If we can judge by the publication known as the Newspaper of Record, then comics’ bid for mainstream cultural acceptability is rapidly increasing in momentum. On Sunday, July 11, the cover story in The New York Times Sunday Magazine was devoted to graphic novels, including interviews with Joe Sacco (Palestine), Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis), Art Spiegelman (Maus), and Chris Ware (Jimmy Corrigan) (all of whom will be reviewed in this column eventually; I’m in this criticism business for the long haul) and Alan Moore (about whom I’ve already written a considerable amount). The piece’s author, Charles McGrath, is no less than the former editor of The New York Times Book Review, and he ventured that “it’s not too soon to wonder what the next new thing, the new literary form, might be,” following the decline of the novel. ” It might be comic books,” he said, and although he did condescend to the medium at times, to put it mildly (“and if the highbrows are right, they’re a form perfectly suited to our dumbed-down culture and collective attention deficit”), it was overall a very positive piece.
Speaking of the Times Book Review, on Sunday, July 18, it ran two pages surveying a wide range of comics in book form, including the first volume of Fantagraphics’ Complete Peanuts (another future Comics in Context topic). (This confirms what I’d long thought: if the Times was ever looking for a comics reviewer, I’d never find out in time to apply.)
And then, on Monday, July 26, the Times‘s business section ran a report from the San Diego Comic-Con, focusing on movies adapted from comics, including an interview with Frank Miller, who is co-directing an film of his own Sin City with filmmaker Robert Rodriguez. The Times noted, “Mr. Miller. . .commands a nearly mythic status among comic book fans as the creator, writer and illustrator of the Sin City series of graphic novels. . . ” Actually, I think it was Miller’s work on Daredevil and Batman that made him “mythic” (see Comics in Context #30, 31 and 34), but never mind! The Times came close enough! This year’s San Diego Con, from what I’ve read, represents further progress in publicly showcasing the movement of material that originated in comics into the cultural mainstream via film and television.
Well, I couldn’t get to the San Diego Con this year (It’s a long story; next year I’ll definitely go – I hope.), but maybe I can find some local event celebrating comics that might offer some compensation. Perhaps I can locate another public vehicle for advancing the cultural profile of comics. There was the third annual MoCCA (Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art) Art Fest, which proved to be a great place for renewing contacts with old friends in the comics industry who’ve been dispersed over the years. But is there an event outside the comics world that would pay homage to the medium?
Could this be it? Beginning in June, the Museum of Television & Radio has been staging a retrospective called “Look! Up at the Screen! It’s Superheroes on Television” at both its Manhattan and Beverly Hills locations; the retrospective runs through October 10. This seemed to be good news indeed.
Before many screenings at the Museum, it runs a video clip of actress Candice Bergen asking us if we knew that before the Museum’s founding, over twenty years ago, there was no institution for the preservation and study of America’s cultural heritage of radio and television programs. Hence, the Museum is a pioneer in the serious appreciation of these forms of American popular culture. In their library I’ve watched examples of high art on television (like Ingmar Bergman’s production of Euripides’ The Bacchae for Swedish television, believe it or not) and videos of Museum seminars about prestigious series like The West Wing. But I’ve also viewed videos of Museum seminars on the writing of science fiction for television (with such luminaries as Harlan Ellison, Richard Matheson and J. Michael Straczynski) and on fantasy genre series including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dark Shadows, and Xena; Warrior Princess. The Museum thus pays respect even to genres to which cultural arbiters often condescend. In another example, some years back the Museum staged a soap opera retrospective, even publishing a book of academic essays on the subject. It has held retrospectives on animation from Hanna-Barbera, Jay Ward and Cartoon Network; its library holds a colossal supply of Simpsons episodes.
Surely, I thought, the Museum of Television & Radio will treat the superhero genre with the same dignity and scholarly intent that it has bestowed upon so many other television programs and genres. Attending the various programs in this superhero retrospective should provide ample compensation for not making it to San Diego this year.
