There seems to be much excitement in some quarters over the fact that in recent years libraries have begun collecting graphic novels, thereby according the comics artform a new measure of cultural respectability. But actually this is not entirely a new development. When I was growing up, the term “graphic novel” had not yet been invented, and yet my local library had a good, solid section devoted to comics. There were collections of editorial cartoons, notably those by the Washington Post‘s great master of the form, Herblock, and books chronicling the history of the comic strip. As I mentioned in a previous column, there was Walt Kelly’s Ten Ever’-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Years with Pogo, which I borrowed again and again. And there was also Jules Feiffer’s landmark book, The Great Comic Book Heroes, which was originally published in 1965, and was returned to print by Fantagraphics in 2002. This was Feiffer’s personal history of the first period of superhero comics, the “Golden Age” that stretched from the debut of Superman in 1938 to the near-disappearance of the genre by 1951.
Why was Feiffer’s book a landmark? As Fantagraphics publisher Gary Groth explains in his foreword, this was “probably the first sustained essay on comic books of the ’40s and ’50s.” Groth is overlooking the work of early comics fans like Roy Thomas and Jerry Bails (and their fanzine Alter Ego) and Don and Maggie Thompson, but Feiffer took an intellectual, analytic approach that went beyond the better writing in early fanzines. Groth claims that “nowadays” comics “is practically a de rigeur subject of University dissertations” but he’s exaggerating; as someone who is trying to get back into academia to write about comics, I should know. Nonetheless, Groth is quite right that “in 1965 no one wrote about comic books, much less superhero comics.” This was even a year before the Batman TV show of the 1960s. By being the first American to write seriously, appreciatively and at length about comic books, Feiffer is the forebear of all American comic book scholars and critics, including Groth and myself.
Moreover, Feiffer’s Great Comic Book Heroes was remarkable in that much of the book consisted of reprints of classic Golden Age superhero stories at a time when DC and Marvel almost never reprinted anything from the 1940s. It was in Feiffer’s book that I first read the very first Joker story, by Bill Finger, Bob Kane and Jerry Robinson, from Batman #1 in 1940, still one of the greatest tales in Batman’s long history. Feiffer’s book gave me my first look at Will Eisner’s The Spirit, although he did not pick one of its best examples; moreover, it seems rather improper that, though Feiffer praises Eisner and The Spirit highly in the book, he never mentions that he used to assist Eisner on the strip, and even wrote installments! There were characters who appeared in the reprint section whom Feiffer did not address in his main text, such as the Spectre, featured in a particularly eerie story that was one of the character’s best. And then, as Feiffer explained in the book, due to the legal settlement between DC and Fawcett, he was only able to reprint one page of Captain Marvel, the page on which Billy Batson was first transformed into his superhero self. There it was, my first glimpse of this famous hero, and the only one I would have until DC itself began publishing the character in the 1970s.
Unfortunately, the new edition of Feiffer’s book does not carry any of the reprints, although there are many apt black-and-white reproductions of covers and panels. Groth argues in his foreword that there is no need to reprint the entire stories since in these “more enlightened times” they are available in hardcover volumes from Marvel and DC. Well, sure, at fifty bucks per volume. I suspect DC and Marvel charge far more for reprint rights nowadays than in 1965, or perhaps refuse to let other publishers reprint their stories at all, so Groth understandably decided to do without them.
Feiffer recognizes that critical analysis of the superhero genre involves analyzing the social and psychological implications of these archetypal characters. Feiffer’s insights into what makes the great characters work are thought-provoking even if one disagrees with him.
