REGENERATION
DC Comics’ third Generations miniseries is just about to conclude, but it was only recently that the trade paperback of Superman and Batman: Generations 2, reprinting the 2001 series, came out. Like the first series, Generations 2 is written and illustrated by John Byrne, veteran chronicler of DC and Marvel’s heroes, and colored with her characteristic flair and visual appeal by the reliable Trish Mulvihill.
John Byrne and Alan Moore would seem to represent two very different creative points of view towards the superhero genre. (Just ask John, and I’m sure he’ll agree.) But Generations and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen are actually similar projects: Byrne and Moore are each reshaping a large body of previously existing heroic adventure series into his own fictional universe, following rules that he has himself devised.
In part, Byrne’s Generations answers a question that repeatedly gets asked by fans and even some (clueless) pros: why don’t Marvel and DC allow their characters to age in real time? The answer is simple: teenagers who started reading, say, Spider-Man, in 2003 are less likely to want to identify with a Peter Parker who is fifty-six years old. (Johnny Storm, Jean Grey and Scott Summers would all be 56, too. Scary, huh?)
So Marvel and DC’s characters tend to age very, very slowly if at all.
Moreover, those writers and editors who comprehend how “Marvel time” works (and all too many of them don’t) realize that no matter how much time has passed in real life, it has only been seven to ten years (people differ on this question) since the origin of the Fantastic Four. This is true no matter what year it is now. Hence, even though Fantastic Four #1 was published in 1961, the FF’s 2003 adventures must be written as if the fateful space mission that gave them their powers took place in the 1990s. Time in DC Comics works much the same way, or it should when writers and editors pay attention. (Of course, time in comic strips works the same way, and Little Orphan Annie and Charlie Brown will never reach puberty. There are exceptions, notably Gasoline Alley, but in that case its current custodians shy away from killing off the oldest characters, who are now unbelievably ancient.)
Exceptions are made in various cases in which characters cease being published for long periods of time. In John Byrne’s grossly underrated Sensational She-Hulk, a genuinely postmodern comedy-adventure series, the title character knew that she was a character in a comic book. So did her sixtyish friend, Louise “Weezie” Mason, who was formerly the Golden Age masked heroine called the Blonde Phantom. But, as Weezie explained, since no new stories about her had been published for decades, she had aged normally, in contrast to someone like She-Hulk, who stays permanently young.
Here Byrne was probably thinking of characters like the original Justice Society of America from the 1940s: most of those characters’ series were cancelled by 1951. The surviving JSA members, Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, continued appearing in print and remained young. Editor Julius Schwartz and his writers began introducing new versions of some of the JSA members starting with the Silver Age Flash in 1956. When Schwartz, writer Gardner Fox, and artist Carmine Infantino had their new Flash, Barry Allen, meet the original, Jay Garrick, they gave Garrick white hair at his temples: Garrick had aged! Mind you, when Schwartz and Fox did the initial Justice League-Justice Society team-ups, the JSAers were only in their forties (which doesn’t seem so old to me now!); Black Canary, who debuted in the late 1940s, was probably still in her thirties. Nevertheless, the original JSA had now been established as tied specifically to the 1940s and getting older with the passing years; ultimately, this forced DC writers either to kill some of them off or to figure out ways to rejuvenate some of the others.
The strange way in which comic book time works in superhero stories limits the degree of reality with which they can be depicted. In Generations, though, John Byrne creates an intriguing variant on the DC Universe by allowing its characters to age in real time from the points at which they first appeared in print. (This, you may recall, was the premise of an art installation at the Whitney Museum that I covered several months ago. Now it becomes clearer why Mr. Byrne so disliked that exhibit; the artist played the aged superheroes for laughs, whereas Byrne accords his elderly heroes considerably more dignity.)
As the title Generations suggests, this premise enables Byrne to explore how the original superheroes eventually marry and have children, how they relate to their children as the latter grow up, and how those children – or others – become the heroes’ successors, carrying on the traditions they began. In many tribal cultures, older men don masks and costumes to preside over the ceremonies and training that initiate boys into manhood; it makes sense, then, that from The Phantom onward, a continuing theme in superhero comics has been that of older heroes training their proteges. Generations provides an excellent vehicle for Byrne to pursue this idea, and by the second series’ end, he has shown us three Batmen over the course of nearly eighty years, and as many as five Flashes.
(I am pleased to learn from Dr. Coogan’s article that some Wold Newton enthusiasts have embraced Byrne’s Generations series as a means of explaining how Superman and Batman could have had their recorded adventures over the last sixty-plus years in real time: in Batman’s case, the exploits of three generations of Batmen have, as Byrne himself notes in the series, been attributed to a single figure.)
