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This week I was going to plug my new course at New York University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies: “The Superhero as American Icon.” But then last week I received bad news: only two people had signed up for the course, so NYU was canceling it. This keeps happening. Where is this wave of serious interest in the comics medium that I keep hearing about?

Well, I saw that wave–a tidal wave–hit on the fifth of May. That was the day that I attended the press opening of a new exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: “Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy.” Organized by curator Andrew Bolton for the Costume Institute, the Metropolitan’s department of fashion, this exhibition explores similarities between superhero costumes and contemporary trends in fashion. (See the Met’s own online version of this exhibition here)

Moreover, the most glittering social event of the year in New York City is the Costume Institute’s annual gala. This year the gala was being held for the opening of “Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy” the night of May 5, mere hours after the press preview. Two of the co-chairs of the gala were Julia Roberts and George Clooney, who, of course, played Batman in the 1997 movie Batman and Robin.

So there I was, heading towards the Metropolitan on a beautifully sunny, warm spring morning, clutching the envelope with my invitation to the press preview. I was amazed when I first saw the invitation: it had a reproduction of artwork by none other than comics’ premier creator of painted illustrations, Alex Ross (Marvels, Kingdom Come, Justice).

Arriving on Fifth Avenue outside the Museum, I was excited to see a sign “Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy” hanging above the main entrance of America. This is the Metropolitan, America’s leading art museum, and one of the greatest art museums in the world, on a short list with the Louvre. And there on the Fifth Avenue facade were signs advertising the Met’s Courbet retrospective and its “Poussin and Nature” exhibition, and in the center, a sign about a show inspired by comics.

I expected to see that “Superheroes” sign; I did not expect what I saw as soon as I passed through the front doors. There, in the center of the Museum’s Great Hall, standing atop an immense pedestal, were statues of DC Comics’ trinity, Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, twelve feet tall, towering above the arriving guests. It was a sight that I dare say none of us ever imagined we’d see in the main entrance hall of this temple of high art. Was this the Bizarro World’s Metropolitan?

Despite what the Beat wrote in her blog, the statues, which had temporarily displaced the visitor information desk, were there only for the day of the gala. I subsequently found out that for the Gala’s dinner that evening, the Met’s wing housing the ancient Temple of Dendur, transplanted from Egypt, was decorated with gigantic mock ice crystals to resemble the Fortress of Solitude from the Superman movies–again, for one day only.

Turning left in the Great Hall, I entered the long central gallery of the Greek and Roman wing, passing an ancient statue of a wounded Amazon, on my way to see a show dealing with Wonder Woman. How appropriate it is that visitors must enter a hall of statues of idealized bodies, in a wing featuring images of ancient gods and heroes, in order to make their way to the Special Exhibitions Gallery where the Met’s new exhibit hails those figures of modern pop mythology, comic book superheroes.

Indeed, “Superheroes’” first wall text, accompanied by a 1981 Superman print by Andy Warhol, curator Bolton demonstrates that he too understands the connection: “Like the biblical and mythological heroes who are their ancestors. superheroes have served as avatars of our hopes, dreams, and desires. Perhaps because they . . .evolved from comic books, superheroes have been dismissed as frivolous and superficial. But superheroes should not be underestimated. Their apparent triviality is the very thing that gives them the ability to address serious issues of merit and worth, that frees them to respond to and comment upon shifting attitudes toward self and society, toward identity and ideology.” Bolton continues, “The superhero is most effective as metaphor.” Yes. He Gets It.

And what is the connection between fashion and superhero comics, you may winder? The wall text states that fashion and the superhero genre both deal with “the power of transformation. Fashion, like the superhero, celebrates metamorphosis, providing unlimited opportunities to remake and reshape the flesh and the self.” (The wall texts also appear as parts of Bolton’s essays in the Met’s catalogue for the exhibit.) To dress up, to thereby adopt a more glamorous persona, or to don clothing that expresses a side of your personality that ordinary clothing does not, is like Clark Kent turning into Superman.