It is no great feat to identify the basic appeal of the Clark Kent/Superman duality the way that Feiffer does: that beneath our everyday exterior lies a potential superhero. But Feiffer also offers more intriguing ideas, such as that the timid Clark Kent is actually Superman’s “opinion of the rest of us, a pointed caricature of what we… were really like.” Or even better, that Clark Kent was Superman’s “sacrificial disguise, an act of discreet martyrdom.” Maybe there’s something to this. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby explicitly established that Odin gave Thor his human identity of Don Blake to teach him humility; perhaps Superman chooses to be Clark Kent to keep himself from being carried away with his own power. Feiffer views the classic Superman-Lois-Clark triangle as a reflection of American male misogyny and repression: Clark wanted Lois, who disdained him, while she wanted Superman, who would rescue her but avoid commitment. (This demonstrates just how much healthier the contemporary treatment of Superman and Lois’s relationship is.) Similarly, Feiffer debunks Dr. Frederic Wertham’s notorious accusation that Batman and Robin were gay by pointing out that “Batman and Robin were no more or less queer than were their youngish readers, many of whom palled around together and didn’t trust girls,” and, in short, a reflection of a sexist society.
Feiffer also does something I’ve seen too seldom in comics histories: he compares the Golden Age comics to other aspects of popular culture of their time, notably the movies. Hence, Feiffer points to the cinematic quality of the early Batman, comparing the series to the gritty look of Warner Brothers movies of that period, in contrast to the smoother look of MGM movies – and the rest of DC Comics. Feiffer compares Eisner’s Spirit not just to Warners movies but to Fritz Lang’s German expressionism.
Of course, we have surely all seen writing about comics based on slipshod and scanty research. At a time when there was virtually no reference work on comic books, Feiffer demonstrated a noteworthy knowledge of comics history, identifying such then little-known artists as Craig Flessel and Fred Guardineer. There are but a few errors that stand out: for one, Feiffer somehow remembered Captain Marvel’s friend, the affable talking tiger Mr. Tawky Tawny, as being a villain. Feiffer also credits Bob Kane with actually writing Batman, apparently never having learned that Bill Finger wrote the early stories; since Feiffer ghosted scripts for Eisner, surely it should have occurred to him that Kane may not have been his own writer.
Feiffer manages the trick of recapturing the feelings he had about comics at various times in his youth while simultaneously analyzing those emotions from his then middle-aged perspective. The book even has an ongoing subplot, as Feiffer portrays himself changing from pure fan to amateur cartoonist (who liked “swipes” of other cartoonists’ art) to comics professional (who disdained “swipes”). Feiffer even traces how the young comics pros eventually age into jaded disillusionment; the former fans stopped thinking of comics as their “life’s work” but merely as a “steppingstone,” and amused themselves by mistreating co-workers designated as victims. (This all sounds familiar from what I’ve seen.) Those who have witnessed the dark side of comics as a business will find truth in Feiffer’s dry observation that “the men who had been in charge of our childhood fantasies had become archetypes of the grownups who made us need to have fantasies in the first place.”
Ultimately, Feiffer characterizes superhero comics as “junk,” yet he clearly means this affectionately. Indeed, one might well wonder if Feiffer fully believes they are all “junk,” considering his praise of certain series, including the 1930s-1940s Batman and, above all, of Eisner’s The Spirit. Having read so many Golden Age stories myself, I couldn’t make claims for most of it as enduring art either, again with the major exception of The Spirit. Feiffer concludes by hailing this superhero “junk” as a necessary outlet for the tensions and frustrations of youth, creating a more manageable world where “we were able to roam free. disguised in costume, committing the greatest of feats – and the worst of sins. And, in every instance, getting away with them.” He interestingly argues that such comics derive their power from the fact that they are an “underground” part of culture, not accepted or co-opted by the establishment from whose power they provide psychic relief and escape.
Perhaps best of all, Feiffer wrote his text in a vividly descriptive, witty and incisive, colloquial and yet sophisticated, continually entertaining style that should be the envy of all other comics critics and historians.
Feiffer demonstrates so much insight into the superhero stories of the Golden Age that I keep wondering what he would think of the superhero comics of today. Here’s a person who clearly appreciates the genre, but who hasn’t read many if any new superhero comics for half a century! He presumably hasn’t even read the revolutionary Silver Age Marvel comics of Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, much less more modern landmarks like Dark Knight and Watchmen and Sandman. Would it be possible for Fantagraphics to persuade Feiffer to look at some classic and landmark superhero works from the latter half of the 20th century (He’s been “away” a long time!) and write down what he thinks about them, about what has been gained and what has been lost over the decades? I would certainly be interested in reading what he had to say.
