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Last week I wrote about Dave Cockrum and Marshall Rogers, both of whom recently passed away, and whose innovative work as comics artists in the 1970s had considerable impact on the superhero genre. But tastes shifted, and neither artist was considered “hot” in the last few decades. Will their reputations continue to fade? Are the people paying tribute to their work doing so merely out of nostalgia? Or, as time passes, bringing new perspectives, will their work prove to be enduring classics, that survive the shifting tides of fashion?

Recently I read online a 2004 piece by the essayist Paul Graham titled “What You Can’t Say“. He starts out by asking, “Have you ever seen an old photo of yourself and been embarrassed at the way you looked? Did we actually dress like that? We did. And we had no idea how silly we looked.” That’s because fashions change, and what seems stylish in one decade may well look ridiculous in the next. Graham moves from this example of fashion in clothing to the subject of “moral fashions” and fashions in ideas, which both can prove just as ephemeral and wrong. I find that I can apply much of what he says about shifting fashion to the world of the creative arts as well.

Graham contends that “In every period, people believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you would have gotten in terrible trouble for saying otherwise.”

I saw a couple of comics pros at this year’s New York Comic-Con who were superstars a little over a decade ago. They would have been mobbed at a con in the 1990s, but at this 2007 con they attracted relatively little notice. They had proved to be no more than creatures of the popular fashions in comics of that time, and their work lacked the true artistry that would make it vital and relevant to a new century. Why, collecting multiple copies of their work back in the 1990s now seems ridiculous.

But, Graham warns, we must not assume that the present day is more enlightened than the past. “It would be a remarkable coincidence if ours were the first era to get everything just right.” Graham finds that “It’s tantalizing we believe things that people in the future will find ridiculous.” Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns are still popular twenty years after they were published, and it looks likely that they are becoming true classics. Which of the “hot” comics of 2007 will still matter in 2027?

Graham asserts that it is difficult to see beyond the conventional thinking of one’s own time, and identify which notions will prove in time to be transient fashions. “Indeed, the arrival of new fashions makes old fashions easy to see, because they seem so ridiculous by contrast.”

Graham is trying to identify ideas that may be unfashionable now, but which will eventually be accepted as truth. His first question, then, is “Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?” He acknowledges, “OK, it may be heretical (or whatever modern equivalent), but might it also be true?”

I’ve got a splendid example, with which other Baby Boomers can identify. I kept on reading comic books after the age at which one was supposed to give them up. Not only did I like them, but by college I believed that in the hands of the better writers and artists they were vehicles for serious artistic expression. But the world at large did not agree, and I felt uncomfortable about reading comics in public places, or letting people know I read them.

Graham would sympathize, since he writes that “The most important thing is to be able to think what you want, not to say what you want. . . . . Inside your head, anything is allowed. . . .But, as in a secret society, nothing that happens within the building should be told to outsiders.” So I kept believing in the creative worth of comics, even if I felt I had to keep it to myself. While attending university in New York, I finally got to make friends who were comics pros or comics fans, and they became my “secret society.”

Once my classmates in graduate school and I were attending an end-of-term party at a professor’s house, and my friends decided to embarrass me by revealing my fascination with comics to the professor. Their prank backfired, because the professor turned out to have been a passionate comics fan when he was growing up, started reminiscing about the Sub-Mariner, and told me that as a boy he once owned a copy of Action Comics #1!

In retrospect I see this incident as a sign of things to come. It turned out that the “secret society” was far vaster than I imagined. The result is that now, in the 21st century, suddenly we’ve passed the tipping point, and people stopped keeping their appreciation of comics to themselves. For most of my life the conventional wisdom was that comics were junk for kids, and it was a “heresy” that comics could be taken seriously as art. Time is proving the “heresy” right.