In fact, early in the show there is a display in which, through lighting tricks, a mannequin dressed as Clark Kent transforms before your eyes into one dressed in Christopher Reeve’s Superman uniform from the movies. DC Comics, Warner Brothers, and Marvel cooperated with the exhibition, which includes a good number of movie costumes, including Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman uniform from the 1970s TV series (She attended the Gala that evening), Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman costume from Batman Returns (1992), Christian Bale’s Batman uniform from The Dark Knight (2008), and even the second version of Iron Man’s armor from the new movie. Both Tobey Maguire’s red and blue costume and the black costume from Spider-Man 3 (2007) are on display; the mannequin in the black costume clings to the wall, reminding me of Kiki Smith’s black sculpture of Lilith in the Met’s modern art galleries. Atop a rotating pedestal is a mannequin covered with the appliances simulating blue-skinned nudity of the sort that Rebecca Romijn wore as Mystique in the X-Men movies.

Among the printed backdrops behind the costume displays are blown-up reproductions of Alex Ross artwork from JLA: Secret Origins (2002) for the Flash section, and from Batman: War on Crime (1999), behind the Bale uniform. Yes, Alex Ross’s work is now on display at the Met, and he gets credited for it, too, unlike certain other artists, as we shall see.

There are a number of costumes in the exhibition that explicitly work variations on Superman’s “S” emblem. But the majority of the clothes in this show do not demonstrate direct influence from the comics. Rather, the “Superheroes” exhibition shows comic book artists and fashion designers following parallel paths in working along various themes. Hence, the section called “The Aerodynamic Body” compares the sleek uniform of the Silver Age Flash, suitable to a man who runs at super-speed, with bodysuits from Nike and Speedo intended for athletes. “The Patriotic Body” segment deals with American flag motifs in the uniforms of Captain America and Wonder Woman as well as costumes from the House of Dior. The Maguire Spider-Man costumes appear alongside fashions utilizing webbing motifs designed by Giorgio Armani, John Galliano, Jean Paul Gaultier, Thierry Mugler and others. (Armani even pointed out in an interview that he was not thinking of Spider-Man when he designed the costume in the show.)

The athletic bodysuits serve a practical function. As for the other costumes in the show, it is hard to imagine anyone wearing them on the street. That is probably the point: this exhibit is about fashion as dressing up for display at parties and galas, for putting on alternate identities, not as practical everyday wear.

The fashion designers’ costumes are not only often entertainingly over the top, but in a number of cases delve into kinkiness. The show links Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman costume, torn in intriguing places, to dominatrix garb, and the other mannequins in this display wear variations on that theme. Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man armor, its eyes and chest beam lit up, stands among female mannequins wearing “armored” costumes that, far from providing protection, expose vulnerable body parts, even the breasts.

The Beat described Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman costume as comparatively demure in this company. I’d say that it has a simplicity and regality that most of the fashion designers’ costumes here lack. The Met’s show emphasizes the side of superhero fashion that pushes against the limits of social acceptability. (Indeed, during the press conference that morning, curator Andrew Bolton reportedly described the costumes in display as “extreme, phantasmagoric, hard edged, aggressive, overtly sexualized fashion.”) But superhero costumes, like Captain America’s, Wonder Woman’s and Superman’s, have an iconic dimension, setting to inspire audiences with visual representations of the community’s ideals. This is a side to superhero imagery that the Met’s show fails to address.

Before I could finish going through the entire exhibit, taking notes, everyone moved out the other end of the gallery to what is perhaps my favorite space within the Met, the Petrie Sculpture Court, for a press conference. This usually quiet, sparsely populated indoor courtyard was now packed with press representatives, with photographers jammed together along one side.

The first speaker was the third co-chair of the gala, Anna Wintour, the editor in chief of Vogue. The Beat has pointed out that Wintour was the only guest at the evening’s gala who came dressed in a way that genuinely evoked superhero costumes. Wintour was quoted as saying she came as Storm from X-Men, but seeing the photos of Wintour at the Gala, I realized she looked like a very different X-Men character: a real life version of Emma Frost, the White Queen, as originally drawn by John Byrne!

Wintour devoted her speech to praising Philippe de Montebello, who has served as director of the Metropolitan since 1977, longer than anyone else in its history, and who is retiring at the end of this year. (He’s going to be teaching at NYU!) “This will be Philippe’s last Costume Institute exhibit at the museum,” she pointed out. “Alone among world class museum directors,” Wintour asserted, de Montebello had “the vision to acknowledge the role that style, self-presentation, and design play in modern culture,” and has “executed that vision in a way that has inspired millions to think of fashion as one of our most complex and rich decorative arts.” She extolled de Montebello for giving his curators “the freedom to explore the connections between what we wear and how we live,” even though “the fashion world may not be his world,” and declared de Montebello to be “superheroic.”