This also seems to be an appropriate theme for a comics writer/artist who has spent three decades in the business. Comic books, like rock music, are thought to be for the young, but as the Baby Boom generation has aged, we have seen many performers in rock who have continued their careers well into middle age. Some of them just recycle oldies, but others continue to write and perform new material, proving that rock can serve as a means of personal expression for people past not only 30 but 40 and 50. With Generations, with its themes concerning parents and their adult children, Byrne has devised one way for comics creators to deal with themes appropriate to midlife in superhero comics while remaining accessible to younger readers as well, who can identify with the father-son connections from the opposite vantage point.
Kurt Busiek’s Astro City also deals in real time and deals occasionally with successors taking over superhero identities from predecessors. But Byrne goes farther in Generations than simply allowing time to take its normal course. Just as Moore’s premise in League is that all Victorian fictions took place in the same fictional reality, one of Byrne’s premises in Generations is that the different styles and tones of the comics in which Superman and Batman appeared from decade to decade are all valid. Hence, for example, the 1970s sequences in Generations involve evocations of psychedelic art, referring to the experiments of comics artists like Neal Adams and Jim Steranko; the events in his 1980s sequences reflect the “grim and gritty” mood of the comics of that period such as Frank Miller’s Dark Knight. It goes further still: Byrne allows the contradictions in the ways in which the characters were presented from decade to decade to stand. Since Superman did not fly when he first appeared in comics in the late 1930s, he cannot, or, more precisely, does not fly in Byrne’s 1939 sequence. However, in the later 1940s DC retrofitted into continuity Superboy, the adventures of Superman as a child, setting them in the 1920s. By then it had been established that Superman could fly, and so could Superboy. Hence, in Generations Superboy in the 1920s can fly, but the 1930s Superman does not. It also makes sense that a Baby Boom comics writer/artist (and his readers in the same generation) would be interested in the changes in the superhero genre over time as a theme.
Though John Byrne probably would not use the term himself, Generations is another postmodern series, characterized as it is by openly presenting itself as a work operating by rules of fiction, not of reality; a work that incorporates features from stories of the past; and a work that regards these past stories with a certain ironic distance (not to disparage them but to show amused and affectionate awareness). (Moore, by the way, has been quoted as acknowledging that League is postmodern.)
The original Generations leapt ahead ten years, for the most part, between chapters; the second series jumps over eleven year gaps from 1942 to 2018. Hence, the chapters in Generations 2 fit into gaps between the chapters in the original series. I wondered if I’d be able to follow the second series without rereading the first. But Byrne does an excellent job of making his continuity sufficiently clear in Generations 2 without relying on text synopses or clunky expository chunks of dialogue; the attentive reader should be able to figure out what he needs to know. There are those at comics companies who claim that the continuity of longrunning series prevents them from understanding new stories, and therefore the continuity should be started over again from scratch, i.e., at the point at which the current Powers That Be took over. In the Generations series Byrne shows how it can and should be done.
My favorite sections of the original Generations series were the sequences set in the 1930s and the far future. The 1930s sequence showed Superman/Clark Kent, Batman/Bruce Wayne and Lois Lane as they were originally conceived by their creators. The characters, as depicted by Byrne, had a restored youthfulness and freshness to them, and he splendidly captured the period look and feel. I loved what Byrne did with Batman and Superman in the far future: they were now virtual immortals (Batman’s youth having been restored), and this seemed such a fitting fate for the two greatest characters in the superhero genre, these two embodiments of the heroic potential of the human spirit, these two classic figures of popular literature who have become enduring mythic figures like King Arthur and Robin Hood. They will go on nearly forever, just as there will continue to be Batman and Superman stories in some storytelling medium for as far into the real world’s future as we can predict.
In the second Generations series I like the way that Byrne works other classic DC characters like the Blackhawks, Abin Sur, Deadman, the Spectre, and even Wonder Woman’s friend Etta Candy, presented as the comic relief figure she was in the 1940s, into his chronology. I like the clever bits that Byrne works with special meaning for those who are knowledgeable about DC’s history. Hence, the Wonder Girl who works with the JSA proves to be a sentient hologram sent by Queen Hippolyta; that’s because Byrne remembers that the original Wonder Girl stories were fantasies about Wonder Woman’s childhood that were created by Hippolyta through an Amazon forebear of CGI effects. Superman’s original evil scientist/archenemy, the Ultra-Humanite, transplants his brain into Lex Luthor’s body. This is Byrne’s acknowledgement of the fact that Luthor supplanted the Ultra-Humanite in the same basic role in the early 1940s. The Generations Supergirl wears a wig in her costumed identity as a joke on the fact that the Silver Age Supergirl wore a wig in her everyday identity. These, of course, are the sort of tricks that Moore uses with Victorian fiction in League, though I doubt that Byrne has even read League. Creative minds are just following similar paths at the same time.