Moreover, comics and their creators are following a path that other artforms and their creators have trod in the past. In the April, 2007 issue of Harper’s Magazine, British Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate writes an essay “The Mirror of Life.” He begins by relating that “. . .in the spring of 1616, [Francis] Beaumont and Shakespeare died within a few weeks of each other. Beaumont became the first dramatist to be honored with burial in the national shrine of Westminster Abbey. . . .Shakespeare was laid to rest in the provincial obscurity of his native Stratford-on-Avon. That same year , Ben Jonson became the first English dramatist to publish a collected edition of his own plays written for the public stage. He was much mocked for his presumption in doing so, especially under the title of Works, suggestive of an edition of a classical author such as Virgil or Horace” (Harper’s, April 2007, p. 37).

Here Bate reinforces two of the points I’ve been making here. First, he shows that at the time of their deaths, Beaumont, who often collaborated with John Fletcher, was considered a superior playwright to Shakespeare. But, of course, there is no Royal Beaumont and Fletcher Company nowadays; indeed, today only people who studied English Renaissance drama at university, like Mr. Bate and myself, have any idea who Beaumont and Fletcher were. “We now think of Shakespeare as a unique genius, the embodiment of the very idea of artistic genius,” Bate continues, “but in his own time, though widely admired, he was but one of as constellation of theatrical stars. How is it, then, that when we reach the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Shakespeare’s fame has outstripped that of all his peers?” (p. 37). Bate’s essay shows that as the centuries passed, Shakespeare’s work proved to transcend passing fashions. Although Shakespeare addressed the issues of his own time, his plays dealt with themes and personalities which remain vital and relevant to each succeeding generation. Once again, time proves to be the test of artistic merit.

Second, it continues to astonish me that in the early 17th century Ben Jonson was “much mocked for his presumption” in publishing a collection of his plays, thus treating them as works of literature like the ancient classics. Plays were popular culture, and it was a “heresy” at that time to think of them as high art. Hence it would have been as much a “heresy” in the early 1600s to consider Shakespeare’s plays to be art as it was in the late 1900s to declare that comics were an artform.

Here’s yet another example: recently I went to New York’s City Center to see the “Encores!” revival of Face the Music, a 1932 musical with songs by Irving Berlin and a book by Moss Hart. But Face the Music had not been performed for nearly seventy-five years, in part because neither a full copy of the score nor a definitive version of the book existed. Playwright David Ives explains in the program book that this show “bespeaks an era when there were 90 Broadway theaters, all hopping, and shows went up and down like billboards in Paramus. . . .When shows closed, books got tossed and musicians left their scores in the pit.” In other words, the pop culture of the time was taken for granted, and, Ives continues, “What this means is that nobody thought about preserving Face the Music for posterity.” But time has proved Hart and Berlin to be major figures of the history of the American theater, and so “Encores!” undertook a major research to reconstruct a performing edition of this “lost” show.

Bate asserts that it was the passionate advocacy of Shakespeare’s works by subsequent writers and actors, like John Milton and David Garrick, that caused his reputation to climb with the succeeding centuries. Bate also points out that the publication of the “folio” editions of Shakespeare’s plays further extended his influence by making his work more accessible.

How does this relate to the world of comics? For one thing, the 21st century has brought explosive growth in reprint editions of classic works of the past. Now, rather than poring through back issue bins and sending a fortune, a newcomer to comics can easily, inexpensively acquire copies of the classic work of the past, including Marshall Rogers’ Batman and Dave Cockrum’s X-Men. It would have been “heretical” to carry comic books in public libraries only a decade ago, but now you can even read these classics for free in a well-stocked graphic novel section of a neighborhood library. This will bring about a major change in the comics readership. Older work and its creators will be less likely to fall into obscurity; readers will be able to judge contemporary comics in the context of the medium’s classics.

Further, I believe it is the duty of a critic to separate the wheat from the ephemeral chaff, to identify work of lasting artistic value and praise its creators, whether it–and they–are popular today or not. Graham declares that, “To see fashion in your own time, though, requires a conscious effort. Without time to give you distance, you have to create distance yourself. Instead of being part of the mob, stand as far away from it as you can and watch what it’s doing. And pay especially close attention whenever an idea is being suppressed.” Or when a major creator is undeservedly ignored.

