FRED Entertainment

Long, long ago, I attempted to persuade my high school English teacher that comics could be a means of serious artistic expression, just like prose fiction or film. She looked at me with disbelief, for this was the 1970s, and in those pre-Internet days, I knew no one who thought that comics could be serious literature. But I was certain that they could, and I brought evidence to my high school teacher to prove my case. Exhibit One was a Man-Thing story written by Steve Gerber, who passed away last week after a lengthy illness.

According to one school of thought, the 1970s was a dreadful decade for Marvel. It is true that in the 1970s most of Marvel’s top tier titles, such as Fantastic Four and Amazing Spider-Man, ran well-intentioned but second or third-rate imitations of Stan Lee’s superhero sagas of the 1960s. But if you knew where to look, the 1970s was an extraordinary innovative period in Marvel history. Away from the flagship titles, a new wave of young writers, their imaginations fired by the great comics of the Silver Age, were taking Marvel and the comic book medium in new directions, putting the stamp of their own creative personalities on genres from superheroes to sword and sorcery to horror and more. There were Roy Thomas’s Conan the Barbarian, Steve Englehart’s Avengers, Captain America and Doctor Strange, Doug Moench’s Master Of Kung Fu, Jim Starlin’s Captain Marvel and Warlock, Don McGregor’s Black Panther and Killraven, Marv Wolfman’s Tomb of Dracula, and the resurrected series that would transform the industry: Len Wein, Dave Cockrum, Chris Claremont and John Byrne’s “new” X-Men.

Of all of the 1970s new wave writers, perhaps Steve Gerber had the most distinctly individual voice. Gerber continued working in comics on and off over the decades, and was writing a new series about DC’s Doctor Fate at the time of his death. But his groundbreaking, most influential work was in the 1970s, when he wrote an eclectic assortment of series for Marvel, including Defenders, Guardians of the Galaxy, Tales of the Zombie, and his co-creation, Omega the Unknown.

Gerber did not create Marvel’s swamp monster, the Man-Thing, but it was he who made the series memorable. Anyone who has subsequently worked on the character has labored in Gerber’s shadow. It was a horror series, but the nature of its title character, a creature lacking human intelligence, gave Gerber the opportunity to shift its focus to the human characters who wandered into the Man-Thing. More than any other mainstream comics series of its day, Gerber’s Man-Thing focused on psychological drama, and not just on individual character studies but on portraits of American society in the 1970s. Other Marvel “new wave” writers gave personal touches and viewpoints to genre stories, but Gerber’s best work of the period was so personal as to verge on the autobiographical, however fictionalized.

Marvel has collected Gerber’s early Man-Thing work in Essential Man-Thing Vol. 1. Looking through this thick paperback, you will see Gerber’s rapid development as a comics writer. By the time the Man-Thing series spun out of Adventure into Fear into a comic book of its own, Gerber had become a master of comics storytelling. This week I am examining two of these tales, which I believe to be enduring classics.

Let’s begin with the two-parter, “Night of the Laughing Dead” and “And When I Died!” from Man-Thing Vol. 1 #5 (May 1974) and 6 (June 1974), drawn by the foremost Man-Thing artist, Mike Ploog, and inked by Frank Chiaramonte.

In the opening pages Man-Thing rises from the waters of the swamp, as if from the subconscious mind, and trudges forward. Gerber’s narration recounts that this monster was once a human scientist, Ted Sallis, whose one little experiment went awry.”

Like Bruce Banner, Sallis was working on a military project, heedless of its potentially destructive consequences: in Sallis’s case, he was working on: recreating the “super-soldier” formula, to create a race of superhuman soldiers for the government. (I wonder what Gerber thought of Marvel’s Civil War, which led to the U. S. government coercing superheroes into its service.) Just as Banner’s gamma bomb turned him into the Hulk, a monstrous embodiment of destructive power, Sallis’s experimental formula transformed him into a nearly mindless swamp creature, a distorted caricature of a superhuman.

Through his Faustian bargain, Sallis forfeited his prized intellect. The Man-Thing is a being of physical power but only primitive consciousness. Gerber was particularly interested in this theme of the disconnect between the mind and the body in contemporary humankind.

Further, as Gerber’s narration informs us, “as if to compensate for all it stole from you, the swamp gave you back an ability mankind lost in its infancy. . .that of psychic empathy.” The Man-Thing is a creature governed by emotions: he senses and even shares the feelings of others and responds to them. Reduced to a minimal level of intellect, the Man-Thing ironically has greater comprehension of the emotions of others than normal human beings do, a kind of empathy that the human Ted Sallis sorely lacked. Gerber’s narrator tells the Man-Thing, “You can feel what others feel. . .You can understand those feelings. . .And the mote of humanness left within you can act on that understanding.”

As the narration tells us this, we see instead another figure trudging forward: a circus clown, who looks utterly miserable. Gerber seems to be suggesting that the Man-Thing will be capable of understanding this clown. Moreover, perhaps Gerber meant for us to identify the Man-Thing with the clown, both pitiable figures walking through the swamp, and both, as we shall see, brought to the bottommost point of human existence. This swamp, “the festering marshland,” as Gerber puts it, is a visual metaphor for a world of despair.

Of course, the image of the weeping clown is a familiar archetype from I Pagliacci and so many other works. But Gerber, as we shall seem went beyond cliché in his handling of the archetype. For one thing, he surprises the reader by having the clown, merely a page after his entrance, commit suicide.

His counterpart in misery, the Man-Thing, is the only creature who hears and responds to the gunshot. As the creature stares at the corpse, Gerber’s narration concisely and affectingly contemplates how much killing there is in the world, for a variety of reasons, “even, incredibly, for. . . pleasure.” The Man-Thing becomes the clown’s sole mourner. Dimly recalling the ritual of funeral, the creature lifts up the clown’s corpse, in Ploog’s macabre variation on the Pieta, and seeks a place to bury him.

No longer capable of reading, the Man-Thing is mystified by the clown’s suicide note: “Laughter is dead, futility!” This may seem at first a cliche. But, again, Gerber moves beyond the obvious. Another of his themes is whether art–not just comedy–offers a means of transcending the sorrows of existence.

The scene shifts to Richard Rory, Gerber’s semi-autobiographical character, and his friend Ruth Hart, who are being hassled by a motel clerk. Reading this scene now is a reminder that society did not always accept the idea of unmarried couples rooming together. There’s another reason that the clerk objects to Rory, whom he sneeringly calls “Joe College.” Rory complains, “I hate people who make “˜education’ sound like a dirty word.” Gerber’s comics did not indulge in the anti-intellectualism of American pop culture.

Soon Rory encounters a circus owner named Garvey, who brutally strikes down a high wire performer named Ayla Prentiss when she insists they go looking for their missing clown. Rory goes to her defense, but this is not a superhero story, and his heroic moment is short-lived: another circus performer, a strongman named Tragg, overpowers him. Ayla accompanies Rory and Hart and tries to persuade them to help her find “my clown,” whose name is Darrel Daniel. “I loved Darrel. . but I betrayed him,” she confesses, and as a result “He stopped laughing. . .stopped living. . .just wanted to die. . . .”

