartooning” that keeps the narrative tradition alive. This is why we need museums of cartoon art and comics art: to focus serious attention on the masters and important works of a vital aspect of American popular culture. Eventually, the major museums will come around, but for now, we need the small, specialized cartoon and comics museums to fill a needed niche. We can hope that like Griffith’s cartoonist in the tale recounted above, the artistic merits of comics medium too will finally receive their proper recognition.

-Copyright 2003 Peter Sanderson

Disney’s advertising campaign for its new animated feature, Brother Bear, made me wary about how good this film really was. Why did the commercials and so many of the posters focus on the comic relief characters, the two squabbling moose (as in the promotion’s catchphrase “The Moose Are Loose”)? (Some of the posters were clever, like the one characterizing the moose as “Grazed and Confused.”) But why weren’t they spotlighting the title character, the bear? Does this mean that the moose will steal the show, but that the actual story about the central characters is a flop?

Far from it, as it turned out. Brother Bear, which has many fathers (directors Aaron Blaise and Robert Walker, and writers Tab Murphy, Lorne Cameron, David Hoselton, Steve Benich and Ron J. Friedman) is one of the best traditionally animated Disney films since The Lion King. In large part that is because of the psychological depth of the story of its title character. Brother Bear is an effort to go beyond devising merely an adventure story to creating a contemporary fairy tale, albeit one set in the distant past, with the emotional resonance of myth. And it succeeds.

One initial point of interest is that Brother Bear continues Disney’s efforts over the last few decades to make the cast of characters of its canon of animated features multiracial. The early Disney animated features drew on European fairy tales (Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty) and classic European children’s stories (Pinocchio, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan and the partly animated Mary Poppins). More recent Disney animated features have made their main characters Arabs (Aladdin), Chinese (Mulan), Hawaiian (Lilo & Stitch), and, in Pocahontas and now in Brother Bear, Native American. (Disney hasn’t done an animated feature with black lead characters as yet, unless we count the 1940s live action/animated Song of the South, which has been accused of racial stereotyping. But the voices of black actors are prominent in The Lion King, and the stage version makes the central characters’ African ethnicity explicit.)

Brother Bear is set in primeval North America at a time following the Ice Ages, when woolly mammoths have not yet succumbed to extinction. Since the Northern Lights, also known as the Aurora Borealis, are visible (and judging from the moose’s accents), presumably the story takes place in Canada. The human characters are all Native Americans, and the story begins with three brothers, Sitka, the eldest; Denahi, the middle brother; and the much younger Kenai, who initially comes off as something of a prankster and a slacker, quite unlike his dutiful older siblings.

The tribe’s female shaman offers each of the three brothers with a separate figurine of an animal, which is to be his totem, a representation of his true personality and path in life. She presents Kenai with the totem of a bear, which, one might think would represent strength or perhaps ferocity. Indeed, most of the people in this film seem to think of bears as ferocious enemies to be killed. But the shaman instead calls the bear the totem of love. Kenai vehemently rejects the totem and the idea that this represents his destiny and himself.

Now, in his description of the archetypal format of the hero’s adventure, Joseph Campbell referred to the call to adventure. The shaman in Brother Bear is both a herald, announcing the “adventure,” and a mentor, offering guidance. But the adventure she is heralding is a journey of self-discovery, and Kenai denies that he is the “self” that she sees him as being. Campbell contends that to deny the call to adventure is to bring on serious, harmful repercussions, and so it is here.

The path that Kenai seems, by his initial actions in the film, to prefer to take is a more stereotypically masculine one: that of a hunter and warrior. So it seems significant that the shaman is a woman. She presents his eldest brother with the totem of the eagle, signifying wisdom. So wisdom is not restricted to only one sex. Nonetheless, the film does seem to be establishing a dichotomy between traditional male values (violence, vengeance) and traditional female values (love, nurturing).

Irresponsible as usual, Kenai fails to guard a basket of fish, which are eaten by a bear. Demonstrating his lack of self-control, Kenai foolishly sets out after the bear, intent on killing the creature for what is, after all, a paltry offense, for which the hungry bear is hardly to blame, and one that was really Kenai’s own fault. So one might say that Kenai is actually in denial over his own guilt and displacing the blame onto the Other, the bear.

Kenai quickly gets in over his head, the bear attacks him, and his eldest brother, Sitka, has to intervene to rescue him. In the course of Sitka’s struggle with the bear atop a glacier, both fall from a great height: Sitka is killed, but the bear gets away.

Sitka’s death, too, is ultimately the result of Kenai’s mistakes, but, now with even greater cause to be in denial, Kenai turns furious, projecting the guilt for his brother’s death onto the Other, someone he sees as distinct and different from himself, the bear. Kenai casts the bear as what the psychologist Carl Jung would call a Shadow figure, the embodiment of all that he believes he is not and rejects.