This should remind us that there are other artforms besides our own–fashion, film, photography–that have had to struggle for serious recognition, and that it is important to have allies in the world of high culture who are open to recognizing what is important and enduring in popular culture. It’s rather wonderful from my standpoint that de Montebello’s final Costume Institute show also represents, as far as I know, the Met’s first dabbling into the artform of comics in a half century. (Readers of R. C. Harvey’s new biography of Milton Caniff will learn that the Met did a survey of American comics back in the 1950s, and still owns an original Caniff somewhere in its archives.)

Wintour then introduced de Montebello, who had not expected her lavish praise: “I have been accused of many things,” he said, “but loss of words was never one,” confessing that he felt “so utterly overwhelmed” and “surprised” by her speech. He returned her compliment, stating that Wintour “is our superheroine” in her contributions to the Costume Institute.

Agreeing with Wintour, de Montebello said that he “did not presume” to have “expertise in fashion,” but “I did give them quite free rein,” referring to the Costume Institute’s curators. De Montebello declared that the Costume Institute had proved itself to be “not an ancillary curatorial department but a full-fledged member of the academic part of this institution.”

Significantly, de Montebello made the point that art can come in a variety of forms. “Do they have to be rectangular or framed, or carved out of stone” he asked, “as opposed to being worn?” This too is a point applicable to our own artform.

Then, demonstrating that he too “got” one of the major points of the Superheroes” exhibition, de Montebello spoke of the nearby Greek and Roman wing (whose recent renovation and reinstallation is the crowning achievement of his long directorship), “which is filled with great mythic superheroes of ancient times.” He spoke of “the representations of Hercules” as the forebear of Superman, “or the huntress, Diana” which “led to Wonder Woman,” and pointed to Antonio Canova’s statue of Perseus, slayer of the Gorgon Medusa, standing before him in the Petrie Court.

Praising “the myth itself of Anna Wintour, who has co-chaired this event for the past ten years,” de Montebello then introduced “in our midst a true myth of this field,” the honorary co-chairman of the evening’s gala, and sponsor of both the exhibit and its catalogue, fashion designer Giorgio Armani.

Armani spoke in Italian, translated by a woman standing nearby. He confessed he’d lost the paper with his prepared speech, but told us he “will figure something out,” and proceeded to improvise quite well. He first thanked New York City for supporting his work for thirty years and remarked on the “love of fashion that imbues the city [New York] at all levels–rich people, not so rich people.”

Armani said he was “surprised” to be asked to sponsor this show, since he is famous for “a fashion that is worn mainly”; as I noted, one wouldn’t wear the outfits in this show in everyday life. Armani joked that the “curators must have worked very hard to find something in my past production to be in the exhibit.” Nonetheless, he “would’ve made twenty dresses to be in this exhibit, but they said, “˜Shut up, Armani!’” Though he found the costumes on display “quite spectacular,” Armani admitted to wondering, “Did these guys have the guys to show them in London and Paris?”, referring to “the brave designers.”

Armani closed by thanking the “cartoonists from the 1930s and 1940s who conceived of these characters,” and making a reference to Flash Gordon (not a superhero, but close enough!). And as soon as he was done, the translator told us they “just found the speech.” He hadn’t needed it: he was wonderful.

Next up was curator Andrew Bolton, who revealed that “Philippe admitted in a moment of candor” to reading Captain Marvel as a child. Bolton then went on to explain that the letters of Captain Marvel’s magic word, “Shazam,” stood for the names of ancient gods and heroes; thus Bolton reinforced the point of connecting ancient mythology with the pop mythology of the superhero genre. Bolton also praised de Montebello for his “intellectual elasticity,” presumably meaning his openness to doing shows not just about unusual fashions but about comic book superheroes as well.

