In the brief sample of their documentary Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist that director Andrew D. Cooke and writer Jon B. Cooke showed at comics-related events when it was still a work in progress, there was a clip from Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941)–the panning shot of the exterior of Susan Alexander Kane’s night club–to make a case for its influence on Eisner’s work in comics. As I began recounting last time, I attended the world premiere of the completed documentary at Manhattan’s Tribeca Film Festival on April 26 (but not actually in Tribeca; the theater was in the East Village). That Kane clip was the only part that I remembered from the work-in-progress sampler, so the Cooke brothers had obviously considerably revised even that partial early draft of their film.

When I left off last time I was covering the film’s lengthy treatment of the question of Ebony, the Spirit’s young African-American sidekick. Jules Feiffer, who was Eisner’s assistant on The Spirit in the late 1940s and early 1950s, found Ebony a “stereotype,” Eisner says that, in the context of the culture of that time, it “never occurred to me” that “I was violating black sensibilities,” and Art Spiegelman points out that as The Spirit continued, Eisner portrayed African-Americans in a non-stereotypical manner. This seems to me a balanced approach to the issue that explains Eisner’s attitude in the 1940s, albeit not getting him off the hook, and shows him learning from his mistakes.

This is part of a deservedly long section of the film that serves as an appreciation of The Spirit, complete with a cameo by Stan Lee declaring he was “blown away” by the series’ celebrated splash pages. Feiffer hails The Spirit as “full of imagination,” “full of life,” with “urban energy,” and contends that the Spirit was a “Jewish hero disguised as Irish.” A bearded Frank Miller turns up to point out that The Spirit combined “great realism” with “cartoony characters” such as Commissioner Dolan. (I wonder if and how Miller will manage to duplicate that combination in his forthcoming Spirit movie.)

Suddenly Adolf Hitler appears in the film, to the accompaniment of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, in the fashion of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971). After the film shows us that Eisner satirized Hitler in The Spirit before the United States entered World War II, we are informed that Eisner was drafted. The movie explains that at that time everyone was “patriotic” and “eager” to join the army; this is an attitude that audiences will find unfamiliar, considering the current Iraq conflict and memories of the Vietnam War. Then there is the unexpected sight of soldier Will Eisner holding a gun, at Fort Dix, I think. But Eisner was soon making comics, not war: Eisner recounts how he started doing comics explaining equipment maintenance to soldiers. He even ended up being transferred to the Pentagon.

Following the war, Eisner returned to The Spirit, and Miller comments that the “handcuffs came off”: Miller states that Eisner’s Spirit stories were “movies on paper,” and comments that “perhaps only [Milton] Caniff”–Eisner’s hero–“could compete.” (In recent years when people tell me that today’s “decompressed storytelling” in comics is “cinematic,” I always respond that Eisner’s Spirit is an example of truly cinematic comics. Now I can quote Miller in support of my case.) Onscreen Eisner asserts that the movies of the 1930s and 1940s had an “impact” on people’s “reading habits,” by which I expect that he meant that the films accustomed them to visual storytelling. Here is where the Citizen Kane clip appears, and Miller states that Welles’ influence on Eisner is unquestionable. (Certainly, The Spirit and Kane have much in common, but I wish the documentary had footage of Eisner himself acknowledging the influence.) The resemblance of The Spirit to the film noir of the period is also mentioned. Was Eisner consciously influenced by those movies? Or were Eisner and the noir filmmakers simply responding to the same influences from German expressionism in film and theater from the 1920s and 1930s?

Miller returns to describe and praise Eisner’s various femme fatales in The Spirit: this may foreshadow an emphasize on these characters in Miller’s Spirit movie. Providing a feminist take on the same characters, Trina Robbins appears in the documentary to contend that their “shady pasts” actually “made them stronger.”

Then the late Kurt Vonnegut comes onto the screen and asserts that Eisner made a “radical” change by introducing “genuine agony” into the comics pages: he “showed pain, real pain.” I don’t know that Eisner should be credited as the first cartoonist to do this. His hero Milton Caniff had already broken the conventions of comic strips by killing off heroine Raven Sherman in Terry and the Pirates, an act with an impact comparable to that of the death of Gwen Stacy decades later in Marvel comics. Certainly much of the violence in Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy, in which death was hardly unknown, looked as if it really hurt. The Cookes accompany Vonnegut’s statement with a series of images of the Spirit bleeding from his mouth, showing pain. Perhaps a better phrasing would be that Eisner gave the Spirit a vulnerability that was unexpected in comics heroes. He was no invulnerable Superman, nor was he like Tracy, capable of being hurt but nonetheless unstoppable. These onscreen images of the Spirit show him not only physically but emotionally affected by pain, as people would be in real life: he is both iconic hero and vulnerable everyman.

Spiegelman’s remark that in later stories “the Spirit became almost a walk-on in the lives of people in the city” leads to Eisner’s onscreen comments about his “favorite story,” “The Story of Gerhard Shnobble,” which I quoted several weeks ago (see “Comics in Context” #176). It is a fable about a little man, rejected by his employers, who discovers he has a unique talent that gives him joy: he can literally fly. But while soaring through the air, he is inadvertently shot down during a battle between the Spirit and some crooks, none of whom saw him fly; indeed, nobody did but the readers (see “Comics in Context” #68). In the film Eisner explains that “Shnobble” is about “people who go through life, do great things, have moments of glory no one knows about.” We can therefore regard Shnobble as a secular patron saint of the creative artist who never receives the public recognition his work deserves, and I previously speculated that in the 1940s Eisner might have regarded himself in that category. Now I wonder if, consciously or not, Eisner might also have been thinking of his father, an artist whose career was unsuccessful, in creating Shnobble.

Then comes an excerpt from Eisner’s “Shop Talk” interview with artist Neal Adams, who points out that virtually no one entered the comic book business in the late 1950s and early 1960s; Eisner comments that it was a “dead time.” This may amaze younger viewers of the film, inasmuch as so many publishers are now delving into graphic novels, but the film explains why.

Comics (and mystery novel) writer Max Allan Collins appears onscreen and asserts that the comics “market” “adjusted” itself to “GIs” who were reading comics, leading to “new genres” in comics. That’s a point I’d never seen made before, and it certainly helps explain why the superhero genre faded after World War II, and EC’s horror, crime, science fiction, and war comics, presumably appealing to a somewhat older audience, arose.

Since the public regarded comic books as fare for children, these edgier comics led to controversy. Miller returns onscreen to refer to the foremost opponent of comic books in the 1950s, whose “name,” he remarks, is “not worth mentioning.” (There’s a pun there, placed intentionally or not.) The movie immediately puts Dr. Fredric Wertham’s name and visage onscreen, earning a laugh from the audience. There follows the familiar clip of EC publisher William Gaines testifying before Congress, contending that attempting to explain the appeal of his comics is like trying to explain “the sublimity of love to a frigid old maid.” This is a dependable laugh line whenever I see it used in a documentary, and the Tribeca audience loudly responded, though, of course, Congress was not amused at the time.

In response to the furor, the comics industry established its “Comics Code,” which comics historian Gerard Jones says onscreen “drove almost all readers over the age of twelve out” of comic books. The late Gil Kane reappears to recall that as a result there was “less work” in comics, and that “no one new came into” the business, bringing this segment of the documentary full circle.

The Spirit came to an end in the early 1950s, too, but for different reasons. Eisner claims onscreen that the cost of newsprint was “skyrocketing,” making the Spirit mini-comic books in Sunday newspapers too expensive. Feiffer states that Eisner had “lost interest” in The Spirit, and the filmmakers reinforce that point by inserting an interview clip in which Eisner states that “My main thing is innovation.” Hence he would soon leave The Spirit and newspaper comics for a new project that would occupy the next two decades of his career.

Moving chronologically, the film next introduces Eisner’s wife Ann, whom he married in 1950, and who even briefly takes over the narration at this point. Explaining her taste in men, she observes that so many people become “lawyers” or “doctors,” or “businessmen,” which she finds “boring”; Eisner the cartoonist, she states, was “not boring.”

Once again I have reason to admire this documentary’s clever segues and juxtapositions, since now we see Eisner and Feiffer together onscreen at a 1997 event held to commemorate Eisner’s eightieth birthday. In the clip Feiffer declares that he has no interest in the period that Eisner devoted to the U. S. Army’s P.S. The Preventative Maintenance Monthly, which used comics for educational purposes, or, as Feiffer puts it, “this boring stuff.” (Well, I like the initials in the title.)

In the film Denis Kitchen points out that P. S. had a circulation greater than that of the average comic book. (When Eisner died, a few obituaries I read placed more emphasis on P. S. than on The Spirit, presumably because the former had the far larger audience in its day; The Spirit was actually carried by relatively few papers.) Ann Eisner returns to comment that she didn’t understand how her husband could explain preventative maintenance of army equipment in P. S. since “Will couldn’t repair anything himself,” a gag that works even if it isn’t that surprising.

But though Eisner worked on P. S. for twenty-one years, the filmmakers understandably don’t seem to find much interest in it and pass over this period quickly. Although the film does not say so, the P. S. period seems to represent Eisner the businessman taking precedence over Eisner the creative artist. If Eisner’s interest was in “innovation,” how much was he innovating by the end of his two decades on P. S.?

The film does show Feiffer stating that it “pained me” that after Eisner ended The Spirit it was as if “The Spirit never happened.” In other words, The Spirit was forgotten over the years that Eisner was working for the military. I believe Feiffer is right. When I was growing up, I would read books about the history of newspaper comics from my local library, and they never mentioned The Spirit. Was it because so few papers had carried it, or because it was more like a comic book than a conventional comic strip?

It was because the series had been forgotten, Feiffer says in the film, that he wrote about The Spirit in his 1965 landmark book The Great Comic Book Heroes (see “Comics in Context” #26). (That, indeed, is where I first learned about The Spirit, although I would not see any more of it until Warren Publishing began its Spirit reprint magazine in 1974. And thus, strange as it may seem today, treasures of comics art once disappeared entirely from sight.)

Eisner amusingly remarks in the film that seeing his Spirit work back in print gave him “second thoughts about being a “fershtukiner businessman.” In different clips Eisner, Kitchen, and Spiegelman recount the story of Eisner’s visit to Phil Seuling’s 1972 New York comics convention, which proved to be a turning point in Eisner’s life, and by extension a turning point in the history of American comics. Their accounts serve as reminders of the gaping generation gap that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, wider than any generational shift since. Spiegelman recalls Eisner at the con as a “guy in a suit,” obviously implying he looked out of place; the bald Eisner jokes on camera that “I never trusted anybody with a lot of hair,” which is what Kitchen and many other underground cartoonists had back then. (Nonetheless, we see in a photo from the time that Eisner had a mustache, so he wasn’t utterly immune to fashions of the period.)

At this comics convention Eisner received his first exposure to underground comics, and, we are informed, picked up a comic by S. Clay Wilson. known for his explicit treatment of sex and violence, first. Though they were later to become friends, it seems that Eisner and Spiegelman quarreled over the wilson comic: Spiegelman says on camera that he got “very defensive” and this initial encounter with Eisner “didn’t go very well.” But Kitchen sent Eisner a package of other undergrounds, and Eisner wrote back that he “loved” them. In the film Eisner says that he found the underground comics “revolutionary.” We are informed that Eisner then sold part of his educational comics company so that he “could now afford to spend a whole year” doing the kind of comics he wanted.

Ann Eisner returns onscreen to say there was a “risk” in her husband’s turning away from what he earlier called in the film the “industrial usage of comics,” but that they said “what the heck.” Will Eisner on camera likens this point in his career to the 1940s, when he took a big risk by starting The Spirit. Eisner was in his early fifties when he attended that 1972 convention. As I’ve commented in the past (“Comics in Context” #81), Eisner proved that creativity in comics is not the sole possession of the young, that the middle-aged can build upon their accumulated experience and wisdom to take further creative leaps, and that it is entirely possible to have a “third act” in one’s creative career. By pioneering the American graphic novel in his “third act,” Eisner arguably had greater influence on the history of American comics than he had had even with the medium’s own equivalent of Citizen Kane, The Spirit.

This account of how Eisner changed the course of his career in midlife and ended up changing the course of the American comics artform as well parallels the familiar story of how Stan Lee, a decade earlier, was on the verge of quitting the comics business but instead founded the Marvel revolution (see “Comics in Context” #15-16). In Stan Lee’s case, he seems to have been going through what we would now call a midlife crisis as a result of creative frustration. Come to think of it, according to Neal Gabler’s biography, Walt Disney also seems to have gone through a midlife crisis for similar reasons: thwarted in his ambitions to produce further animated features that could artistically equal his first ones, Disney instead found a new creative outlet in Disneyland (see “Comics in Context” #160–161). I wonder if Eisner’s change of career course in the 1970s was also influenced by a kind of midlife crisis. Creative frustration may have been a cause: how fulfilling were P. S. and his other “industrial” comics after over two decades? And maybe another cause was personal loss.

Perhaps the most remarkable part of the Cookes’ documentary is Eisner’s onscreen comments about the real life basis for the title story of his first “graphic novel,” A Contract with God (see “Comics in Context” #69), which concerns a rabbi’s reaction to the death of his young daughter. Not until the final years of his life did Eisner speak to interviewers about the death of his own daughter from leukemia when she was sixteen, as he did for Bob Andelman’s biography Will Eisner: A Spirited Life (http://aspiritedlife.com/) and this documentary. In the film Eisner says that before doing A Contract with God he and his wife “had just gone through years of tragic events that made me question God’s contract with me.” Eisner says he had been “in a rage over it” and did not speak to anyone about his daughter’s death.

What is interesting psychologically about this is that in the film Eisner admits that “in hindsight” his daughter’s death “probably had an influence on the book,” but that he did not realize this when he was working on Contract. The influence seems so obvious–both Eisner and the protagonist of Contract lost beloved daughters–yet Eisner at the time was oblivious to it. In the last installment of this column, I wrote about how a creative artist may not consciously be aware of the meaning of his own work. Here is a perfect example. Not only did Eisner not speak to anyone about his daughter’s death for years, but it seems that he also subconsciously blocked off his own realization that the daughter of Contract’s protagonist represented his own. To what extent did Eisner recognize that the protagonist was partly an autobiographical portrait? In my own review of Contract, I pointed out that the rabbi in Contract forsakes his calling and becomes a businessman, just as Eisner stopped the pursuit of innovative comics in The Spirit to become a businessman doing “industrial” comics for two decades.

Contract is also a reworking, probably unconscious, of the Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, but in Contract God does not ultimately spare the life of the father’s beloved child. But like the Biblical story, Contract is the story of a test: how does the father react? Contract’s protagonist fails in his attempted return to his religious faith; Eisner, on the other hand, succeeded in returning to his muse through Contract.

In the film Eisner recalls how he tried to persuade New York publishers to publish A Contract with God, but “none of them got it.” As the years pass, this anecdote will surely become an archetypal tale of the blindness of the cultural establishment to the new artform being birthed in front of them.
Eisner never shows anger in the film’s interview excerpts: he seems to have reached peace of mind, whether about his daughter’s death or obstacles in his career. The rejections of Contract had become the subject of humor for him. He recalls onscreen that, seeking to describe Contract to a man at Bantam Books, he dubbed it a “graphic novel.” “You know this is still a comic,” Eisner reports the man replying.

The Cookes’ documentary implies that A Contract with God, first published in October 1978, was the first graphic novel, and that Eisner originated the term in that encounter with the Bantam representative. It seems that Eisner thought he had invented the phrase, but it was actually coined back in 1964 by comics enthusiast Richard Kyle in 1964. The phrase “graphic novel” appeared in 1972 on the cover of DC Comics’ The Sinister House of Secret Love #2 and that term, or “graphic album” was used by various other works preceding Contract. Moreover, Contract the book is a collection of short stories in comics form, including the title tale, not a single “novel.” The graphic novel form goes back to the works of Swiss cartoonist Rodolphe Topffer in the early 19th century.

So the documentary is misleading about the origin of the graphic novel, but it is nonetheless correct in creating the impression that Eisner was the foremost pioneer of the contemporary American graphic novel, in that Contract and his subsequent “graphic novels” demonstrated that comics could deal with serious themes, be aimed at an adult audience, and be successfully published in book form. Even if Eisner did not originate the term, his use of the phrase gave it the momentum that has resulted, nearly thirty years later, in its widespread acceptance by the cultural mainstream.

The power of names should not be underestimated. “Comics” suggested “funnybooks,” humor for children. in popularizing the term “graphic novel,” Eisner was offering a viable alternative name for comics in book form, which made them sound more sophisticated and artistically ambitious. That change in name helped enable people to overcome the stereotypes associated with the word “comics.”

As far as I know, Eisner did originate the term “sequential art” as an alternative to “comics” as the name of the artform. In naming their documentary Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist, the Cookes are continuing his work in “rebranding” the medium. If the documentary gets sufficient exposure, perhaps the mainstream culture will adopt this phrase as well.

What I especially admired in the film’s treatment of Contract was that, in showing the sequence in which the protagonist weeps over his daughter’s death and then defiantly challenges God, the movie’s jazz score disappears. There is no spoken narration, either. The abrupt silence, as the audience studies the sequence onscreen, after having heard Eisner speak about his own daughter’s death, has a powerful dramatic impact.