Now, note that Kenai’s older brothers tried in vain to dissuade him from chasing the bear in the first place, and, even after Sitka’s death, the middle brother, Denahi, tries to persuade Kenai not to seek vengeance on the bear. This is an interesting stance on violence for the film to take. Previous Disney animated features actually commend the seeking of vengeance and even violence under the “right” circumstances. Hence, after the Wicked Witch puts Snow White into her deathlike sleep, the Seven Dwarfs pursue the Witch to her death. (They do not actually kill her, and her death comes by other means, but they sure do seem like a lynch mob.) The Prince in Sleeping Beauty actually kills Maleficent in her dragon form. Brother Bear, in sharp contrast, never countenances violence or vengeance in any instance whatsoever.

Obsessed with blood vengeance, Kenai finds the bear and kills it with his spear. At that point, the bear and Kenai are both enveloped by the Northern Lights, which in the world of this film have spiritual significance. The Lights transform Kenai into the form of the very creature he killed.

In Neverwhere, too, the hero becomes one of the Shadow figures: Richard Mayhew enters the world of the homeless, and, effectively has become one of them. Kenai had regarded the bear as the Other, the Shadow, a creature different from himself, the evil to be destroyed. He regarded the bear as a killer and became a killer himself in destroying it. By employing the same lethal violence he believed the bear embodied, Kenai has become “the Other,” the Shadow, himself: now he is the bear. Appropriately then, Kenai is horrified when he discovers what has happened to him.

In Campbell’s monomyth, the hero crosses a threshold from his original, everyday world, into the literally or figuratively enchanted world in which adventure takes place. Brother Bear utilizes unusual means to dramatize this transition. Once Kenai has become a bear, the colors on the screen become brighter and richer. Moreover, the image of the film projected on the screen actually widens; I suspect I would not have consciously noticed this happening if I had not read about it beforehand.

All of this reinforces the idea that Kenai has entered a higher realm than the world of his previous human existence.

Kenai has also undergone a symbolic death and resurrection of an unusual sort: having meted out death to the bear, his human self “dies,” and he is “resurrected” in the bear’s body.

As befits a magical realm, now the transformed Kenai can understand the language of the animals. The stated reason for this is that Kenai is now in animal form himself. But I wonder if the tale of how the warrior Siegfried killed a dragon, tasted its blood, and then was able to understand the language of birds, is also relevant here. Siegfried slays the Shadow figure, the embodiment of dark forces, and then, by tasting the blood, takes on part of the Shadow himself.

The natural world of the animals, in which, as demonstrated, magic works, is the “enchanted realm” of Brother Bear. But the “enchanted realm” of Brother Bear is ultimately not so much a geographical location as it is a state of mind, a perspective on life, and a form of identity. After all, humans can and do journey through the wilderness in which Kenai’s adventures take place. His “enchanted realm” is really his existence in the form of a bear. The crossing of the threshold was not physical travel but his physical transformation, his change of identity. (Likewise, I think, in superhero stories, the crossing of the threshold into the world of adventure takes the form of the hero’s change from his everyday self into his costumed, heroic identity.)

As in Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, which I reviewed last week, once the threshold is crossed into the enchanted world, the journeyer cannot return until his mission is accomplished. Neverwhere‘s Richard Mayhew tries to go back only to learn that people do not recognize him or, in most cases, even notice him. Security guards treat him as a criminal. Similarly, Kenai, transformed into a bear, discovers that he can no longer communicate with human beings. And the humans, including his middle brother Denahi, now regard him with fear and hatred: this is exactly how Kenai regarded bears before he became one. Kenai cannot return to the human world or even communicate with its people as long as he remains a bear.

Oddly, Denahi has himself undergone a transformation. Thinking that the bear he sees (which is really the transformed Kenai) killed Kenai, Denahi becomes as obsessed with vengeance and violence as Kenai had been. Having formerly condemned vengeance, Denahi has now become what he rejected: the Shadow has overwhelmed his former personality.

On first realizing he has transformed into a bear, Kenai is understandably horrified. But in large part that is due to the fact that Kenai regards the bear as an evil monster and does not recognize the capacity for monstrousness within himself. Kenai receives another shock when he realizes that Denahi now sees him, in his bear form, only as a killer to be destroyed. Denahi now regards Kenai as Kenai regarded the bear.

One of the principal themes of Brother Bear is the need to try to perceive things from a different perspective than one’s own, to understand how other people might look at something. As a human, Kenai saw the bear as the embodiment of fear, evil and death; the transformed Kenai is now forced to see his brother as the embodiment of fear, evil and death instead. The key moment in stating this theme comes when Kenai, in bear form, and a bear cub, Koda, come across a Native American painting of a man with a spear confronting an enormous, ferocious-looking bear. The bear looks like a monster to human eyes, but Koda calls the spear-carrying human the “monster.”

But Kenai has not simply shifted 180 degrees from one perspective to the opposite one. True, he now must fear his brother, but Kenai knows that his brother is not truly evil, but merely mistaken: he doesn’t know who this bear really is.

Furthermore, Carl Jung’s concept of the Shadow entails qualities that a person rejects and tries to repress, but these qualities can be positive as well as negative. Remember that the shaman told Kenai that the bear was his totem and represented his destiny, which took the form of love. Kenai rejected the totem and this path through life. In being physically transformed into a bear, Kenai was actually set back on his correct path by supernatural forces. Though Kenai thought the bear represented violence, the bear as Shadow actually incarnates a side of Kenai that is positive yet buried, his capacity for love, just as the shaman told him.

