The following events took place on Thursday, July 20 between 11:OO AM and 7:00 PM. 

Discussing fellow columnist Fred Hembeck some months back, Quick Stop editor Ken Plume asked me, “What would it take to get him to go to San Diego?” Well, perhaps if I dazzle Fred sufficiently with my account of the wonders to be found at the San Diego Con, I can persuade him to undertake the pilgrimage that seems mandatory for all American comics enthusiasts.

Another reason that Fred should go is the opportunity to do something neither he nor I have ever done: meet Ken Plume face to face. As far as we know, he is merely a disembodied voice on the telephone. Last year Ken and I managed to miss each other, but surely at this year’s con we could not fail to meet. (Could we?)

THURSDAY 11:00 AM
When I left off my account of this year’s Comic-Con last week, I was attending the U. S. Postal Service’s First Day Issue ceremony for the new set of DC Comics superheroes stamps. I made an early exit in order to take in a panel that was running simultaneously: the opening session of the Comic Arts Conference (CAC), the academic conference on comics that is held every year at the San Diego Con, and, as it did last year, set up residence in Room 7B.

The Conference showcases serious scholarly explorations of the comics artform. But this first panel was only serious inasmuch as the speakers maintained straight faces while keeping their tongues firmly in their cheeks.

This panel was “Myths for the Modern Age,” featuring contributing writers to a recent anthology of essays, Myths for the Modern Age: Philip Jose Farmer’s Wold Newton Universe, published by Monkeybrain Press.

Farmer, a renowned science fiction novelist, wrote two purported biographies, Tarzan Alive and Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life, which alleged that these characters are real people, whose lives and exploits were fictionalized by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Lester Dent, and other writers. (Thus, for example, Farmer claimed that pulp novel hero Doc Savage, one of the forebears of the superhero genre, was actually a man named Dr. James Clarke Wildman, Jr.) Moreover, Farmer contended that long ago radioactive meteorites landed at a spot in Britain called Wold Newton, and that various pregnant women passing nearby were exposed to this radiation. As a result, the children of these women and their descendants possessed heightened physical and intellectual abilities. Tarzan and Doc Savage are members of the “Wold Newton” family, as are Sherlock Holmes and numerous other characters from classic adventure fiction of the 19th and 20th centuries.

I recall reading at least part of Tarzan Alive decades ago, but never encountered anyone else who mentioned it. So I was surprised some years ago to discover that, once again, something that I considered a private pleasure in growing up is shared today by many others. The writers of Myths for the Modern Age are carrying on and elaborating upon Farmer’s Wold Newton mythos, and this CAC panel dealt with its applications to comics characters. Hence, one paper presented at the panel hypothesized that Modesty Blaise was Tarzan’s daughter; another argued that Vampirella was the same character as Lady Rawhide from recent Zorro comics.

When I arrived at the panel, writer Win Eckert was presenting his paper, which attempted to reconcile the seemingly contradictory accounts of Doc Savage’s later career from Farmer’s book (in which Savage retired in 1950 and had a daughter) and from DC Comics’ Doc Savage comics of the late 1980s (in which Savage instead married a Mayan princess and fathered a son, though Farmer denied that either event took place).

Eckert alleged that earlier in 2006 an anonymous party had sent him news reports by one Adelaide Johnston Lupin, who is the daughter of the gentleman thief Arsene Lupin and the aunt of anime adventurer Lupin III. Based on this purported evidence, Eckert concocted an incredible theory that he nonetheless contended was the only way to reconcile these two contradictory histories. According to Eckert, at one point Doc Savage had traveled back in time. Therefore, for forty years Doc Savage (who ages at a different rate than normal humans) was leading two parallel but different lives on Earth, and thus both Farmer and DC were right.

Now, obviously, Farmer and DC were each devising a different version of Doc Savage’s career following the classic pulp novels of the 1930s and 1940s. The reader should regard each version as an alternate possibility. If the reader insists that one version should be canonical, than he should judge each on its literary merits and on its fidelity to the work of Doc Savage’s creator Lester Dent. It is easy to regard Eckert’s convoluted effort to reconcile such disparate accounts of a fictional character’s life as merely silly.

But I nonetheless sympathize with what Eckert was doing, even if he took it to an extreme. The Wold Newtonian scholars know full well that Doc Savage and the rest are fictional characters, but they are engaging in an entertaining intellectual exercise. They pretend that the characters are real, and try to demonstrate that, beneath a fictionalized facade, the stories about them are true. Thus it becomes an intellectual challenge to reconcile seeming contradictions, and even to find links among various celebrated fictional characters created by different authors.