I am pleased that the third Batman, in the mid-1980s, turns ruthless and fanatical and wears an armored costume, evoking storylines if the “grim and gritty” period in which brutal, overreaching pretenders temporarily supplanted Bruce Wayne and Steve Rogers as Batman and Captain America. It was fun to see the gigantic war machine, evoking memories of the War Wheel and such dreadnoughts from Blackhawk, that Byrne creates for his World War II scene. I like seeing Hal Jordan become the white-haired President of the United States. (And I observe once again how Byrne, Frank Miller in The Dark Knight Strikes Again and Alex Ross in JLA: Liberty and Justice all ignore the deaths of Barry Allen and Hal Jordan, recognizing that they are greater versions of Flash and Green Lantern than DC’s current replacements.) I like the way Byrne parallels his generations of heroes by introducing a daughter who takes over the role of her super-villain father. I’m pleased by Byrne’s use of elements of the Superman mythos that he himself discarded in Man of Steel – the Phantom Zone villains, Superboy, Gold Kryptonite – and how well he uses them. At first I was taken aback by the way Byrne uses Alfred’s ghost in Generations 2: I had admired his ambiguity in the first series, in which it was unclear if Alfred’s ghost was real or simply imagined by Bruce Wayne. Still, there’s something to be said for Alfred’s ghost taking the spirit of a deceased Batman to the hereafter; I like the way that serious treatments of heaven (as opposed to Vertigo-style negative revisionism) seem to be resurging in popular culture.
I especially like Byrne’s treatment of three members of the Silver Age Flash’s Rogues Gallery – Grodd, the Weather Wizard, and the original Mirror Master – in his 1960s chapter. I think that the Silver Age Flash stories by John Broome, Gardner Fox, Carmine Infantino and Julius Schwartz in the late 1950s and early to mid-1960s comprised nearly a decade of masterpieces. And for decades subsequent comics writers and editors have proven they have no idea what made them so great. I recently looked in on an issue of Flash guest-starring Captain Cold (issue 204, cover-dated January 2004, written by Geoff Johns), and found the same dreary melodrama the book has now featured for decades (even before Barry’s demise, when he was on trial for murder!). The Silver Age Flash, at its height, was a miraculous combination of brilliant graphic style, inventive science fiction concepts, clever humor and satire, dynamic action and genuine suspense. More recent writers tend to castigate the Silver Age stories as silly: Oh, look, there’s Abra Kadabra turning his enemy the Flash into a puppet! Such clueless critics miss the point that yes, it is intentionally funny, but not in the contemporary heavy-handed way of today’s superhero comics that try to be funny (see DC’s new Plastic Man #1). Flash’s fate is absurd, yes, but it is also visually striking, evoking a sense of wonder, and Broome treats it seriously enough for the situation to be suspenseful (How can Flash get out of this?) and genuinely grotesque and horrific. I don’t know of any current comics writer who can pull this amazing combination off. Byrne doesn’t come up with the dazzlingly amazing tricks that Broome devised for Mirror Master and Weather Wizard. But Byrne’s Rogues Gallery sequence here, like the story about the Golden and Silver Age Flashes he did several years ago, shows he can come closer than most to capturing the look and feel of the classic Silver Age Flash. I vote for Byrne to do a Barry Allen miniseries someday!
What I admire most about Generations 2, though, reminds me of something from my recent reviewing of the episode “Sacrifice and Bliss” from Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth on New York City’s Channel Thirteen. Campbell and interviewer Bill Moyers discussed how parents will defy the basic instinct of self-preservation and sacrifice their own lives to ensure the future of their children. This, ultimately, is the theme of Generations 2, and Byrne dramatizes it both surprisingly and well.
BAUM FOR THE SOUL
Every time that FilmForce’s redoubtable Ken Plume sends me a box of review copies, there is a surprise inside, some book that we had not discussed reviewing and that I had not requested. On this latest occasion, it was L. Frank Baum, Creator of Oz by Katherine M. Rogers, a 2002 biography published in paperback in 2003 by Da Capo Press.
How does Baum tie in to a column about comics and cartoon art? Well, I can find links. Eric Shanower has handsomely illustrated handsome graphic novels about Oz. In the 1970s at Marvel Roy Thomas initiated comics adaptations of Baum’s first three Oz novels in oversized tabloid format; the third, adapting Ozma of Oz, was, unfortunately, never released. At DC in the 1980s Thomas co-created a funny animal superhero series, Captain Carrot, which had a spinoff miniseries, The Oz-Wonderland War; as the latter’s title indicates, Thomas was thinking along the same kind of lines that Alan Moore does in League. Like the drawings of Sir John Tenniel in the Alice books, the work of the original artists for Baum’s Oz books, W. W. Denslow and John R. Neill, could just as easily be classified as illustration or cartoon art.