The documentary then shows a number of clips of other comics professionals speaking about the importance of Contract to the history of comics. Neil Gaiman, for example, says that when Contract was published, “suddenly the people who were writing Supergirl had nothing to say to me anymore.” A number of interview clips, such as Gaiman’s, were shot at a San Diego Comic Con. Years ago, I co-wrote a documentary titled Super Heroes that was shown on the Learning Channel, and some of the filming was done at the 1998 San Diego Con, but the constant background noise rendered most of it unusable; so I admire the fact that the Cookes somehow solved the problem.

In the Cookes’ film Frank Miller says that Contract showed “for the first time” that “what I did” was not restricted to publication in “periodicals”: instead, comics could be published in book form “that would sit on a shelf, forever.”

As I stated above, Eisner’s use of the terms “graphic novel” and “sequential art” made the artform known as “comics” or “the funnies” seem more serious and sophisticated, more adult than juvenile. Similarly, the publication of Contract in bound book format was a statement that comics need not be ephemeral. The culture was used to seeing comics in newspapers, destined to be discarded, or in traditional “pamphlet”-style comic books, which seemed equally disposable. It’s because comics are now widely available in hardcover or paperback book formats that conventional bookstores now stock them and that libraries carry them. Just like DVDs for film, the book format has provided an impetus for reprinting classic comics of the past, making them available to new generations. As Miller observed, books collecting comics can be easily and compactly stored on bookshelves. An interest in comics no longer requires long boxes and Mylar bags and turning over a room of one’s house to the collection. I suspect that, before the rise of trade paperbacks and graphic novels, many comics aficionados might have wearied of collecting comics simply because they took up so much space. Moreover, if a book of comics can reside on a bookshelf next to a book of prose, there is an implication that one medium is as good as the other.

So, ultimately, Contract was just as important for the format in which it was published and for the name Eisner gave that format, as it was for demonstrating that comics could deal with serious moral, psychological, and even religious issues.

In the movie Art Spiegelman notes that he was already working on Maus (see “Comics in Context” #64) when Contract came out. This suggests an intriguing alternative history: if Eisner had not done Contract, would it have been Spiegelman who got the credit for creating the first contemporary graphic novel dealing with serious subject matter?

The final section of the movie shows how Eisner inspired generations of comics professionals, with Brian Azzarello, Peter Bagge, Kyle Baker, Peter Kuper, Scott McCloud, and Adrian Tomine praising him on camera. (Notice that it’s mostly pros primarily associated with alternative comics in this segment; I wish more “mainstream” pros had been included.) There’s also a clip of Eisner behaving with appealing modesty at the Eisner Awards ceremony at the 2004 San Diego Con. This is the kind of biographical film that will make you wish you had known its subject personally.

Spiegelman returns as narrator at the close, stating that through Eisner’s example “comics has entered the hall of the Muses with the other arts.” Well, great work is great work, whether or not it has been recognized as such, and there were great cartoonists before Eisner; perhaps it’s more appropriate to say that through Eisner’s efforts, there is now far more widespread awareness that comics belongs in the hall of the Muses. And the screening ended with loud, sustained applause greeting the credit for the director. (The Thursday and Saturday screenings must have inspired good word ofd mouth, since the Big Apple Con’s Allan Rosenberg informs me that the final screening, on a Sunday morning, attracted many comics professionals.)

I used to say that another film that I co-wrote, Sex, Lies and Superheroes, was the best documentary on comics that you’ve never seen. But now, far and away, that description belongs to Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist. It didn’t have a distributor at the time of its premiere, but I hope that it finds one, or that somehow the Cookes can release it on DVD. (And wouldn’t it make a great special feature for the DVD of Miller’s forthcoming Spirit movie?) And if the Cookes are looking for their next documentary subject, I have one word: Kirby.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR OTHER PEOPLE

The mainstream media are covering comics on a regular basis, and I’ve now been interviewed about cartoon and comics art by the BBC, CBS, and MSNBC.
So I’ve begun to wonder: will I ever turn up in the newspaper of record, The New York Times? Technically, I have, since my name was listed last fall in a Barnes & Noble ad for doing a signing of DK Publishing’s Marvel Encyclopedia. But what I’m hoping for is to be mentioned–or even interviewed–in an actual Times newspaper article. Mind you, there are plenty of comics pros whom the Times has not seen fit to write about until it runs their obituaries, from Jack Kirby and Gil Kane to Dave Cockrum and Marshall Rogers. It would be nice if the Times ran my name while I am still alive to see it.

It turns out that I am not the first Quick Stop contributor (apart, of course, from Mr. Smith himself) to get his name in the Times. On May 26 Paul Dini, co-auteur of Quick Stop’s video feature “Monkey Talk”, turned up in Times comics specialist George Gene Gustines’ article about how the comics industry is beginning to adopt the “show runner” concept from television. (You can find the article and accompanying photos here, although you probably won’t be able to access it unless you’re a Times Select subscriber).