But it didn’t. Oh, the Museum is providing plenty of material for me to write about over the coming weeks, and I’ve quite enjoyed some of it. But this “Superheroes on Television” went deeply wrong, as you shall see over the course of these next few columns.
MUTANTS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
Arriving at the Museum’s Manhattan building on a Saturday in June, I started out with the daily program called “Superfun for Families,” billed in the retrospective brochure as a “superhero-themed screening appropriate for all ages!” This day the Museum was screening an episode of Goosebumps, based on author R. L. Stine’s series of supernatural tales for children.
This particular show was titled “The Mutant Attacks,” and its protagonist is a boy who reads superhero comics., or, rather, super-villain comics. His favorite comic was “The Masked Mutant,” so presumably the makers of this episode had some awareness of X-Men. The comic’s artwork was in the style of a run-of-the-mill 1990s Image imitation. But they’d missed the main point of X-Men. The Masked Mutant was a villain, and the implication was that mutants are bad guys. And how many comics have villains as the title characters?
As is to be expected, our protagonist was to some extent a walking cliche of a comics fan: he was out of shape and something of a social misfit,. There is an attractive girl who tagged along with him on his adventure, and, of course, she made fun of his interest in comics. But the comics fan did indeed prove to be the episode’s hero.
Initially this episode bored me. Children’s shows aren’t made for adults, of course, but I like to think that the best children’s literature, whether Lewis Carroll or L. Frank Baum or J. K. Rowling, has imaginative and stylistic qualities that will interest adults as well. But as the episode proceeded, it did prove to have points of interest. The premise was intriguingly spooky, reminiscent of Twilight Zone plots: the comics fan sees the Masked Mutant’s headquarters and discovers he is being drawn into the world of the comics.
At times the episode used a special effect to show how reality looked to our protagonist as he was drawn (so to speak) into the world of comics: he saw huge spots before his eyes, meant to suggest the tiny dots formerly used to print colors in four-color comics, so beloved by pop artist Roy Lichtenstein. This, of course, is long dated, but demonstrates how the concept of what comics are like, originating in the mid-20th century, has persisted for decades in the popular imagination. Now came the best part of the episode: exploring the Masked Mutant’s headquarters, our protagonist came across his captive, a superhero with the nonsensical name of the Galloping Gazelle, played by Adam West, the television Batman of the 1960s! Here was West again, decades later, still employing his wonderful deadpan delivery to convey an ironic tone that adult viewers would more readily recognize and appreciate than the kids watching the show.
This led to the cleverest bit in the episode. With the Gazelle free, the comics fan attempts to become his new sidekick and tries to keep up with his hero as he athletically makes his way through the Mutant’s lair. But the kid, as noted earlier, is out of shape and soon covered with sweat. The Gazelle, annoyed, advises him (in West’s tones of understated exasperation) to start working out. I found this amusing, taking it not as a cheap shot at the overweight (and the kid was not actually fat), but as an affectionate acknowledgement of reality. Growing up we may identify with the hero’s kid sidekick, going off on exploits with the senior hero. But if we were really going into action, we’d be more like this comics fan than the athletic figure like Robin we imagine ourselves to be.
After a brief tussle with the Masked Mutant, the Gazelle decided he was “too old” for this sort of thing and took his leave. Unfortunately, that was the end of Adam West’s contribution to the episode, and the Goosebumps makers did not cast the villain nearly as well. The Masked Mutant himself simply indulged in hackneyed cackling without a trace of wit.
Unable to overcome the Mutant physically, the comics fan plays trickster instead. This is a familiar fairy tale device: tricking the villain into defeating himself, as with Rumplestiltskin. Indeed, that’s how Superman regularly beats Mr. Mxyzptlk (tricking him into saying his own name). Even in Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, Wotan captures the dwarf Alberich by tricking him into using his powers in a self-defeating way. So the comics fan persuaded the (incredibly stupid) Masked Mutant that he was actually a stretchable hero like Plastic Man. To cope with his supposedly rubbery foe, the shapeshifting Masked Mutant turned to acid, inadvertently dissolving himself. Yes, it’s a fate similar to that of the Wicked Witch of the West, though Dorothy did not intend to melt her nemesis. It’s rather odd that this children’s program shows its kid protagonist intentionally bringing about his adversary’s death.