SILVER MINE
Looking at The Silver Age of Comic Book Art, written and designed by Arlen Schumer, and published late last year by Collectors Press, one question immediately leaps to my mind. How did he do this? This is in effect a paperback coffee table book, virtually every page of which is filled with illustrations from DC and Marvel comics of the late 1950s and 1960s, the “Silver Age of Comics.” As a comics historian myself, I’ve been involved with projects – books, film and television – that tried to get the rights to reproduce images owned by Marvel and DC, so I know how hard and how expensive this can be. I can’t say that I know all the ins and outs of Marvel and DC’s policy towards allowing their artwork to be reproduced by others; fan publications, like the TwoMorrows magazines, seem to get away with reproducing lots of old DC and Marvel artwork. (And how can all those DC and Marvel characters appear on the cover of Fantagraphics’ Great Comic Book Heroes?) Then again, I remember hearing Mark Hamill say during the 2003 San Diego Con panel about his Comic Book: The Movie that they could not show any comics character copyrighted by someone other than themselves in the film for more than a certain number of seconds. I also know how much Marvel said it would charge filmmaker Constantine Valhouli to use Marvel artwork in his Sex, Lies and Super Heroes documentary. So how did Arlen Schumer get away with this in his book? (Or has he gotten away with it?)
The Silver Age of Comic Book Art is an effort to showcase and honor the achievements of eight of the greatest artists for Marvel and DC comics from the start of the Silver Age in 1956 to what Schumer designates as its close in 1970: Carmine Infantino, Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby, Gil Kane, Joe Kubert, Gene Colan, Jim Steranko and Neal Adams. According to the December 14, 2003 interview with Schumer in The New York Times, “‘We’ve got to start acknowledging these guys as great American artists.’ he insists. He proposes, for example, a night dedicated to them at the Kennedy Center, ‘How many of these guys have to die before America honors them?'” Well, a night at the Kennedy Center seems rather unrealistic. How many American painters in the fine art world have been honored at the Kennedy Center? Face it, if Jasper Johns hasn’t gotten there yet, Neal Adams isn’t. Schumer is right that these eight Silver Age masters are “great American artists,” and a tribute to them in book form is long overdue. (In fact, DC and Marvel should have done similar books themselves.) But I found Schumer’s book a well-intentioned disappointment.
After reading Schumer’s book, I was reminded of a rule of online etiquette that forbids writing in all capital letters, which comes off like shouting. Even though there’s no actual sound involved, it’s as if it were too loud. Schumer’s book also seems too “loud” to me. In part that’s because so much of the artwork, whether single panels or even portions of panels, is blown up to sizes larger than the images were intended to appear or actually appeared on the original artwork.
Another reason the book seems “loud” is that the vast majority of the images that Schumer reproduces are action scenes – fights, running – or what I will call “power poses,” with the character standing in a pose meant to demonstrate his might: for example, in the chapter about Jack Kirby, there are celebrated shots of Doctor Doom standing triumphantly over the fallen form of the defeated Silver Surfer from Fantastic Four #56, and of Galactus surrounded by energy from Fantastic Four #50.
But there is a lot more to comics artistry than this. For example, I recently had the pleasure of seeing a page of original Kirby artwork showing a very quiet scene. Ben Grimm, the Thing, once again sunk into depression over being trapped in the form of a monster, has disguised most of his grotesque form beneath a hat, overcoat, and other street clothes. He looks sadly and enviously at Johnny and Crystal, who in turn gaze lovingly at one another, with Crystal looking particularly beautiful. With understated melancholy, the Thing walks along and encounters some children, who beam with delight at their hero; Ben performs a simple feat of strength to entertain them, but his sadness is not lifted.