Hence, Kenai soon encounters a newly orphaned bear cub, Koda, whom he initially finds annoying. However, the perceptive viewer may see the connection between the rambunctious Koda and the human Kenai of the film’s early scenes, whose pranks made trouble for his older brothers. Kenai grumpily assumes a sense of duty to accompany the cub, and eventually their relationship evolves into an affectionate friendship and even fraternal love. Kenai evolves into Koda’s “brother,” hence the title of the film. Kenai’s literal journey across the wilderness with Koda becomes his figurative progress into maturity. Once the irresponsible, emotionally immature little brother whom his older brothers had to look after, Kenai grows into the role of Koda’s older “brother,” mentor and guide. One could also see Koda as representing the childish side of Kenai, which his newly mature personality now supervises.

By the way, about the aforementioned moose, Rutt and Tuke. The main story of the movie is strong enough that they do not tip the film’s balance and actually steal the show. But they are really funny, nonetheless, and certainly Disney’s best team of comedy characters since Timon and Pumbaa in The Lion King. Rutt and Tuke are voiced by Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas, respectively, and are basically recreations of two other Canadian siblings that Moranis and Thomas played, Bob and Doug McKenzie from SCTV’s “Great White North” sketches, which later spawned the feature film Strange Brew. (So, the moose are like Bob and Doug, but without the beer, eh?) It’s a pleasure to have these characters back again, even transformed into moose (much like Kenai is turned into a bear!), in such an effective vehicle. In fact, the characters work surprisingly well in animal form, perhaps demonstrating that the McKenzie brothers were always cartoonish, in a good sense. Disney must think so, too: the screening I saw was even preceded by a bit of animation in which the moose tell us to turn off our cell phones. The “Great White North” sketches were always improvised, and I presume that much of the moose’s dialogue in Brother Bear was, as well. In fact, if the Disney Home Video folks are smart, I think they should commission Moranis and Thomas to do a commentary track, in character, for the eventual Brother Bear DVD.

Now, here is the Spoiler Warning point at which those of you who have not yet seen this movie may wish to get off and head to the next topic in this week’s column.

During Campbell’s hero’s journey, the hero gains something of value in the enchanted realm that proves to be of use in the journey’s later stages. In Brother Bear, that is Kenai’s realization of his capacity for love. I believe there is also a point in the hero’s journey that Campbell does not recognize, and which I call the Second Fall. At the outset of the hero’s journey the hero is in a low condition, or falls into one. This also seems to happen again at the beginning of the journey’s final phases. In Brother Bear, this Second Fall comes when Kenai makes a discovery that even those who insist on Spoiler Warnings should have seen coming: he learns that he himself was the killer of Koda’s mother.

Looking elsewhere in the world of cartoon art, this reminds me of Spider-Man’s discovery in his origin story that he could have stopped the Burglar before he killed his Uncle Ben. It is the shock of the realization of one’s own responsibility for the central crime of the story.

This revelation also furthers several of the themes of the film.

One is the theme of the necessity of looking at things from different points of view. Now Kenai ““ and the movie ““ revisits earlier scenes of the film from the mother bear’s point of view. By taking on the form of the mother bear, Kenai has now gained her perspective on events. Rather than viciously attacking Kenai and his brothers, she was merely defending her cub, whom they did not see. From this perspective, the human Kenai becomes the monster of the piece, killing Koda’s mother.

Second is the need for self-recognition. The human Kenai characteristically projected his own hatred and violent urges onto the figure of the bear, and by killing the bear, tried to expunge them from his world. But now Kenai is confronted with the fact that he is, in effect, the murderer of Koda’s mother, and cannot shift the responsibility onto anyone else and thereby rid himself of it. In fact, Kenai confesses his guilt to Koda, whereupon Koda understandably rejects him, completing Kenai’s Second Fall.

Third is the redefinition of the bear as Shadow figure. The mother bear did not truly embody violence and death, but other qualities that Kenai denied in himself even more strongly: moral maturity, a sense of responsibility, and, as the shaman told him at the outset, love.

Fourth, by becoming a bear, the Shadow figure, Kenai has been put in touch with the positive qualities in himself that the bear truly represented. The bear was Koda’s mother, and Kenai, in his growing love for Koda, has really become more than his figurative “brother.” Kenai has effectively become Koda’s foster parent.

Unexpectedly, Koda’s reconciliation with Kenai comes about because of the two moose, Rutt and Tuke. Up until this point of the movie, I had thought that Rutt and Tuke’s only purpose was that of highly effective comic relief. But this movie is about brothers: Kenai has human brothers as well as an adopted brother, Koda, and argues with all of them. Rutt and Tuke are likewise brothers, constantly squabbling, even at one point literally locking horns, or, more precisely, antlers. This is a parallel that hadn’t really registered to me until their final scene with Koda. Here the two moose hesitatingly acknowledge their fraternal love for each other, with Rutt, the smarter (or, more precisely, less stupid) of the two, speaking of his sense of responsibility for his brother. They then go off, happily bonded, having taught Koda a lesson by their example. Rutt and Tuke have not only served as comedic mirror images for the other brothers in the movie, but ended up proving to be mentor figures as well. Now that was a real surprise. But, now that I think about it, the idea of a seemingly foolish comedic character proving to be a mentor is not unprecedented: think of Yoda’s first scenes in The Empire Strikes Back.