At the episode’s end we see that the comics fan really has gained Plastic Man-like powers: he stretches on-camera, using up the rest of the episode’s miniscule special effects budget. I get that this is a metaphor to show that through his actions he actually became the hero he wanted to be. But I wish there’d been some logical explanation. Were this indeed some sort of Twilight Zone for kids, rationales might be unnecessary; the Zone created an eerie world in which various accepted rules of logic and science no longer applied. This Goosebumps episode took a more matter-of-fact approach to its paranormal doings, that led me, anyway, to expect logical explanations: the hero’s final transformation seemed to come out of nowhere.
So, this was not an auspicious start for my viewing of the retrospective, but not without interest. Though recognizing that superhero comics genuinely evoke heroic aspirations in their readers, this Goosebumps episode still treated the costumed heroes and villains of the genre as silly stuff for kids.
And how did the rest of the audience react, you may wonder. This was “Superfun for Families,” after all. Well, I was the only person who remained in the screening room from the time I entered till the episode’s end. Some other adults came in, got bored, and left. There were no kids. This seemed ominous.
A LOST GOLDEN AGE
The next screening in the “Superheroes” retrospective was over an hour away, at 3 PM, so I found other, somewhat related programs with which to pass the time till then.
For one thing, for a long time I’ve thought that puppets are effectively cartoon characters in three dimensions. Puppets are to cartoons as sculpture is to drawing. So I don’t think that puppetry is out of place in a column that concerns itself with cartoon art, comics and animation.
In the fifth floor corridor, outside the screening room for Goosebumps, were a series of large color photographs of the Muppets and puppet characters from Fraggle Rock, Bear in the Big Blue House, and even a British puppet show unknown in this country, all under the exhibition title “Creating Characters That Entertain the World: Photographs of Characters from The Jim Henson Company.”
In retrospect, this seems ironic. It was this same day that I learned the old news (from February) that Disney had finally bought the Muppets (though not the ones from Sesame Street, who’d already been sold to Children’s Television Workshop by previous corporate owners) and the Bear characters. So this was really an exhibition of characters from the Jim Henson Company, Children’s Television Workshop and the Walt Disney Company.
At one end of the corridor was a video wall with multiple screens showing Of Muppets and Men: The Making of The Muppet Show, a documentary going behind the scenes at the Muppets’ classic 1970s television series. Of course it’s fun and interesting seeing the faces and hearing the real voices of the Muppeteers, though founder Jim Henson and his second-in-command, Frank Oz, were already familiar to me, and watching footage of the Muppeteers manipulating their puppets from below as scenes for The Muppet Show are shot. (Somehow I assumed that the puppeteers sat or crouched down, but instead they seem most often to be standing, and even walking back and forth, the puppets held high over their heads.)
If I saw this documentary when it was first televised, I would have had these same reactions. But now, decades after it was made, it takes on a new dimension. It’s a time capsule, capturing what may, in retrospect, be the high point in Muppets history. Jim Henson, the creative visionary who founded the Muppets, died abruptly in 1990, but here he is, on video, alive, enthusiastic, and at the height of his artistic powers. Frank Oz is now primarily a live action movie director, most recently for this year’s remake of The Stepford Wives, but there he is in the documentary by Henson’s side, still a full-time Muppeteer providing major creative input into their projects. The Muppet Show was at this time an astonishing, international success, shown in an extraordinary number of countries. Even with many “Muppet” movies still to come, this was arguably the peak of the Muppets’ success. And yet Henson’s organization is still a relatively small group, with what appears to be a genuine sense of community. On camera Henson talks about how the group is made up of people who like each other, and that their chemistry helps their work. Certainly what the documentary shows viewers bears this out: good feeling abounds. Now, it’s possible, even probable, that there were black sheep in this creative “family,” and one would expect that any proverbial dirty laundry would be edited out of this self-promotional documentary. Still, I’d like to think that the image Henson presents of his company at that time is basically true.
Now consider what has happened in the decades since this documentary was made. Henson passed away in 1990, and his children take over the organization and attempt to keep it creatively vital, moving into new directions while maintaining the viability of the classic characters. But there is no making up for the loss of the founder’s creative genius, as indeed there was not for the Disney organization after Walt’s death. And the question arises as to whether the Muppets are truly evergreen characters, popular with each succeeding generation, or whether they have become dated, at least until the right person comes along who knows how to revitalize the concept.
So, no longer as successful as they once were, the Muppets come under corporate control. First, in the 1990s, the Hensons sold off the Muppets and their other creative properties to a Germany’s EM.TV and Merchandising AG, only to buy them back, after the new owners proved their inability to manage these acquisitions effectively. Thereafter, in 2004, the Henson Company sells the Muppets to the Disney Company, which has long pursued them.
So, in June I read reports about the Muppets’ fate on JimHillMedia.com, a comprehensive online site of Disney-related news. According to him, the Hensons believed that the Disney Company would find the means to revitalize the Muppets for the new century, But, it would seem, apart from the Imagineers who design theme park attractions, Hill says in an April 16 article that “it’s becoming more and more apparent that the Walt Disney Company really doesn’t have a clue what to do with the Muppets.” Worse, due to lack of sufficient work for their company, Hill reports that two thirds of the Henson company staff may be downsized. Hill notes, “Most of these folks initially came to work for the Jim Henson Company because that was where the Muppets were. Now that Kermit and Co. will soon be heading off to Burbank, a lot of these people just don’t know what to do with themselves. They’re worried that – once the Disney acquisition deal is completed – that their jobs will be eliminated.”
This should strike a familiar note with readers of this column. Sounds like what happened in the world of comics, and more recently, at Disney Animation, ironically enough. It sounds like yet another case of people who got to fulfill their dream of working within a particular creative tradition and then had it taken away from them.
I recently watched a television interview with a filmmaker named Rick McKay, who had made a documentary called, Broadway: The Golden Years. Asked why Broadway’s Golden Age came to an end, McKay wisely pointed out that a Golden Age, by its very nature, must come to an end. In other words, no Golden Age lasts forever. Moreover, pointing out that the Golden Age of the movie musical lasted only fifteen years, McKay rhetorically asked if anyone involved in that particular Golden Age at the time would have believed it if you had told him that it was going to end “in ten minutes”? That’s true in my experience. When one is part of a creative enterprise enjoying success, it seems as if it will go on forever. But it won’t.
LUNAR TOONS
It’s still not yet time for today’s superhero retrospective main event, so I reenter the screening room for a showing of the first of Nick Park’s stop-motion animated films starring Wallace and Gromit, A Grand Day Out, made in 1989 by Aardman Animations for British television (hence its presence in the Museum’s collection). Park’s stop-motion figures are puppets of a sort, and hence could also be regarded as sculpted cartoons.
The two later Wallace and Gromit featurettes, The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave, are comedic thrillers, with outright villains, and dynamically staged, suspensefully edited action sequences. This first film is more of an exercise in gentle whimsy. All three films pull off the trick of appealing to adults as well as to children; in fact, my impression is that these films are intentionally aimed not at either audience but at both.
Appropriately, then, Wallace and Gromit themselves simultaneously partake of adulthood and childhood. Wallace, the human, is clearly along in years: he’s bald and has an old man’s voice. But there’s something childlike about him. Though he has a cerebral, adult profession, that of an inventor, he’s driven by appetite. Wanting cheese to spread on his crackers, Wallace decides to take a vacation to the moon, which, as we told as children, is made of cheese. (Actually, are we all told this, or are Wallace and I dating ourselves? Do today’s children still get told the moon is made of green cheese?)
So Wallace sets out building a rocket ship in his basement. Not only does he hold the child’s belief that the moon is made of cheese, but he also has a child’s incomprehension of the difficulties of going to the moon.
But perhaps this also parodies the way we’ve grown accustomed to the miracles of science. I recently saw a Broadway production of Tom Stoppard’s 1970s play Jumpers, which contends that astronauts’ successful landings on the lunar surface demystified the moon, making it useless as a romantic symbol in the songs sung by the play’s heroine. The moon is no longer unattainable; going to the moon is no longer inconceivable. We grew so used to it we stopped going! Wallace wants to go there, but displays no awe at the thought. His attitude is the same as if he were taking a trip to any of the Earthly vacation spots he had been considering. Actually, maybe even going elsewhere on Earth wouldn’t give him any sense of wonder either. He’s basically going to the moon as a substitute for visiting the supermarket: he’s looking for a place to get cheese so he can have a picnic.
Another childlike aspect of Wallace’s world is that animals, including his dog Gromit, can possess human intelligence. Gromit can’t talk, but he can read, and though Wallace is the inventor, Gromit is clearly the more practical of the pair. Some people treat pets like substitute children, but Gromit seems the more “adult” of the two, with his silent, ironic reactions to Wallace’s naivete. (This becomes clearer in the next film, in which it is Gromit, not Wallace, who first recognizes the criminality of the villain, a penguin boarding in their house.)
Wallace’s attitude towards the moon, as if it were a combination of neighborhood park and cheese shop, might also be intended as a satire on British provincialism. Significantly, the interior of Wallace’s rocket ship is a cozy sitting room much like the rooms of Wallace’s own home. It’s as if travel consisted not of exploring different cultures, but of transporting one’s own environment and lifestyle somewhere else. I also recently saw the original 1950s film adaptation of Around the World in 80 Days, in which world traveler Phileas Fogg insists on having his British menu for dinner every day, no matter where he is. It’s like the stereotypical image of British explorers dressing up for teatime in the jungle. Now, long after Britain’s imperial age, it’s the middle-class Wallace and his pet having cheese and crackers on the moon. And yes, I am well aware that this parody of British attitude towards other countries could equally apply to Americans’ similar sort of provincialism.
Could A Grand Day Out even be a gentle jab at imperialism and the British Empire? After all, Wallace and Gromit go to the moon to exploit its cheese resources, oblivious to the desires of any natives they may find there. And they do indeed come in conflict with one of the natives. Oddly, the native is a machine of some sort. Wallace invents and uses machines, so perhaps it makes sense that his nemesis is a machine with a mind of its own.
Oddly, this moon machine seems very Earthlike. It looks like some sort of kitchen appliance, it has a drawer and wheels, and it is activated by inserting British coins! Its existence seems to reflect Wallace’s own inability to imagine a truly alien environment. Since Wallace inadvertently activates the threat by putting coins into the machine, there’s a bit of a Frankenstein motif here.
The moon machine also proves to be something of a counterpart to Wallace: it wants to go on vacation, too. And, as if proving the cliche that grass is always greener on the other person’s side, whereas Wallace wanted to go to the moon, the machine, studying his travel brochures, wants to go skiing, presumably on Earth.
For some moments, the moon machine poses a menace to Wallace and Gromit, trying to prevent them from escaping in their rocket ship. But, after ripping strips of metal from the rocket ship, the machine realizes it can use them as skis. No longer resentful of the two invaders, the machine gestures a happy farewell to Wallace and Gromit. So in this film there is no real villain, unlike the implacable evildoers in the following films in the series. The film leaves the moon machine happily skiing over the lunar hills (which don’t really exist), and perhaps we are meant to ignore the inevitability that the machine will eventually stop when it needs a new coin (as we’ve seen earlier in the film).
There are only three significant characters in the entire film, and Wallace does not talk all that much. The great animated shorts of Hollywood’s classic studio years followed in the tradition of the live action silent comedies of the 1910s and ’20s. This is especially noticeable with characters who don’t talk, like Tom and Jerry and the Roadrunner and Coyote, but the craft of constructing and timing visual gags is evident even in talk-heavy cartoons in this tradition, like Bugs Bunny’s. The Wallace and Gromit featurettes often, as in A Grand Day Out, maintain a certain British reserve and understatement, in contrast with the in-your-face slapstick of the American cartoon tradition. But the Wallace and Gromit shorts take the same care in creating humor and characterization and suspense through visual terms, and the climactic tumult of the later shorts matches the larger than life action of the Hollywood cartoons. Gromit is a latter-day silent comedian, neither talking nor barking, communicating through understated facial expressions and body language even when enacting elaborate stunts: he’s sort of a canine Buster Keaton. The Wallace and Gromit animated shorts capture a mastery of visual comedy and storytelling that often seems absent from recent animation; I’m looking forward to their forthcoming feature film, 2005’s ominously titled Wallace and Gromit and the Curse of the Were-Rabbit.
SUPERHEROIC UNMENTIONABLES
With the time for the afternoon’s main presentation drawing close, I head downstairs to the first floor’s Steven Spielberg Gallery (the Museum has some high profile contributors), which held another part of the retrospective: an art display titled “Saturday Morning Super Cels: Madison Avenue Meets the Superheroes.”
It was not so very long ago that it seemed that any newspaper article about comics had BAM! POW! ZAP! in the title. Headline writers everywhere appeared to think this was clever and original. But in the last several years the sound effects faded away, I noticed at first and was grateful, but I now realize that over time I had taken the headline writers’ newfound respect for the subject for granted. I had forgotten what it used to be like.
To walk into the Spielberg Gallery, however, was to suffer flashbacks. There they were atop the long display texts: pointy balloons with WHAM! POW! PLONK! and the like.
The Museum’s brochure for the retrospective describes this art exhibit thus: “See eye-popping animation cels from various Saturday morning superhero cartoons and commercials from the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. . . .” Dear readers, you need not fear that I was in any danger that my eyes would pop out of their sockets and get inadvertently trampled on the floor by the crush of comics enthusiasts, eager to gaze upon dazzling examples of animation art. In fact, much of the art was from Filmation’s DC superhero cartoons, which is less likely to pop one’s eyes than to glaze them over from ennui.
The wall texts disagree with my assessment. One asserts that “the studio’s superhero series of the late 1960s and early ’70s as seen here in examples from Aquaman, Batman and Green Lantern remain cherished fan favorites for the vividly realized look of these classic comic-book characters.” Now I am well aware that virtually any form of comics-related material has its devotees. But I can’t say that I know anyone who “cherishes” Filmation superhero cartoons. The artwork on the walls is bland, mediocre and undistinguished, lacking in any distinctive style. The television sets in the gallery, playing endless loops of the actual animated cartoons, serve as reminders of just how dull and uninspired they were.
And yet the wall texts praise the “strong graphic design and liberal use of rotoscoping” – tracing live action movement – in the Filmation superhero cartoons. The wall texts acknowledge that rotoscoping is “controversial.” Actually, my impression is that most animation aficionados consider it just plain bad.
Now, whoever wrote these wall texts does have more knowledge about comics history than I would have expected from the Museum. The anonymous author credits the late Julius Schwartz as editor of stories that inspired the early DC superhero TV cartoons (see Comics in Context #32). The wall texts state that in these cartoons, “the lighthearted adventures. . .harken back to the optimism, whimsy, and enthusiasm of classic ‘Silver Age’ comic books (roughly covering the late ’50s through the late ’60s), in which definitive versions of many classic heroes were established.” Yes, but there’s a decided difference between the classic Schwartz “Silver Age” stories and these early TV cartoons. Schwartz’s stories were ingeniously written and stylishly drawn, playing not to the lowest common denominator in the audience, but reaching out to the more intelligent readers, old and young. The Filmation and later Hanna-Barbera Super Friends cartoons look dull and have dull stories; small children might like them but will quickly outgrow them. They are examples of what the general public has long thought superhero stories are: mediocre material lacking in depth or artistic value.
Now there are some features of this exhibit of genuine interest to longtime comics enthusiasts. Here, for example, are drawings that longtime Marvel artist Herb Trimpe did of the Hulk for commercials for Post’s Honeycomb cereal. The wall text calls Trimpe “a legendary comic-book artist.” Well, Trimpe’s comics work on the Hulk is certainly classic, memorable, and distinguished. But is he a “legend”? The Trimpe art displayed here is craftsmanlike but hardly his best, despite the ecstatic somersaults the wall text’s writer seems to have turned in praising it.
I was surprised that the wall texts noted that “Trimpe was one of many older artists laid off by Marvel in the early 1990s when falling comic-book sales forced the company to file for bankruptcy.” That’s true enough; perhaps the anonymous writer saw the article that Trimpe wrote about the Marvel downsizings in The New York Times a few years ago. And were Trimpe or any of them hired back when Marvel financially recovered? The wall texts do not address the subject.
Elsewhere in the gallery comics aficionados will find something else of interest: drawings of DC’s Teen Titans for a projected 1974 Hanna-Barbera animated series that never got made, even Titans characters who are now as obscure as Mal. The drawings were done by Mike Royer, who is perhaps best known as a longtime inker of Jack Kirby’s work, or, rather, as the wall text calls him, the “legendary artist Mike Royer.” Another legend! If Trimpe and Royer are legends, what does this make a truly great artist like Kirby? A myth?
In describing the Teen Titans drawings, the wall texts note there is currently an anime-influenced Teen Titans animated series on Cartoon Network, and that other teen versions of DC heroes have appeared on the live action TV series Superboy (in the ’80s) and Smallville, and the animated Batman Beyond. Yes, indeed. And are any of these series represented in the Museum’s retrospective. No.
But doesn’t Smallville represent a serious, psychologically perceptive reworking of the Superboy concept for teens and adults? Don’t Batman Beyond and Warners’ other recent superhero animated series demonstrate a level of sophistication in writing, art design, and animation technique far beyond the level of any of the Filmation DC shows? Wouldn’t anyone with a reasonably developed sense of appreciation of cartoon art prefer seeing an exhibit of superhero artwork by Bruce Timm and other contemporary Warners Animation artists? Surely examples are available; there used to be loads of them for sale only several blocks away at the Warner Brothers Studio Store on 5th Avenue before it closed.
But the guiding principle behind this exhibition appears to be nostalgia for juvenilia. Another subject covered in the gallery is superhero artwork done for Underoos, children’s underwear. The wall text notes, “Froot of the Loom has also introduced an adult line of Underoos in classic superhero characters, betting that even adults still long to be their favorite superheroes.” (I leave it to my readers to imagine what it would be like to take someone back to your apartment for a romantic evening and discovering, when he/she undresses, that he or she is wearing superhero adult Underoos. Seems to me that might kill the moment.)
The Museum’s retrospective brochure observes that “the spectacle of superpowered ‘long underwear’ vigilantes has resonated with audiences of all ages and inspired debate and analysis in the halls of academe.” Indeed, I agree, speaking as someone who is about to undertake just such analysis in academia. The brochure acknowledges that superhero sagas can be “enjoyed as escapist fantasy or pondered as archetypes of modern myth. . . .”
“But,” the wall text instructs museumgoers, “let’s not get too high-flown. The best value this work embodies is fun.” The text refers to “the invitations from Underoos and Post Cereals to become your favorite superhero. . . .”
That’s my problem with this retrospective. The Museum recognizes that the superhero genre has mythic depths worthy of serious academic study, and chooses to ignore that very fact. The same Museum that directs serious attention to other children regards the superhero genre merely as fodder for small children and adults seeking ironic humor. The retrospective ignores mythic underpinnings in favor of adult Underoos.
But the retrospective will get better, as you shall see in the next installment.
-Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson
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