There is a school of thought that any publicity is good publicity. I suppose that Marvel considers the furor over the recent demise of Captain America (see “Comics in Context” #168) to be good publicity if it boosted sales of the comics. But just what kind of lasting impression did that leave in the world beyond comics speculators? If people believe that Captain America really has been killed off, then it would seem to them that Marvel has destroyed an iconic figure representing the finest in the American spirit. If people believe that Captain America isn’t really dead, or will be resurrected, then it would seem to them that Marvel is exploiting and trampling upon said American icon as a publicity stunt to make big bucks. Why would a company that cares about its public image want to create either impression?

Last week Marvel got still more publicity of questionable value when the mainstream media discovered Sideshow Collectibles’ rather sexist statuette of Spider-Man’s leading lady Mary Jane Watson as a sexually submissive laundress. Not only was I interviewed about this figurine on MSNBC (see last week’s column), but former Spider-Man comics editor Danny Fingeroth showed up five times on the network to talk about the controversy (as you can see on YouTube here).

Comics artist Adam Hughes has posted his design for the statue on his website, and I find the original drawing considerably less objectionable, prettier, and even charming. Perhaps it was the people at Sideshow who pushed the design over the edge of taste. (And just who designed the rear of the statue?)

Even so, Hughes seems not to get why it was regarded as sexist and offensive, and this is part of the problem. “Mary Jane is a bit of a bimbo,” he explains, blaming the victim, adding that “Well, she’s bending over. Pin-up girls do that.” It’s as if male artists had nothing to do with creating the pin-up girl image. “But by that argument – if we take bending over to be a sign of sexual availability, every woman who bends over to pick up something should be chastised.” And just how many such women show off their thongs as they do so? Using some inappropriate hyperbole, Hughes asserts that “I think the whole ‘sexual availability’ claim comes from trying to back up the argument that this is the most awful thing to hit mankind since the Holocaust”. Here is a perfect example of someone who finds himself in a hole and unfortunately reacts by digging himself in even more deeply.

Hughes asks, “is it really a sexist or misogynistic act if it wasn’t intended that way on the part of the people doing it? . . .are you seeing something that’s either not there, or that the artist never intended to be there?” First, this demonstrates a lack of understanding of human psychology. Certainly, a person can be subconsciously sexist or misogynistic. Certainly people can consciously hold prejudiced opinions without being aware they are prejudiced: they consider their opinions to be correct. D. W. Griffith was reportedly surprised that his film Birth of a Nation (1915) was attacked as racist, though today that is the unanimous opinion of cinema scholars. There’s that song in the musical Avenue Q, “Everybody’s a Little Bit Racist.”

Moreover, even if Hughes did not consciously or unconsciously have sexist intentions, that does not mean that people who interpret the statue as sexist are wrong. Certainly artwork can be interpreted in ways of which the artist was not consciously aware. A Freudian interpretation of Oedipus Rex is not invalid simply because Sophocles died centuries before Freud devised the term “Oedipus complex.” If an interpretation fits the artwork, it is justified whether or not the creator agrees with it. This is a basic principle of criticism, long accepted in academia, and comics writers and artists had best wake up and take notice. (Not surprisingly, Neil Gaiman recognizes this principle, as can be seen from his introduction to The Sandman Papers, Fantagraphics’ 2006 anthology of academic essays about his work.)

But the Mary Jane maquette, as I suggested last week, is relatively tame compared to what just turned up in the comics shops. Years ago, back when I was first mulling over doing a column on the Internet, I considered doing a segment called “Atrocity of the Week.” Maybe I shouldn’t have dismissed the idea, since, lo and behold, less than a week after I wrote about the MJ statue, Quick Stop editor Ken Plume e-mailed me about this: the cover of Marvel’s new issue of Heroes for Hire, appropriately #13. It appears that the ladies in bondage, with necklines cut so low that in two cases they approach the navel, are the Black Cat and the detective team of Misty Knight and Colleen Wing, all formerly presented as empowered, independent heroines. Drawn in manga-influenced style, they’re virtually unrecognizable, and Misty looks less like the African-American she’s supposed to be than a well tanned Caucasian. But the biggest problem is those tentacles feeling them up.