Bolton revealed that they had first “toyed” with the idea for this show five years ago, and that originally the idea was to focus on clothing that actually enhances one’s physical abilities. There are still some of these in the exhibit, including “wingsuits” from Atair Aerospace that enable the wearer to glide through the air. (Over at the Museum of Modern Art, in its recent “Design and the Elastic Mind” exhibition, I had seen an exoskeleton-like device that amplified the strength of the wearer’s arm, much like Iron Man’s armor!)

Bolton explained that both fashion and the superhero genre reflect the “zeitgeist” and “mirror’” themes that are “social, political, even sexual,” and that both fashion and superhero stories allow you “to act out your fantasies” and “to transform yourself.”

Bolton said that the show was “partly inspired” by Michael Chabon’s novel about the early days of comic books, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and he thanked Chabon, who wrote an essay in the catalogue and was present at the press preview (although, alas, I never saw him there).

Bolton also thanked DC and Marvel for their cooperation with the show” and their patience over our somewhat idiosyncratic interpretation.” (You mean, like Catwoman as dominatrix?)

Then Bolton introduced the final speaker, Nathan Crowley, the British production designer for the films Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, who designed the exhibition space for “Superheroes.” Crowley told us that he’d never designed a museum space before, and how he’d employed a trick from the movies, using mirrors to “elongate corridors.” I can attest that he did a great job: the first floor Special Exhibitions Gallery is usually a dark, even somewhat claustrophobic space, but “Superheroes” is brightly lighted, and the mirrored walls create a powerful illusion that the exhibit space is far bigger and more filled with people (who turn out to be reflections of ourselves) than it truly is. And can we credit Crowley for the idea of using the Alex Ross printed backgrounds?

With the press conference over, I returned to the “Superheroes” exhibition. Along a wall at the end of the exhibit was a row of vintage comic books, each relating to one of the characters featured in the show. There was Amazing Fantasy #15 (1963, the first appearance of Spider-Man), Amazing Spider-Man #252 (1984, the first appearance of Spider-Man in his black costume), Sensation #1 (1942, the first cover appearance of Wonder Woman, who had earlier debuted in All-Star Comics #8), Captain America Comics #1 (1941, the debut of Captain America, famously punching Hitler in the jaw on the cover), Incredible Hulk #1 (1972), Fantastic Four #51 (1966, “This Man, This Monster,” featuring the Thing), Batman #42 (1947, featuring the Catwoman in her Golden Age costume, which the exhibit never mentions), Detective Comics #33 (1939, an early Batman comic whose cover illustration makes his cape look particularly like bat wings), Tales of Suspense #39 (1963, the debut of Iron Man), Flash Comics #1 (1940), X-Men #1 (1963), Amazing Spider-Man #129 (the first appearance of the Punisher), and Marvel Spotlight #5 (the premiere appearance of the Ghost Rider).

Yet there was something missing. The museum’s labels for the covers on display specified the titles of the comics, their cover dates, and the name of the person or company that lent the copies of the comics. But what about the names of the artists? Like Jack Kirby, who drew the covers for Amazing Fantasy #15, FF #51, Incredible Hulk #1 and X-Men #1, and collaborated with Joe Simon on the cover of Captain America Comics #1?

For that matter, in the exhibition catalogue, distributed by Yale University Press, there are many, many reproductions of classic comic book covers, and once again, the titles of the comic books and their cover dates are specified, but not the artists’ names.

The book’s essays and the exhibition’s wall texts make a practice of listing the creators of each comic book character they mention. Some errors creep in. The Metropolitan follows DC’s official line that Bob Kane was the sole creator of Batman; once again, Batman’s first writer, Bill Finger, is the forgotten man. The wall text for Iron Man lists his creators as Stan Lee and Larry Lieber, neither of whom drew the character’s first story. (I salute the credits for the Iron Man movie for getting it right, listing Lee, Lieber, Don Heck, who drew the first story, and Jack Kirby, who designed Iron Man’s original armor.) In the case of the Flash, the exhibition and the book correctly name Gardner Fox and Harry Lampert as the creators of the original Flash back in 1940. But “Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy” is concerned not with the Golden Age Flash’s costume, but with the streamlined, modern uniform worn by the Silver Age Flash. The name of its designer, Carmine Infantino, is not to be found in the show or the catalogue.