This one page, which probably seems a minor vignette in the context of the rest of the story, nonetheless is a showcase for many of Kirby’s strengths as a comics artist: his ability to convey emotion subtly and effectively through facial expressions and body language, his ability to draw “real” people, ranging from gorgeous leading ladies to appealing (but not saccharine) children, his ability to stage a scene clearly and dramatically, conveying a mood (in this case, a wistful sadness). One would learn none of this from Schumer’s chapter on Kirby.
For that matter, in his introduction to his chapter on Gene Colan, Schumer praises Colan’s ability to give superheroes “a REALISTIC, HUMAN side,” and notes concerning Daredevil that “Colan CONVINCINGLY depicted the SWASHBUCKLING side of the character as well as his CIVILIAN alter ego.” Do we see any examples in this book of Colan’s depictions of Daredevil’s alter ego, Matt Murdock, or of his sensitively human portraits of supporting characters Karen Page or Foggy Nelson? Nope. In another chapter, Schumer devotes a double-page spread to a collage of images to depict Neal Adams’ ability to depict emotions, but most of the images depict emotional extremes; once again, the book is unremittingly loud!
By the way, in quoting Schumer above I put into capital letters the words he puts into bold lettering. This is yet another way in which Schumer’s book seems loud: he so overuses the comics device of emphasizing words by putting them in bold lettering that it becomes annoying.
Throughout the book the text is usually done as comics-style lettering; often quotes from an artist are substituted for the dialogue in reproduced panels. But the text design is also annoying: the lettering can take different sizes on the same page. Often the text, when it is not in balloons, is placed against darkly colored artwork, making it difficult to read.
The Kirby page I mentioned above also demonstrates Kirby’s mastery of storytelling, which is the essence of the comics artform. Will Eisner dubbed the form “sequential art” because it conveys a story through a sequence of pictures. Schumer’s book, on the other hand, concentrates almost entirely on single panels, or cover shots.
Schumer told the Times “I think I’m the first to study these particular artists as an art historian would.” Actually, he doesn’t. Keep in mind that most people in the fine art world regard Silver Age comics art as junk that “real” artists like Roy Lichtenstein can use as raw material. To persuade art scholars that the Silver Age masters should be taken seriously, one would need a book that could make a case for these artists’ talents in composition, in depicting the human figure in movement, in conveying a sense of the artist’s own personality, and so forth. Despite all the quotations from the artists themselves and Schumer’s own commentaries, there is no serious attempt to analyze what makes these artists’ works so great. Real insights come few and far between. There’s one page which parallels a Kirby panel of Captain America fighting with Gil Kane panels from Green Lantern and Captain America, with the heroes in a similar position, showing how Kane absorbed Kirby’s influence. This is the sort of thing I wish that the book did more often. Similarly, Schumer devotes a spread to examples of work by Will Eisner, Wally Wood and Jim Steranko, visually demonstrating how Steranko was influenced by the two earlier masters. And yet there’s so much that goes uncovered in the Steranko chapter. Steranko’s style is this amazing amalgamation of influences from early 20th century surrealism, 1930s pulps, 1940s posters, 1950s and 1960s comics, pop art, op art, cinema and more, but Schumer’s Steranko chapter only scratches the surface of some of these topics.
Perhaps this book’s imagery will catch the attention of some comics readers who aren’t sufficiently aware of the works of the Silver Age masters, but they will not really learn to appreciate these artists until they see actual stories drawn by these men and not just blown up power poses. I don’t think this book would persuade many people who aren’t already comics aficionados that the work of these artists is worth taking seriously. As for comics enthusiasts who already know these great Silver Age artists’ work, I doubt this book will substantially increase their understanding or appreciation of what makes them great.
Schumer’s interview in the Times held one unpleasant surprise. The article states, “Mr. Schumer recalls Art Spiegelman, the creator of Maus, once telling him that paying serious attention to Silver Age comics ‘is akin to studying the signage at Nazi concentration camps. His tongue was in his cheek, but still.'” Well, there’s a case of particularly tasteless hyperbole, even more startling since it comes from a serious writer about the Holocaust. And the warfare between “mainstream” and alternative comics really is tiresome. With few exceptions, such as Mr. Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize, most of American culture disdains the whole comic book medium. We should be cooperating, not squabbling among ourselves.
PETER DVD: COMIC BOOK, THE REVIEW
I was looking for a subtitle for this section on DVD releases and hit upon this pun. Let confusion in comicdom ensue.
Towards the beginning of Warners Animation’s direct-to-video Batman: Mystery of the Batwoman, Detective Harvey Bullock complains about the female title character. First Batman, then Batgirl and now Batwoman, he grumbles; what’s next, he asks – Bathound? I didn’t expect much from this DVD either, and suspected that the main reason Warners had for doing it might have simply been to maintain a trademark on the name “Batwoman.”
But I should have known better. Mystery of the Batwoman was directed and produced by Curt Geda, with a story by Alan Burnett and screenplay by Michael Reaves, all veterans of Warners’ now classic Batman animated series, and Batwoman is up to the standards of its best episodes. What most impressed me was that the title was no misnomer: it really does work as a mystery. The question is who the new vigilante calling herself Batwoman is, and there are numerous candidates.
I thought I had figured it out (based on a similarity between one suspect and the 1950s comics Batwoman, Kathy Kane), but then came up with an alternate solution, which proved to be correct. Kudos, too, to the character designers, who managed to give individualized faces to each of the many female characters, something one does not often see in superhero comics.
Comic convention panels promoting forthcoming projects should be entertaining, but they really should not be more entertaining than the project itself. As you may recall from my San Diego Con reports, the panel for the direct-to-video feature Comic Book: The Movie, directed by Mark Hamill and distributed by Miramax, was loads of fun. The movie, though, is not.
Comic Book: The Movie was mostly shot on location at the 2002 San Diego Comic Con and seems to have relied heavily on improvisation by the various actors playing parts and real life comics pros portraying themselves. It thus reminds me of Christopher Guest’s fictional “documentaries” including Waiting for Guffman (about a small town theater group) Best in Show (about participants in a dog show) and A Mighty Wind (about 1960s-style folk music), all of which deal with an ensemble of eccentric characters sharing a particular interest as they prepare for and participate in some big event. I suppose that Comic Book: The Movie has preempted the subject of comic conventions from Guest’s possible to-do list.
The premise of Comic Book: The Movie is that some Hollywood producers who have no real appreciation of comics (no surprise there) intend to make a movie about Commander Courage, a super hero who has been around since the Golden Age. To placate comics fans, the producers hire Don Swann, a Midwestern English teacher and comics historian, as a consultant. Swann and the producers attend the San Diego Comic Con to promote the forthcoming film, and it is there that Swann discovers that the movie people plan to treat the Commander as a grim and gritty, ultra-violent marauder. Swann decides to subvert the moviemakers’ plans.
So, Don Swann, eh? Is it possible that this name is a reference to Donald Swann of the 1960s British comedy-and-music team of Flanders and Swann? (They passed away long ago, but there are websites devoted to them; look them up.) No, I doubt it, since that kind of homage would suggest that the makers of Comic Book: The Movie had a more sophisticated sense of comedy than they demonstrate here.
Comic Book: The Movie and the Guest films both seem to rely heavily on improvisation, but there’s a big difference: the Guest films are far, far wittier. Only occasionally does Comic Book: The Movie rise to comparable heights. In this regard, I’ll single out Kevin Smith’s scenes portraying himself, although they make me become even more impatient for Smith to volunteer for a fashion makeover on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. I suppose that someday we’ll see him turn up at the Oscars as a presenter wearing a tux; even Woody Allen finally showed up there two years ago.
Another problem with Comic Book: The Movie is that, much as I hate seeing clueless media executives distort great comics characters, I cannot care about Commander Courage. The character was invented for Comic Book: The Movie but nothing we see or hear about him suggests that he was ever more than a vacuous generic super hero. We are shown how the Commander was reworked to suit different trends over the decades, but it only ends up further demonstrating that there was no substance to the character to begin with. In contrast, look at Michael Chabon’s novel The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, for which Chabon devises a super hero, the Escapist, who could credibly have been a rival in popularity to Superman and Batman in the 1940s. That’s because Chabon’s Escapist is a distinctive creation, not an imitation of other characters or an empty suit; Chabon even built the escapist around an archetype (the hero as escape artist, inspired by Houdini) that other superhero creators had ignored (until Jack Kirby created Mister Miracle circa 1970). As for Commander Courage, Mark Evanier, another of the truly funny contributors to the movie, comments that the Commander’s comics were the only ones he was glad that his mother threw out. As far as the movie shows us, Mark’s mom was right.
So if there was nothing of literary or artistic merit in Commander Courage, what are we to think of the movie’s middle-aged hero, Don Swann, who cares so deeply about the character? Well, he comes off as rather a sad figure. At one point Swann talks with the Comic Buyer’s Guide‘s Maggie Thompson (who conveys real star quality!) and tells her how there’s more to comics than super heroes: there’s Walt Kelly’s work and Little Lulu. Uh huh, I certainly agree about Pogo, but basically Swann’s taste in comics is stuck in the 1940s into the 1960s. He and the movie seem to have no interest in the great strides that comics have made over the last quarter century or more; this is a long time. Do you begin to feel sorry for Swann’s students? What can he be teaching them about the great works of English literature when his own taste in comics seems so, well, mundane and juvenile? In one scene Swann complains to the real Hugh Hefner that the comics have replaced the Commander’s boy sidekick with the sexy female “Liberty Lass.” Hefner points out that this is actually an improvement. Hef is right, and what does this say about the seemingly asexual Don Swann?
Then there’s Swann’s Big Surprise when he discovers that the movie turns Commander Courage into this dreadful Image-era killer. Why is he surprised when the movie has already established (as in the Hefner scene) that the comics have already wreaked this change on the character? Comic Book: The Movie makes moviemakers into villains while ignoring the way that the comic book companies and many contemporary comics writers and editors bear blame for the “grim and gritty” versions of traditional characters. (Peter David turns up in the movie as the writer of the violent contemporary Codename: Courage comics. This is miscasting: Peter has too much taste and talent and respect for the genre to write that kind of drivel.)
Then there’s the San Diego Con itself. Those of you who have read my reports on the 2003 Con know that I found it genuinely entertaining, full of intellectual stimulation, and the sort of event to make me proud to be associated with this artform. But yes, I was aware even while I was there that I was looking at the spectacular booths on the convention floor, the well-dressed people as at the Eisner Awards, and the gifted speakers in the auditoriums, and subconsciously editing out of my field of vision the shoddier side of the con. But that side is on full display in this movie. Really, out of 70,000 attendees, only a fraction of one percent wandered about in costume, but in this movie, it seems closer to fifty percent. And in a movie, it’s harder for a viewer to overlook the badly dressed and badly shaped who keep wandering into the frames. Comic Book: The Movie captures the tacky, kitschy side of the San Diego Con.
Is this really good publicity for the Comic-Con? On the basis of this movie, why would anyone want to fly cross-country to attend: you can find shoddy comics cons on the East Coast! Really, the Comic-Con is far more impressive than it looks in this movie, and I’m looking forward to going back. But just as Comic Book: The Movie seems infatuated with the banal juvenilia of Commander Courage, so too is it enthralled with the dorkier side of comic conventions. Comics and its enthusiasts deserve better than this movie.
KING OF THE WORLD
Working on an installment of this column sharpens my attentiveness to information that relates to its topic. So it is that after writing my recent essays on The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and the subject of constructing fictional universes, I happened to catch a segment about The Lord of the Rings on, of all places, PBS’s The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Asked about the reasons for the work’s appeal, the Tolkien expert being interviewed spoke at length about Tolkien’s creation of a highly detailed fictional universe, complete with its own languages.