Researching this week’s column has expanded my knowledge of Japanese cartoon culture, though not in a way I would have preferred. It seems that the Heroes for Hire cover evokes the style and content of hentai manga, a term used outside Japan for Japanese comics dealing in explicit sexual or pornographic content. It turns out that so many Japanese comics deal in “tentacle rape” that this subgenre merits its own Wikipedia entry, which informs us that “Tentacle rape is a concept found in some horror hentai titles, where various tentacled creatures (usually fictional monsters) rape or otherwise penetrate women (or, less commonly, men). Much of the genre also consists of humiliation and bondage fetishes, since the victim typically is restrained by the appendages.” That suggests that the point of this cover is to take three of Marvel’s empowered, independent heroines and humiliate them.

Even the great Japanese artist Hokusai did a “tentacle rape” woodcut, “The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife” (1820), as shown in the aforementioned Wikipedia entry, a considerably superior work of art, as well as further evidence that great artists are not necessarily beyind reproach (see Wagner, Richard).

And it turns out that the Heroes for Hire cover was done by a female Japanese artist, Sana Takeda, and that fact is a forceful reminder that being a member of a group that is the target of prejudice does not necessarily make one enlightened about prejudice.

But you don’t have to know this background in Japanese culture to be appalled by this cover. All you have to have is a sufficient grasp of Freudian psychology to recognize tentacles as phallic symbols. And can that milky white fluid splattered atop one of the Black Cat’s breasts be what I think it is?

Probably the mainstream media will take no notice of this cover, since people who don’t read Marvel comics are unaware of the three characters depicted. But what if superhero comics continue down this path, and sooner or later produce an equally, or even more offensive cover or a story about a character that the mainstream media knows–and that they notice?

I wonder if this is another sign that contemporary superhero comics are overreaching in their pursuit of the sensationalistic, to try to get a charge out of its shrunken, jaded niche audience. I worry that superhero comics are in a decadent phase, marked by the continual killing of longtime characters, and the distortion and demeaning of others, and that not even the reconstructionalist writers can pull the genre out of its descent. Is this Heroes for Hire cover the kind of work of which those of us who value the comics medium can be proud?

So let’s turn instead to a recent event that did do comics proud. On April 26, the night after my trip to Geppi’s Entertainment Museum (see “Comics in Context” #176–177), I attended the world premiere of a new documentary about one of the artform’s greatest creators, Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist, at New York City’s Tribeca Film Festival. Eisner was one of the founding fathers of modern American comic books, the creator of one of its masterpieces, The Spirit, and the pioneer of the contemporary American graphic novel (see “Comics in Context” #6, 25, 64, 68, 69).

Tribeca, which is short for a “triangle below Canal Street,” is a section of lower Manhattan near the site of the World Trade Center. Robert De Niro and his business partner, producer Jane Rosenthal, founded the festival in 2002, in part to help revitalize lower Manhattan following the September 11, 2001 attacks.

In May, 2003, shortly before I started “Comics in Context,” the second Tribeca Film Festival included a panel, which I attended, called “The Return of the Superhero,” dealing with the new wave of superhero movies. The panelists were Mark Steven Johnson, the writer/director of the Daredevil movie, and since then, this year’s Ghost Rider flick; Alan Cumming, who played Nightcrawler in X2: X-Men United, which premiered that month; and Kevin Misher, a producer who was developing a Sub-Mariner movie (which seems to have sunk from sight).

It occurs to me that I haven’t written about the Ghost Rider movie yet. Even if Nicolas Cage doesn’t look like the young, blond Johnny Blaze, I think the idea of Cage as a middle-aged Blaze with an Elvis Presley vibe. The visual concept of this demonic motorcyclist with a flaming skull for a head is undeniably powerful, and, as an updated version of Faust, Ghost Rider has great story potential. But it has gone untapped: I agree with Peter B. Gillis’s observation that Ghost Rider was never a great comics series, even despite Mike Ploog’s memorable art in the early stories. Although I can tell from the Tribeca panel that Mark Steven Johnson’s heart is in the right place in his respect for Marvel series, the execution of his movies doesn’t match his good intentions. The Ghost Rider movie is just an empty series of action sequences, devoid of wit or true human interest, not really worth writing about for more than a paragraph. Casting Easy Rider’s Peter Fonda as Mephisto was clever, but I couldn’t care about Ghost Rider battling another devil, Blackheart, on behalf of Fonda’s not-quite-as-bad devil. As an update of Faust, Ghost Rider the comic and the movie both should be better than they ever have been. At the end, Blaze defiantly declares that Mephisto may possess Blaze’s soul but not his spirit. But if you don’t understand that they’re the same thing, you don’t get what Faust is about. I exited the Ghost Rider screening, wondering how low the reputation of Marvel movies would be were it not for Sam Raimi’s great Spider-Man trilogy.