The impulse behind the Wold Newton scholars seems much like that behind Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentleman: to chronicle an alternative history in which all these classic characters of popular literature co-exist and interrelate (see “Comics in Context” #22-23).

Eckert was followed at the podium by Peter Coogan, one of CAC’s chairmen, who dropped the pose of utter seriousness in presenting “Principles of Wold Newtonry,” an explication of Wold Newtonian methodology. Coogan pointed out that Wold Newtonry is based on what Sherlock Holmes aficionados call “the Game”: their pretense that Holmes was a real person and their efforts to explain away contradictions within Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories about him,

Among the guiding principles of Wold Newtonry that Coogan identified was the Principle of Physical Resemblance, which underlay a previous speaker’s theory that Modesty Blaise was Tarzan’s daughter. Another was the Principle of Unverifiable Evidence, as exemplified by Ms. Lupin’s newspaper stories. Eckert claims to have clippings of these stories, but, as Coogan observed, “you can’t find them.”

My affinity for Wold Newtonry should not surprise anyone since I was engaged in a similar endeavor. In working on the original versions of The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe in the 1980s, its creator and editor, Mark Gruenwald and I operated from a similar assumption: writing as if the Marvel Universe were real. We too found ourselves resolving apparent contradictions in Marvel stories and filling gaps in past Marvel history. And much of the appeal of the Marvel Universe lies in the concept of an entire alternate cosmos in which so many favorite characters coexist and interact.

THURSDAY 11:30 AM
Once Wold Newtonry was out of the way, the Comic Arts Conference moved on to more serious matters with Session #2: “The Great Leap: Adapting Comics into Film.” I stayed to hear the initial two presentations.

The first was by Kate McClancy of Duke University, who this year joined Peter Coogan and Randy Duncan in co-chairing CAC. As I did in my lengthy review of the comics and film versions of Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta earlier this year (see “Comics in Context” #126-131), McClancy disputed the conventional critical opinion that the movie is a faithful adaptation of the comics. In her presentation, “Should Governments Be Afraid of Their People?: Fascism in V for Vendetta,” she argued that whereas in the comics, Moore contended that each of us must make his or her own decisions, “the film tells us we must rely on a superhero to save us.” Hence, McClancy asserted, the film “actually enforces fascist implications” in the story. That explains the radical change that the Wachowskis made in the film’s ending, wherein the people of London all don “V” masks and costumes: they are idealizing a strong, iconic leader figure, as fascists do, rather than “take responsibility themselves.”

Agreeing with Moore’s contention that the film reflects an “American liberal fantasy,” McClancy pointed out that Moore’s V not only destroys the entire fascist government, but goes after the church and the media as well, whereas the movie V is content merely to bring about “peaceful regime change.”

McClancy also criticized the movie for overly humanizing V, through such means including displaying his burn scars and having him fall in love with Evey, whereas Moore’s V claims to be “an idea,” rather than “a man of flesh and blood,” and his emotional calm reinforces that impression.

(McClancy also asserted that there is no proof of the original V’s gender, and noted that it has been speculated that V is actually Valerie, the woman he claims inspired “him.” Well, the Larkhill sequences certainly indicate that V is male, but then again, can we be certain that the male escapee was V? Hmm.)

McClancy was followed by Richard A. Becker of CSU Northridge, who contended that the makers of movie and television adaptations of superhero series suffer from “a lack of conviction” in the genre. Hence, for example, there were never any supervillains in the live action Hulk TV show, and the X-Men movies refuse to put the characters into colorful costumes. Becker asserted that film makers were afraid that audiences would not suspend their disbelief enough to accept the many fantasy elements of the superhero genre, and yet he pointed out that audiences are willing to accept “Oz, Middle-Earth, and the Star Wars universe.” Becker summed up his presentation by stating that “all fiction” involves a “threshold of disbelief,” but that what is most important is that the audience “must accept” a story “on an emotional level, in their gut.” In comparison to this emotional reality, he said, “it doesn’t matter how many rivets are on Iron Man’s armor.”

THURSDAY 12:00 PM
Once again I left a panel early, this time to get some lunch, or, more precisely brunch, at one of the Convention Center’s fast food counters (not as bad or as overpriced as some claim) and to do some exploring of the main floor of the convention before I appeared on the DK panel at 2 PM.