Ultimately, by risking his own life to protect Koda from the vengeful Denahi, thereby demonstrating the degree to which love now rules his personality, Kenai wins his redemption for his past sins. The Northern Lights reappear, as does the spirit of Kenai’s brother, Simka, who can now take the form of his own totem, an eagle signifying wisdom and guidance. The Lights transform Kenai back into human form before the eyes of Denahi and Koda.

But Kenai, surprisingly, does not stay in human form. As I commented last week about the ending of Neverwhere, this may indicate that Campbell was not always right in outlining the final phase of the hero’s journey. According to Campbell, the hero ultimately returns to the normal, everyday world, often giving up things of value that he had gained in his adventure. (Hence, for example, in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Indy must leave the Holy Grail behind and ride off into the sunset with his reunited community of father and friends.) The hero does not remain in the enchanted realm of his adventures.

Brother Bear has it both ways. The hero, Kenai, is transformed back into a human being, thereby leaving behind the enchanted world, in which he can understand the speech of animals, and returning to the human world. But it is made clear that in human form Kenai can no longer communicate with Koda. Feeling responsibility towards his orphaned “little brother,” Kenai chooses to become a bear once more. (To leave Koda behind would be to orphan him once more, thereby repeating his crime.)

At the film’s end Kenai does return to his tribe, receives the archetypal recognition of the hero, and is welcomed back with honor. But he remains a bear. He has transformed his community, which now welcomes bears rather than attacking them, and is in a sense still part of it. But Kenai can no longer speak with them, and, presumably, once the film is over, he and Koda will spend most of their time with Kenai’s new “tribe,” a blissfully happy community of bears depicted earlier, not with the tribe.

Perhaps by letting Kenai remain in the enchanted realm, and his enchanted identity, Brother Bear is acknowledging an odd aspect of past Disney animated features. Characters such as Pinocchio, the Beast, and the Little Mermaid are all transformed into humans at the end of their films, yet Disney nevertheless continues to picture them in the theme parks and merchandising and elsewhere in their untransformed state. It seems that this is how audiences prefer to remember them. And, indeed, at the opening weekend screening of Brother Bear that I attended in New York, at the film’s end, people dressed as Kenai ““ in bear form, not human ““ and Koda came out into the theater to greet and hug the children who were present.

I was surprised that Brother Bear proves to be more openly religious than previous Disney films, in that it depicts the hereafter as a reality within the movie’s world. There is a precedent: Simba’s father appears as a ghost in The Lion King. However, Brother Bear dies much more with the concept. We are told at the outset of the film that the dead live on among the stars. Kenai’s eldest brother and the mother bear both return as spirits. The fact that the dead brother becomes an animal, too ““ an eagle ““ and that the mother bear too lives on as a spirit, links the hereafter to the “enchanted realm” of the animals in the film. The implication is that everyone, man and animal, will continue to exist in the hereafter, and thus life in an eternal enchanted realm awaits everyone. This also gives the story of Brother Bear a cosmic scale, setting the story of one boy, Kenai, against not simply a primeval wilderness, but the world of spirits, who exist among the stars.

I was pleased by Brother Bear‘s framing device: an old man, who at the film’s end is revealed to be Denahi, tells Kenai’s story to a younger generation. Fairy tales are usually set in a distant past, a convention adopted by Star Wars, which sets its futuristic stories “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” In this case, the distant past is Denahi’s youth, and, in a nice touch, this is a time following the Ice Age, when woolly mammoths still existed; apparently, by Denahi’s old age, they became extinct. The framing device gives Kenai’s story even greater significance: now it is the tale of the hero’s journey from irresponsible kid to a figure who inspires myth and legend for subsequent generations ““ and, by extension, for the movie’s audience. As I only realized later, this was also a clever reworking of a standard framing device for Disney animated films: the opening of a storybook at the beginning, and its closing at the film’s end.

Speaking of enduring stories reminds me of ominous news. It is said that Brother Bear is the next to last hand-drawn animated film from Disney; there are supposed to be no more in the planning stages after Home on the Range opens next April. DreamWorks has no more hand-drawn animated films in the works at all. In recent years computer-animated films such as the Disney-Pixar films like Toy Story, Monsters, Inc. and Finding Nemo, and DreamWorks’ Shrek have been immensely profitable blockbusters, while most traditional hand-drawn animated features have been financial disappointments or failures. So, less than a decade after the triumphant commercial success of The Lion King, the powers that be have apparently decided that audiences now prefer the three-dimensional, more realistic look of computer animation, and the hand-drawn animated feature, with its more stylized look, is obsolete.

I still think and hope that the difference between the successful and unsuccessful animated features actually lies in the stories and in the inherent appeal of the characters to the prime audience, families with small children. The various attempts to do animated adventures to appeal to teenage audiences ““ Sinbad, Treasure Planet, Atlantis, The Road to El Dorado ““ flop, while the hand-drawn Lilo & Stitch, centering on a little girl and her rambunctious alien pet ““ is a big success. It also appears that Brother Bear, which centers on a surrogate parent-child relationship, is doing surprisingly well. Whether its success will change corporate attitudes towards hand-drawn animation, I have no idea.