But back to the “Return of the Superhero” panel. Of course, there are more comics writers, artists and editors in the New York City area than anywhere else in the nation. Constantine Valhouli, the indie filmmaker with whom I collaborated on the documentary Sex, Lies and Superheroes, offered to put the Tribeca Festival’s panel programmers in touch with comics professionals we had interviewed for the movie. But the Festival wasn’t interested. Presumably they felt that people who wrote and drew the superhero comics on which the movies were based had no relevance to a panel about said movies. Considering that one of the people on Constantine’s list of contacts was Frank Miller, soon to become a formidable filmmaker himself, this seems even more ironic.

A great deal has changed in only four years. Now the Tribeca Film Festival was showing a movie about the life of a comics professional, filled with interviews with other comics pros. This was the glorious end of a long, long road for the filmmakers, director/producer Andrew D. Cooke, and its writer/producer, his brother Jon B. Cooke, the editor of Comic Book Artist, an invaluable magazine that serves as a continuing oral history of American comics. They had been working on this movie made for five years, showing a twenty minute sample of their work-in-progress at comics conventions, as they searched for the additional financing they needed to complete it. It is their and our good fortune that they were able to conduct extensive interviews with Will Eisner before he passed away in early January of last year. You may recall that Jon B. Cooke showed the sample of his documentary at Eisner’s memorial (see “Comics in Context” #80). Finally, teamed with the film’s editor and executive producer Kris Schackman and Montilla Pictures, they had completed the film, roughly a year after the memorial.

The Tribeca Film Festival scheduled four showings of the Eisner film, and initially, I tried to get a ticket for the second one, on Saturday evening April 28, after learning that Eisner’s widow Ann would attend. A number of comics professionals who appear in the documentary–Jules Feiffer, Jerry Robinson, and Art Spiegelman–also attended the Saturday screening. But that one was sold out, so I went with my second choice, the world premiere, on the evening of April 26.

The Tribeca Film Festival has grown so large in five years that this premiere wasn’t in Tribeca, but further north, at the AMC Village VII multiplex on Third Avenue and 11th Street, in the East Village. The showing was in one of the multiplex’s smaller screening rooms, and though it was well attended, and I was surprised to see that there were still plenty of empty seats. I assumed that since thousands of people attend the New York Comic-Con, surely all of the Eisner documentary showings would be sold out, but no.

Moreover, I got the sense that the people at this initial screening weren’t a crowd of comics buffs, either. During the opening credits, the audience broke into applause when they saw the credit for “Schackman Films,” executive producer Kris Schackman’s company, so his friends must have attended en masse. I expected there might be applause for at least some of the notable figures of the world of comics when they first appeared on screen, but no. There was, however, a gasp from one member of the audience when an unexpected interviewee first turned up in the film: novelist Kurt Vonnegut, who had died on April 11. Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist presumably is his final public appearance.

Nor did I spot any comics professionals in the audience, aside from Jon Cooke, who greeted me before the movie started, and Randolph Hoppe of the Jack Kirby Museum (http://www.jackkirbymuseum.org/), with whom I chatted after the film had ended. Not even the legendarily ubiquitous Beat had come!
There still seems to be far too little serious interest in the study of comics, whether it takes the form of classes in critical appreciation of the medium, museum exhibitions, or documentaries such as this one.

So, then, I told myself, that meant I was part of a small group who can say in years to come that they were fortunate enough to attend the world premiere of a film whose reputation will surely grow as the serious appreciation of the comics artform continues to rise.

The program began with an introduction by a man named Aaron (I didn’t catch his last name), one of the people who selects the films to be shown at the Tribeca festival, who told us how much this film had surprised him. He was not a comics aficionado, but as amazed to learn from the movie about Eisner, “someone I never knew was so important,” who had participated in “creating a whole new artform.”