The convention already appeared crowded, yet it was only Thursday, a day when most adults could not attend unless they took a day off from work. (Do I need to explain that the vast majority of Comic Con attendees are adults, and not school-age kids?) Comic-Con sage Mark Evanier, who has attended each San Diego Con from its very beginnings in 1970 (presumably when the nearby Gaslamp Quarter really was lit by gaslamps), observed on his blog (www.newsfromme.com) that “Thursday afternoon could have passed for Friday.” If Thursday at Comic-Con is the new Friday, and Friday is the new Saturday, then could anyone imagine the horrors of congestion that awaited us on the real Saturday?

I managed to covere a great deal of the convention main floor on Thursday, and explored much of the rest (with difficulty) on Sunday. The immense DC Comics booth area and the somewhat smaller Dark Horse section were easy to locate. As for the question that those of you who have read my past Comic-Con reports are about to ask, yes, I was informed that there was a Marvel booth at the Con, or, rather, a Marvel/Activision booth, but I never found it, and I was searching for it!

One Comic-Con landmark that was hard to miss was the unearthly, unspeakable menace of H. P. Lovecraft’s elder god Cthulhu, which hovered above the heads of unsuspecting convention attendees, and was once again disguised as a giant version of Pikachu from Pokemon. Don’t these fans realize that the reason that Cthulhu/Pikachu wears that blissed-out smile is that he is just about to suck out their brains? Can anyone stop his march to world domination?

Consider Pikachu’s latest triumph. Perusing the current schedule for Boomerang, Cartoon Network’s sister cable network, to which it has banished 20th century animation, I cannot find classic Looney Tunes except for most episodes of the revived anthology series Toon Heads. But Boomerang is now doing hour-long blocks of Pokemon. Could any of us have imagined a day would come when there was no Bugs Bunny show on daily television? Does it even make sense that Warners would drop such a valuable property from its TV networks, especially from a channel that doesn’t have commercials and hence presumably need not cater to current fads? Grateful as I am for the 1990s Batman episodes on Boomerang, will the network eventually become so crammed with retired series from Kids WB and Cartoon Network that Warner/Turner will have to found yet another new network for classic theatrical cartoons? Or should TCM just expand its Cartoon Alley schedule? Or is Warners’ current attitude, “Let ‘em eat DVDs”? (And will a new generation buy Looney Tunes DVDs if they haven’t seen samples of the cartoons on television?)

Damn! If only Pikachu/Cthulhu could meet the fate he so richly deserves! Little did I know on Thursday that before Comic-Con ended, I would see justice served.

By sheer chance I encountered my longtime friend (and former comics pro) Meloney Crawford Chadwick as I made my way through the crowded aisles. We talked animatedly, and discussed getting together on Sunday afternoon, as we had the last two times I attended Comic-Con. We didn’t set a specific time or place to meet ln Sunday, but she told me how to get in touch with her.

And this was a mistake that I make every year at Comic-Con since the new century began. It was merely by luck that I met Meloney on Thursday, and it would be a matter of luck if I saw her again at this Con. Always set a specific time and place to meet. I again quite the wisdom of Mark Evanier, who rhetorically asked on his blog, “Why is it I couldn’t locate the ten or twelve people with whom I had to talk business but I couldn’t take twelve steps without running into Len Wein?” In my case, it was Danny Fingeroth.

I also found the DK booth, where I had the pleasure of meeting two people from DK Publishing’s London office, who would be sharing the panel with me: senior designer Robert Perry and DK Licensing publisher Alex Allan, who, despite the misleading name (or, rather, I was just too unimaginative to recognize an alternate possibility), proved to be a blonde woman.

THURSDAY 2:00 PM
It was also a pleasure to see former Marvel editor in chief Tom De Falco again. We are two of the many writers of DK’s forthcoming Marvel Encyclopedia, which goes on sale in October. I don’t think either of us had any idea what we would say on the DK panel in Room 1B, but thanks to our improvisatory skills it went quite well. We even discovered that we had different stories about the origin of The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe: I think it came from former editor on chief Jim Shooter’s notion of doing a book of “specifications” of Marvel superheroes’ powers, and Tom thinks it came from Shooter’s suggestion that Mark Gruenwald turn his style guide sheets on Marvel characters into a book. But as I pointed out, both stories could be true. Alex Allan said that the Handbook was indeed a partial inspiration for the DK Marvel Encyclopedia, so I’m still working on the Gruenwald legacy. During the panel I also surprised Alex by praising DK’s art and travel books, which I had been buying long before I did any work for them.