So what if much of today’s audience–and today’s comics editors and publishers–don’t sufficiently appreciate the work of Dave Cockrum and Marshall Rogers? My considered opinion is that Cockrum’s and Rogers’ work will be rediscovered by the comics scholars and connoisseurs of the future, and that they will be remembered and their work appreciated long after the taste of many of today’s “flavors of the month” have faded away. Time will tell.

Another way to examine the careers of Cockrum and Rogers is to consider how much they changed the field in which they chose to work. As I wrote last week, according to inker Terry Austin, the powers at DC Comics originally castigated Rogers’ artwork until he made his enormous impact with fandom on his mid-1970s Batman stories with Englehart. Around that same time, according to DC president Paul Levitz on a panel at the New York Comic-Con, Cockrum, serving his muse, was putting far more creative effort into his artwork than various veteran artists. On the same panel Cockrum’s X-Men collaborator Chris Claremont pointed out that before Cockrum, superhero artists did not pay attention to costuming characters in such a way as to express their individual personalities. To use Graham’s term, Rogers and Cockrum were innovators whose “heresies” eventually won recognition and acclaim from both the critics and the audience of the superhero genre.

In fact, their impact has extended beyond comics onto television and film: Cockrum’s co-creations Colossus, Nightcrawler, Storm, and Mystique have all appeared in the X-Men movies and animated TV series, and Rogers’ 1970s collaboration with Steve Englehart on Batman paved the way for the serious treatment of the character in the 1990s animated TV series and the live action Batman films from 1980 onward. I was amazed and gratified to see that Time magazine not only gave Rogers an obituary, but ran a considerable sampling of his Batman artwork.

Cockrum and Rogers thus each had visible impact on American popular culture. I was thinking of them recently while watching three animated films, which share a common theme: how a creative figure, whose efforts at first meet with disdain and rejection, can ultimately change the world.

Warner Home Video has just released on DVD director George Miller’s computer-animated Happy Feet, which won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature earlier this year. Someone at Warner Home Video had the inspired idea of including a classic Warner Brothers cartoon on a similar theme as a special feature on the DVD. This is the 1936 hand-drawn animated short I Love to Singa, directed by the great Tex Avery (see “Comics in Context” #100-101), with Chuck Jones credited as one of its animators.

Long, long ago in the dim, dark days before home video, film reviewer and animation historian Leonard Maltin, aided and abetted by future “Cartoon Brew”-master Jerry Beck, used to teach a course on animation at the New School in Greenwich Village. Though nominally a course, there were no examinations or term papers. Basically, people such as myself and a number of my friends would pay a reasonable fee to attend eight weekly sessions in which Maltin would show us classic Hollywood cartoons, many of which we could not otherwise see, or at least not until Greg Ford’s “Cartoonal Knowledge” festival came around again in the summer at the Thalia (the legendary revival theater on the Upper West Side). Actually, Maltin’s most popular session each semester was “Sex, Violence and Racism” night, in which he’d show cartoons that still don’t make it onto official home videos (such as Bob Clampett’s infamous 1943 Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs). Maltin served less as an academic than as a well-informed master of ceremonies, introducing and giving the background for each of the well-chosen animated gems on the evening’s program. (Then one semester the course was abruptly canceled at the last minute; Maltin had abandoned us for the siren song of Hollywood to appear regularly on Entertainment Tonight.)

Anyway, I recall that Maltin was bewildered by his audience’s–uh, I mean, students’–fervent love for I Love to Singa, a cartoon that he didn’t consider to be particularly special. But I believe I understand the reasons for it, and it’s interesting that this cartoon still produces such a strong response, since it is so heavily indebted to the fashions of its own time.

First, I Love to Singa is a parody of Warner Brothers’ first “talkie,” the groundbreaking 1927 film The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson. The young owl who is the cartoon’s protagonist is even named “Owl Jolson.” Made nine years before, The Jazz Singer would still be remembered by adult audiences of 1936; this is even evidence that Warners–or at least Avery–was aiming cartoons at adult viewers as well as children. Jolson was still popular at the time, and it turns out that the song “I Love to Singa,” around which the cartoon was created, was written by Harold Arlen and E. Y. “Yip” Harburg (the composer and lyricist for MGM’s The Wizard of Oz!), for Jolson and others to perform in a live action movie of that same year, The Singing Kid.