This is an indication of how effective the Cookes’ documentary is. It’s not just for people in the comics subculture who are already familiar with Will Eisner’s life and achievements. It caught the interest of someone who know nothing about them, and who, indeed, would have had to wade through many other documentaries in the course of helping to select the films for the festival. This one stood out.

In the question and answer session after the screening, Jon Cooke told us that “Previously Kris”–the executive producer–”didn’t know who Will Eisner is.” Kris Schackman then explained that he had “always liked comics,” but that working on this documentary was an “eye-opening experience.” He said that he “spent a year working on it,” during which time he “fell in love with his [Eisner’s] work” and “the whole artform.”

And if I’m correct that the audience on Thursday evening was more of a film buff crowd than a comics crowd, it worked for them too: they were quietly attentive through the entire film. This is a movie that can make converts to comics as an artform.

Let’s shift back to Aaron’s opening remarks: he then introduced Andrew Cooke, who was greeted with cheers and applause. Cooke explained that the “process” of making the movie had taken “five years.” Not only was tonight’s showing the “world premiere,” he told us, but “no one has seen the film in this form except Kris Schackman and myself.” (Not even Jon?) In fact, in the question and answer session, we were told that the Cookes had only done the interview with Jules Feiffer–who started his extraordinary career as Eisner’s assistant on The Spirit–“four or five weeks ago”! So I really was present at a special occasion.

Then the film began, and after the opening credits, there was vintage black and white footage of Manhattan–Fifth Avenue, Times Square–and then of a newsstand with comic books. An offscreen narrator, who turned out to be Art Spiegelman, explains that comic books were originally intended to entertain kids. There was a “notion,” he continued, that “kids are. . .stupid adults,” so “most comics were junk.” But it as Eisner, he went on, who pioneered comics as a “bona fide means of self-expression.”

we first hear the film’s score, jazz music played by a group that Kris Schackman’s father had assembled; it sounded appropriate playing under images from The Spirit and footage of early 20th century New York.

Next came a surprise: the voice of Jack Kirby, who passed away over a decade ago. The movie makes use of the interviews that Eisner taped in the 1980s with various peers in comics, including Kirby, Milton Caniff, and Harvey Kurtzman, all now deceased, as well as the still active Neal Adams. I read the interviews when they first appeared decades ago in The Will Eisner Quarterly and The Spirit Magazine, and Dark Horse has since published them in the book Shop Talk, but it is an unexpected pleasure to hear the voices of these giants in this movie.

Many other major figures in comics appear on-camera, including Eisner contemporaries such as Jules Feiffer, Joe Kubert, Jerry Robinson, and the late Gil Kane; leading creators of contemporary comics including Frank Miller and Art Spiegelman; Eisner’s friend and longtime publisher and agent Denis Kitchen; Michael Chabon, author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, his novel about comics’ Golden Age; and comics historian Gerard Jones.

The film’s most important interviewee, however, is Eisner himself, who appears throughout, as the movie progresses chronologically through the story of his life. Eisner comes across as open, articulate, intelligent, good-humored, warm and friendly. If he had a dark side, it never appears in this film. I expect that audiences for the movie, even those who don’t know his comics work, will find him immediately likable. He is the perfect ambassador for the comics medium.

Eisner’s story starts with his birth in 1917, and here was another surprise; a nude baby photograph of the Great Man. That certainly set a tone of intimacy, and indeed, the film is about Eisner’s personal life as well as his career in comics. It’s an appealing strategy to follow, humanizing its portrait of its subject.

It was also a surprise to see silent film footage of Eisner’s father and mother. But much of the story of Eisner’s youth and early career in comics is illustrated onscreen by selections from two of his autobiographical graphic novels, To the Heart of the Storm (1991) and The Dreamer (1986), in which Will, his parents, and other real life figures appear in thinly fictionalized form. I’ve lectured on both books at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (www.moccany.org), so it was like seeing old friends appear on the big screen. For example, Eisner, on the soundtrack, recounts the tale of how bullies taunted his brother for his Jewish-sounding first name, and how Eisner slugged one of them only to be beaten up. Meanwhile, the screen shows a succession of images from Eisner’s fictionalized depiction of the incident in To the Heart of the Storm. When Eisner, on camera, delivers the punch line, telling his brother, “From now on your name is Pete,” not only does he laugh himself, but so did the audience. He had already won them over, this early in the film.