It would be very strange if Brother Bear ends up being the next to last Disney hand-drawn animated film. To think that several generations who have grown up watching Disney animated features will witness the death of an artform. Did any of us, only a handful of years ago, ever think that would happen? Indeed, this is even happening within the long lifetimes of the last animators to work with Walt Disney himself.

This is strange, indeed.

-Copyright 2003 Peter Sanderson

Just as Neil Gaiman turned up on more events and panels at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con than anyone else, so too his works keep showing up in this column. I make no apologies for this: he is incredibly prolific and is surely the most important creative figure in current comics. His output ranges into other media, as well, and in this column I will examine some of his ventures into television and books without comics.

As in my previous column, I can’t deal properly with the themes in these stories unless I talk about their endings, so those who insist on spoiler warnings are hereby put on alert.

NEVERWHERE

It seems odd but very welcome that A&E Home Video has released Neil Gaiman’s 1996 fantasy miniseries for the BBC, Neverwhere, on DVD in the United States. I’m used to associating A&E Home Video with series that I’ve actually seen on the A&E television network. But as far as I know, Neverwhere has never been shown on United States television. In his commentary on the DVDs, Gaiman even talks about the fuzziness of the duped videotapes of Neverwhere that get sold on eB3ay, and how he prefers that look to the crystal clarity of the original version.

Those of us who don’t deal in pirated videos have been waiting a long time to see this series. It was years ago that I bought Gaiman’s Neverwhere novel, which was written after the series was shot, on a trip I made to London before the American edition of the book came out.

It’s interesting that though the series itself is simply titled Neverwhere, A&E is selling the DVD set under the title Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere. Gaiman may not be a household name, but this signals A&E’s awareness of Gaiman’s growing fame, in niche markets, true, but big ones. The set includes a BBC interview with Gaiman about the series and a new commentary track, recorded by Gaiman earlier this year. The track is low on thematic analysis but full of anecdotes about the filming of the series, wittily and pleasantly recounted by Gaiman. More DVD commentary tracks should be this enjoyably comfortable to sit back and listen to.

By coincidence, on the same day I was watching some of the Neverwhere episodes, I also saw Peter Bogdanovich’s 1972 film comedy What’s Up, Doc? on television. This movie, inspired by Howard Hawks’ 1932 screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby, borrows from the earlier film the premise of a male protagonist with unrealized inner potential, who is stuck leading a humdrum life and is engaged to marry the wrong woman, a conventional sort who is (in Hawks) disapproving, or (in Bogdanovich) a nag. In the course of each film, the male protagonist is drawn by an alluring and decidedly unconventional woman into a series of misadventures, during which he shakes off his emotional repressions, proves capable in coping with danger, realizes that his new female guide through this seeming chaos is his proper mate, and parts with his original fianc¿e. It was a surprise to realize that Neverwhere shares this same starting point for its protagonist and follows a similar pattern, but in terms of fantasy adventure, not screwball comedy. Still, perhaps the resemblance between Neverwhere‘s basic plot and comedy is significant. Though death, madness and pain are all involved, Neverwhere is a considerably more optimistic work than much of Endless Nights. In his commentary, Gaiman repeatedly likens Neverwhere to Doctor Who. That seems right, and not just because both are British fantasies done for television on low budgets: Neverwhere is more sophisticated than Doctor Who, but it’s basically an intelligent light entertainment.

The title Neverwhere evokes the name of the enchanted realm of another British fantasy writer, Sir James Barrie’s Neverland, and Neverwhere‘s hero, Richard Mayhew, is something of an adult Lost Boy.

Neverwhere‘s protagonist, Richard Mayhew, has what appears to be the kind of dull office job that creative types abhor, and is engaged to Jessica, a woman who is indeed so wrong that it’s hard to see how they got to the point of planning to marry: she’s controlling, pompous, and utterly contemptuous of the poor and homeless. Hence, when Richard and Jessica come across what appears to be a wounded homeless woman lying on a London sidewalk, Jessica wants to abandon the unfortunate woman, while the kindhearted Richard insists on helping her. It turns out that the wounded woman is Door, a denizen of London Below, a realm whose existence is unsuspected by ordinary Londoners. She has the power to create and open doorways where none existed, and she ends up figuratively serving as Richard’s “door” from his everyday reality into hers.

In Joseph Campbell’s outline of the pattern of all stories of heroes’ journeys, the hero crosses from the world of his normal existence across a threshold into a literally or figuratively enchanted world, wherein his quest takes place. Door’s very name signifies her role as an opener of thresholds, and London Below is a literally enchanted realm, where magic does indeed exist.

Further, London Below is an example of specific kind of enchanted world, which I will dub the Secret World, a realm that exists near us, even around us, but whose existence is unsuspected by the vast majority of people. The Secret World concept can be found in The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dark Shadows, and Marvel’s Doctor Strange: in each case the heroes combat paranormal menaces to defend people ““ individuals, a family, a town, or even the world ““ from threats in or near the world in which they live, but of which most people remain ignorant.