In The Jazz Singer the protagonist Jakie is the son of a cantor at a Manhattan synagogue. When thirteen-year-old Jakie starts singing jazz songs in public, his father is enraged, saying, “I’ll teach him better than to debase the voice God gave him!” Jakie’s mother protests, “But Papa–our boy, he does not think like we do.” Papa is not convinced and actually beats Jakie, who leaves home, and grows up to become a professional jazz singer, now known as Jack, played by Jolson.

Avery’s I Love to Singa omits explicit references to The Jazz Singer‘s central characters’ ethnicity, although the European accent that voice actor Billy Bletcher gave Papa Owl may be a hint. But notice how that quotation from the father in Jazz Singer relates to Graham’s reference to new ideas as “heresies.” The father in Jazz Singer fairly clearly condemns Jakie’s enthusiasm for this newfangled jazz music as sinful, in defiance of God’s will. The mother, on the other hand, seems to realize that Jakie’s “heretical” thinking is merely a result of his belonging to a different generation, that “does not think like we do.”

I Love to Singa doesn’t use the religious analogy, and doesn’t emphasize the generation gap either. In the opening of the cartoon Papa and Mama Owl’s eggs hatch, and the first three young owls emerge singing or playing classical music, of which Papa, a music teacher, approves. The fourth egg hatches to produce our hero, Owl Jolson, who launches into the title song. Infuriated, denouncing his son as a “jazz singer” (just as the father does in the Jolson movie), Papa Owl throws young Owl out of his home.

Since the other three young owls all share Papa’s taste in music, the cartoon isn’t necessarily pointing to a generational difference as the problem. Instead, Owl is presented as the advocate and practitioner of a kind of music that is new, untraditional, and even innovative in this time period. And at the start of the cartoon this makes him a solitary outcast.

Then Owl enters an amateur talent competition on a radio show presided over by host and judge “Jack Bunny,” a rabbit. Here again Avery is satirizing popular culture of that particular time. “Jack Bunny’s” name is an obvious reference to radio comedian Jack Benny, whom the Warners animation seemed to love (as most clearly demonstrated by the real Benny’s appearance in Robert McKimson’s 1959 cartoon The Mouse That Jack Built). But the amateur competition, this rabbit’s sour demeanor, and his rapid dismissal of blatantly incompetent contestants all suggest Avery is really parodying Major Bowes’ Amateur Hour, which is referenced in the title song’s lyrics, and was a Depression-era counterpart to today’s American Idol.

Young Owl performs on the show and is an instant sensation. Hence, this cartoon is also about the difference between high culture, represented by Papa Owl and his classical music-playing offspring, and popular culture, represented by the jazz singing Owl. Young Owl is the creative artist whose new style of work is considered “heretical” by the cultural establishment, and who seems isolated at first, but who eventually finds a wide audience among the general public.

Walt Disney addressed the same topic in his “Silly Symphony” cartoon Music Land (see “Comics in Context” #136), which had come out the year before Avery’s cartoon. But Music Land , I Love to Singa, and The Jazz Singer each resolve the conflict between the old and the new differently.

At the climax of The Jazz Singer, Jack has to decide between starring in a Broadway musical on opening night, or substituting as cantor for his dying father. Despite being warned that if he skips opening night, his career in show business will be ruined, Jack becomes the substitute cantor. The film’s coda reveals that Jack became a successful “jazz singer” anyway. But The Jazz Singer ultimately is a variation on the tale of the Prodigal Son, and in the moment of crisis he chooses the old over the new.

Music Land takes Romeo and Juliet as its basis, instead, and gives it a happy ending. The literal war between the rival kingdoms of music is resolved through the marriage of the prince of jazz to the princess of classical music. High culture and pop culture thus coexist peaceably as equals.