Is it imaginable that the Metropolitan Museum would exhibit artwork in its galleries for drawings and prints on the second floor without naming the artist in the accompanying label, if that artist’s identity was known? How hard is it to identify the artists for classic DC and Marvel covers in the age of the Internet’s Grand Comics DataBase, or when there are acknowledged experts both within and outside the Big Two comics companies?

No, if the Metropolitan failed to name the comics artists responsible for those covers, then it must be that the museum did not feel that their identities are important. How different is this from the way that Roy Lichtenstein would base his pop art paintings on comics panels drawn by Kirby or by Russ Heath without crediting them? Or that Warhol at the start of the Metropolitan exhibition that is so clearly based on a Superman drawn by Curt Swan–but not credited as such?

Moreover, some of the artists who helped create the superhero costumes acclaimed in the exhibition are still with us: Joe Simon (Captain America)–95 years old but still active, Carmine Infantino (The Silver Age Flash), John Romita, Sr. (The Punisher), and Mike Ploog (Ghost Rider). Wouldn’t it be wonderful if these artists were invited to appear at the Metropolitan during the run of the exhibition, which does not close until September 1?

With “Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy,” the Metropolitan has come a long, long way towards acknowledging comics as an artform. But the Metropolitan also still has a long way to go.

There was something else at the end of the exhibit, the biggest surprise of all for me. Near that wall of vintage comics is a little gift shop, which, among other things, sells Alex Ross superhero prints and books about superior comics. And I was flabbergasted to see among them my own Marvel Comics Travel Guide to New York City! Looking further, I found The Marvel Vault, which Roy Thomas and I wrote. As I watched, one of the attendees even bought a copy of the Travel Guide, which I quickly offered to autograph. (He said yes.) And on a subsequent visit to the Metropolitan, I discovered that both books were also prominently displayed on a table in the front if this Met’s main gift shop, as well! I had never anticipated this, but I was a part of the Met’s “Superheroes” show!

Following the press conference, most of the attendees quickly left, but I stayed nearly till the exhibit closed at 1 PM, and was even interviewed by a reporter for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. (She said she had been told I was a comics historian, and I still don’t know by whom. Did any of my readers up in Canada see the CBC report on the exhibit? Did they use my interview?)

On my way out of the Museum I saw that the red carpet for that evening’s gala opening had been laid down along the Metropolitan’s celebrated front steps. I thought, why not? And I made my exit walking down the red carpet. My books were being sold at the Met, and I had just been interviewed by Canadian television; I felt like a bit of a celebrity myself.

THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK

My next stop was a nearby movie theater, where I saw a matinee screening of the new Iron Man movie. In the Beat’s annual survey last January, I wrote that one of the big comics-related stories to watch in 2008 was Marvel Studios’ first efforts at producing motion pictures in their own. There have been so many disappointing Marvel-based movies over the last decade–Ang Lee’s Hulk, Ghost Rider, Punisher, Daredevil, Elektra, the two Fantastic Four films; they may have made money, but they weren’t good. Marvel had input into these movies, but major Hollywood studios had been in charge. Could Marvel Studios, a newcomer attempting to become a new major, fare any better producing on its own? Iron Man demonstrates that the answer is yes. Iron Man has not only proved to be a commercial blockbuster, but it’s a superb translation of the comics series to the screen. To my mind, Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy is still at the very top, but director Jon Favreau’s Iron Man ranks right below them, above even the X-Men movie series. Maybe Marvel Studios’ main role was simply to give Favreau and his writers and cast creative freedom, but that has proved to be a wise decision.

From seeing the trailer for the Iron Man movie, I was concerned that Robert Downey, Jr., despite looking like Tony Stark, complete with mustache, would project too lightweight a persona for the character. I was expecting a more conventional leading man performance. But watching the movie, I was quickly won over, just like the soldiers accompanying Stark in the opening scene, who swiftly segue from seemingly regarding him as obnoxious to be charmed and delighted by him.

When Stan Lee and his collaborators introduced Tony Stark in 1963, he was a “millionaire playboy” in the mode of Bruce Wayne and other pulp and comics heroes.

It’s now well known that Lee was inspired by the young Howard Hughes in depicting Stark. Movie reviewers who find it unlikely that there could be someone like Stark who was a brilliant inventor, a multimillionaire, and a handsome ladies’ man should be reminded that the young Hughes was all of these things before he was swallowed up by madness. After the Fantastic Four movies caricatured the genius Reed Richards as a stereotypical geek, it’s refreshing that the Iron Man movie makes it clear that you can be smart and simultaneously be the complete opposite of a social misfit.