London Below also strikes me as being like an urban, distinctly less beautiful version of the greenwood of Shakespeare’s plays. Here identities may shift, and transformations may occur. It is often a more primitive world, reminiscent of the past, where good and evil are more clearly defined, and where magic and other paranormal forces manifest themselves. L. Frank Baum’s Oz is just such a place, and Neverwhere explicitly alludes to The Wizard of Oz twice.

As the series points out, despite its name, London Below also encompasses rooftops, deserted buildings, even a retired battleship, and is “everywhere.” Nonetheless, as its very name signifies, London Below is primarily an underworld. In fact, much of the story takes place in London’s underground rail system, which Americans would call the subway, but which the British call the tube or, more properly, the London Underground. Hence Richard’s quest in Neverwhere entails a descent into the underworld and confrontations with figures of death (the deadly and amusing assassins Messrs. Croup and Vandermar, who to my mind steal the show, and the dreaded Beast of London, which, as Gaiman complains, was supposed to be played by a wild boar but ended up being incarnated by a rather inoffensive-looking bull).

This underworld even comes complete with a presiding angel in exile. I must say, though, that despite the neat effect of light reflecting from the angel’s costume, I find the angel to be a disappointment. Too often angels in fiction, as here, just seem to be humans with magic abilities. Surely angels, if they exist, are beings of a higher order than humanity, with minds and modes of thinking very different than ours.

London Below includes what is explicitly called a labyrinth, a literal means of picturing the seemingly chaotic twists and turns that a heroic quest may take. (Note that the cover of 1602 #2 likewise pictures a labyrinth. Since mythology’s most famous labyrinth housed the half-man, half-bull Minotaur, perhaps the Beast was well cast, after all.)

I did not spot any allusions to Lewis Carroll in Neverwhere, but, of course, Wonderland is also an underworld, and the looking glass serves as a “door” to another world. Just as Carroll used playing cards and chess pieces as inspirations for characters, so too Gaiman based characters in Neverwhere on a familiar set of preexisting names. Gaiman uses the amusing device of asserting that the colorful names of London Underground stations actually bear significance that is unknown to, or forgotten by, the upper world. Hence, there actually is an Earl and his court associated with the Earl’s Court station, and there are African-British friars based at the station named Blackfriars. (Neverwhere informs us that other cities, including New York, have their own underground communities, although few of the names of New York’s subway stations could spark such imaginative creations.)

I very much like one twist that Gaiman gives the motif of crossing the threshold into the enchanted world. In Neverwhere it seems that at least some of the homeless people on the streets of London are actually members of the London Below community. It is not simply insensitivity that keeps more prosperous Londoners from paying attention to these people, but some form of magic. Richard’s interest in helping the wounded Door apparently signifies that he belongs more to her world than his own. After his initial venture into London Below, Richard returns to the everyday world only to discover that the spell now affects him: people don’t remember or recognize him, or in most cases, even notice him. Having crossed the threshold without completing the quest (aiding Door in avenging her family’s death), Richard cannot now return to his normal life. He therefore returns to London Below and engages in the series of adventures in which his innate heroism emerges and is proven. Only then can he return to London Above and be recognized as a member of its community.

The principal pleasures of watching Neverwhere lie in watching Gaiman, the director, actors, designers and the rest create this other world before our eyes, with its colorful characters and its new perspective on London settings. In terms of creating the proverbial sense of wonder, it’s a success.

My problem with it is that the hero, Richard Mayhew, doesn’t match the grandeur of the concept. He just doesn’t strike me as the potential hero capable of performing the feats assigned to him. To me he never believably rises far above the character at the beginning, who, as noted, could just as easily have been the lead in a comedy. Perhaps the large role plated by Richard’s ally, the Marquis de Calabas, a more credibly capable and commanding figure, inadvertently attests to Richard’s drawbacks as the story’s protagonist. Why is Richard the one able to survive the Blackfriars’ ordeal, and to slay the dreaded moocow ““ I mean, the Beast ““ when so many before him have failed? The story requires that Richard’s adventures bring out his untapped potential, but never see what is so special about him. Moreover, Gaiman’s commentary insists that the continuing allure that London Below has for Richard is not because of the adorable Door. Still, their final scene together made me think that there should have been a romance between them: something felt missing from the story, and that was it.

I have another problem with Neverwhere, as well. According to Joseph Campbell’s heroic monomyth, the hero ultimately returns from the enchanted realm to the normal world from which he came, having gained something valuable from his experience. But perhaps Campbell is wrong, and this does not always happen. Luke Skywalker does not return to live on Tatooine at the end of Star Wars, or of the entire trilogy. In an interview on Turner Classic Movies about The Wizard of Oz, director John Waters disagreed with the ending: why would anyone prefer Kansas to Oz? And indeed, in a later Oz book, creator L. Frank Baum moved Dorothy and her uncle and aunt to Oz permanently. Why return to the place one had to escape from to find one’s true self? There is the saying that one can’t go home again: sometimes the hero should remain in the world wherein he fulfilled his true potential.