In I Love to Singa Papa Owl and the rest of the family hear young Owl singing on the radio and rush to Jack Bunny’s studio. Upon seeing them, Owl unhappily shifts into a dreary rendition of “Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes,” but Papa Owl and the family encourage him to continue singing his jazz tune instead. Now it seems that Papa’s change of heart came about not because he suddenly learned to appreciate jazz, but because his son is on the verge of winning a trophy, presumably representing fame and fortune. Owl goes back to singing “I Love to Singa,” Mr. Bunny presents him with the winner’s trophy, and the cartoon ends with the entire Owl family singing and even dancing along with the prize-winning son.

In other words, I Love To Singa concludes with complete victory for Owl Jolson, the lone, pioneering creative artist who has remade his world: he was once an outcast, but by the cartoon’s end, everyone is literally dancing to his tune.

The topical references in the cartoon–to Al Jolson, The Jazz Singer, Jack Benny, and Major Bowes, and Papa’s mention of violinist Jascha Heifitz–have all dated, and it is questionable how much they mean, if anything, to contemporary audiences. But the thematic heart of this cartoon enables it to transcend its own time, and to appeal to audiences who were born long after it was made.

Happy Feet likewise centers on a clash between two schools of art, with a lone innovator who is initially shunned by the cultural establishment. I’m lucky that I saw the 2005 documentary March of the Penguins first, since Happy Feet based its fantastical story on actual facts about the habits of Emperor penguins. For example, in real life penguins recognize each other by each bird’s distinctively individual cry. Happy Feet turns this into the notion that each penguin, chick or adult, has his or her own “heartsong,” which expresses his or her personality. So each penguin is effectively a creative artist, devising a song which is his or her means of self-expression.

The movie’s protagonist Mumble, however, is a dreadful singer, and expresses himself instead through tap dancing. Mumble has invented dancing (as far as his community is concerned), and the rest of the Emperor penguins, including his own father, Memphis, are horrified and repulsed by it. Their religious leader, a penguin called Noah, condemns Mumble’s dancing as sinful. This may well be a reference to the 1984 movie Footloose, with its minister villain who condemned dancing, but it also echoes The Jazz Singer and ties in to Graham’s comparison of the unpopular, innovative idea to heresy. (I find it interesting that the reviews I’ve read of Happy Feet all miss the fact that every religious opinion expressed by the penguins in the film is obviously false: a penguin enclosure at a zoo is nor “penguin heaven,” the oracle Lovelace is an impostor, and so forth. Is this the first animated family film that presets religion as a delusion?)

Perhaps even worse, Mumble’s father and the penguin community attribute Mumble’s dancing to the fact that Memphis dropped Mumble’s egg before it hatched. Hence, the penguin community regard Mumble’s new art form, dancing, as the result of alleged brain damage! Creative artists with new ideas may be called crazy, but the penguins go further, thinking of Mumble as effectively retarded!

And so Mumble becomes the artist as outcast. But over the course of the movie he gains more acceptance, first from a band of Adelie penguins, a different species, who speak with Latino accents. This put me in mind of Disney’s Dumbo (1941), about another shunned misfit, who is considered a freak, the title character, a baby elephant with enormous ears: his talent for flying is encouraged by a group of crows with African-American voices. In both cases, members of a different ethnic community are portrayed as more open to new ideas than the establishment of the protagonist’s own community. In Dumbo‘s case the crows clearly respond through sympathy with a fellow outcast. On the other hand, Happy Feet never makes clear why the Adelie penguins, “The Amigos,” whose species has its own community, don’t share the Emperor’s apparently innate revulsion towards Mumble’s dancing. Later in the film younger penguins, of Mumble’s own generation, start admiring his dancing, while Noah and the elders still condemn it. So why did the younger penguins, who hadn’t liked the dancing earlier in the film, change their minds?