The Cookes have good eyes for selecting artwork. Eisner’s characters can sometimes seem over the top in their broad, emotional gestures and expressions, but throughout the film the Cookes chose more subtly effectve work which can stand being blown up to the size of a movie screen. At one point they even employ some animation to a Dreamer sequence, which works well.

The documentary simply and accurately describes the arc of Eisner’s career, so that even filmgoers who are unfamiliar with comics history should be able not only to follow his life story but to understand the significance of his innovations in the medium.

But a movie like this should ideally work on two levels: stating the basics for newcomers, while providing illuminating nuggets of information and insight for people like myself who are already familiar with Eisner’s work and career. This documentary succeeds on both levels.

For example, it was interesting to me to hear Eisner say that he considered going into the theater as a career, until his mother stopped him. People compare the “cinematic” style of The Spirit to film noir, but what about examining its theatricality, through the lighting, the staging, and the “performances” of its cast of characters? When Eisner talks about the artists who influenced him, he names illustrators Dean Cornwall and J. C. Leyendecker (see “Comics in Context” #132). This is followed by a segment that follows Eisner in the International Museum of Cartoon Art in Boca Raton in 1997, before it closed, in which he points to an original Krazy Kat by George Herriman, declaring that the strip was “influential on me.” I wonder how, or was it simply the fact that Herriman constantly experimented with the conventions of the artform? Among other strips he singles out are Richard Outcault’s Yellow Kid; the early, now nearly forgotten adventure strip, Lyman Young’s Tim Tyler’s Luck; Bud Fisher’s Mutt and Jeff, and E. C. Segar’s Popeye. (Did Commissioner Dolan get his enormous chin from Popeye?)

Joe Kubert then appears to assert that Milton Caniff (Terry and the Pirates), Alex Raymond (Flash Gordon), and Hal Foster (Prince Valiant) were “saints in our business” who were “admired by every guy in comics.” That sets me wondering how many contemporary comic book artists know their work at all.

The movie then shifts back to Eisner, who declares Caniff to have been a “tremendous influence” on him, with his “ability to stage his stories so you could follow it.” (Note that “stage” is a theatrical term.) Eisner praises Caniff’s “high degree of drama” and how Caniff utilized “shadows [to] increase a sense of threat.” The “film noir” look of The Spirit would thus actually be Eisner’s evolution of Caniff’s use of chiaroscuro. Later on in the film, Eisner is quoted as saying that his goal with The Spirit was to be “as good as Caniff.”

A little later Denis Kitchen incisively exposes the hypocrisy of newspaper people who looked down on comics. He points out that the Sunday newspapers were actually wrapped in the comics section. This is true: I remember this from my childhood. When my family and I left church on Sunday morning, we’d pick up the Sunday newspaper from a dealer on the sidewalk outside, and each one on sale had the comics section on the outside. When you looked at the Sunday Boston Herald Traveler, the first thing you saw was not the headlines, but Peanuts. “Comics sold the papers,” Kitchen triumphantly declares. Now those were the days, and a testament to the powerful role that newspaper comics then played in American popular culture.

Yes, I was having a good time watching this film, and to think that I was there, and the allegedly omnipresent chronicler of comics culture, the Beat, was not! Wait, what’s this? It was a clip onscreen from the 2004 San Diego Con, with Eisner recounting a story from his early days in comics. And there, to his right, is the Beat, gazing worshipfully at the Great Man, with her name clearly visible on a placard in front. She’s not at the movie; she’s IN the movie! How does she do it?

Within the documentary there are sequences that might be considered sidebars: short investigations of subjects relating to Eisner’s career. Art Spiegelman introduces the topic of the important role of Jewish creators in the early comic book industry (a subject on which Danny Fingeroth is even now writing a book). Kubert points out that comic books were considered a “gutter profession” in the 1930s and 1940s; today’s graphic novel enthusiasts may find that hard to believe. Chabon quotes Eisner saying that Jews would “gravitate” to comics, because they could get work there. (The implication is that bigotry barred them from other professions.) Feiffer comments that the comic book heroes these Jewish creators concocted had WASPy names: they “assimilated themselves on the comics page.” Gerard Jones widens the scope of the topic, observing that Jewish creators played important roles in movies and popular songs, as well as comics, in this period: that they contributed to American pop culture as a whole.

A little while later, Jones notes that many of the early creators in comic books “were just storytellers,” who were not adept in business, and were exploited by the publishers. In contrast, Eisner proved to be a master of both fields. Onscreen, Spiegelman phrases it cleverly: Eisner, he says, made a “great cocktail” out of his parents’ disparate ambitions: his father’s dream to be an artist, and his mother’s emphasis on making money.

Once the documentary gets to The Spirit, another sidebar emerges: Ebony, the Spirit’s African-American sidekick, who was drawn and dialogued in a stereotypically caricatured manner. The movie goes to considerable lengths to put this character in the context of the times. We are shown onscreen that Eisner’s hero Caniff also used racial caricatures. exemplified by Connie, the Chinese sidekick in Terry and the Pirates. The movie includes an excerpt from the truly dreadful movie Check and Double Check (1930), featuring the popular radio characters Amos and Andy, played in blackface by their white creators. Eisner explains that the “whole culture accepted Amos and Andy” back in the 1940s and that it “never occurred to me I was violating black sensibilities.” And you should be able to see here what relevance this passage of the film has on the controversy over the Mary Jane statuette. Here is an example of the sort of unconscious prejudice that I mentioned earlier.

The film returns to the subject of Ebony a little later, when it gets to the point that Feiffer began working with Eisner. Spiegelman comments that Ebony made Feiffer “irritable.” Feiffer explains that he was of a “different generation” than Eisner and was “more interested in civil rights” and more liberal politically than Eisner. Acknowledging that he “had great affection for Will,” Feiffer does not condemn Eisner’s use of Ebony. Feiffer says he didn’t think the treatment of Ebony was “racist”; he thought the treatment of Ebony was “dumb.”

Maybe that’s the lesson we should apply to the MJ statuette and the Heroes for Hire cover: their creators weren’t necessarily being consciously sexist, they were just being too “dumb” to understand the implications of their work.

Come back next week for the rest of my review of Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist and my report on my adventures at another Tribeca Film Festival event: the American premiere of Spider-Man 3.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR OTHER PEOPLE
Heidi MacDonald, the Beat herself, has been writing a thoughtful series of essays on the Mary Jane and Heroes for Hire controversies and the larger subject of sexism in comics. You can find them over at the following addresses:
http://pwbeat.publishersweekly.com/blog/2007/05/17/night-of-the-feminazis-pt-1/
http://pwbeat.publishersweekly.com/blog/2007/05/18/but-the-little-girls-understand/#comments
http://pwbeat.publishersweekly.com/blog/2007/05/21/2563/#comments
http://pwbeat.publishersweekly.com/blog/2007/05/22/and-the-tits-just-keep-coming/

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

Comments: 1 Comment

One Response to “Comics in Context #179: Pride and Prejudice” Richard Cooke Says: August 25th, 2008 at 3:20 pm Hi Peter-I just thought I’d drop you a quick-if belated-note to say I enjoyed your review of Jon and Andy’s Eisner Documentary. While being largely upbeat and complimentary you managed to dig into the thematic content and artistic scope of Eisner’s best stuff. We Cookes always loved the Eisner reprints and realized early on in our lives/careers the importance and value of his work. In any event thanks for your smart and surprisingly kind review of the boys’ work. They, in whatever they’ve done, have first and foremost always tried to get it right, whether it be magazines, screenplays, videos or their own comix titles, as well as all sorts of pitches, presentations and one-offs. A little praise goes a long way with these guys and I know your essay must have tickled them to death. Clearly you know your comics lore although I hope you’re wrong about contemporary comic artists’ possible ignorance about Caniff, Foster and et.al. Like Eisner, Kirby, Ditko, Steranko and the E.C. and Mad Mag people, they were/are titans in our eyes. I like your site and plan to delve deeper into the archives, you strike me as being pretty hip and not your average fan quibbler. Most cordially, Rich Cooke bookchaserus@yahoo.com Leave a Reply Name (required) Mail (will not be published) (required) Website Δ