But I don’t need these excuses to write about Baum. The Baum biography arrived here the day after I completed my previous column about the creation of fictional universes, and Baum fits right in. Since the immense impact of MGM’s 1939 film of The Wizard of Oz has so greatly eclipsed Baum’s original 1900 book, most people are unaware that Baum went on to write fourteen more books about this magical realm. He created scores of characters, and not only filled out the geography of Oz, but even concocted other countries that lay beyond Oz’s encircling, protective “Deadly Desert.”
In my boyhood, several times I perused a book, which, alas, I never bought, which I believe was Jack Snow’s Who’s Who in Oz, which had first been published in 1954. This book was a visual encyclopedia of the many, many characters with whom Baum and later authors of the Oz series populated his fictional reality. In retrospect, my fascination with Snow’s book obviously anticipates my work on the Marvel Universe Handbook and DC’s Who’s Who, though I’d never thought of the connection until I read Rogers’ book.
Katherine M. Rogers’ book, which is both scholarly and pleasantly readable, is billed as a biography and does indeed cover Baum’s life in detail. Baum appears to have been a genuinely good and kind man. It may surprise those who consider the middle-aged to have nothing to contribute to works read by the young, that Baum was a late bloomer who did not truly find his vocation, creating the Oz books, and success until midlife: he was forty-four when he wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. (Similarly, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were in their forties when they were creating the Marvel Universe.) One might have thought that Wizard would have made him wealthy for life, but instead Rogers traces the sad story of Baum’s continual financial struggles through most of his life following Wizard. Baum is yet another example of a creator of enduring works of art who is insufficiently appreciated in his own lifetime. Baum’s repeated attempts to translate his Oz creations into stage shows and silent movies, which he believed would prove more lucrative than his books, even if he diminished his own characters in the process (perhaps through a failure to fully understand what made them work), reminds me of Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon’s biography of Stan Lee, discussed in previous columns. (The 1939 Wizard movie debuted twenty years after Baum’s death.) Considering the hardships and frustrations of his life, Baum’s continuing optimism and good cheer become heroic. (Also, having visited the Hotel del Coronado on San Diego’s Coronado Island, and seen its exhibit claiming that Baum based the Emerald City on the hotel, I am grateful to Rogers for pointing out that Baum wrote Wizard years before he first visited Coronado.)
What interests me more about Rogers’ book, however, is that it is really a critical biography of Baum that examines his work as a writer, book by book. Rogers is justifiably shocked that Baum’s work has been so long underrated by critics and scholars; only recently, she says, have public libraries begun collecting his books in adequate numbers. It strikes me that this parallels the situation of graphic novels, and perhaps for similar reasons. Rogers thinks the problem is Baum’s relatively plain narrative voice, which, as she points out, is actually key to his realistic presentation of a fantasy world. I think that, as with comics, too many people in the academic and critical establishment fail to understand how archetypal characters and story lines in fantasy can serve as metaphors with psychological meaning and depth.
Rogers is excellent at illuminating the themes of Baum’s Oz books: his satires on human pretensions, fixations and self-delusions, which she compares to the eccentric characters of Dickens and the “humorous” characters of playwrights of Shakespeare’s time; Baum’s idealization of the virtues of an already vanishing rural America; his socialist ideas about economics and, in seeming contrast, his advocacy of the entrepreneurial spirit; and even his philosophical inquiries into such matters as the nature of the human soul. She is particularly good at drawing attention to Baum’s strong feminist themes. Despite his satire on suffragettes through General Jinjur and her all-girl army in The Land of Oz, which even Rogers finds hard to explain, Baum presented heroic females, most prominently Dorothy, Ozma and Glinda, who are brave, sensible, capable – and, in Ozma and Glinda’s cases, highly formidable – more so, in fact, than their male colleagues. Rogers compares Dorothy’s common sense attitude to her forebear, Lewis Carroll’s Alice. When Rogers points out how often Baum opposes heroines such as Dorothy or Ozma to male figures of violence and oppression, like the Nome King, I started thinking of Dorothy as a predecessor to such later female opponents of male aggression as Wonder Woman and Buffy.