So, in the last episode of Neverwhere, Richard returns to London Above. Having completed his quest, Richard is once again recognized by friends and coworkers, and is better off than he was when he started. And yet he is dissatisfied, wants to return to London Below, and in the series’ final moments, succeeds in doing so. The series’ ending thus becomes another “here we go again” moment, as at the end of The Wolves in the Walls.

I see what Gaiman is trying to do with this ending, but it doesn’t work for me. What is really so appealing about London Below? It’s a world of adventure, certainly, where Richard has the opportunity to act heroically, unlike the workaday world. But is it a place to relax, to enjoy life, to meet people who don’t carry weapons, to create art? Even freed of three humanoid embodiments of evil and the Beast, it is a nasty, dismal place with plenty of other dangerous denizens. When, on leaving the darkness of London Below after the villains’ defeat, Richard reemerged into Trafalgar Square, filled, uncharacteristically, I admit, with light, I recalled my own happy memories associated with the place on my London trips. Gosh, what’s so wrong with this? The man who is tired of London Above is tired of life, to amend Dr. Johnson.

Maybe if there was ever a television sequel to Neverwhere or a movie version, I could get to see Gaiman’s rendition of my own favorite name of a London Underground station: Elephant and Castle. I can see why they didn’t have the budget to do this in the TV series (They couldn’t even get a proper Beast, after all). I wonder if the inhabitant of Elephant and Castle would end up looking like the title character in Barry Windsor-Smith’s classic visualization of the Conan story The Tower of the Elephant, eh? (Or maybe what we should see is an adaptation of Neverwhere or sequel done in comics form.)

THE WOLVES IN THE WALLS

Next up in this all-Gaiman column comes the The Wolves in the Walls, a delightfully inventive, literate and amusing book written by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Dave McKean, and published by HarperCollins. This is different from the projects I’ve critiqued above: this is intended as a children’s book. And yet, it’s not all that different, since characteristic Neil Gaiman themes turn up here as well.

That solves the problem of how I, an adult without children of my own, can review a children’s book. I can’t really regain a child’s perspective. I do recall that images can have more power for children than for adults, who have grown more jaded, or more accustomed to dealing with the unpleasant. Hence I suspect that children may find Dave McKean’s human figures, looking like sculpted dolls, eerie and disturbing.

But I can describe how I think the book works thematically.

One of its themes, and a highly appropriate one for a children’s book, is that of a new generation asserting itself. It is the young heroine, Lucy, who hears the sounds coming from the walls, and realizes that there are wolves within. Wolves don’t have a good reputation in fairy tales and hence are good representatives of the dark, threatening Shadow forces.

Lucy knows something that her elders ““ her parents ““ refuse to acknowledge. Both her mother and father (a) deny that there are wolves in the walls, and (B) claim that if the wolves come out of the walls, “it’s all over.” This is, of course, a contradiction that the parents won’t admit to: they deny that the wolves exist,. but are frightened of them nonetheless. The parents are simultaneously in denial and repressing fear. And that fear may be irrational. Lucy wants to know what “it” is, but her parents will not explain. (“It” could symbolize any bad thing that parents will not tell a child about, even if the child senses that “it” exists.) The parents do not question the idea that if the wolves emerge from the walls, “it’s all over,” although Lucy, the member of a new generation, does.

Then again, not everyone in the new generation can see through the elders’ denials and fears. Lucy’s brother says his teacher also says “it’s all over” if the wolves emerge, and the brother does not question this. He just goes along with his elders’ conventional wisdom. The parents and brother all busily try to rationalize the sounds away: it’s mice, or rats, or bats, anything small and easily dealt with.

The wolves finally emerge from the walls when Lucy is asleep. This may suggest that they also represent unruly forces in the subconscious, the Id. That would suggest that the “it” that the parents fear may be a side of Lucy they do not comprehend: her growing independence, perhaps.

With the wolves loose, the other family members panic and flee from the house. Note that Lucy does not flee herself: she is carried off by her frightened father, and McKean portrays her looking and pointing back.

Willing to give in to their fears, the other family members want to move far away. Lucy, on the other hand, wants to recover her beloved pig puppet that was left behind. Is the puppet like a child to which she feels responsibility? Or perhaps like a vulnerable part of herself? That would cast Lucy in the role of a parent, while her actual parents are behaving childishly. By being separated from her home and the pig puppet, Lucy has been rendered incomplete.

In order to rescue the puppet, Lucy enters the wall of her bedroom, where the wolves once lurked. So she is taking over their role, becoming a Shadow figure herself in her subconscious (as represented by the bedroom, the place of dreaming), taking on aspects of the Shadow in order to defeat the greater Shadow.

From the walls she sees a wolf sleeping on her bed, and even wearing her socks. Not only has the wolf usurped her rightful position (and even her bed and clothes), but this suggests that the wolf may indeed represent some aspect of herself.

Lucy rescues and hugs the puppet. Returning to her family, she goes to sleep, cradling the puppet. If the puppet represents a benign aspect of herself, then she is again complete, and can now take action against the Shadow once she awakes, in a sense reborn.

Whereas the other members of her family have given up and plan to live somewhere else, it is Lucy who declares that they should reclaim their house. She has the vitality and drive the older generation (and their follower, her brother) lack. She persuades them to follow her example and enter the walls of the house.