By the end of the film (and at this point I issue a spoiler warning for those who haven’t seen it), dancing has become necessary for the penguins’ survival. The movie establishes that the penguins are suffering from a shortage of food, caused by fishing by humans. Investigating, Mumble is captured and placed on exhibit at a zoo, where he won the interest and hearts of humans through his tap dancing. Released back into the Antarctic wild, Mumble induces the whole Emperor penguin community to dance in front of what they consider the “alien” invaders–human scientists. The world of humans is so impressed by the penguins’ dancing, which presumably indicates they aren’t just dumb birds, that the United Nations takes steps to ensure their survival.

The internal logic of Happy Feet‘s story has sizable holes. In any animated film with talking animals, we have to accept the notion that animals have human-level intelligence and their own language, which we moviegoers hear as English even if the humans in the film can’t understand it. (A scene in the zoo makes clear that humans can’t understand the penguin language, and hear it only as squawking.) Until the end of Happy Feet most of the penguins have never seen human beings; there are a few who have encountered them and consider humans to be aliens from another world. So if the penguins are supposed to be ignorant of human society, why do the moviemakers give them such famous songs to sing, even “Heartbreak Hotel” and “My Way”? Not only is Mumble’s father voiced by Hugh Jackman as an Elvis Presley soundalike, but he’s named Memphis, as if the penguins, isolated in Antarctica, would have known about either Memphis, Tennessee or Memphis, Egypt! All of this is asking for a lot more suspension of disbelief than I’m used to giving.

As for the movie’s climax, why is dancing necessary to save the penguins? Even if the humans can’t understand penguin language, if they heard them singing, couldn’t the humans tell that they were making music? And wouldn’t the humans recognize the melodies of, say, the songs by Prince that the filmmakers give the penguins?

But, once again, the main thrust of the movie’s story is the innovative creative artist’s journey from lone outcast to widely recognized success, remaking the culture in the process. Owl Jolson set his entire family dancing to his tune at the end of I Love to Singa and became a success on local radio. Mumble goes much further, getting his entire community to dance along with him, playing to a worldwide audience, and altering the history of his community for the better. Mumble is the artist as savior, literally bringing a new lease on life to his culture. His “heretical” art supplants his culture’s old religion.

Happy Feet encountered considerable controversy since it employed “motion capture” technology, comparable to that used in The Polar Express (see “Comics in Context” #66) and the new King Kong (See “Comics in Context” #121) with live human dancers in creating the penguins’ dance movements. I don’t have the expertise to judge how much of the characters’ movements in Happy Feet may have been taken directly from motion capture and how much were the result of conventional computer animation. But penguins aren’t built like people, so I should think that animators had to do considerable modification of the motion capture data to make it look right for penguins.

Now that I’ve finally seen Happy Feet, it’s not surprising to me that it won the Academy Award, considering the joyousness of its musical sequences, the sheer visual spectacle of its Antarctic landscapes, and a theme that Hollywood, filled with creative artists who went there seeking success, would identify with. By the same logic, they would be less likely to identify with Pixar’s Cars (see “Comics in Context” #137-138), which was about getting out of the rat race (or auto race) to success, and learning to value life’s other virtues. But I still think that Cars was a more profound and affecting movie, and should have won.

The latest Disney animated feature, Meet the Robinsons, has a young protagonist whose talents lies in science and invention, not in singing or dancing. Yet it too follows the same basic theme as I Love to Singa and Happy Feet, as we shall see next week.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR SOMEONE ELSE

Instead of plugging myself this week, I wish to turn readers’ attention to one of my fellow Quick Stop columnists’ latest episode of The Fred Hembeck Show. Discover how Fred, the herald of SpongeBob SquarePants was finally rewarded for his faith by a phone call from Tom Kenny, the mortal incarnation–and voice–of the Absorbent One!

Here’s a real life equivalent of the same pattern followed by Owl Jolson and Mumble. Fred was far ahead of many of us in preaching the virtues of SpongeBob, and now, as he points out in his column, the rest of the world has caught up with him!

I also want to compliment Fred on the brand new cartoons he has been doing lately for his Quick Stop column. And there are only two weeks to go until The Fred Hembeck Show hits its hundredth anniversary!

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson