When I left off last week, I was being dazzled by the vast array of vintage comic books on display at Geppi’s Entertainment Museum (http://www.geppismuseum.com/), which opened last fall at the former Camden Station building in Baltimore, Maryland. Hundreds and hundreds of comic books from the Golden Age of the 1930s and 1940s to nearly the present day lined the walls of the gallery titled “A Story in Four Colors,” as you can see in this photo of just a sampling. There were also an enormous array of Big Little Books and a selection of pulp magazines, including The Shadow and The Spider.

But there was even more than just the actual comics and pulps on display beneath glass. For example, on a video monitor a documentary about the history of EC Comics was playing, presumably the same one that was a subject of a panel at the 2005 San Diego Con (see “Comics in Context” #95). Nearby were original copies of the legendary ECs themselves, and beyond them, high on a wall, the original artwork for various EC covers, including a stunning comics cover by Harvey Kurtzman.

At one end of the hall were a series of screens on which the very first Superman story from Action Comics #1 (1938) was projected, a few pages at a time. In front of the screens were two kiosks with touch screens, which enable the visitor to electronically page through this story, or Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s Fantastic Four #1 (1961), or Lee and Ditko’s first Spider-Man story from Amazing Fantasy #15 (1962), or Carl Barks’s “Donald Duck Finds Pirate Gold,” from Four Color #9 (1942). First one touches the screen to select one of the comics, and then, through additional touching, cause the onscreen book to open and its pages to turn, through simple, appealing animation. This was entertaining, and I found myself wishing that there were a lot more selections in the kiosks, and, probably impracticably, that the museum people had scanned the backup stories for these comics as well. (Fantastic Four #1, which had no backups, was the only complete issue, but, of course, most visitors would probably not care about, say, the other features in Action #1.) While I was playing with the kiosks, the first Batman story, “The Case of the Chemical Syndicate” from Detective Comics #27 (1939) and the first Spider-Man story appeared on the big screens behind them.

As much fun as I had with these electronic toys, afterwards I wondered how much the museum visitor with little knowledge of comics history would get out of them. He or she might figure out that the stories on the screens are the debuts of Superman, Batman, the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man, and the latter two have credits for Lee, Kirby and Ditko. But no information is supplied about who these men are, or what made these stories so revolutionary in their time. Nor is there any information about Superman’s co-creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster and their struggle to get their innovative strip published, or about Bob Kane and his long unacknowledged co-creator of Batman, Bill Finger (see “Comics in Context” #94).

In the case of Barks’s “Pirate Gold,” I recalled that this was one of his earliest comics stories, but it wasn’t until after returning home and researching it on the Net, that I discovered that (1) this was the first Donald Duck comics story produced by American publication, (2) it was Barks’s first work in Disney comics, following his stint as a story man for Disney animation, (3) the story was not written by Barks, but adapted by a writer named Bob Karp from a script for an animated cartoon that was never made, and (4) Barks only drew half the story, while his former Disney writing partner Jack Hannah drew the rest. Now, I’m pretty knowledgeable about comics, but all this came as news to me.

But of course I already knew who Carl Barks was, and his importance to Donald Duck’s history, and, indeed, to the comics medium (see “Comics in Context” #114). How many typical visitors to this museum have even heard of Carl Barks, whose comics work went uncredited for decades?

Furthermore, although the “Four Colors” room’s introductory wall text asserts the significance of comics as an artform, what the visitor principally sees in this gallery are the outside of comic books: their covers. Each cover is a single image, however iconic it may be, whereas the essence of comics is a succession of images that tell a story. Apart from some original artwork near the room’s entrance, only the screens and kiosks provide examples of comics storytelling in operation.

But all one need do is to step out into the main hall of the museum to find some brilliant examples of classic newspaper comic strips. To enter this splendid hallway with its high ceiling is like stepping back in time to the Victorian period when Camden Station was built. Artworks have been hung from waist level right up almost to the ceiling, in the fashion of art galleries and museums in the 19th century. But here the objects d’art range from an Alex Ross color print of the Justice League, with his trademark combination of realism and idealization, to a huge Joe Shuster drawing of Superman signed by Siegel and Shuster. There are an enormous 1933 RKO King Kong poster (in German, I think) and an original 1956 “half-sheet” for the movie Forbidden Planet, as well as lobby cards going all the way back to one featuring Mary Pickford from the silent movie era. Here is a page of Bob Kane’s 1930s funny animal series Peter Pupp, as well as a Joe Kubert page from the Viking Prince tale “Curse of the Dragon’s Moon” (from Brave and the Bold #24, 1959). There’s a genuinely amazing piece by Wally Wood entitled “Comic Strip Christmas Party,” with a multitude of interacting famous comic strip characters, drawn of the styles of their creators (apparently from MAD #68 in 1962). And down at one end of the hallway, instead of the Greek or Roman heroic statue one might expect in a Victorian museum, stands instead a statue of a modern hero, Superman.

Then there’s animation art from the Golden Age of the Hollywood Cartoon. Amazingly, there’s a whole series of cels over backgrounds from the Max Fleischer Popeye cartoon Let’s You and Him Fight (1934): Popeye gets kicked in the chin by a mule, Popeye eats spinach, and the setting of his latest boxing match, “Yank’Em Stadium”. Here is the Wicked Queen from Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), holding the box in which Snow White’s heart is to be placed, and her alter ego, the Old Witch, holding her own trademark, the poisoned apple. Nearby an underwater Jiminy Cricket tips his hat to a passing fish in a cel and background from Disney’s Pinocchio (1940), while another pairs the evil puppeteer Stromboli with Foulfellow, the con artist fox. Two other cel-and-background combinations aren’t properly identified, but this Mickey Mouse in bandleader’s uniform and long-billed Donald with a flute are obviously from the classic 1935 cartoon The Band Concert (see “Comics in Context” #110).

As for the original art for comic strips on view, here we see museum founder Steve Geppi’s collector’s eye at its best. My favorites in this main hall are two extraordinary Sunday pages by Hal Foster that persuaded me to rate this master even higher in my estimation. I usually think of Foster as creating formal, stately, handsomely drawn tableaus. But this 1933 Tarzan page, titled “The Woman and the Ape,” is a masterpiece of kinetic power, as Tarzan plunges and swoops among the tree trips, wresting a princess from the clutches of a great ape (probably it is no coincidence that this appeared the same year as the premiere of King Kong), only to confront a roaring lion in a climactic close-up.

Elsewhere along the hallway is a Prince Valiant page from August 2, 1953, in which Foster demonstrates his prowess at visual characterization. Here Valiant confronts Rory McColm, the king of Ireland. Foster communicates the king’s arrogance through a subtly imperious, condescending look. Then, with equal skill, Foster uses a different, more openly expressive approach to convey Valiant’s reaction: he bares his gritted teeth in anger, a surprising sight from this archetypically noble prince, alerting the reader as to just how evil Valiant considers his foe.

There are examples of Walt Kelly’s Pogo in different spots in the museum. I was especially pleased to find a 1960s Sunday page I remembered from my childhood: Albert the alligator, wearing a scoutmaster’s hat, and his troop of scouts, consisting of a single bug, are lost in the woods until in the final panel they see what Albert calls “Civilization!”: Beauregard Houn’Dog, moving to what seems to be a rock beat, with his transistor radio to one ear (the mid-20th century version of an iPod), as a commercial blares forth: “No ifs, no ands, no butts, no, no!/No cigarettes, no tobacco!” (This, children, is not just an example of Kelly as a master of nonsense poetry, but a cutting parody of contemporary cigarette commercials that attempted to delude the unwary into believing that some cigarettes were actually safe to smoke.)

There’s an unusual Peanuts strip from May 18, 1953, back in the early days before Charles Schulz had fully molded Charlie Brown’s personality into its now familiar form (see “Comics in Context” #66): after Charlie Brown typically blunders in a baseball game, Schroeder pointedly asks him if he’d mind going home, and Charlie Brown angrily roars back, “Yes, I would!”

A late example of Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie from the late 1960s features an intriguing character about whom I’d like to find out more; in one panel he seems to be a giant, but he has a philosophical bent, and calls himself Mr. Alpha Omega, after the Greek letters denoting the beginning and end: he tells Annie, “It’s what happens between these two terminals that’s important.” Considering that Gray died in 1968, Alpha Omega seems to be his response to facing mortality.

Examples of Al Capp’s Li’l Abner in display provide looks at two fabulous animal species he created. A 1948 strip showcases the Shmoo, the all-purpose animal that satisfies virtually all human needs (especially if it is killed and eaten): “There’s good Shmoos tonight,” the strip declares, burlesquing a 1940s catchphrase. A strip from the following year features the Kigmy, who relieves human tensions and aggressions by allowing itself to be kicked: in another parody of cigarettte commercials, the strip refers to “the kick that refreshes.” I wonder what contemporary animal rights activists would think about these two races of critters that exist to be humanity’s slaves.

And there are many more strips here of note. There’s one of Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy Sunday pages from 1943, in which a grotesquely disfigured woman shows the captive Tracy a locket bearing the visage of her deceased husband, one of his archfoes, and introduces herself as “Mrs. Pruneface.” (More original art from this storyline appeared in the “Masters of American Comics” show, as described in “Comics in Context” #153. And yes, I know, Max Allan Collins resurrected Pruneface decades later.) In a George Herriman’s Krazy Kat from Sunday, March 25, 1934, a solar eclipse seems to thwart Ignatz Mouse’s umpteenth effort to clobber Krazy with a brick, until the darkness is unexpectedly–and prettily–illuminated by a swarm of fireflies. In an E. C. Segar daily Thimble Theatre from 1936, Olive Oyl tests Eugene the Jeep’s oracular powers by repeatedly asking him if she is beautiful, to no response. Finally, exasperated, she demands, “Am I ugly?” and Eugene’s tail shoots straight up, his gesture denoting “yes,” as Popeye reacts with his barking laugh. And there is a gorgeous Sunday March 15, 1936 page by the great Alex Raymond, pairing his Jungle Jim strip, featuring a character called Bat-Woman (!), with a classic Flash Gordon featuring Flash, the archvillain Ming the Merciless, and leading lady Dale using MIng’s “paralyzo ray” against his underlings.

There are examples of Winsor McCay’s work in both the main hallway and the “Extra! Extra!” exhibit room. A 1906 Little Sammy Sneeze finds the little menace in the water at the seashore, as a nearby pair of adult swimmers dread his inevitable nasal assault. But the sneeze proves anticlimactic and disappointing; what’s remarkable here is McCay’s depiction of a wave which cascades over the swimmers yet is sufficiently transparent that we can still see them. Elsewhere, in a Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, another beachgoer wears a life preserver so large that he looks like an immense balloon; unsurprisingly, then, when a wave dashes him against the shore, it explodes. At the start of an astonishing 1909 Little Nemo, Doctor Pill already feels somewhat disoriented, having lost his hat. Matters quickly grow worse, as the characters find themselves standing on an immense face, with giant eyes. Then they are standing upon some enormous creature’s feet. Was McCay anticipating or commenting upon the movie close-up, which was developed around this period? Finally, McCay’s “camera” pulls back to a long shot, and we see that the eyes and feet belong to a creature resembling a flying dragon, which the various characters try to identify. (One calls it a “pusillanimous,” perhaps projecting his own reaction to the beast.)

However, my favorite McCay in the Geppi Museum is one of his editorial cartoons, hanging in the main hallway. A tremendous storm with billowing thunderclouds, lightning, and towering, crashing waves, rages about the Statue of Liberty. Yet the Statue stands firm, its torch alight, as if untouched by the storm, and looking somehow both melancholy and determined. McCay labeled the storm clouds “Futile Attacks,” and the Statue “Liberty of the Press”.

From this grand corridor you can enter any of a series of rooms which trace the history of American pop culture collectibles, dividing it into a different set of “ages” than the history of comic books.

The first of these rooms, “Pioneer Spirit 1776-1894,” actually starts even earlier with the only privately owned copy of the May 9, 1754 Pennsylvania Gazette with Benjamin Franklin’s famous editorial cartoon “Join, or Die” (see “Comics in Context” #159). The room includes conventional playthings such as dolls and marbles. However, the stars of this gallery are the Brownies, created in illustrated children’s books by artist Palmer Cox (1840-1924). As a lengthy wall text satisfactorily explains to people like myself who knew nothing about them, the Brownies were the first cartoon characters to spin off commercially successful licensed products, such as these bowling pins.

The title of the next gallery, “Extra! Extra! 1895-1927” refers to the competition between turn of the last century newspaper moguls Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearts which led to the first flowering of the American newspaper comic strip. The McCay strips are here, as is an autographed photograph of comics pioneer Richard Outcault and an array of merchandise based on his comics characters the Yellow Kid and Buster Brown. There’s even a cartoon in which Buster Brown tells off Theodore Roosevelt (circa 1904).

But what particularly enchanted me was the merchandise on display that was based on a character most of you have never heard of: Uncle Wiggily, a rabbit who was a gentleman, but still a trickster (like the later Bugs Bunny), who starred in illustrated children’s books written by Howard Roger Garis (1873-1962) in the 1910s and 1920s. No, no, I’m not that old: when I was a child and I visited my grandmother, I used to read Uncle Wiggily books at her home. (It’s like how members of my generation show Bugs Bunny DVDs to their offspring.) And here in the museum were an Uncle Wiggily crayon box from 1923, an Uncle Wiggily mug from 1924, and all sorts of Wiggily memorabilia I had never known existed. My sole disappointment was that I was hoping for a look after all these years at his archvillain, the dreaded Skillery-Skallery Alligator, who, if memory serves, was determined to “nibble Uncle Wiggily’s ears!”

The title of the next gallery, “When Heroes Unite 1928-1945,” surely alludes both to American soldiers in World War II and to the birth of the superhero genre. To look around this room is to recognize that the period of the Great Depression and World War II gave rise to some of the most important and enduring iconic characters in American popular culture.

The centerpiece of this room is a display of Mickey Mouse merchandise from the 1930s, including plush dolls, a toy circus train, a radio, and even underwear. There are also charming Walt Disney studio Christmas cards featuring Mickey from 1930 (in which Mickey merrily plays the piano out in the snow, oblivious to a huge snowball looming above him) and 1931 (with Mickey caroling). Other characters are represented by toy figures as well, ranging from Horace Horsecollar and Clarabelle Cow to the “Dance of the Hours” cast from Fantasia (1940). My favorite was the matador from Ferdinand the Bull (1938), a caricature of the young Walt Disney himself.

To look at all the early Superman merchandise on display is to realize how rapidly after his 1938 debut that the Man of Steel became an American icon; here are Superman buttons from 1939 through 1945, a Superman belt from 1940, a Superman hair brush from the 40s, and more. Popeye was no slouch in licensing, either: the museum has Popeye soap, a Jeep doll, and even Popeye Sunshine biscuits (but not spinach!).

Collectibles featuring other pop icons of the period turn up as well, some that you definitely know, such as coloring books based on the 1939 films of The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind, and Little Orphan Annie decoder badges, and some that have been fading into obscurity, like statuettes of the radio characters Amos and Andy. There’s a toy of ventriloquist Edgar Bergen’s dummy Charlie McCarthy sitting in his car, and a doll of Bergen’s other famed dummy, Mortimer Snerd. And again I wondered how many visitors would know who they were.

The next gallery, “America Tunes In 1946-1960,” brings us to the start of television and the childhood of most of the Baby Boomers. As soon as you enter the room, you’ll see Howdy Doody puppets atop a series of TV screens showing not only Howdy’s show, but also The Honeymooners’ “Chef of the Future” episode (“Better Living through TV,” 1955), Lucille Ball’s drunken encounter with “vitameatavegemin” on I Love Lucy (“Lucy Does a TV Commercial,” 1952), Hopalong Cassidy, and comedian Milton Berle interacting with, of all people, Ronald Reagan.

The Sixties get their own room, “Revolution 1961-1970,” but it’s not politics, rock music or fashion that dominates this gallery. Instead, on entering, you will face an imposing statue of the Batman, flanked on one side by the bright red Batphone from the 1960s TV series, and on the other by the bust of Shakespeare that concealed the device for opening the study wall to the Batpoles.

It was “A New Heroic Age,” according to a wall text, the time of comics Silver Age, and there is Merry Marvel Marching Society memorabilia on exhibit, as well as the March 11, 1966 issue of Life magazine with Adam West as Batman on the cover. (Hey, I owned a copy of that myself! And remind me to tell you sometime how Jim Salicrup introduced me to Adam West last year.)

It was also the decade of the superspy, who was being marketed to both adults and kids: among the exhibits are a Get Smart lunch box from 1966 and Milton Bradley’s John Drake Secret Agent game featuring a good likeness of Patrick McGoohan. In contrast the rather repellent Honey West doll from 1965 on display comes nowhere close to the luminous looks of Anne Francis in the title role of this early feminist detective TV series.

Elsewhere in this gallery is another issue of Life, from August 28, 1964, featuring the Beatles on the cover. A copy of their Magical Mystery Tour album hangs on a wall above a toy version of the Yellow Submarine from the 1968 animated film of that same name. There are copies of The Monkees comics (and little did I know this was a prophetic sight, as you shall learn next week), along with a Woodstock festival poster from 1969.

The name of the next section, “Expanding Universe 1971-1990,” suggests to me how science fiction and fantasy grew from niche cults to genres with mass audiences over these years. My favorite piece in this room was an original “3-sheet” poster for Star Wars (1977), which was both memorably iconic and blatantly deceptive. There’s Luke baring part of his chest, while Princess Leia stands seductively, hand on hip, displaying both cleavage and long, bare legs: the poster was way sexier than the movie! I also wonder about the horizontal ray of light that intersects Luke’s raised lightsaber, creating a luminescent cross, suggesting Christian imagery.

The chronological survey ends with a section called “Going Global & Special Edition.” Here in a room at the end of the hallway was a small exhibit on African-Americans in comics, ranging from the usual suspects (Jack Kirby’s Black Panther, Will Eisner’s Ebony) to the unexpected (a Gasoline Alley Big Little Book called Skeezix in Africa, about which I’d like to know more).

I should think that the main problem with providing more information about the exhibits at the Geppi Museum is that there are so many of them. There is only room for the brief descriptions in the labels.

This reminds me of the newly opened Roman galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which I mentioned in critiquing the 300 movie (see “Comics in Context” #175). On a mezzanine level above the sculpture court is a long gallery containing “The Greek and Roman Study Collection,” an enormous assemblage of roughly 3500 numbered but otherwise unlabeled artworks. But the Metropolitan has installed several touch screen kiosks in the gallery that enable the visitor to access information about each item on display. This is the sort of system that the Geppi Museum could use, but it may be prohibitively expensive. Why pay for something that, at this point, not many people would use?

If you get the impression that I pretty much had the museum all to myself during my visit, well, I pretty much did. There were as many staff members present as visitors when I was there. Of course it was a Wednesday afternoon in April, when most potential visitors are at work or school, although Baltimore’s magnificent National Aquarium (www.aqua.org), which I visited later that afternoon, was far from deserted.

Reportedly, attendance levels for the Geppi Museum have been well below initial estimates. My initial reaction to this was that there isn’t sufficiently widespread interest in the museum’s niche subjects, the histories of comics and pop culture collectibles. But the Sports Legends museum on the first floor likewise suffers from low attendance.

The problem is blamed on the two museums’ location in Camden Station, next to the Baltimore Orioles’ stadium at Camden Yards. It is said that the Orioles’ attendance has been declining recently, and that few people pass through the stadium are outside the baseball season. Moreover, Camden Station is across the street from the Baltimore Convention Center, a number of hotels are being built nearby, and pedestrians allegedly avoid walking by the construction sites.

On my visit, however, there was no construction blocking my path. More importantly, my overwhelming impression was how close so many of Baltimore’s major attractions were to each other. One might think that museums that were directly across the street from a major convention center, and within short walking distance from the nearby major hotels, would attract plenty of tourists. When I left the Geppi Museum, it took me only ten to fifteen minutes to walk roughly six blocks from Camden Station to Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, the center of the city’s tourist activity. Walking from the Geppi Museum to the Inner Harbor’s National Aquarium was no different from going from one museum to another on the Mall in Washington, D. C.. And there’s a light rail stop directly across the street from Camden Station!

I just don’t understand why the Geppi Museum is so allegedly inaccessible. Is it that New York is a walking city, and I’m simply more used to foot travel?

The more knowledge about pop culture history that you bring to the Geppi Museum, the more you will get out of it. But even if you don’t know who, say, Uncle Wiggily is, the Geppi Museum covers so many subjects–superheroes, dolls, Disney cartoons, Star Wars, the Beatles, classic television shows–that you are bound to find something here that will not only interest but fascinate you. For anyone who grew up in the 20th century, no matter what your age, it is a treasure trove of memories. As for the subjects the museum covers that you are unfamiliar with, perhaps the toys and memorabilia on display will whet your interest so you’ll want to go home, get online, and look up their background. And then you can go back to the Geppi Museum and take another look.

I traversed parts of five different states over two and a half hours to get to Geppi’s Entertainment Museum, and not only did I have no trouble finding it, but I felt my visit was well worth the time and expense. I advise any of you with a serious interest in the history of American comics, who can get down to Baltimore and back within a day, to make the trip to Geppi’s; you won’t regret it. In fact, you should make it an overnight trip and see much more of this historic city while you’re at it.

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–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

Comments: 1 Comment

One Response to “Comics in Context #177: The Collector’s Eye” mark shapiro Says: June 11th, 2009 at 11:06 am As one of the worlds largest collectors of L. Frank Baum books (he wrote the Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1899 along with a series of Oz books numbering 14 to 1919 ), I am looking forward to seeing the Oz collection provided by Fred Trust of Maryland of which I know him personally. This will be a wonderful informative collection for those to see since most people are only familiar with the 1939 movie of the first book in the series. Fred has provided more than 80 items to the museum which will be a tremendous viewing experience for the public. Leave a Reply Name (required) Mail (will not be published) (required) Website Δ