Whereas in filmmaking the director is God, writers dominate the making of television series. The head writer or head writers also act as “show runners” who not only supervise the other writers, but the production of the series. Hence Joss Whedon was the show runner on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Damon Lindehof and Carlton Cuse are the show runners on Lost, a series on which Paul used to work. It makes sense that Whedon is now the show runner (or, as he puts it, “executive producer”), on Dark Horse’s new Buffy comics series, which I enjoy and may write about later this year. Scott Rosenberg, head of Platinum Studios, has consciously adopted the “show runner” term, referring to the people in charge of producing comics as “comic runners.”

Just as he was a story editor on animated series like the 1990s Batman, Paul Dini is now the story editor on DC’s weekly series Countdown. He told Gustines, “Each week I go over the beats of the upcoming issue with the editor and the writers.” Not only is he the head writer, in charge of the series’ overall outline, but he also reviews scripts by other writers on the series.

I’m not certain how this role differs from that of a hands-on comics editor who effectively co-plots the stories, as the late Julius Schwartz did, or who considerably rewrites scripts, as Stan Lee used to do. This also reminds me of the old, supposedly obsolete writer-editor system at DC and Marvel in the 1970s and 1980s, wherein “star” writers edited their own series. So if the story editor supervises the creative aspect of the story, does that leave the just-plain editor to just deal with mundane managerial tasks? In the 1980s DC and Marvel both eventually got rid of writer-editors so that the in-house editors could exert full creative authority over the books. Maybe the “comic runner” is yet another example of my Rubber Band Theory of Comics, whereby ideas that the comics companies declare dead forever inevitably bounce back, given sufficient time (see “Comics in Context” #75). The Hollywood terminology may be a new disguise for an old way of creating comics.

Well, Paul certainly deserves recognition in the pages of The New York Times. The paper not only quoted Paul, but ran a photograph of him. And his wife and “Monkey Talk” co-conspirator Misty Lee is in the picture, which is rather sweet. And the monkeys are in the picture, too.

Wait a minute! I can easily accept the fact that Paul and Misty got into the Times before I did. But Rashy!?! I’ve been beaten to immortality in the Times by Paul’s talking monkey Rashy?!? (Rashy beat Fred Hembeck, too!) This is further proof that there is a God, and He has a really ironic sense of humor concerning my life. Or that He likes “Monkey Talk.”

Ah, well, you should go watch “Monkey Talk” and listen to Paul and Misty’s podcasts at their website (http://dinicartoons.com/). And you should also follow this link to Paul’s blog, where on June 2 he write about the closing of the Warners Animation building, the latest sign that what he rightly describes as a “Silver Age” of Hollywood animation (including Disney features like The Lion King to Warners animated series of the late 1980s and 1990s) has come to an end after nearly twenty years. (Warners Animation survives in another building, but, it seems, in reduced form.) Paul blames “studio cement-heads” who junked 2D animation, thinking 3D computer animation was the “key to riches” and who meddled in the creation of stories. He also points to an overabundance of cheap animated series driving out the better crafted, most expensive series: “if more kids are watching Pokemon, the business edict is clear–buy more Pokemon.” And how often have I told you that Pikachu is really Cthulhu in disguise, sucking out the brains of unwary young viewers?

Paul points out that this Silver Age of animation was “largely guided by creators who had grown up on the legacy of Classic Disney, Warner Bros., Tex Avery and pre-1965 Hanna-Barbera.” Well, then, maybe a new generation will arise that is similarly inspired by these classic works. Or maybe not. On the subject of the classic Warners animated shorts, Paul wrote on his blog on May 7 that “It’s a damn shame they don’t run those cartoons on TV any more.” This is an overstatement: it’s the post-1948 Warners theatrical cartoons that are off the air, but that’s bad enough. He continues, “Each Christmas several cartoonists I know do free character sketches at a holiday event for underprivileged children. Every year fewer and fewer kids ask for the classic Warner characters. Last year one of the artists was warming up by doing a sketch of Bugs Bunny and none of the kids knew who he was.” Damn.

I’m sorry I was unable to complete this column by my regular deadline last week: on the day I had set aside to write it, I suddenly learned that DC Comics was holding a memorial for Dave Cockrum that very afternoon, and felt I should attend. I will be writing about the memorial in weeks to come.

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

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