As for Baum’s skill at universe-building, Rogers writes that “A fantasy world must be convincing as well as inventive. . . Oz is believable. First of all, Baum wrote as if he believed in it himself. . . Second, his fantasy world is filled with familiar details from actual everyday life – a bag of tools, the job of washing dishes, a terrier that loves to bark. Finally, his world is internally logical and consistent. . . The Scarecrow and the Patchwork Girl are magically alive and highly intelligent, but their ability to manipulate is limited by their clumsy stuffed fingers. The air of reality given by homely details and attention to logic makes the Oz stories more satisfying than traditional fairy tales. Moreover, the Oz protagonists are neither victims nor princesses” – well, Ozma becomes one, actually – “but normal children who confront magical situations just as readers imagine they would do themselves.” (p. 244) This reminds me of the way that J.K. Rowling crafts her fantasy world in the Harry Potter books; she may be the L. Frank Baum of our time, albeit one who succeeded in going from dire financial straits to becoming inconceivably rich. (Odd, isn’t it, that Baum, a man, makes girls the heroes of his books, whereas Rowling, a woman, makes her protagonist a boy? Perhaps some writers find it easier to project ideals of heroism into “the Other,” a figure unlike themselves.) And the three rules that Rogers establishes at the beginning of that paragraph would serve other creators or caretakers of fictional realities well as guides.
THE DICKENS YOU SAY
In my Christmas column I discussed various adaptations of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol into cartoon art. The most recent graphic novel by Will Eisner, the great pioneer of this form in America, has nothing to do with Christmas but everything to do with Charles Dickens and the dark side of his work. This is Eisner’s Fagin the Jew, published last fall by Doubleday, which provides a backstory for the notorious villain from Oliver Twist and then retells the events of Oliver Twist from his perspective. Through this means Eisner contends with the disturbing paradox that one of the English language’s greatest authors, known for the humanity and compassion in his works, nonetheless perpetrated an anti-Semitic stereotype in one of his best loved novels.
Eisner has done considerable research on Dickens and on the Jewish population of London in his time. The question of how anti-Semitic Dickens was proves to be surprisingly complicated. In his afterword Eisner finds that Dickens made casual anti-Semitic slurs in his conversations and letters but notes that these “were common in the language of the day.” In other words, this was part of the conventional thinking of the time. On the other hand, Eisner goes on, Dickens publicly condemned anti-Semitic persecution and advocated Jewish civil rights. Moreover, Dickens even seemed to have regrets about continually referring to Fagin as “the Jew” (as if he symbolized his entire race) in Oliver Twist and deleted most of the references to his ethnicity in a later edition. Eisner points out that nevertheless modern editions used today still contain the ethnic references Dickens wanted to delete; that raises the ominous question of just why modern editors seek to retain the anti-Semitic implications that Dickens himself wanted to remove.
Eisner seems perhaps even more disturbed by the original illustrations for Oliver Twist than by the text: George Cruikshank, one of those artists who straddles a borderline between illustration and cartooning, literally drew on anti-Semitic stereotyping to create what Eisner terms “an unquestionable example of visual defamation in classic literature.”
Eisner concludes that Dickens “never intended to defame the Jewish people, but by referring to Fagin as ‘the Jew’ throughout the book, he abetted the prejudice against them.” Eisner then declares, “I challenge Charles Dickens and his illustrator, George Cruikshank, for their description and delineation of Fagin as a classic stereotypical Jew. I believe this depiction was based on ill-considered evidence, imitation, and popular ignorance.”
Interestingly, Eisner demonstrates from his own experience how easy it can be to engage in the conventional ethnic and racial stereotyping of one’s own time. In his foreword Eisner writes about his creation of Ebony, the young African-American sidekick in his classic strip The Spirit in the 1940s. Though Eisner “became very fond of Ebony and sought to make him as real as I imagined him,” he eventually came to realize that “I was nonetheless feeding a racial prejudice with this stereotype image.” (Oddly, Eisner seems to think that the problem with Ebony was his stereotypical dialect; a greater cause for alarm was surely the visual caricaturing of Ebony. Referring later in his foreword to past pictorial depictions of Fagin, Eisner rightly calls them examples of “visual defamation.” However well intended, the visual caricaturing of Ebony fits that description, too.)
Moreover, Eisner eventually realized the parallel between the stereotyping of African-Americans and that of his own ethnic group: he writes in his foreword, “I never recognized that my rendering of Ebony, when viewed historically, was in conflict with the rage I felt when I saw anti-Semitism in art and literature.”
Eisner then goes on to make a rather strangely worded argument. “I concluded that there was ‘bad’ stereotype and ‘good’ stereotype; intention was the key.” and he also asserts that “stereotype is an essential tool in the language of graphic storytelling.”
Well, first, Eisner’s own experience with Ebony demonstrates that the road to negative stereotyping can be paved with good intentions; Dickens may have sincerely but wrongly thought he was merely delineating facts when he perpetrated the stereotyping of Fagin.
Further, I think that Eisner is badly misusing the word “stereotype,” which inevitably carries negative connotations. Here is a dictionary definition of the word: “A conventional, formulaic, and oversimplified conception, opinion, or image.” By this definition, even a positive stereotype is something that creative artists should avoid. Art should go beyond formula, conventional thinking, and oversimplification. In his afterword Eisner calls Sherlock Holmes an “enduring stereotype.” I think that the word that Eisner should be using for such a character is “archetype,” which my same dictionary defines as “an ideal example of a type; quintessence.” That’s what I think Eisner is really advocating, and that is what fits the comics medium, which casts archetypal characters into visual iconography.
