You might think that Kyle Baker’s Undercover Genie: The Irreverent Conjurings of an Illustrative Aladdin (from DC/Vertigo, edited by the redoubtable Steve Bunche) is another of his series of graphic novels. Instead, it’s a wonderfully witty and artistically dazzling anthology of caricatures, satiric illustrations, one-page strips, and even some short character-driven short stories, many originally published in venues where one is unused to finding the work of mainstream comic book artists: New York Magazine, The New Yorker, The Village Voice, Esquire, and even The New York Times Sunday Magazine.
In his introduction Baker notes that comic book professionals claim that his work is “uncommercial.” He points out that he did most of the work in Undercover Genie in the 1990s, which other comics pros think of as “a ‘Golden Era,’ when books were selling in the millions and everyone was getting rich.” (Well, not everyone, as I know from personal experience, and the gravy train came to a sudden halt in the mid-1990s.)
“Throughout this ‘Golden Era’ I couldn’t get much work in comic books,” Baker recalls; unwilling to do “McFarlane ripoffs,” Baker says, “I couldn’t get a comic book published, except for a couple books I did for free. . . .” (I know what only being offered work for free is like, too.)
So, instead Baker did cartoons for markets other than the comic book industry: for advertising, magazines, and more, and “had to content myself with huge paychecks and an audience of millions.”
Well, I can certainly understand that, after having his work dismissed by the comic book industry, Baker gives in to the temptation to gloat. Considering the continuing high unemployment figures and the recent devastation in the comic book business, though, boasting about one’s wealth does seem a wee bit tasteless, though.
Baker attributes his success to doing what he says animation does, “continually updating styles and imitating the most successful current hits and trends,” whereas he claims comic books have remained “more or less stylistically unchanged for over a century.” Well, comic book art styles certainly change, and more quickly than ever (see the review of the Kurt Schaffenberger book below).
I think comparing Baker’s work to the typical contemporary superhero artist’s is really a proverbial case of apples and oranges. Baker is on target when he points out that “the primary subject matter” of comic books remains super heroes (in America, anyway). Unlike him, I don’t think the genre itself is dated; it has evolved with the times. But what I think really makes Baker stand out in American comic books is that he is working in an area that most other comic book artists and writers ignore: humor.
The more I think about that, the stranger it seems: how can there be so few funny works being produced in the “funny book” medium? While the comic strip narrowed its scope in recent decades, so that the field is dominated by humor strips and there are relatively few adventure or dramatic strips, the opposite happened in American comic books, so that there are few humor books and the vast majority of books, either “mainstream” or alternative, deal in adventure or other forms of dramatic narrative. And yet the American public has always seemed to prefer humorous material in the cartoon form. How different would the American comic business be if it had produced a far greater range of comedy material over the years than just MAD and various ripoffs thereof? (A brief digression: I was delighted to see a recent issue of MAD with parody superheroes designed by such notables as Frank Miller and John Byrne.)
So Undercover Genie is a wonderful compendium of the kind of things that Baker does well and most other comic book artists can’t do: caricatures of celebrities and comedic styles of cartooning.
Most importantly, Baker is an insightful satirical writer, who in this collection addresses a range of subjects with a subtlety and sense of irony that proves more intelligently penetrating than the broad, obvious approach of MAD-style humor comics. Baker deals perceptively with self-delusion in romance, whether born of sexual insecurity or macho arrogance; superficial notions of coolness that turn out to be no more than shallow, conformist group-think; and self-destructive, even suicidal modes of thought.
Baker also observes how two people can talk to – and past – one another, neither quite able to see the other person’s viewpoint. My favorite story in the collection is his account of his last conversation with the late Jack Abel, longtime comics inker whom I knew slightly myself. Baker sympathetically tries to cheer Abel up by telling him how well he’s recovered from a stroke; Abel in response tries to convey his anger over actually having gone through such a horrific experience and still suffering ill effects. Neither can bring the other over to his point of view, yet each still reaches out to the other as a friend. This story demonstrates that Baker is a satirist but no cynic: he can be touching, as well.
But as much as I liked Undercover Genie, Baker’s work on DC’s new Plastic Man #1 didn’t work for me at all. Then again, I don’t think anyone’s gotten Plastic Man right since DC acquired the rights to the character. In fact, DC’s recent Plastic Man 80-Page Giant #1, which reprints Plastic Man stories from the 1940s into the 1970s, demonstrates exactly that point, as well as what seems the nearly ubiquitous difficulties that superhero writers and artists seem to have in doing comedy.
I think the problem lies in violating some basic principles of comedy. First there’s the method of pairing the comedian with a straight man (using the latter term in a non-sexual sense, I suppose I should add). In Federico Fellini’s movie The Clowns he divides clowns into the “white clowns,” who officiously and pompously embody authority, and the prankster clowns who rebel against propriety and undercut their seriousness. Then there’s a rule that one often hears or reads in interviews with directors and actors: don’t play comedy as if your character knows that he or she is funny; just perform the part as if you believe in the seriousness of what you’re doing, and the dialogue and situations will come off as funny.
In Baker’s Plastic Man #1 virtually everyone is drawn in a heavily caricatured manner all the time; it is a relief when, at moments, Plastic Man resembles a real human being. There’s no sense of reality or seriousness for the humor to react against.
The artwork for the 1960s and 1970s stories in the Plastic Man Giant achieves more of an even balance between realism and comedic exaggeration: the Gil Kane artwork for the 1966 story is especially handsome. But the problem is that everyone in these stories acts silly, from Plastic Man himself to absurd villains like “Dr. Dome.” (One might think that Dr. Dome would be written and drawn as a parody of Marvel’s Dr. Doom, but no. Moreover, Dr. Dome has an ally named “Professor X,” and yet there are no X-Men jokes! In contrast, E. Nelson Bridwell’s wonderful 1960s comedy series The Inferior Five did not shy away from satirizing those new upstart superheroes at Marvel.) Not one of the characters in these two stories has a personality with any recognizable reality to it.
Now, the original Plastic Man stories of the Golden Age, written and drawn by the late Jack Cole, are now acknowledged classics. DC has published Archive editions collecting Cole Plastic Man stories, and Art Spiegelman wrote an essay on the subject for The New Yorker that he later expanded into a book, Jack Cole and Plastic Man, published by Chronicle Books. (Yes, DC thinks highly of Cole’s work now, but the part of Spiegelman’s article that most struck me was his account of how Cole went to DC looking for work in the 1950s and was shown the door. As noted elsewhere in this column, this sort of thing happens over and over and over.) How did Cole make the Plastic Man concept work when so many other people attempting to follow in his footsteps haven’t?
The Plastic Man giant reprints the 1940s stories in which Cole introduced Plastic Man and his sidekick, Woozy Winks, and they both get the balance between seriousness and comedy right. In Cole’s origin for Plastic Man (from Police Comics #1 in 1941), the hero starts out as a hardened criminal named Eel O’Brian. During a robbery at a chemical works, O’Brian is shot and acid from a vat gets into his wound. (Seems something like the Joker’s origin,. doesn’t it?) O’Bria n is abandoned by his criminal partners, all fair-weather friends, staggers into the countryside, and collapses. His symbolic death is followed by a symbolic resurrection: he awakes in the sunlit mountain retreat of a community of monks.
Significantly, O’Brian initially thinks he is in heaven. O’Brian is astonished, grateful and moved that the monks have saved his life: he makes it clear that he had turned to crime because he had lost faith in mankind since he was orphaned as a child. (As we have seen, even his criminal cohorts betrayed him.) Discovering that the acid has somehow transformed him, giving him stretching powers, O’Brian decides to use them to atone for his past by fighting crime.
Now, since Cole had to fit his entire origin story into merely six pages, O’Brian’s change of heart seems to happen absurdly quickly by today’s storytelling standards. Indeed, Baker pokes some fun at it in his retelling. A 1980s Plastic Man revival ignored the monks and instead had O’Brian amorally flip a coin to decide whether or not to turn hero (a gimmick borrowed from Woozy Winks’ origin). However, Cole’s origin has a strong, recognizable emotional reality to it, giving O’Brian a credible personality.
As Plastic Man, O’Brian then goes after his former criminal partners, employing an array of surreal stretching and shapechanging stunts. But Plastic Man is serious about capturing these crooks, and the crooks are not fools but genuinely dangerous menaces. It makes it all the funnier and more rewarding to see serious adversaries being tripped up by Plastic Man’s tricks. (DC’s Silver Age character, the Elongated Man, was clearly inspired by Plastic Man. Gardner Fox and Carmine Infantino’s Elongated Man backup series in Detective Comics was a serious detective series with touches of whimsy, whereas Cole’s Plastic Man tales are comedies. But Fox and Infantino clearly understood the dynamic of having their stretchable sleuth using his powers in amusing ways against serious criminals who did not “get” the joke.)
In Cole’s first Woozy Winks story (from Police Comics #13 in 1942), he draws Woozy with considerable comedic exaggeration. (The other people in the story are drawn relatively realistically.) But though Woozy looks like a clown, he does not act like one. His facial expression rarely changes, and when it does so, only minimally. He takes most things in stride, and even seems only mildly surprised on discovering he has magically acquired virtual invulnerability. It is Woozy who Cole has flip the coin to decide whether he will use his powers for good or bad, and this moral indifference seems to fit Woozy’s blase attitude towards life. (Woozy picks crime, though he never forfeits audience sympathy by actually harming anyone.) In this story Woozy reminds me of Tex Avery’s Droopy: in both characters’ cases, humor arises from the disparity between the unusual, extreme events of the story and the character’s understated reactions to them. Woozy causes giant hailstones to fall, squashing Plastic Man accordion-style, like Wile E. Coyote hit by a boulder. But despite the absurdity of this, Plastic Man and Woozy react to it seriously: Plastic Man, unhurt, is astonished, and Woozy, taking everything in stride, walks off whistling. Actually, Woozy also resembles Buster Keaton in his nearly imperturbable acceptance of whatever strange situation occurs. There’s a “serious” criminal in the story, too: a crime boss who tries to have a black panther kill Plastic Man. There is a comedic denouement, in which Plastic Man finally breaks down Woozy’s unemotional facade by reminding him of his mother: this is funny, but it also humanizes Woozy. And I like Plastic Man’s quiet amusement when he realizes that he and Woozy are going to be partners in crimefighting.
In these two stories Plastic Man and Woozy have distinctive, appealing personalities, and while they do funny things, they never come off as foolish or silly. As a result, there’s genuine comedy here, and these stories remain funny sixty years after they first saw print.
WHEN ELSEWORLDS COLLIDE
Two of DC’s recent Elseworlds books have come my way: Superman: Last Stand on Krypton, written by Steve Gerber, one of the great comics writers of the 1970s generation, and illustrated by Doug Wheatley, and the first issue of JLA: Age of Wonder, written by Adisakde Tantimede (a new name to me), with breakdowns by P. Craig Russell (another important figure who came to comics in the ‘ 70s) and finishes by Galen Showman. Elseworlds reinvent familiar DC characters in different times, places and continuities. Ideally, in thus reconceptualizing these characters, the Elseworlds stories can illuminate aspects of the “mainstream” versions of these archetypal figures. Each of these two Elseworlds, by the way, deal with the Golden and Silver Age versions of the DC characters: indeed, the Superman book describes his powers as being as limited as they were circa 1938.
Superman: Last Stand on Krypton has a very good concept at its heart: a clash between the traditional Silver Age depiction of Krypton (a lush paradise and utopian society, whose destruction was tragic) and John Byrne’s radical revision of Krypton in his 1980s Man of Steel mini-series (as a sterile world with an utterly sexually repressed populace, a world, as Wendy Pini once put it, that deserved to die). In Gerber’s story Jor-El and Lara have recreated the idyllic Krypton that Byrne established existed in centuries past, but it takes the form of Krypton as it was depicted in the 1960s, even complete with “thought-beasts”; I’m surprised that Gerber didn’t include the Fire-Falls while he was at it. Jor-El has even cast aside the Byrne “bio-suit” to wear his traditional 1950s-1970s costume. Jor-El’s own father and other Kryptonian elders seek to put a stop to the Silver age Krypton he is recreating.
However, I found much of the execution of the story confusing. It seems that the Superman of this story is actually an Earthman who was rocketed to Krypton and somehow prevented its destruction. Now that would be interesting to see, but you won’t find it here. There are continuing references to an extensive backstory, necessary to understand what is going on, but which I wish I had seen dramatized in comics form. Moreover, characterization doesn’t go beyond either pure nobility (Superman, Jor-El, Lois, Lara) and insane villainy (Luthor). There was a good idea here, but I was still disappointed.
JLA: Age of Wonder also has an interesting idea at its core. In the 20th century (and, indeed, as Alan Moore shows us in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the 19th as well), the marvels of science supplanted magic in the popular imagination. The superhuman abilities of the American super hero are rooted in science fiction; hence, the superhero is a mythic figure of the age of technology. So, in Age of Wonder, Superman and other familiar heroes arise in the 1870s, the time of Thomas Edison and the Industrial Revolution.
But the creators of this book haven’t found an interesting means of creating dramatic situations out of this concept. The villain is Lex Luthor, combining the traditional concept linking Luthor to the misuse of advanced science with the 1980s revision of Luthor into the embodiment of malevolent corporate power. So in Age of Wonder Luthor builds weapons and treats his employees like dirt, and it comes off as a simple left-wing attack on big business. It is amusing to see Luthor turning into a double for Daddy Warbucks from Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie, though.
A DIME’S WORTH OF DIFFERENCE
Prowling through Manhattan’s better comic book shops (like Jim Hanley’s Universe, Cosmic Comics and St. Mark’s Comics, to plug three), looking for potential review subjects, I will sometimes come across interesting items that have actually been out for a while, but are still on sale there. Mind you, sometimes I get a case of sticker shock: I recently paid nearly ten dollars for merely two comics! But one such item of interest was Batman: The 10 Cent Adventure; can’t argue with the price here. This one-shot, written by Greg Rucka, drawn by Rick Burchett, and inked by Klaus Janson, came out in 2002 as a prelude to the “Bruce Wayne, Murderer” story arc that is now long over.
Still, I found this one-shot still had much to offer. I especially liked the artwork on the cover and throughout the book, which superbly combined a contemporary feel with the look of the original Batman stories of the late 1930s: the shot of the early Batman on p. 4, recreating the pose and (to a large extent) costume from his first Detective cover was an especial treat.
I was also very pleased with Rucka’s take on Batman’s character. It is an important comics tradition to retell the key stories of a character’s mythos, notably the origins, as touchstones for the series through the decades. (Ideally, this should be done without unnecessary revisions.) Here Rucka emphasizes that Batman’s persona and mission were born out of tragedy, and in retracing the familiar steps of his origin (through evocations of Bill Finger, Bob Kane, and Frank Miller), dramatically conveys a sense of Batman’s sense of purpose.
The story is titled “The Fool’s Errand,” and Rucka puts his individual stamp on the retelling by pointing out that Batman can never truly succeed in his mission to wipe out crime, and that some might call him a “fool” for trying. Instead Rucka states that Batman knows he can never achieve utopia and makes him seem more heroic for continuing to strive towards his impossible goal. Most of the rest of the issue shows Batman in action during a typical night in Gotham, coming across, through his dealings in saving individuals, as a protector who is both stern and kind. This may have only cost a dime, but it proved far more satisfying than most of the three buck comics I come across.
OLD YELLOW
Having reviewed Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s Hulk: Gray #1 a while back, I also picked up the first issue of their earlier Daredevil: Yellow (titled after the color of Daredevil’s original costume). Like their Hulk series, Daredevil: Yellow is a retelling of the title character’s origin story, whose initial version was written by Stan Lee. I applaud the fact that in both series Loeb and Sale so effectively capture the spirit of the original Silver Age stories they are adapting.
Still, I had misgivings about Loeb’s rewriting scenes from Incredible Hulk #1: true, Loeb has a more sophisticated writing style than Stan Lee’s, but it didn’t seem right to replace Lee’s dialogue, as if there was nothing of merit in the original author’s “voice.” I liked Daredevil: Yellow #1 much better, since it manages to retell the familiar tale of Daredevil’s origin primarily through presenting new moments within established scenes, or entirely new scenes (like Matt and Foggy talking in their dorm room). I have no problem with devising new dialogue in these cases.
(I suppose the argument could be made that newer artists shouldn’t redraw the stories that were originally illustrated by giants like Hulk‘s Jack Kirby and Daredevil‘s Bill Everett, either. But this doesn’t bother me: there’s been a long tradition in comics of one artist drawing retellings of classic past stories or scenes. What would bother me in these cases would be outright swipes of the earlier artist’s work or changes to his character designs.)
Moreover, Daredevil: Yellow #1 actually undoes previous damage to Silver Age continuity. However well written and drawn it was, Frank Miller and John Romita, Jr.’s previous retelling of Daredevil’s origin, in their Daredevil: The Man Without Fear miniseries, substantially revised the plot of Lee and Bill Everett’s original version. In the original, Matt Murdock takes on the costumed identity of Daredevil in order to avenge his father’s death; in Miller’s reworking, Matt merely disguises himself in Dad’s old clothes (as if he were a ghost) to hunt down his father’s killer, and doesn’t concoct the Daredevil identity until months later. The Lee and Everett version has more primal power, tying the Daredevil identity directly to Matt’s loss of his father and his resulting need for justice. I am still surprised that Miller’s version was permitted back in the 1980s when Marvel was much more strict about maintaining continuity than it is in today’s more careless times. Loeb and Sale reestablished the Lee-Everett origin, and that is to their considerable credit.
EMOCLEW, ANNATAZ!
Another comic that has been out for a while, but which I only just found out about, is DC/Vertigo’s Zatanna: Everyday Magic. Written by Paul Dini and illustrated by Rick Mays, this one-shot stars the young sorceress who has become familiar to Vertigo readers in recent years from Books of Magic and other series, but who debuted in DC Comics four decades ago.
Zatanna’s roots actually go all the way back to Action Comics #1, which, along with the debut of Superman, also featured a less well known character, Zatara the Magician, created by Fred Guardineer. A crimefighting magician in top hat and tails, Zatara was obviously inspired by Lee Falk’s comic strip hero Mandrake the Magician. As Feiffer points out in his book, all of Guardineer’s magician characters, including Zatara, cast magic spells by speaking backwards. (Could Guardineer have been thinking of the way Leonardo da Vinci wrote in backwards handwriting?)
In the 1960s writer Gardner Fox and editor Julius Schwartz introduced Zatara’s daughter Zatanna, who also spoke magic spells backwards and wore a sexy variation on her father’s costume, substituting net stockings and high heels. Zatanna traveled from one Schwartz-edited series to another, searching for her missing father, and finally being happily reunited with him. (Little did she know that Alan Moore would subsequently kill Zatara off for no good reason in Swamp Thing in the 1980s.)
Zatanna was a favorite of various comics fans-turned-pros (myself included), and it was no surprise that writers after Fox used her. But, for years there was this attitude at DC that Zatanna would be a good, workable character if only (a) they got rid of the top hat, tails and fishnets and gave her a superhero-style costume, and (b) they got rid of all that backwards talk. Unfortunately, these were the very factors that made Zatanna appealing. It wasn’t simply a matter of a specific costume and verbal gimmick, but what they implied about the character: a sexiness, a sense of whimsy, a showman’s sense of style, and a willingness to follow her father’s path into what traditionally used to be the male realm of action.
Luckily, oftentimes in comics if one waits long enough (decades, sometimes), a character who has drifted away from the source of his or her appeal will revert to true form. Paul Dini has long been not only a Zatanna fan but one who understood what made the character work, and he introduced her, with the correct costume (without the fishnets, though: too hard to animate) and personality, into a memorable episode of the Batman animated series. He has long wanted to work with Zatanna in the comics as well, and Zatanna: Everyday Magic finally came out in 2003.
In Zatanna what would be fun to believe about real life magicians is actually true in her case: Zatanna is a stage magician who really does have magical powers. (One wonders what those DC stage magicians without real magic powers who live in the DC Universe think about this.) In his “On the Ledge” piece in Vertigo comics the month this book came out, Dini likens her to actors he knows: in his view Zatanna is first and foremost a performer, and that is the key to her personality. I suppose it’s as if, back in Amazing Fantasy #15, Spider-Man had succeeded in staying in show business while being a costumed crimefighter on the side.
Rick Mayes’ artwork is pleasantly attuned to the light tone of the story, and Brian Bolland’s cover art is expectedly and very satisfactorily striking. But what is a post-1960s Zatanna story without quibbling over her outfit: I’m not pleased with the substitution of knee-high boots for high heels, leading Mayes to give her a literal bigfoot look. (My favorite Zatanna artwork is Carmine Infantino’s in her 1960s Elongated Man appearance in Detective Comics and Alex Ross’s in last year’s JLA: Secret Origins. A man of consummate good taste, Ross gets the costume exactly right.)
As if to remind us this is a Vertigo book, there’s gratuitous rough language (in which our heroine participates) and bare butts (not that of our heroine, who keeps her dignity). One of the bareassed cast members is Hellblazer antihero John Constantine, who Alan Moore established long ago in Swamp Thing as having been Zatanna’s former lover. I thought this reflected badly on her taste in men; on the Batman animated show, Zatanna was Bruce Wayne’s ex-girlfriend, which made more sense to me. But Constantine’s presence in this story works for me since he’s played as a comedic figure, whom a somewhat exasperated Zatanna has to bail out of trouble.
There’s a villain, naturally, and there are moments of serious combat and inner conflict. But Zatanna is not meant for grim and gritty stories, and this one-shot story is, in overall tone, a comedy (in the sense, not of a farce, but a story with plenty of wit and a happy denouement). I had not associated comedy with the usual ominous supernatural gloom of Vertigo, but now there are the comedic elements of Bill Willingham’s Fables and the sunniness of the humor of this Zatanna book. There is now more light to balance Vertigo’s dark, and that’s a welcome development indeed.
ARTIST GETS BOOK!
In its ongoing and commendable work in chronicling the achievements of important comic book creators of the past, TwoMorrows Publishing recently released Hero Gets Girl! The Life and Art of Kurt Schaffenberger by Mark Voger. Who is Kurt Schaffenberger? It seems he is not well enough known even by some people who should know. In the book Voger writes, “Kurt once visited the National Cartoonist Society’s museum, then in Connecticut, and found original Captain Marvel artwork on exhibit labeled ‘by C.C. Beck.’ ‘I looked at it,’ Kurt told me, ‘and it was my own stuff!'” How interesting. Voger is referring to the Museum of Cartoon Art, which I visited many times before it moved to Florida, and I noticed the mislabeling, too, and even pointed it out to a member of the curatorial staff. I even explained how it was easy to distinguish Beck’s flat figures from Schaffenberger’s, which were more rounded and three-dimensional, with a clear sense of volume. Other comics pros who were with me backed me up. And nothing was done about it. It must be odd for an artist to have his achievements honored in a museum and then credited to someone else. (It must be somewhat like my reaction when seeing the first documentary I worked on – no, not Sex, Lies and Superheroes – and discovering that my name had been misspelled in the credits!)
In fact, Kurt Schaffenberger was one of the most distinctive and memorable artists of DC’s Silver Age. I doubt there are many Baby Boomers who were comics fans in their youth who do not have fond memories of Schaffenberger’s work on the Superman books, most of all Lois Lane’s own regular comic book. There were no credits in most DC books back then, but Schaffenberger’s style was unmistakable: the beauty of his women and the handsomeness of his men; the three-dimensional realism he gave the figures he drew; his range and sensitivity in depicting emotions, so appropriate to Lois’s comics. Lois’s stories were often ludicrous by today’s standards, but Schaffenberger grounded them in pictorial and emotional reality. He wasn’t on the same level of achievement as the Silver Age artists that Arlen Schumer deals with in his new book (reviewed in last week’s column), but Schaffenberger was still one of DC’s leading artistic craftsmen. Schumer devotes a spread to showing how Neal Adams depicts various emotions, and I found it a disappointment; Voger devotes a page to Schaffenberger’s subtle and varied depictions of the many moods of Lois Lane, successfully demonstrating Schaffenberger’s prowess at characterization.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s Schaffenberger had worked on Fawcett’s Captain Marvel titles. DC started publishing new Captain Marvel stories under the title Shazam! in the 1970s, and after the character’s co-creator C.C. Beck left the series in a huff, Schaffenberger took over as its artist. Unlike Beck’s work, which still had a nostalgic charm even for readers too young to have been around in the 1940s, Schaffenberger’s art style had evolved with the times. His work on DC’s Shazam was appropriately good-humored, handsome as always (with my favorite depictions of Mary Marvel), better than Beck in handling the action sequences, and combined a nostalgic feel with a look that was just modern enough.
Recently, I had the pleasure of seeing, in person, the original art for a Schaffenberger cover, depicting a typically silly Lois Lane plot, but with the simplicity, clarity and attractiveness so characteristic of his work. Voger’s book is filled with reproductions of Schaffenberger’s work, showcasing these and more of his artistic virtues.
Unfortunately, as Voger’s book also shows, comics are a business as well as an artform, and as trends and fashions in pop culture change, even important artists can get left behind. Twice we get the story of how, once DC decided to have John Byrne and others reboot Superman in the mid-1980s, longtime Superman artists Curt Swan and Kurt Schaffenberger and various others who worked on the Superman series, were called into the DC offices and told they wouldn’t be working on the character anymore. They were all promised they would get other work to do, but in actuality they did not get much. So, Schaffenberger and Swan, after decades of being two of DC’s leading artists, were abruptly (curtly?) out of favor. Their decades of loyalty and achievement ultimately counted for nothing. This is a familiar story that unfortunately happens over and over. (You will see it again in my forthcoming columns about Looney Tunes: The Golden Collection and the paperback collections of Jack Kirby’s Fourth World series.)
In large part the fall of Schaffenberger and Swan was due to changing times, a changing audience, and changing tastes. As Alex Ross says in the book, Schaffenberger “was the stylistic holdover from a simpler, more carefree, child-driven era of comics into a very adult era of comics.” The children who had loved Captain Marvel in the 1940s and 1950s and the girls who read Lois Lane in the 1950s and 1960s had been supplanted by an older, mostly male comics readership. The new audience wanted to see the more dynamic, propulsive kind of action that Jack Kirby and others drew at Marvel. Swan and Schaffenberger could each handle darkness and even tragedy in their work: think of Swan’s “The Death of Superman” and Schaffenberger’s “The Three Wives of Superman,” both from the Silver Age. But their styles were basically sunny and optimistic, less suited for the angst-ridden heroes of a new generation. And, indeed, if the audience had not grown older and more sophisticated, the American comic book would not have made the progress as an artistic medium that it has achieved over the last four decades. It’s sad to see in a few interviews with older comics professionals in this book that they just cannot see anything good about contemporary comics. Understandably dismayed that art and storytelling styles to which they devoted their careers have fallen from favor, they’re as blind to the virtues of today’s comics as many younger people in the business would be to the virtues of the comics of earlier generations. This is a potential peril for anyone in a creative field: to allow one’s taste to freeze and become unable to appreciate what is good about new developments in one’s field.
But it’s just as bad for younger people in a creative field not to develop an appreciation of the classic work in their medium’s past. What I also find sad is that the tastes and the demographics of the comics-buying audience are nonetheless so narrow. If only there still were plenty of comics for pre-teens and early teens. If only there were more young girls’ comics like the Lois Lane and Supergirl books of the 1950s through the 1970s, albeit more enlightened on women’s role in society. The best Captain Marvel stories of the Golden Age are imaginative enterainments for children with a knowing, clever whimsy that adults can appreciate; in short, they were like the intelligent children’s comics I reviewed in the Little Lit collection. If only there was a sufficient audience in the comics marketplace for books like the best of Captain Marvel. (Come to think of it, I could easily imagine Dini and Schaffenberger m collaborating on a Zatanna book, were the artist still with us.)
In other words, I wish that there was so much variety in American comics and in the audience for comics, that someone like Schaffenberger would never have been lacking for work. I wish there had always been plenty of children’s adventure comics and romance comics and just plain humor comics that would have suited his talents. But at least we now have the new Hero Gets Girl! book to provide him the recognition and honor he deserves.
-Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson
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