From there Lucy and her family watch the wolves, these terrible Shadow figures, engaged in their dreadful evil: “The wolves were giving a party.” (This is why I instructed you to remember that the intruding revelers in the “Desire” story in Endless Nights, who were also defeated by a plucky female, were likened to wolves.) We are told that some of the wolves had donned the family’s “nicest clothes”; again, this not only designates the wolves as usurpers of the family’s roles, but suggests that they embody the family’s id, not just Lucy’s.

Now, the wolves’ rampage in The Wolves in the Walls is pretty silly compared to the actions of the wolfish strangers in the “Desire” story. One might have expected that, even in a children’s book, wolves, known for swallowing and impersonating grandmothers in one famous fairy tale, would perpetrate something worse than “singing and dancing and telling jokes.” You mean, like a raucous party of adults in a child’s home? One wolf is playing with Lucy’s brother’s videogames. Another wolf is playing her father’s tuba. Again, perhaps the wolves represent the family themselves, taken to excess. These wolves are lords of misrule.

Gaiman and McKean even give us the image of wolves with their mouths smeared with red. It looks like blood, but it turns out to be Lucy’s homemade jam.

I suspect that Gaiman and McKean are making the wolves look silly and funny, specifically in order to undercut their ability to terrify. By treating them humorously, Gaiman and McKean reduce the wolves, initially presented as unspeakably fearsome, to something that the readers and Lucy can feel superior to.

Lucy is the first to rebel against the wolves, picking up a chair leg as a weapon. The other three family members speak the same words of exasperation with the wolves, in unison, following her lead.

The family have taken over the role the wolves once had: they have become the wolves’ Shadow. When the family burst out of the walls, the wolves echo the parents’ and brother’s earlier behavior. The wolves cry out that “It’s all over,” panic and flee the house. The family, for their part, seem to be imitating the wolves: “whooping and singing people songs,” and perhaps acting livelier than they once did. The wolves are scapegoats, permanently expelled from the house: they intend to flee to far off places, as Lucy’s family once did, but the wolves have no Lucy to urge them to stay. If the wolves represented disturbing forces in the family’s subconscious, then those forces have been dealt with permanently.

But I wonder if the story works entirely as Gaiman and McKean presumably intended. McKean makes the wolves look rather funny and appealing. The wolves may have made a mess of the house, but they seemed livelier and a lot more fun than Lucy’s family did. Isn’t fun preferable to stodginess?

The book’s ending likewise may be more ambiguous than its creators may have intended. Like Neverwhere, it ends on a note of “here we go again.” Now Lucy hears elephants in the walls. What are we to make of this? Joseph Campbell contended that one must go on figurative quests all one’s life, continually remaking oneself, lest one become stagnant. So moving from coping with wolves to coping with elephants is rising to the next phase in one’s development. The ending might also suggest that Lucy is trapped in an ironic cycle, and that she will never reach a point of lasting success and peace. But perhaps Gaiman intends this to be a positive cycle: the fun is about to start again, since by now the readers surely have no doubt that Lucy will triumph once more. So the end is the equivalent of getting back onto the roller coaster again for another fun ride.

1602 #3

Finally, I’m continuing to keep up with Gaiman’s ongoing Marvel limited series, 1602, having now read the third issue. I am pleased to see that I was right on target about Magneto, and not pleased to see I was equally right about Gaiman’s conception of Nick Fury, who in issue 3 considers torture as a viable option.

One of our readers has suggested that Virginia Dare is Snowbird. That would certainly account for her blonde-white hair and ability to turn into white animals. But Snowbird, whom John Byrne created for the Canadian superhero team Alpha Flight, is the daughter of an Eskimo goddess and can only transform herself into animals native to Canada. What would she be doing as far south as Virginia? We are told that Virginia Dare can turn into a horse, but horses are not native to Canada. Moreover, every other recognizable classic Marvel character in this series so far is someone who appeared in the 1960s, and was written by Stan Lee. Why would Snowbird be the only exception to the rule?

Meanwhile, there are plenty of small pleasures to be taken in the third issue. There is the scene between the Grand Inquisitor and Brother Tomas, in which the two men threaten one another in quiet, understated, and at first indirect ways, so different from the usual banal ranting of comic book villains. There’s the delightful moment in which the Black Widow is charmed that Matt Murdock thinks her the most dangerous woman alive. Gaiman finds refreshingly different ways for familiar characters to express themselves, as in the Watcher’s opening speech, or Angel’s simple declaration that Javier’s/Xavier’s refuge enables him simply to be himself. I especially like the scene of Javier in prayer. It contrasts him with the hypocritical Grand Inquisitor, but also provides insight into Xavier’s overall role in the X-Men. Even in “normal” continuity, Xavier’s vision makes him a prophet and a preacher who has gathered around him a flock of believers, seeking to bring about a better world. Xavier is a secular saint for the cause of mutant rights.

One might think that in the course of these two long column that I’ve covered all the Neil Gaiman projects that came out recently. But there are, of course, more issues of 1602 to come. And he’s got a story in Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly’s new Little Lit anthology too, itself the subject of a future column. Gaiman writes about the Master of Dreams and yet the man clearly never sleeps.

–Copyright 2003 Peter Sanderson