In his foreword, Eisner states that his intention in this book is “to undertake a truer portrait of Fagin” than the one Dickens and Cruikshank presented. Now that raises an interesting philosophical question. Can one writer have a “truer” vision of a character than the writer who created him?
Eisner is not the first person to seek to rehabilitate Fagin’s image. There is Lionel Bart’s classic musical Oliver!, which was turned into an Oscar-winning film in 1968, which turns Fagin into a charming, likable rogue who wins the audience’s sympathies with memorable songs and is allowed to get away at the end, avoiding the death by hanging that Dickens decreed for him in the novel.
The device of inventing a backstory for a “classic” villain to explain his or her motivations is also not new. Fagin the Jew has been compared in one review to John Gardner’s novel Grendel, which is the epic Beowulf told from the perspective of the “monster” he battles. Then there is Wicked, a novel that has become a Broadway musical, which wins sympathy for the Wicked Witch of the West by showing the prejudice that she faced in her younger days.
Inevitably, though, Eisner’s mission in Fagin the Jew reminds me of modern directors’ interpretations of an even more dire and disturbing case of a great author whose work is scarred by anti-Semitism: Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. In the productions I’ve seen, directors and actors stress that Shylock is a tragic figure, understandably (though not justifiably) driven by the prejudice around him to take extreme measures, and various Christian characters come off as repellently bigoted through their contempt for him. There is indeed evidence in the play’s text for this more sympathetic view of Shylock. But a friend of mine who is working on a book about Merchant has argued that despite all this, the play’s treatment of Shylock is still anti-Semitic. So Eisner faces a similarly difficult task in trying to devise a more enlightened depiction of Fagin. Whatever past Eisner invents for Fagin, he is still stuck with the actions Dickens gave him in Oliver Twist.
The first roughly fifty pages of Fagin the Jew are the most interesting portion of the book, as Eisner places the young Fagin within his extensively researched portrait of Jewish society in early 19th century London. They are divided into the educated, prosperous Sephardim, originally from Spain and Portugal, and the mostly illiterate and impoverished Ashkenazim, from Germany and middle Europe. Many of the first group assimilate to the extent of even raising their children as Christians; in Eisner’s story, Fagin is a member of the second group, who do not forsake their religion. Eisner shows how through a combination of anti-Semitism and sheer misfortune, young Fagin is thwarted time and again in his attempts to make an honest success of himself and ends up turning to crime. Eisner’s dialogue and characterizations are broad and lacking in variety compared to Dickens (foreshadowing his problem in the next section of the book), but this part of his graphic novel has a Dickensian feel nonetheless. The young Fagin’s peripatetic journey through life, suffering through the cruelty of others and the twists of fate, parallel the unhappy life of Oliver himself.
Fagin, Eisner declares in his foreword, “is not an adaptation of Oliver Twist!” But on page 53 that is exactly what it becomes, a retelling of the events of Dickens’ novel, and it is here that the graphic novel fails. This is a considerable and surprising disappointment, inasmuch as Eisner has so much in common with Dickens: an ability to portray mood and atmosphere, an interest in portraying life within a major city, empathy with the downtrodden and poor, skill at evocative caricature, and a strong theatrical sense.
Now, Dickens works within the conventions of melodrama, and even of fairy tale (for example, with his orphaned hero Oliver and the mystery of his true identity) and transcends them through the genius in which he handles them. In lesser hands, the character types and plot devices he uses could seem like empty cliches. (This is likewise the difference between the best comics authors who work in genres like superhero action and the many lesser writers who turn out run of the mill stuff.) But Dickens transforms his archetypal characters into vivid, colorfully larger than life, memorable personalities. In large part he does this through the rich descriptions of his narrator’s voice. Dickens also does it through his immense talent for dialogue. (Regular readers of this column should recall my discussion of how much Stan Lee’s dialogue contributed to the characterizations even when the stories were principally plotted by his artists.)
Who can forget the plaintive note sounded by Oliver early in the book when he begs for more food at the orphanage, “Please, sir, I want some more.” It’s a simple phrase, far different than, say, the elaborate bombast of Micawber or ranting of Scrooge, but it so memorably combines the child’s desperate need, timidity, politeness, determination and innocence.
In Eisner’s version what Oliver says instead is “Please, Ma’am, er. . . more?” It’s as if he were auditioning for a movie titled Dude, Where’s My Broth?