A bigger surprise awaited me in the Sunday, Jan. 3, 2004 edition of The New York Times Book Review. Here Andrew O’Hehir, the books editor of salon.com, reviews Stephen King’s Wolves of the Calla, the fifth book in King’s long-running The Dark Tower series. This book should already be of interest to comics aficionados since it has illustrations by Swamp Thing co-creator Bernie Wrightson. And, according to O’Hehir, “villains from a Spider-Man comic” turn up in the book. I assume their appearance is brief enough to avoid legal complications, but what are they doing there at all?
O’Hehir states that “The Dark Tower is nothing if not ambitious: it seeks to blend disparate styles of popular narrative, from Arthurian legend to Sergio Leone Western to apocalyptic fiction. More than that, it tries to knit the bulk of King’s fiction together into a single universe (or a set of interlocking universes). . . .” This reminds me of how the great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, in his later s. f. books, sought to link together the continuities of his best known works (the robot stories, the Foundation saga, etc.). Hence characters from King’s The Stand and Salem’s Lot turn up in the Dark Tower books. The reference to “a set of interlocking universes” suggests Michael Moorcock’s Multiverse (the title of DC’s recent comics adaptations of Moorcock stories) and the DC and Marvel Universes, which are more properly called multiverses.
But there’s yet more. O’Hehir continues the previous quotation to explain that King is trying “on some level even to accommodate all stories, known or unknown, into a master narrative that encompasses the whole of creation.” If O’Hehir is correct about this, then King is attempting to go beyond even Alan Moore’s attempts at linking fictions from across the centuries together.
O’Hehir points out that when King accepted the 2003 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters at last fall’s National Book Awards, “he castigated intellectuals for disdaining popular culture and suggested that bridges could be built between literary and popular fiction. For better or worse, The Dark Tower is clearly an attempt to communicate between these realms.” This reminds me of Moore’s comments in his 2003 Locus interview that he enjoyed setting characters from literary fiction and from popular fiction alongside each other in League. And just as League has its annotator in Jess Nevins, O’Hehir plugs Robin Furth for his Dark Tower concordance.
The creation of complex fictional cosmoses, linking large numbers of stories, seems less the obsession of individual writers and fans than a genuine trend in popular culture. What its significance shall prove to be requires further exploration.
COMIC COINCIDENCES
Here’s further proof of how the superhero genre has become ingrained in popular culture, and not just in the United States: I see that the slogan for this year’s Australian Open tennis tournament, which begins January 19, is Super Heroes and Super Tennis. Visiting the Australian open’s web site to find out more, I looked over at its map of the Open’s location in Melbourne and discovered that its principal location, Ron Laver Stadium, is on Batman Avenue. Now there’s a coincidence for you; I wonder if the name of the street inspired the slogan. But let me tell you about another coincidence that’s even stranger.
Sid Caesar, the great comedian of 1950s television, makes a brief appearance in Comic Book: The Movie, and this may not be his only connection to comic books. I came across the Hollywood Reporter‘s Jan. 3, 2004 review of his new book, Caesar’s Hours. The reviewer begins, “Ask a learned comics fan who created Peter Parker and his arachnid alter ego, and the instant reply will be Stan Lee.” (That should be Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, I grumbled learnedly.) But then the reviewer quotes Caesar in his book, “Although I can’t prove it, I suspect Larry Gelbart and Woody Allen may be indirectly responsible for the creation of Spider-Man.” It seems that Gelbart and Allen wrote a sketch in which Caesar was bitten by a termite, causing him to develop termite-like attributes and to devour the furniture.
Oh, well, this is just a colossal coincidence! I suppose it’s quite possible that Lee and Ditko could have watched the show, and that the sketch lodged in their subconscious. I sort of like the idea of Woody Allen helping to inspire the creation of Peter Parker. But no, it’s just a coincidence! (Isn’t it?)
-Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson
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