The panel had a good audience, some of whom came up to speak to me afterwards. This was how I got to meet Stuart Vandal, one of the writers of Marvel’s current Handbooks, who had journeyed to Comic-Con all the way from the United Kingdom (thereby putting the reclusive Mr. Hembeck to shame!). As we left, Tom and I got to talk to an old friend, comics writer Marv Wolfman, who was arriving to sit on the next panel. And once I was outside the panel room, I encountered Ben Jackendorf, the cameraman for Constantine Valhouli’s Sex, Lies and Superheroes, the documentary I worked on several years ago, who had since moved to Los Angeles. There may have been over a hundred thousand people at this convention, but sometimes the gods of Comic-Con arrange welcome surprises.

THURSDAY 3:30 PM
Gina Misiroglu, the co-editor of The Supervillain Book, and I had set a time and place to meet (in front of Pro Registration) before we left for Comic-Con, so we had no trouble finding each other. Since we a relatively quiet spot to talk, I escorted her to a quiet restaurant with a picturesque view that Meloney has shown me which is only a short walk from the Convention Center, and yet it appears to remain a secret to over ninety-nine percent of Con attendees. (No, I’m not going to tell you where it is.) There we discussed Gina’s idea for her next book, which I would help write if we find a publisher for it. (No, I’m not going to tell you what it is.) And I finally told Gina my idea for yet another book that she and I could co-edit and co-write, which she loved. (And I’m certainly not going to tell you what this is!) (Gina was also excited about my airborne encounter with Annette: “Did you ask her out?”)

This meeting with Gina worked out fine, but I missed the big Publishers Weekly meeting that was also held that afternoon. I knew there was going to be one, but as of the time I left my apartment on Wednesday I still hadn’t been e-mailed the time or place; the e-mail wasn’t sent out until Thursday, when it was too late for me to see it. The meeting was at 5 PM, which, according to the Beat’s e-mail, was “after the Grant Morrison/[Deepak] Chopra thing that everyone seems to be going to.” (Well, not “everyone”: I am not a particular fan of Morrison’s work or New Age blather.)

Too bad, since the e-mail continued, “We’ll be going over assignments, party invites, and other stuff.” Hey, you mean PW could have gotten me into some of these exclusive parties? Not only that, but I could have gotten my press badge, which PW editor Calvin Reid had picked up. (Couldn’t he have left it at Registration for me?) But Calvin and Heidi had already been swallowed up by the Comic-Con crowd, and I would not see either of them for quite some time to come. Sometimes the gods of Comic-Con are determined to keep people apart.

THURSDAY 5:30 PM
For me Comic-Con would not be complete without dropping in, at least once, on the con-within-a-con hosted by Mark Evanier, who moderates panels, primarily about animation and the Golden and Silver Ages of Comics, throughout the convention. For any comics fan with a sense of history (say, like Fred Hembeck), simply following Mark from panel to panel –twelve in four days this year–and staying clear of the crushing masses on the main convention floor, would make for a perfectly satisfying Comic-Con experience.

If you follow Mark’s blog, you know that he recently underwent surgery for weight reduction, which has had astonishing results. On July 30 he posted on his blog, “I’ve lost 65 pounds in 65 days. I used to eat steaks that weighed that much.” At this rate, I expect that at next year’s Comic-Con we will see the Incredible Shrinking Mark wielding a sharp needle to fend off a predatory housecat. If DC’s new Atom series doesn’t work out, I know where they can find a new contender for the role.

The next panel in EvanierFest was “Spotlight on Jerry Robinson,” the Golden Age Batman artist, editorial cartoonist, and comics historian, held in Room 8.

Before it began, I asked Mark if he had seen our mutual friend Ken Plume. Mark looked at me somewhat severely and said no, but advised me to seek out Ken’s friend, voice actor Billy West. I would not realize the full import of this counsel until later, as you shall see in ensuing installments.

Because I was on the DK Publishing panel, I wasn’t able to attend the Evanier panel that was held simultaneously, “Batman: The Golden/Silver Age,” on which Robinson had appeared. Perhaps that is one reason why Evanier did not ask Robinson much about Batman on his “Spotlight” panel. Another, even better reason, is that there has been considerably more to Robinson’s lengthy career.

Evanier began by observing to Robinson that Batman comprised perhaps “five percent of your career” but that’s “probably what you’re asked most about at cons.” Robinson agreed, “That’s true,” but he added that “It doesn’t bother me.” He added that “I wish maybe they asked more about” his career as an editorial cartoonist, which lasted for thirty-two years. But, Robinson said, reminiscing about Batman “lets me relive my youth.”

Evanier said that “I didn’t realize for a long time that the Jerry Robinson of Batman is the same [person] as Jerry Robinson the editorial cartoonist” because their “styles are so different.” To illustrate Robinson’s versatility, Evanier projected a retrospective of selections of Robinson’s work on a screen: I know that the presentation was done via computer, but the end result was effectively a slide show.

Early on were some classic Batman covers from the 1940s, including one from Detective Comics #70, showing Batman underwater, attempting to rescue Robin, who was trapped inside a bathysphere and, from his expression, clearly running out of air. Robinson explained that this “never happened in a story,” but that he “liked the shape” of the bathysphere. He came up with the visual idea, and “just did it” and showed it to DC editor/art director Whitney Ellsworth, who bought it.

Later there was Flubs and Fluffs, a Sunday comic strip that Robinson did for “seventeen, eighteen years,” in which he drew cartoons based on funny things that children had actually said in classrooms, such as “An autobiography is the life of an automobile.” We were shown a cartoon illustrating the line “In the Civil War, the Southern States receded from the Union”: Robinson’s illustration showed Confederate soldiers at sea, with one dryly observing, “I think we receded too far.”

Robinson said that Flubs and Fluffs received “up to 1500 letters per week,” and he was “told it got more mail than the President of the United States.”

Robinson also said that some lines were submitted to the strip that were too “off color” for them to use, giving as an example, “Magellan circumcised the world three times.”

Beginning in 1961 Robinson did a daily series of editorial cartoons called Still Life, in which inanimate objects commented on current events. In one that we were shown, the Presidential seal states that “The President [Richard Nixon] is in conference with his most trusted advisor. He’s alone.” Still Life was succeeded by a more conventional editorial cartoon series, Life with Robinson, in which people appeared.

Robinson told the audience that as a result of his cartoons he was invited by President Lyndon Johnson down to his ranch, and to the White house by Presidents Johnson and Carter. Robinson said that Richard Nixon “once asked for an original,” but this was “early on,” before Robinson “started criticizing him heavily.”

Since these editorial cartoons were syndicated to numerous papers, Robinson said this gave him “freedom.” He said he “was as harsh as I needed to be” in his commentary. “At times” he “lost papers” due to what he said in the cartoons, but thanks to syndication he could “lose a paper” but “not lose your job.”

How cutting were his cartoons? Here’s an exchange from a Still Life, presumably from the Vietnam era, that we were shown that seems relevant today: a cannon asks, “What’s a limited war?” and is told, “That’s one where the casualties don’t exceed the birth rate.”

Robinson also spent years doing “Theatre Life with Robinson” for Playbill, the program given out at Broadway shows. As something of a counterpart to the late Al Hirschfeld, Robinson would draw illustrations of performers on Broadway shows. (Evanier mentioned that he had once sat for Hirschfeld, and was surprised that he “drew me without looking at the page” once!) Robinson would sit in the audience during a show to do sketches, but he would also go backstage. Evanier showed various examples of “Theatre Life,” such as a striking portrait of Duke Ellington amidst a montage of performers from the Ellington revue Sophisticated Ladies and the original cast of the musical Nine. Commenting on portraits of MGM musical stars Ann Miller and Mickey Rooney from their Broadway show Sugar Babies, Robinson had interesting insights into performers’ public and private selves.

Miller, Robinson said, “posed for me in her dressing room,” which was full of “big stuffed lions.” This affectation, it turned out, was not a reference to the MGM lion; Miller was a believer in reincarnation, and claimed she lived in Egypt circa 300 B. C.. She “told me about some of her funnier lives” in what he termed “a high. sweet voice” until she was interrupted by a phone call to her agent, whereupon Robinson imitated Miller shifting into a loud, angry voice. Then, when the call was over, he told us, Miller shifted “back to the sweet voice” as if nothing had happened.

Rooney, he said, was “frenetic, couldn’t sit still” until Robinson offered him the Napoleon-style hat he wears in the picture. He “held [his] grin for almost a minute once he put the hat on,” Robinson said, long enough for him to make the sketch.

And there were many more examples from Robinson’s wide ranging career in cartooning, which makes most contemporary comics artists’ careers look rather narrow. From a book about the Civil War (America’s, not Marvel’s), there was Robinson’s fine portrait of Abraham Lincoln, which he said he “tried to do in the engraved style of the 1860s.” There was art from children’s books, and a cover that Robinson did for a book called Moon Trip. (Here Evanier interjected that he once asked Jack Kirby about the moon landing, and Kirby told him, “I’ve been there already.”) There were pages from comic book stories he had drawn in the Western and crime genres. There were sketches he had done on his travels to such places as Florence and Prague. We were shown pictures of a caricatured eagle and bear, representing the United States and the Soviet Union, that Robinson had done as co-art director for an animated film called Stereotypes. We were also shown the cover for Robinson’s early 1970s book, Comics: An Illustrated History of Comic Strip Art, which Dark Horse will be republishing, probably next year.

The subject of the recent protests against the cartoons of Mohammed drawn by Danish artists came up. Robinson said that the Cartoonists and Artists Syndicate, which he had founded to represent foreign cartoonists in the United States, represented two of those Danish cartoonists.

This led to Robinson’s recounting of how in the 1970s Jules Feiffer called him to tell him about “a cartoonist imprisoned and tortured in Uruguay,” which then had “one of the worst fascist regimes.” Robinson said this cartoonist was a “prisoner of conscience” who “only opposed the government in his art.” Robinson set about publicizing this man’s case. “It took three years,” Robinson told us, but finally, through the help of Senator Paul Tsongas and other U. S. senators, the cartoonist “was released six months before his term was up.”

“Most such prisoners,” Robinson continued, have “no one outside to help, so they lose hope” and “commit suicide” or die by other means. Robinson stated that this cartoonist’s wife told him that “Knowing that American artists were working to get him out kept him alive.”

Perhaps inevitably, the panel ultimately returned to Robinson’s reminiscences about his early days in comic books. Mark Evanier asked Robinson to retell the celebrated story of how he, the late George Roussos, and several other artists turned out a whole sixty-four page comic book over a long weekend, starting on a Thursday night in 1941. If they didn’t have the comic done by Monday morning, publisher Charles Biro would have lost the allotment of paper he needed to print it. The artists rented a vacant apartment to work in, but on that Saturday night the city was hit by “one of the biggest blizzards in New York history.” Robinson told us they “had to dig our way out of the doorway.” One of the artists, Bernie Klein, “went out to forage for food,” and returned with a dozen eggs and a can of beans. But they had “no way to cook them,” Robinson recalled, until they started to “break off tiles out of the bathroom” to construct an improvised hot plate.

The artists all created new characters for this book, and Robinson’s contribution was a superhero named London, It was “just before we got into the war,” Robinson told us, the city of London was being “bombed by the Nazis” and “the fate of Western civilization” was at stake. Robinson’s new superhero embodied the British resistance to tyranny. A caption in Robinson’s London story read, “As he is London, the living, breathing reality to prove London can take it!”

Also perhaps inevitably, a questioner from the audience asked Robinson how he came up with his most famous creation, the Joker. Robinson was a student at Columbia University (like myself!) when he was first working on Batman. “I was studying literature,” he told us, and “I knew every great hero has an antagonist,” like “David and Goliath” or “Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty.” Hence, Robinson said, he wanted to come up with a villain “with some dimension.”

Robinson was specifically influenced by the fact that, he said, his brother and mother “were champion bridge players. I played too, but not as well.” So he “searched a deck of cards” and found the “classic image” of the Joker.

Robinson pointed out that in the first Joker stories they “didn’t explain his white face.” (Or, for that matter, the Joker’s green hair and blood-red lips.) He “felt it was more intriguing not to explain it.” Robinson is aware that later it was established that the Joker’s hair and skin were permanently dyed by chemical wastes, but he contends that “once you know he fell in a vat, it’s not bizarre.” In a period when comics fans demand explanations for everything, Jerry Robinson thus advocates the appealing intrigue of unsolved mysteries.

A dweller of the Northeast like Mr. Hembeck or myself can see Jerry Robinson speak at New York City conventions, but it took a trip to California to hear him drawn out on these many other interesting facets of his career.

Is this enough to persuade Fred to go to San Diego? Or does he need more? If you and he come back next week, you’ll learn still more about Comic-Con ’06.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF
I’ve written yet another review column for Publishers Weekly‘s online newsletter Comics Week, and you can find the article here.

Copyright 2006 Peter Sanderson

 

 

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