And it’s the same throughout the next forty-two pages. Here’s Mr. Bumble, who in Dickens’ hands is the very embodiment of self-important, self-satisfied petty authority, and is renowned for his peculiar insight into a husband’s legal responsibility for his wife (“The law is a ass.”). In Eisner’s version he is merely a colorless, forgettable bureaucrat. In Dickens’ book the twists (so to speak) and turns of the story, become gripping because one cares about the characters involved, and because Dickens is so skilled at creating suspense through his narration. But this comics version finds no storytelling equivalent: instead it’s like hearing rusty plot mechanisms clanking into place.
But look at another example: Sikes’ murder of Nancy. Dickens made personal appearances in which he gave dramatic readings of selections from his works, and his performance of Nancy’s murder is said to have been harrowing. Nancy in the comics version is no more than a one-dimensional bug-eyed victim. Here, however, is the single best part of this section of Fagin, for in Eisner’s version Fagin witnesses the murder. Instead of showing Nancy at the moment of her death, Eisner shows us Fagin’s reaction to it. The look on Fagin’s face, his stance and gestures, amid the utter blackness of the background, with Sikes’ dog, somehow looking shocked without anthropomorphism, genuinely conveys the horror of the scene. It is the one part of this retelling of Oliver Twist that rises to the original novel’s greatness.
But then Eisner strongly recovers with his scenes of Fagin in his prison cell, awaiting his execution. I was startled by Eisner’s treatment of Oliver, who visits Fagin there: innocent little Oliver is so wrapped up in his own problems that he is at first utterly insensitive to the obvious anguish of Fagin on the brink of death; so this version of Oliver is not the angel that we thought. Eisner’s novel reaches its dramatic pinnacle when Fagin is next confronted by the shadowy figure of Dickens himself, like a dark god who had created Fagin and has now damned him. Eisner is far more harsh towards Dickens in this scene than he is in the book’s text pieces. Physically unable to stand, Fagin nonetheless spiritually rises to a great height, arguing that his fate should not be used to slander an entire race. Fagin finally thunders, “A Jew is not Fagin any more than a Gentile is Sikes!” forcing Dickens to retreat, bested in argument.
And then there is an epilogue, set years later, in which the adult Oliver has married Fagin’s granddaughter; how they learned she was related to Fagin is a tale of unlikely coincidences and hidden identities, complete with a watch that solves the mystery, of the sort that Dickens himself would concoct. The graphic novel then ends with the adult Oliver happily united with Fagin’s granddaughter as the smiling spirit of Fagin himself beams down on them from above. And this was a happy ending I could not go along with.
That’s because I think that Eisner’s recasting of Fagin’s story ignores one of Dickens’ primary themes, both in Oliver Twist and in other works: the mistreatment of children. Even if we accept the idea that Fagin had no choice but to turn to crime, he mentored – and exploited – children in crime as well. Like the musical, Eisner’s graphic novel presents Fagin as a kindly father figure towards the boys he tutors in thievery. There are plenty of stories, in print, movies and TV, that portray clever, charming thieves for the audience’s amusement; being robbed in real life is decidedly unpleasant, and I doubt that honorable thieves exist in reality. Dickens took crime much more seriously, and his version of Fagin is a moral corrupter and exploiter of children. Oliver Twist is a saga of one boy’s continual mistreatment by cruel adults in a harsh world. Fagin is hardly the only culprit: there are plenty of others, all of whom are WASPs – among them, Mr. and Mrs. Bumble, the Sowerberrys, Noah Claypole, and worst of all, Bill Sikes. In Dickens’ novel, Fagin’s quarters are not a refuge for Oliver, but a prison he must escape; Dickens may make the Artful Dodger into a likable scoundrel, but he is still horrified at the idea of an innocent child like Oliver being turned to crime. When Sikes abducts Oliver from the Brownlow home, it is as if he has fallen back from heaven to hell.
After all, in Eisner’s own backstory for Fagin, he too was an innocent who was led into crime by adults. Fagin is really perpetrating on Oliver the same kind of mistreatment that was perpetrated on himself in his youth. But that doesn’t excuse it. Nor does Eisner portray Fagin’s own corrupters sympathetically.
Dickens’ great wrong was in fostering anti-Semitic prejudices through Fagin, whether intentionally or not. In making clear that Fagin should not be used to negatively stereotype all Jews, Eisner’s Fagin the Jew is entirely successful. But in attempting to excuse Fagin’s actions as an individual, it just doesn’t work for me.
AULD LANG SYNE
In real life we’ve just made the transition from 2003 to 2004, but in Neil Gaiman’s 1602 series, the new year has yet to begin. As regular readers know, I’m examining 1602 issue by issue, as each new installment arrives.
Issue 5 does not move the story forward or explore the complexity of its world as much as previous installments did, although this chapter ends on the brink of doing both, through what appears to be the start of an encounter between Doctor Strange and the Watcher: issue 6, then, will more than make up for this issue’s comparative lack of revelations.
Not until my second reading of issue 6 did I spot that the knight assisting Fury in the opening pages has a red mustache and is named “Dougan”: it’s Dum Dum Dugan, from the Sgt. Fury and SHIELD series. On the other hand, on my first reading, mental bells sounded when Strange, meeting with the mysterious old man who had been transporting that equally mysterious weapon, called him “Donal.” That’s close to “Donald,” so can this somehow be an aged version of Don Blake, the circa-1960s human identity of Thor? (“Donal” and “Donald” are also close to “Donner,” another name for Thor – indeed, the one used in Wagner’s Ring cycle – but I suspect that is merely coincidental.) So then is the mysterious Templar treasure really Thor’s uru hammer, magically disguised as a walking stick (accounting for the fact that Doom has overlooked it)? I suspect I’m still heading down the wrong path in figuring out what the Templar treasure is.
How wonderful to have a mystery in a superhero comic that actually is a mystery. So often nowadays comics writers are so set on the goal of writing multi-issue arcs that can be packaged as trade paperbacks that they seem unconcerned that these stories must also work as individual installments in the monthly comics. In contrast, Gaiman’s various mysteries in 1602 serve as hooks to induce the reader to come back the next month for the next issue.
Unexpectedly, Fagin the Jew actually gave me an insight into the 1602 series. In his afterword, Will Eisner notes that the Sephardim fled Portugal and Spain to escape from the Spanish Inquisition. Reading that, I thought of how in 1602 Gaiman has reconceived the X-Men’s Professor Charles Xavier as Carlos Javier, a religious man who shelters his mutant students from persecution by the Spanish Inquisition. Can Gaiman have had the historical persecution of Jews by the Inquisition in mind? This would certainly tie in with the subtext of the anti-mutant hatred in X-Men as a metaphor for anti-Semitism, which was made more explicit when Chris Claremont established that Magneto was a survivor of Auschwitz, a notion adopted by the X-Men movies. Come to think of it, Claremont was doing the same thing as Eisner with Fagin’s background, or modern directors of The Merchant of Venice with Shylock’s: showing how anti-Semitic persecution can shape the personality of one of its victims. I wonder if Ian McKellen, the Shakespearean actor who plays Magneto, sees the connection with Shylock.)
I like the treatment of Fury this issue: the Elizabethan Fury here proves to be a man of strong moral principles, and, though he may speak in a more refined manner than the present day version, his refusal to believe in Strange’s magic mirrors the street-smart practicality of the Nick Fury who grew up in a Depression-era New York City slum. It’s fun seeing the Toad turn up as Magneto’s man at the Vatican, though his pointy tongue is a post-1960s addition to the character. (And is 1602‘s Magneto with a long white beard an in-joke about McKellen, as if this version of Magneto looks more like Gandalf?) “Master Grey” is finally called “Jean,” but this is no surprise. (So Jean is seemingly dead again in the present-day X-Books, but a living Jean has been transported back to 1602 in this series? Perhaps the tangles of contemporary continuity explain why Gaiman and John Byrne and Alex Ross seem to prefer to create their own alternate timelines/realities in which they don’t have to deal with what’s going on in the “main” titles.) I’m also pleased that towards the end of this issue Fury, Strange and Javier agree that they must do the right thing, even if it means becoming outlaws according to King James’s laws; the superhero as outcast is one of 1960s Marvel’s prime innovations.
The centerpiece of this issue is 1602‘s reworking of the Fantastic Four’s origin, with what seems a variation on the Aurora Borealis substituting for the cosmic radiation storm that granted them their powers. It’s also fun to see Andy Kubert’s variation on the cover of Fantastic Four #1; there have been so many homages to the cover, but this one, through substituting a dragon-like creature for the monster, has a period feel that makes it stand out. I like the fact that instead of establishing a Baxter Building analogue in London, Gaiman states that the 1602 F.F. continues to travel the world, thereby emphasizing that the Lee-Kirby F.F. were explorers and adventurers. It seems, if I’m interpreting the art correctly, as if, centuries before Lee and Kirby’s F.F. uniforms made of “unstable molecules,” the Storm siblings’ powers require that they go into action nude, though, oddly, the 1602 Reed’s clothing appears to stretch with him. As for the F.F.’s perennial archenemy, Doom, thundering that “There is no right, no wrong. There is only von Doom,” seems to be anticipating Nietzche’s concept of the ubermensch.
The cover image of the flying ship, which takes off in issue 5’s final pages within, is a lovely idea. Is it intended to be reminiscent of the flying pirate ship at the end of Peter Pan, as seen in the Disney animated film and the new live action version? Or is it an attempt to render the modern day X-Men’s airship in 17th century terms? Or, more likely, is it both at once?
-Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson
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