Then Darrel’s spirit, still in clown costume and make-up, appears, first to Ayla, Rory and Hart, and then to Garvey and Tragg, causing the latter two to crash their truck as the spectral clown watches “gleefully.” So here are more familiar archetypes: the vengeful ghost and the scary clown, most famously embodied in comics by the Joker, merged into a single figure.

But Gerber develops the figure of Darrel yet further. As part one of this story ends, the clown’s spirit appears before the cast of characters–Rory, Prentiss, Hart, Tragg, the Man-Thing, too, and Garvey, who joins them in the following issue–and proclaims, as if he is now the circus’s ringmaster, that “we’re going to have a little show, my friends! And you–all of you–are going to be the actors! We’re going to play out the story of my life–and death–with the swamp as our stage–and my soul at the mercy of the critics!”

There are so many tales of ghosts who remain on Earth because of traumatic events in their mortal lives, which they reenact over and over as spirits. Here Gerber combined this idea with the Shakespearean concept of the world as a stage and ourselves as players upon it.

But Gerber goes still further, for at this point his story takes on a metafictional dimension. As a clown, Darrel is a kind of artist, and here he becomes a playwright and director as well, staging the story of his life. It is implied that every man is the author of his life, that each of our lives are works in progress, completed with our deaths, when our lives are judged by any higher powers that may exist. Thus through Darrel’s “play,” Gerber presented a variation on the idea of judgment after death.

When a person dies, his or her fellow human beings look back upon the life of the deceased and judge its value; indeed, this is what we are doing right now in reading and contributing to appreciations of Steve Gerber upon his passing. But even during our lives, we are continually being judged by the people around us. What sort of public impression do we make? How truthfully does it reflect our inner selves?

Furthermore, Darrel the clown is like the author of any work of art that contains personal, even autobiographical themes, and thus, certainly like Steve Gerber himself. The artist creates his work of art out of his ideas, emotions, and elements of his or her own life, and then presents them to the public, to the world at large, his audience and the critics.

It’s interesting that Gerber, then a full time comics writer, should put such emphasis in critics in this story, since back in the 1970s mainstream critics did not write reviews of comics; the only comics “critics” were writing for comic book letter columns (like myself) and early fanzines. But of course, in a sense, everyone in the audience is a critic, who decides whether what he or she sees is good or bad. When the artist creates a work with such personal meaning to him and presents it to the audience, he or she is not only offering the work up for judgment, but himself or herself as well.

So the play of Darrel the clown is a powerful dramatic metaphor, indeed. It begins in the following issue, in which Darrel announces that his “set” will be the circus. Life as a mad circus is another familiar trope, and Gerber would use it again in his final storyline for the original run of Howard the Duck, casting Howard as a clown who fights back against his oppressors.

Darrel explicitly casts the Man-Thing as a visual metaphor: “You, Man-Thing, shall portray my inner demon–the force within me that laced my laughter with bitter tears–and drove me to self-destruction.” The narrator observes that though the Man-Thing cannot comprehend language, “the swamp beast seems to nod.” The Man-Thing comprehends emotions, you see, and feels repelled by evil. Therefore, it is significant that he sides with Darrel, signaling that the clown is not the villain he might seem to readers at this point.

Darrel then transforms his other “actors” into figures from his childhood. Ruth explains that they’re not just playing these characters: “we’re actually going to be these people from Darrel’s past!” As I observed earlier, in ghost stories the specters are often obsessed with repeating events from their past. I am reminded of how in Dark Shadows ghosts sought to mesmerize mortals into thinking themselves to be people from the ghosts’ own mortal lives. Gerber just makes the role-playing metaphor explicit.

Darrel casts Rory in the role of the clown’s boyhood self. Since Rory is considered Gerber’s stand-in, this may suggest that Darrel, too, is to some degree an autobiographical figure, emotionally and psychologically.

Through the clown’s casting of other roles, Gerber makes an acute psychological observation: relationships that one has an adult can mirror those he or she had as a child. Hence Darrel casts the brutal Tragg as “the bully who was my bane in youth,” and Garvey, his cruel boss at the circus, as his insensitive father. Perhaps the real point is that Darrel, consciously or not, perceives Garvey, whom he blames for his suicide, as another father figure who failed him.

In “Act I” of the clown’s play, Darrel the child hints that he wants to go to the circus. His father Milo forbids it and insists on forcing Darrel into a way of life that the boy finds anathema: constantly working to become rich. Milo condemns the circus as “dirty,” “foolishness,” and “fit for animals only.” Since we know that Darrel grew up to be a circus performer, Milo is condemning his son’s creative ambitions. Milo is bent in forcing Darrel into an identity, a role in life, that is not true to the boy’s nature. If the father succeeded in imposing his will on Darrel, he would stifle the boy’s spirit. “I’m not allowed to have fun,” Darrel the boy tells his father. Later, afflicted with self-doubt, the boy wonders, “Nobody else is laughin’–why should I be able to?”

One of Gerber’s recurring themes is his rebellion against society’s attempts to compel everyone into a sterile, soul-destroying conformity. Like many who grew up in the 1960s, Gerber opposed the American mindset that prized monetary success as a measure of personal worth. The boy Darrell bitterly tells his father, “All you know how to do is count your money!”

Darrel becomes so estranged from his father that, as a teenager, he laughs at Milo’s funeral. A psychiatrist diagnoses Darrel as “a tortured soul. obviously in turmoil over a multiplicity of moral and emotional crises.” But, the shrink adds, “this is America–1951! That makes you normal!” Darrel’s sense of alienation thus becomes a malaise afflicting postwar conformist American society.

Darrel reached a turning point in his life on “the day after Robert Kennedy was shot–the day I went looking for a circus.” In 1974 Gerber did not have to explain to his readers that this was the third of the political assassinations of the 1960s–the murders of John Kennedy and Martin Luther King–that shocked and disillusioned Americans. At this low point Darrel embraced his vocation: “I had at last decided what I wanted what I thought the world needed most”–to make people laugh again.

In real life, after working unhappily in advertising, Gerber figuratively joined the circus by moving to New York and becoming a comic book writer, back in the days when mainstream American culture accorded no respect to the comic book medium.

Darrel succeeded for a time in his chosen artform. He won an appreciative audience, perhaps symbolized by the love of his fellow performer Ayla. “It made me feel good about myself for the first time,” the clown declares.

But then Darrel learned that his supposed benefactor, Garvey was coldly exploiting him (You can’t buy laughter,” asserts the clown), and worse, came to believe that Ayla merely pretended to love him on Garvey’s orders. You would expect that this would drive Darrel to despair. But look at the specific form that despair takes: it affects his vision of the world, and therefore his art. “I changed my act–made it evil!” recalls Darrel, to such a degree that Ayla says that it was “frightening the customers.”

In the end, Darrel says, “The act was scaring me, too–showing me a part of myself I hated.” Art had been his salvation; now it was destroying him. “The laughter in me was dead,” which is what his father had wanted. Unable to accept life without laughter or love, the clown killed himself.

Darrel’s ghost had already characterized this play of his life as a “tragedy.” But the three mysterious, hooded critics do not agree. They now cast off their robes and stand revealed as representatives of heaven, hell, “and the realm between.” Speaking as if they were drama (or comics?) critics, they “judge your [Darrel’s] drama –your life–a moral and artistic failure,” accusing him of not showing “sufficient motivation” for his suicide. Claiming he is “neither a good man nor bad” they sentence him to “oblivion.” By coincidence or not, this is reminiscent of the Button-Molder’s scene in Henrik Ibsen’s 1867 play Peer Gynt. Since Peer, too, is adjudged to be worthy neither of heaven nor hell, the unearthly Button Molder decrees that his soul will be melted down like other flawed goods. Although Ibsen leaves Peer’s ultimate fate uncertain, what may save him is the redemptive love of a woman named Solveig.

How does one truly judge the success of a dramatic work of art? Though Brecht might disagree, isn’t one measure the degree to which the audience members identify with the lead character and see themselves reflected in his or her personality? And doesn’t an actor attempt to comprehend the psyche of the character he or she plays? Gerber’s surrogate, Richard Rory, not only portrayed Darrel in his play but “became” Darrel. Moreover, Rory was in a sense an audience member as well, watching the play take place around him. Now he protests the “critics'” decision: “I lived his life! I can vouch for him! His soul doesn’t deserve to perish!”

Moreover, Darrel’s play is still going on: the Man-Thing, still playing his part, “still acting as Darrel’s inner demon,” battles the three “critics.” The Man-Thing has an advantage to playing a part: the narrator informs us that his “empathic nature enabled him, for a time, to become [Darrel’s] soul.” Moreover, the Man-Thing has specifically become Darrel’s “inner demon,” his spirit of rebellion against repression, fighting back against this unjust judgment. The Man-Thing is also an audience member for Darrel’s play; the narrator says that Darrel’s soul “touched” the Man-Thing, as if it were a touching performance.

Characteristically, Gerber, in his narration, dismisses the three unearthly “critics” as “bureaucrats,” as if even the management of the hereafter has become yet another system unresponsive to individuals’ needs.

It it would be a shallow superhero comics cliche if it were the Man-Thing’s sheer brute force that saved Darrel. Instead, as in Peer Gynt, possible redemption comes through a woman’s love for the protagonist. But Gerber’s Ayla is not a moral paragon like Ibsen’s Solveig. Ayla confesses not only her love for Darrel but also her guilt for lacking “the courage to defy Garvey” and to admit her love to Darrel. Remember, she remained silent when Garvey claimed she only pretended to love Darrel, not realizing the clown was eavesdropping; had she told Garvey then and there that she did love Darrel, he would not have fallen into his downward spiral. Now Ayla offers to sacrifice her own soul to the “critics” in exchange for Darrel’s. This is enough to placate the critics, and the judge from heaven signals that Darrel has been redeemed. The clown’s autobiographical drama succeeded by touching the heart of the key member of its audience, Ayla. (And this ending, in which a woman’s sacrifice, motivated by love, saves the seemingly damned hero, reminds me of Richard Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman.)

Gerber’s narration leaves the other witnesses to Darrel’s play–and the readers–with a chilling warning: “to wonder what sort of drama they will be able to stage when each meets his own circle of critics.” Each of us is the playwright/director of his or her own life.

As Ploog shows the Man-Thing submerging back into the waters of the swamp, Ayla delivers the story’s final lines, memorializing Darrel by asserting “That a man who can inspire laughter. . .and joy. . .is the holiest man of all.” That’s rather over the top, but Gerber’s belief in the importance of laughter and joy is surely the motivating force behind his most celebrated comics series, a comedy about a talking waterfowl.

Gerber reworked and reexamined themes from the clown storyline in a later story with a memorable title: “Song-Cry of the Living Dead Man,” with art by John Buscema and Klaus Janson, from Man-Thing Vol. 1#12 (December 1974).

Sensing “the dull, muted agony of a mind in torment,” the Man-Thing is drawn to an abandoned insane asylum, where he sees “a lone man, pale and wan,” unshaven, writing by candlelight, “living on beans and canned meat. . .rarely sleeping, rarely leaving this one tiny room.” It is an archetypal image of the lonely life of the writer, although this one is particularly, self-destructively driven by his inner demons.

This man is named Brian Lazarus, whose Biblical last name suggests that this will be a story of spiritual death and resurrection. But at this point in the story, there is no glimmer of hope.

Darrel the clown’s art turned so “evil” that it frightened even himself. Lazarus is struggling to express himself through his writing, but he is unable to achieve control over his art; “It’s no good–its not right,” he soliloquizes. “No matter how I try, the words just won’t say what I want them to. Or maybe they do–and I just can’t tell anymore!” But Lazarus feels he must continue to try, because writing is his means of defense against a growing pain. “The hurt is afraid of truth,” he declares.

There enters a well-dressed man, who might be a servant, since he has come to escort Lazarus to “them,” yet he calls Lazarus “Brian” and exudes a sinister authority. Lazarus resigns himself to meeting with “them,” and his guide significantly says, “you know you can’t escape them. You don’t even want to, deep down–or you’d never have brought them with you.”

Then the Man-Thing sees Lazarus beset by a horde of figures–all everyday people, but with wild expressions on their faces, tearing at Brian’s clothes, as his head tilts back, eyes bulging in terror, mouth agape in a silent scream. Brian’s agony is no longer “dull” or “muted.” And what do these human vultures want? They demand that Lazarus pay his bills, pay the rent, or pay a parking ticket. This is the constant barrage of the everyday demands of living in contemporary American capitalist society, the necessity to earn and pay out money for the necessities of life, and they are driving Brian Lazarus insane, “each demanding a bit of soul or flesh.”

Watching, dimly recalling his former human existence, the empathic Man-Thing recognizes that “he has had the same experience, felt the same way Brian Lazarus feels now.” Seeking to aid Lazarus, the Man-Thing seizes one of Brian’s assailants, only to see the figure literally fade into nothingness.

Brian Lazarus is a creative artist who not only suffers from emotional and psychological turmoil but who has lost control of his art. So his creative imagination instead produces these apparitions that embody the demands of society and torment him. Even his well-dressed guide was a figment of his imagination, which has turned against Brian, the creator himself.

As an empath, the Man-Thing is capable of perceiving Brian’s hallucinations. Indeed, since the Man-Thing recalls somehow once having the same experience and emotions, Gerber is establishing Lazarus as a kind of double or counterpart to the Man-Thing. Perhaps, by extension, Gerber is suggesting that everyone feels some of Lazarus’s anguish and fear of the the burdens of everyday existence in modern times. But most of us don’t react in the extreme way that Brian Lazarus does. We must probe more deeply for the source of his madness, as the story proceeds to do.

The hallucinatory assailants vanish, and, after his initial fright, Lazarus strangely accepts the silent Man-Thing as his confidant (but inasmuch as they are counterparts of one another, this seems right). Lazarus speaks of the work he is writing, his “Song-Cry,” and, again significantly, acknowledges his responsibility for the torments he is suffering. “I had to explain how iI let the hurt get me,” Brian tells the Man-Thing. As an artist, and like Darrel, Lazarus seeks an audience for his art–even if it’s only one person–who will understand what he wants to express: “somebody who’d listen without asking for something. . . if I just got the words down. . . they’d find their way to someone. . . .” (Why, it’s rather like those of us who write blogs and columns on the Internet, hoping that our ideal readers will find them.)

Gerber then segues to the familiar figure of Richard Rory, with his new friend Sybil Mills. This sequence reminds the reader that Rory too is connected with the arts: he is a disc jockey, selecting rock music to play for his own audience of listeners, and he promises to dedicate a song to Sybil. But though he kissed Sybil goodbye, she has no intention of pursuing a relationship with Rory: “I make it a practice not to involve myself too deeply with anyone–ever.” Sybil distances herself from her own emotions.

Thus, when she sees Lazarus staggering along the street in the driving rain, Sybil’s initial reaction is to keep her distance. But when Sybil realizes “he is on the verge of collapse,” her better nature prevails, and she “rushes to his side” and “guides him to her quarters.” So now Brian has a new guide who is neither imaginary nor sinister.

Lazarus the writer has led such an isolated life that all he initially says he wants from Sybil is to hear somebody’s voice.” But it soon becomes clear he needs to talk, and to talk to someone who (unlike Man-Thing) can talk with him.

What Brian begins talking about is his love of art, in this case. music. (Notice that Brian calls the text he us writing his “song-cry.” Remember, too, that Gerber earlier reminded his readers about Rory’s connection with music.) “I used to love music–more than anything else,” Brian tells Sybil. “I used to say that anybody that didn’t like music was dead.”

Although Sybil earlier was unresponsive to Rory’s offer of a song, this time a shared love of music forges a closer connection between Sybil and Brian. “I like music, too. Very much,” Sybil tells Lazarus, adding, “I’m a dancer.” Indeed, she spends the whole story wearing her dancer’s leotard. Dance and music are important parts of Sybil’s identity. Like Brian. she too is a creative artist.

It seems that the first symptom of Brian’s growing psychological anguish was losing his ability to appreciate art. He tells Sybil that one day, significantly, upon coming home from his job, he started playing the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, “and it just sounded like noise to me. Ugly, ugly, ugly noise. That’s when I knew. . .I was dying.” Art–his ability to appreciate it and his ability to create it–is at of the core of Brian’s identity, too. But he is losing his capacity to perceive the beauty, the order, and the literal and figurative harmony in art.

The problem was that his alienation from the rest of life has hampered his artistic capabilities. “My whole life. . .became one gigantic, impenetrable wall of noise.” It’s not just the demands that his boss and others out on him. Lazarus tells Sybil that “the lies were the worst. . .by far.” Before he worked for Marvel. Steve Gerber was an advertising copywriter, and so is Brian Lazarus. Brian took the road that Darrel forsook: the path to riches in the business world. But for Brian that meant lying about the destructive product he was paid to sell, even though an artist’s duty is to tell the truth. “I was on my way to being a very rich liar,” Lazarus confesses, before he “ran out screaming.”

Then comes Brian Lazarus’s manifesto, the “Song-Cry of the Living Dead Man” itself, which Gerber presents as a text piece, accompanied by Buscema and Janson’s somewhat surreal illustrations (including one of Brian with an arrow through his skull, crying out in agony, like the later Steve Martin gag, but played for horror). This was not the only time that Gerber experimented with the comic book format like this, introducing text passages in the midst of a sequential art narrative, mixing his media.

The point of the “Song-Cry’ is that the pursuit of money in the rat race in the business world destroys the author’s identity as an artist, turning him into “a living dead man,” a corporate zombie. “Sleep, synapses. The world has no use for you today. Or ever,” Lazarus writes, as if his career of telling “lies” for profit has rendered him as mindless as the Man-Thing. “Kill your mind!” Lazarus exclaims in his “Song-Cry.” He writes that he has become “a crumb in the loaf of industry, makin’ life without identity, on the river island of eternity,” suggesting the insignificance of such a life when weighed on a cosmic scale.

Brian’s “Song-Cry” is like Darrel’s play: a deeply personal work of art through which its creator reaches out, seeking understanding from his audience. “There was no one to tell, no one who wanted to listen. No one who could really understand,” laments Lazarus. He asks Sybil (though he is also looking out towards us, the readers), “What about you? Do you understand?” Sybil admits that she doesn’t, “but that doesn’t mean I won’t try. . .or listen,” as she takes Brian’s hand. His “Song-Cry” has succeeded in moving Sybil, his audience of one: “You touched something in me. . .that I wasn’t even sure was there. I think. . . care about you.” Brian’s “Song-Cry” has awakened emotions in Sybil that she formerly tried to suppress.

The late Ingmar Bergman made a film, Hour of the Wolf (1968), about an artist who was going mad and who hallucinated seeing various tormentors. By the film’s end, the artist’s wife, because she cares for him so deeply, has begun to see his hallucinations as well. The same thing happens here. On the brink of overcoming his insanity, Lazarus suffers an abrupt relapse, and this time Sybil sees the phantasms as well, and the demonic apparitions attack them both.

Again suffering psychic pain through his empathic power, the Man-Thing returns to combat the apparitions, only to recognize that “the phantasms are not the enemy. His assailant is Brian!” This reminds me of Number Six’s discovery in the surreal last episode of The Prisoner, in which he finally confronts his mysterious nemesis Number One. Of course the apparitions embodying Brian’s fears spring from his own psyche. The fact that he is a writer with a creative imagination presumably enables them to take such vivid form.

But these phantasms and the terrors they represent are not beyond Lazarus’s control: the well-dressed man said that Brian did not want to escape them.

As the Man-Thing battled the phantasms, “thought-bursts” erupted in Lazarus’s mind. One was “To survive among them. . .you must become them. . . .To survive, you must die.” Lazarus considers himself the “living dead man”: he has figuratively “died.” It was really his true identity as artist, as individual, as a person with a capacity for love, who “died.” Another of the “˜thought-bursts” makes another allusion to the Beatles: “You can’t be the Walrus if they want you to be the system. They are I!!” That is the point at which the Man-Thing turned to attack Brian. Lazarus had persuaded himself that he had to become part of the “system” to survive in life, rather than remain true to himself. The phantasms are really Brian punishing himself for his decision.

Brian needs a psychic shock to break free of his inner demons. and he receives it when Sybil risks her life to shield him from the Man-Thing’s wrath. Suddenly Brian is concerned for someone other than himself. Earlier Lazarus wrote that he thought he had become “like a burned-out machine. . .a dead computer.” Thus Gerber returned to his theme of the mind disconnected from emotion. Lazarus certainly feels terror and despair, but not empathy (the Man-Thing’s specialty) or love for others, until Sybil is nearly killed before his eyes.

Lazarus tells Sybil, “You should’ve let him hit me. I’m already dead.” But Sybil tells him he’s wrong: “You feel–you care. Dead men can’t do that!” Sybil is Lazarus’s counterpart: she would not allow herself to empathize or love, either. “I wasn’t sure I could care that much. . .even about you,” she tells Brian, but by risking her life for him, “now I know I can.”

It is the recognition that someone cares deeply about him, and, surely, Brian’s own response towards her, that resurrects Gerber’s Lazarus from his “living dead” state. The narration tells us that “Brian’s attackers vanish, along with the madness that gave them life.” People don’t overcome insanity so quickly in real life, of course, but in the context of this tale, this exorcism of Brian’s inner demons seems right.

It is appropriate that Steve Gerber did comics for DC’s Vertigo line later in his career, because the best Marvel horror series of the 1970s, and Gerber’s Man-Thing most of all, foreshadowed the sophisticated, character-driven approach that Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, and other Vertigo series would take to supernatural fantasy in the 1980s and 1990s. (You can see Neil credit Steve’s work as an inspiration here) Even so, there was nothing else in the 1970s like Steve Gerber’s psychologically acute, intimately personal, powerfully emotional work in comics, and there is nothing else quite like it today.

But that’s not what Steve Gerber will be best remembered for. Steve Gerber was also unequaled in modern American mainstream comic books as a master satirist, as we shall see next week when we will turn to his most iconic creation, Howard the Duck.

–Copyright 2008 Peter Sanderson

In last week’s column I embarked on a mission: to track down animated cartoons that had made an impression on me when I was in grade school, but which I hadn’t seen since, and watch them again through adult eyes. I wanted to see how many of them I could find on the Internet, and what other animated cartoons of note might be there as well.

My quest proved to be more successful than I’d imagined. I found a lot of vintage cartoons that I recalled as mediocre or worse, and which lived down to my memories: King Leonardo and Friends, Linus the Lionhearted, Silly Sidney and Deputy Dawg and more. But there were also plenty that proved to be true classics.

Although I’ve seen many of the 1940s Superman animated cartoons as an adult, somehow I never caught up with the one I found perhaps most memorable from my childhood, in which Superman battles a gigantic tyrannosaur. But now I’ve found it: it’s called The Arctic Giant, produced by the Fleischer Studios, directed by Dave Fleischer, and released by Paramount in 1942.

Like the other Fleischer Superman cartoons, The Arctic Giant is remarkable for its dramatic lighting, “camera” angles and visual compositions and its sheer energy and momentum. The superhero genre was only four years old in 1942, yet the Fleischer studio caught its spirit perfectly. But what I didn’t expect from The Arctic Giant were the little touches that the Fleischer team added to the cartoon.

A prologue sequence recounts how the colossal dinosaur was found frozen in the Arctic and was transported south in a freighter with similarly colossal refrigeration facilities. A new wing is built for the “Museum of Natural Science” in Superman’s home city specifically to exhibit the frozen creature. The cartoon never names this city, but the museum’s main building is clearly the actual American Museum of Natural History in New York City, with its towers that make the 77th St. facade look like a storybook castle. The Fleischer Studios were originally located in New York, so perhaps they thought of Superman as based there, too.

There’s not much dialogue in the Fleischer Superman cartoons, but the few words pay off in this one. Assigned by The Daily Planet editor to cover the dinosaur exhibit, Lois stops by Clark Kent’s desk to kid him that he’s so timid the sight of the monster would make him faint. This may be condescending, but it seems more witty than cruel, and Clark, once Lois has left, seems amused by it. It’s the sort of repartee I’d expect from the Lois of the 1990s Superman animated series; how interesting to see that the Fleischers had already caught the Lois and Clark relationship so well a half century earlier.

Of course, the dinosaur is not dead but in suspended animation, and, of course, he wakes up. Lois interviews a workman at the museum who sets down an oil can, which accidentally topples into machinery, cutting off the refrigeration that keeps the dinosaur comatose. In this high tech present, I’ve had enough experience with equipment that malfunctions because one little thing unexpectedly went wrong, so it seemed just right to me that to little falling oil can would end up releasing the monster.

When I first got to the real American Museum of Natural History, I think I was slightly disappointed with the size of the dinosaur skeletons. Big as a real tyrannosaur is, it still fits within a room on the museum’s fourth floor, whereas in my childhood, pop culture tended to make a dinosaur at least as tall as the entire museum. So the awakened “Arctic Giant” is far bigger than a real tyrannosaur: his foot is so big that he simultaneously steps on and flattens two police cars. Marauding through the city, this tyrannosaur looks like he is the size of Godzilla, and that’s pretty amazing, considering that The Arctic Giant came out twelve years before the first Godzilla movie (1954)!

Watching Arctic Giant, I wondered, if Godzilla wasn’t the Fleischers’ model for their “Arctic Giant,” could it have been King Kong? That makes sense: they are both gigantic monsters that stalk through a major city; like the dinosaur, Kong too was transported to New York by boat; Kong and the “Arctic Giant” both wreck an elevated subway line. And, of course, the dinosaur also menaces a young woman: at one point the tyrannosaur scoops Lois up in his mouth!

Superman goes to the city’s–and Lois’s–rescue, and there is a striking sequence in which Superman leaps to the tops of a succession of skyscrapers. Even though Superman streaks across the sky in the opening credits, this cartoon was definitely made before it was decided that Superman could fly. On the other hand, on the cover of Action Comics #1 Superman raises a car above his head; by Arctic Giant his strength has grown tremendously. The monster demolished the museum wing in escaping, and in order to rescue Lois, Superman lifts enormous chunks of rubble that dwarf him in size. This looks astounding to me in 2008; what must it have looked like to audiences in 1942, long before the recent rise of CGI, back when the superhero genre was still brand new?

Upon rescuing her from the rubble, Superman warns Lois to stay out of danger, but once he’s gone, she says she’s not giving up on this story. She doesn’t seem foolhardy, as she often does in these cartoons, but rather dedicated to her job. She isn’t the least bit shaken after her close encounter with the dinosaur, and that seems appropriate for Superman’s leading lady, and should have strongly impressed audiences in this pre-feminist period: she wasn’t continually screaming like Fay Wray did at Kong.

The Arctic Giant mostly seems to take place in New York City, but the marauding monster soon crashes his way through a dam as big as Hoover Dam, flooding what seems to be a country setting with small houses. Superman topples a mammoth mass of rock to seal the gap in the dam. Then the monster is back in the city, wrecking a bridge that looks very much like one of New York’s (with Superman lifting an entire span, with trucks and cars on top, back into place!) and finally stalking towards what could be Yankee Stadium. This is where the dinosaur scoops Lois up in his mouth, and Superman has to go in after her. It’s not quite the “belly of the beast” in Joseph Campbell’s phrase, but close enough to fit the archetype. Once Superman rescues her (again), Lois again shows nerves of steel, whereas you or I, after spending time in a dinosaur’s maw, might be in the verge of nervous collapse; after Superman again cautions her, she even jokingly addresses him as “milord.” She kids Clark Kent abut fainting, but this Lois seems incapable of doing the same.

I recalled Superman killing the tyrannosaur in Arctic Giant and my disapproving: kids, after all, love dinosaurs. On seeing the cartoon again, I am pleased to say my memory was wrong. Superman topples the dinosaur, and there’s a Daily Planet front page with a photograph that seems at first glance to show the tyrannosaur lying prone, but this time I saw the headlines saying that Superman “subdued” the creature, what is now in the “park zoo” (Central Park? Bronx Park?). So it seems that the Fleischers anticipated Jurassic Park here.

And so the cartoon ends with Lois and Clark at the Planet, with Lois sitting on Clark’s desk, showing off her legs (the Fleischer team clearly regarding her as a sex symbol for the adults in the audience), and Clark doing what was a trademark of these Superman cartoons, breaking the fourth wall by giving a wink to the audience. The Arctic Giant lasts only a little over eight minutes, but it has thrills, spectacle, humor, sex appeal, and a “meta” touch at the end. What more could one want?

More than once, upon hearing volunteers at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art ask visitors to become MoCCA members that they ought to play the musical question from Max and Dave Fleischer’s Bimbo’s Initiation (1931): “Wanna be a member? Wanna be a member?”

I don’t recall seeing Bimbo’s Initiation as a child, but it certainly and deservedly turned up in Fleischer retrospectives I saw in the 1980s, and it’s about as different from the Fleischers’ Arctic Giant as can be.

“Bimbo” is certainly an odd name for a male anthropomorphic dog, who is now best known for his supporting roles in Betty Boop cartoons. In this cartoon, however, Bimbo is the lead and Betty the supporting cast member. Not only that, but this is one of her earliest appearances, when she was supposed to be a dog, not a human. She looks like the familiar later version, except for her doglike ears.

Watching Bimbo’s Initiation again on YouTube, I decided to apply the Joseph Campbell approach to this infamous cartoon. Walking along a city street, Bimbo tumbles down a manhole, thus inadvertently crossing a Campbellian threshold and descending into an underworld. This might also be an allusion to Alice falling down the rabbit hole into Wonderland. Bimbo, however, finds himself in a sort of hell.

Bimbo lands in the subterranean headquarters of a strangely garbed secret society, who chant in deep male voices, “Wanna be a member? Wanna be a member?” “No!” protests Bimbo. But their invitation is a Campbellian “call to adventure,” and according to Campbell’s monomyth, denying the call always leads to dire consequences. So Bimbo finds himself in a series of seeming death traps, often involving sharp, phallic blades, one of which comes to life and tries to bite him. If the dangers weren’t treated in a somewhat comedic manner, this could easily be a horror story.

As the cartoon’s title indicates, Bimbo is being put through an initiation ritual by this secret society. Presumably these traps are intended as a test of manhood. But whenever the society members return to pose their musical question, “Wanna be a member?” Bimbo persists in refusing to join, and yet more danger ensues.

Midway through the cartoon, the dog-eared Betty Boop appears and beckons to Bimbo. This time Bimbo, sexually aroused, happily accepts the invitation and he follows Betty through a doorway only to lose her and be subjected to yet more traps. Ultimately Bimbo is confronted once more by the leader of the secret society, who poses his question “Wanna be a member?” yet again. Bimbo still refuses, until the leader unmasks, revealing “himself” to be Betty. Now Bimbo definitely wants to be a member, the other secret society members reveal themselves to be Betty lookalikes, and the cartoon ends with Bimbo and Betty dancing hand in hand, while the Boop lookalikes provide a backup chorus line. The subterranean hell has become a romantic heaven.

So, if Bimbo is being initiated into masculinity, he refuses as long as he perceives it as requiring submission to alpha males upon threat of violence. Achieving adult masculinity becomes much more appealing to Bimbo when he comes to see it as the means for making a sexual connection with Betty. (So perhaps the word “member” in this cartoon is also a sexual allusion.) At the cartoon’s end Bimbo has passed the initiation, but instead of participating in power games with other males, he instead wins the hand of the leading lady.

Long before I read my first DC superhero comic, I was a staunch fan of another DC Comics title, The Fox and the Crow, a funny animal series which had an impressively successful run from 1951 to 1968. Although I was pleased to see the Fox and Crow turn up in cameos in the first issue of DC’s new revival of Captain Carrot, DC didn’t own these characters. Not until the 1980s, when I read Of Mice and Magic, Leonard Maltin’s pioneering history of animation during the Hollywood studio system years, did I learn that the Fox and Crow first appeared in Fox and Grapes, a 1941 cartoon directed by Frank Tashlin, who later and briefly made memorable cartoons for Warners. Tashlin would go on to direct live action comedies starring Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis (who, coincidentally, also starred in DC Comics series in the 1950s and 1960s).

Despite all the classic cartoon retrospectives I’ve attended over the decades, Fox and Grapes never turned up and remained a mystery to me. But now YouTube has finally given me the chance to see it, and it is surprising from start to finish.

Surprise #1: The Fox and the Crow are unmistakably voiced by none other than supreme Warners voice artist Mel Blanc!

Surprise #2: Maybe this shouldn’t have been so surprising, since I remembered from the comics that the Crow’s first name was Crawford and the Fox’s first name was, of all things, Fauntleroy, as in Little Lord Fauntleroy. When the Fox makes his entrance in Fox and Grapes, he is skipping along a bridge, virtually dancing, wearing a straw hat and enormous bow tie, whistling or singing “la la la” to the tune of a Strauss waltz, his rear end swinging back and forth. Later, Blanc elaborately rolls his “r’s” when the Fox speaks of grapes. Could it be that Tashlin intended the Fox to be gay? (In that same year, 1941, Disney released The Reluctant Dragon, whose title character also seems to be as stereotypically gay.)

Reportedly, Chuck Jones credited Fox and Grapes as a major inspiration for his Roadrunner series, which began in 1948. I expected to find some vague similarities. But now that I’ve finally seen this cartoon, my Surprise #3 is how astonishingly close Fox and Grapes is to the Roadrunners.

First, there’s the Fox’s obsessiveness, which is arguably greater than Wile E. Coyote’s. The premise of the cartoon is that the Crow is trying to get hold of the Fox’s picnic lunch, and learns from the fable of the fox and the crow in “Eslops Fables” that foxes love grapes. (There’s a “meta” dimension to this cartoon.) So, the Crow hangs a bunch if grapes from a branch high on a tree, and offers to exchange them for the Fox’s picnic food. The Fox refuses to trade and says he will simply jump up and seize the grapes. This leads to a long series of blackout gags in which the Fox tries over and over to reach the grapes and fails every time. Like his fellow canine predator, Wile E. Coyote, the Fox will not give up. But unlike Jones’s Coyote, the Fox already has lots of food right there, and, in fact, had already consumed plenty before he even saw the grapes. The Fox isn’t motivated by hunger; he’s simply after a particular delicacy, and yet despite continual failures, he won’t cut his losses and be satisfied with the food he already has. The Fox and Coyote are both obsessive compulsives, and they both suffer from hubris and overreaching.

Still more surprisingly, many of the gags in Fox and Grapes will be familiar to any Roadrunner aficionados. The Fox repeatedly ends up falling from great heights. At one point the impact literally flattens him, compressing him as if he were an accordion. As with the Coyote, most of the Fox’s failures come from overlooking the one little thing that could go wrong with his plans. At another point, the Fox stands on one end of a kind of teeter-totter, strains to lift an enormous rock, and then, with great effort, hurls it into the air. His intention is that the rock will hit the other end of the seesaw, catapulting him upward towards the grapes. Instead, of course, the rock falls directly back down, crushing the Fox beneath. How often have we seen variations in that gag in Roadrunner cartoons?

Fox and Grapes isn’t just an inspiration for the Roadrunner series; it’s virtually a blueprint! But Chuck Jones and writer Michael Maltese elaborated on this basic structure in numerous ways, turning the Roadrunner series into something conceptually superior to the Tashlin cartoon, and even more profound, as I will explain in some future column.

Who was the first superhero I ever saw on television? I can’t be sure. Was it Superman in the Fleischer cartoons, or Mighty Mouse? Or was it Tom Terrific? He was the title character of a Terrytoons series created by Gene Deitch that ran for years on CBS’s Captain Kangaroo show, back when CBS programmed for children on weekday mornings rather than try to compete with the Today show (here and here).

Tom arguably qualifies as a superhero by the standards established by Peter Coogan in his book Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre (See “Comics in Context” #162). First of all, he has super-powers: he wears a “thinking cap” that not only augments his intellect but also enables him to transform into anything. Distinctively shaped like a funnel, the thinking cap also acts as a symbol of his superheroic identity, as much as the chevron or insignia on the typical superhero’s costume. Of course, he also has a mission, to do good.

On the Internet I found a complete five-episode Tom Terrific serial. Alas, it does not feature Tom’s archnemesis, Crabby Appleton, whom I haven’t seen in decades, but instead substitutes a worthy opponent who seems newly relevant in the wake of the popularity of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies: the piratical Captain Kidney Bean.

The Tom Terrific cartoons turned their miniscule budget to heir stylistic advantage. The characters an backgrounds are simple line drawings, devoid of color: in fact, you can even see the background lines through the characters. But I suspect that graphic simplicity was appealing to very small children, as was Tom’s strikingly visual shapeshifting power.

Like so many superheroes, Tom has a sidekick: his case, his talking pet, whom he calls “Mighty Manfred the Wonder Dog,” Tom insists that Manfred is as heroic as himself, but as surely even the youngest viewers could tell, Manfred is actually sleepy, stupid and virtually immobile. This may be a clever satire on the way that many pet owners project personality traits onto their pets that the animals don’t actually have.

Seeing Tom Terrific now, I wondered, is it possible that Deitch and his colleagues named “Mighty Manfred” after the title character of Lord Byron’s 1816-1817 romantic poem Manfred? If so, Deitch and his writers were amusing themselves in this instance, knowing that the full irony of Mighty Manfred’s name would never be grasped by their target audience.

Though little kids would understand that Tom is mistaken about his dog’s heroic qualities, perhaps they would not realize that the cartoons also poke understated fun at their boy hero’s innocence about the world in general. The “Captain Kidney Bean” serial makes it clear that its pirate villain is considerably nastier than its naive hero realizes. In this regard Tom Terrific reminds me of the Batman TV show later in the 1960s. In both cases this is a joke that grows old quickly. Tom Terrific was aimed at very young children, and has little to sustain adult interest.

But I am impressed on the cartoons’ emphasis on Tom using his “thinking cap” to think his way out of dilemmas rather than resorting to violence. How often do kids’ cartoons make being smart seem cool?

The vintage cartoons that proved to be better than I had remembered were from Bob Clampett’s legendary Beany and Cecil series. I expect that one reason is that, like Jay Ward’s The Bullwinkle Show, made during the same period of late 1950s and early 1960s, Beany and Cecil worked on two levels: these series had colorful characters and plenty of slapstick action that would appeal to the target audience of little children, but also simultaneously aimed verbal humor and satire at an older audience. Significantly, both Beany and Cecil and Bullwinkle ran on prime time television before settling into Saturday morning berths. The smarter children would pick up enough of that upper level of humor to recognize that Beany and Cecil and Bullwinkle didn’t condescend to them, but instead respected their intelligence and even initiated them into appreciating more sophisticated kinds of wit.

Beany and Cecil are, respectively, a young boy who wears a beany cap, which, in the cartoons, enables him to fly, and his best friend, a “seasick sea serpent.” (That new movie, The Water Horse, has hit upon a similar pairing.) They travel the world with Beany’s “Uncle Captain,” Horatio Huffenpuff, an amusingly ineffectual and cowardly father figure, in his ship, the Leakin’ Lena, and frequently run afoul of perennial nemesis Dishonest John.

The animated Beany and Cecil was a follow-up to Clampett’s more child-oriented Time for Beany, a puppet show on local television in Los Angeles. There are examples of this show on the Web, too, such as Episode 241 from 1951, which I found disappointing. lacking the energy and sharp verbal wit of the later cartoon series. Even so, this installment finds the regular cast of characters in Hollywood, where the villainous Dishonest John persuades Cecil to get himself some publicity by jumping of the roof of a building–and Cecil does! It’s a kids’ puppet show, so Cecil survives, but nonetheless gets badly banged up. The publicity stunt works, and a producer hires Cecil to be in a movie–and wants him to jump off another building. Thus a startling dose of adult cynicism about show business turns up in what is supposedly just an innocuous show for children.

Maybe the sign that Clampett ultimately wasn’t interested in doing a show just for small children is his treatment of Beany. Tom Terrific is also a young boy, but he’s the dominant character in his cartoons. In contrast, Beany is a blank, registering little personality beyond his characteristic smile, which sometimes seems as if it is as permanently affixed as Jack Nicholson’s Joker’s. It’s as if Clampett decided that since the audience is primarily made up of kids, there has to be a kid on the show for them to identify with. But really, was wearing a beany cap EVER cool?

One of the main reasons that Boomers loved this show was Beany’s unlikely costar, Cecil, the Seasick Sea Serpent. Think about it: Cecil is actually a gigantic snake! It seems to me that Clampett and the other writers set themselves a formidable task in having to do cartoon scripts about a major character who could only pick things up with his mouth!

But rather than being creepy, Cecil is wholly lovable. Watching these cartoons online, I realized that Cecil had much the same appeal as Ben Grimm, the Thing in Fantastic Four. Both of them, when in combat, are superhumanly powerful, courageous, and nearly unstoppable. (The Thing shouts, “It’s clobberin’ time,” while Cecil’s battle cry is “I’m comin’, Beany boy!”) But both of them also work superbly as comedy characters. They have similar personalities: hot-tempered but loyally devoted to their friends, prone to insecurity and embarrassment, with a ready sense of humor. (Ben mutters, “What a revoltin’ development this is,” while Cecil, faced with a similar situation, simply exclaims, “What the heck!”) Cecil’s voice would sound just as appropriate coming from the Thing.

The other true star of these cartoons is Dishonest John, familiarly known as D. J.. Dressed all in black, with a mustache long enough that he could twirl it, were he so inclined, Dishonest John looks like an updated version of a villain from a silent movie melodrama (and, indeed, an ominously tinkling piano theme accompanies his entrances). Sometimes the cartoons give D. J. a specific motive for his villainy in that particular adventure, like getting filthy rich. But it eventually becomes apparent that his real motivation is his sheer joy in nasty mischief. Although Clampett probably didn’t realize it, D. J. is a descendant of the “vice” figures of medieval drama, who were both evildoers and comedians, who often spoke directly to the audience. So does D. J., who seems well aware that he is in a cartoon. His trademark line (“Nya ha ha”) demonstrates that no one is more amused by his evil antics than he is.

Once I saw which Beany and Cecil cartoons were available on YouTube, I went straight to “Super Cecil,” Clampett’s comedic venture into the superhero genre. Cecil has sent away for a mail order superhero costume, which he dons to become “Super Cecil.” He doesn’t gain any super-powers in the process, but perhaps Clampett was here acknowledging that Cecil often plays a role like a superhero in these cartoons, overpowering the bad guys with his colossal strength.

Determined to outdo Cecil, Dishonest John switches to his own costumed identity, the Bilious Beetle–and his costume enables him to fly! The insect-themed name and the use of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee” as the Bilious Beetle’s theme music suggest that Clampett was alluding to the Green Hornet. But it wasn’t until years after “Super Cecil” that the Batman TV show of the mid-1960s firmly impressed the concept of the costumed super-villain on the minds of the general public. I’m impressed that Clampett was thus parodying super-villains years earlier.

The Bilious Beetle tricks Super Cecil into thinking he’s kidnapped Beany, the perennial abductee in these cartoons, but actually D. J. is using a hand puppet in Beany’s image. This is a “meta” joke for anyone who knows that Beany and Cecil originated as a puppet show (as is the fact that the cartoons never show the end of Cecil’s tail, as if he were still a hand puppet). I suspect it may also be Clampett’s comment on how empty Beany was as a character. The cartoon didn’t even need the “real” Beany to lure Cecil into action. D. J.’s Beany puppet is no more than a Hitchcockian MacGuffin, a plot device of no inherent worth!

There are plenty of visual gags as the Bilious Beetle leads Super Cecil on a merry chase, giving the cartoon strong comic momentum. But it struck me that whereas in Clampett’s cartoons for Warner Brothers, the slapstick would have been the main source of laughs, in this cartoon the comedy principally comes from the personalities of D. J. and Cecil. First D. J. is wittily triumphant, while Cecil is repeatedly frustrated, setting up the cartoon’s payoff in which Cecil turns the tables on his adversary, culminating in a great gag in which Cecil unleashes a swarm of actual “bilious beetles” on their costumed namesake, whom they regard in a way I will not disclose here: go see the cartoon yourselves.

The title of “The Phantom of the Horse Opera“ evokes Lon Chaney, but he’s actually a Western outlaw who has the power of invisibility. (Coincidentally, he thus resembles Marvel Comics’ Western version of Ghost Rider, now known as the Phantom Rider.) When the Phantom first appears in this cartoon, he does indeed seem menacing, until Clampett undercuts the ominous tone by having him speak: he sounds like the 1940s comedian Jerry Colonna. Nowadays Colonna’s most enduring work is probably his vocal performance as the March Hare in Disney’s Alice in Wonderland (1951). Watching “Phantom” on YouTube, I wasn’t at first sure whom the Phantom was imitating, (The cartoon’s final gag makes it clear by revealing the Phantom’s face as a Colonna caricature.) Beany and Cecil cartoons continually engage in such references to the pop culture of their day. But I find that this cartoon captures Colonna’s comic persona so well that even if you’ve never heard of Colonna, you should still find the Phantom’s dialogue funny.

Since Cecil is so enormous, how can human-sized adversaries get the better of him? In “Phantom” the answer comes in the cartoon’s high point, a well constructed comedy set piece in which the Phantom, step by step ruins Cecil’s lunch, spraying him with ketchup, smearing his face with mustard, and dousing him with pepper to make him sneeze, bewildering the sea serpent, who can’t see his invisible tormentor.

Inevitably, the Phantom kidnaps Beany, who just as predictably calls, “Help, Cecil, help!”, but even the Phantom seems exasperated with Cecil’s one-dimensional co-star: “Who writes your dialogue, kid?”

The cartoon climaxes when the Phantom’s “invisible paint” turns Cecil invisible, too, and he has a knock-down, drag-out battle with the Phantom that literally shakes the landscape around them. Breaking the fourth wall, Cecil briefly pauses to tell the audience this is “the greatest fight ever filmed” but “it’s too bad you can’t see it.” I wonder if Clampett and company are joking here that their budget wouldn’t allow them to actually show such a fight, or maybe that the television censors wouldn’t let them show anything this violent.

Better still is “The Wildman of Wildsville“, whose title character is a beatnik artist presented as if he were a “wild man” living in the jungle. This is a topical reference to the Beat movement of the 1950s, and yet, again, Clampett and company make the character so vividly funny that the cartoon has not dated.

The cartoon opens with Captain Huffenpuff presenting one of his typically pun-filled maps. He intends to capture the “ferocious wild man” on the “Hungry I-land,” a reference to the “hungry i,” a famous San Francisco night club of the time. Among the locations on the map are “Mort Soil”–an allusion to political satirist Mort Sahl, who performed at the hungry i–and the “Lenny Spruce.” Wait a minute! A cartoon that was shown to children on Saturday mornings in the 1960s actually made a not-so-veiled reference to Lenny Bruce!?! What the heck!! And that’s not all: later on the Wildman refers to Oscar Wilde!

Once the Captain and company arrive on the island, the backgrounds begin evoking the Abstract Expressionist art of the period. To my astonishment, some of these backgrounds even imitated the “drip” paintings of Jackson Pollack! Which children in the 1960s could possibly have recognized that? And yet Clampett and company put it in, laying a surprise for any adult who knew Pollack’s work and saw their cartoon.

The Captain, Beany and Cecil are out to capture the Wildman, as if he were a wild animal. Clampett and his collaborators are thus satirizing the way that mainstream culture regards people on the radical avant-garde as if they were part of an alien culture, potentially dangerous. The mainstream wants to tame these radical innovators. But in Clampett’s cartoon, it’s the Wildman who wins, just as so many once-controversial artistic movements end up being accepted into mainstream culture (like, say, taking the comics medium seriously). Using his paint, he endows Cecil, Beany and the Captain with berets, dark glasses, and goatees. As Cecil wisely observes, “If you can’t beatnik “˜em, join “˜em,” and the cartoon ends with the nouveau-Beat Beany, Cecil and Captain dancing along with the Wildman to a jazz beat. They’ve gone “wild,” too.

In 1988, four years after Bob Clampett’s death, The New Adventures of Beany and Cecil arrived on television, only to vanish after five episodes. It came and went so fast I don’t think I even knew about it at the time. But one of the delights of MoCCA’s 2006 “Saturday Morning” retrospective was a looseleaf notebook of photocopies of Bruce Timm’s storyboards for one of the new cartoons, “The Courtship of Cecilia,” written by Quick Stop contributor Paul Dini! Now I’ve found this cartoon on YouTube as well (in two parts: here and here). In Clampett’s own “Cecil Meets Cecilia,” Dishonest John disguised himself as a “she-serpent” to humiliate Cecil, and the real Cecilia only showed up at the end. The new cartoon builds upon the original’s premise, by having Cecil alternatively interact with the real Cecilia and with D. J. as the phony Cecilia, thoroughly confusing our serpentine hero. The new cartoon also follows Clampett’s lead in concocting awesomely awful puns (D. J. laments, “Cecil’s singing is giving me a haddock. I wish I was hard of herring.”), metafictional gags (D. J. exults, “I love being a cartoon bad guy–nya ha ha!”), and surreal visual metaphors. Describing what it feels like to be in love, Cecil says he feels “burning hot,” whereupon his face melts and feels as if he is “coming apart,” at which point his body shatters into fragments. This is pretty good! It’s too bad the series didn’t last, apparently in large part due to network interference.

Looking over these old cartoons over the last two weeks, it seems to me that many of those I remember most strongly were the ones that didn’t conform to the conventional notion of what Saturday morning animation should be like. They were wilder and subversive in some way. Matt Groening cites Bullwinkle as an influence on The Simpsons (see “Comics in Context” #8: “San Diego 2003: Day Three: Gaiman, Groening and Bradbury”), so perhaps today’s prime time animation is the true heir of the subversive classics of Saturday mornings of the 1960s.

–Copyright 2008 Peter Sanderson