Moreover, the “playboy” persona fit the early 1960s, with the rise of Playboy magazine and its definition of cool. I suppose that makes Stan Lee’s Hitchcockian cameo in this movie particularly appropriate: a gag in which Stark mistakes him for Hugh Hefner. (But Stan is so entertaining at comics cons that I wish more filmmakers would let him talk in his cameos! He’s wonderful in his bit parts in the FF movies.)

In retrospect, Stan’s treatment of Stark as playboy seems rather naive. If Stark was trying to keep secret the fact that he wore a metal chestplate that kept his injured heart beating, how did he hide it from his lovers? Even if he never took off his clothes, which would seem downright strange, wouldn’t they feel the chestplate?

How do you make the “millionaire playboy” persona work in the 21st century? Isn’t it dated? Downey, Favreau and company found a way to make it work. In the early part of the movie Downey’s Tony Stark is self-centered, often irresponsible, and frequently exasperating. And yet he’s also witty, charming, ingratiating, and genuinely fond of his friends like James Rhodes. You can see how he annoys and irritates his friends and close colleagues, like Gwyneth Paltrow’s Pepper Potts, and yet it’s also perfectly clear why they continually forgive him and why he wins their loyalty and love. Downey’s Tony Stark has genuine charisma, and that is an essential part of the Stark character. Moreover, after he becomes Iron Man and develops a stronger sense of responsibility, he is credibly heroic and committed to his newfound ideals as well.

In the movie Stark starts out being irresponsible in many ways, from being inattentive to schedules to perhaps drinking too much (in an allusion to Stark’s becoming an alcoholic in the comics, quite possibly a storyline that will emerge in the movie’s sequel), to womanizing, to, most importantly, manufacturing weapons of mass destruction, even if they are intended for the U. S. government. The movie suggests that Stark’s brush with death, which leads to his becoming Iron Man, shakes him out of his immaturity, and makes him realize Stan’s famous lesson, that with great power- must come great responsibility. On returning to his factory after nearly dying in Afghanistan, Stark immediately announces that he is getting out of the munitions business. Indeed, in the movie Stark is fatally injured by his own weaponry, which has fallen into the hands of terrorists: his own bad karma has struck him down.

I didn’t think that in Stan Lee and Larry Lieber’s origin story for Iron Man back in Tales of Suspense #39 that they meant for Stark to be presented in a negative light. As noted, the playboy was considered the epitome of cool in the early 1960s. Moreover, Lee and company created Iron Man during the Cold War, only a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis (Lee’s 1960s Stark could also be regarded as Kennedyesque), and although the origin story is set in Vietnam, this was long before the antiwar movement if the 1960s became a major political force. Stan’s Iron Man stories of the 1960s take a militant Cold War viewpoint, with a parade of Communist villains, like the Titanium Man, and, of course, Wong Chu, the terrorist who captures Stark in the origin tale. I believe that Stan Lee thought that Stark was entirely admirable, both in devising weaponry for his country’s defense, and in traveling to Vietnam to witness his weaponry used in combat. In becoming Iron Man, a weapon himself, who could battle Communist super-menaces hand to hand, Stark was going to the next level.

But I don’t object to Favreau and Downey and company turning Iron Man’s origin story into a saga of personal redemption. That is very much in the Stan Lee tradition, and perhaps more specifically, in the tradition of the Stan Lee-Steve Ditko collaboration on Spider-Man and Doctor Strange. On becoming Spider-Man, Peter Parker starts turning into, well, an a-hole, using his amazing new abilities merely to seek fame and fortune, and allowing a fleeing criminal to escape because it’s none of his business. But it is indeed his business: that same Burglar murders Peter’s Uncle Ben, and Spider-Man must forever live with the guilt of knowing that he could have prevented Ben’s death but didn’t. Dr. Stephen Strange is an arrogant New York City surgeon, who is more interested in using his medical talents to make himself rich than genuinely concerned with the health of his patients. When an automobile accident injures his hands enough so that he can no longer perform operations, Strange loses everything, sinking into poverty. Only when he discovers a new purpose in life, selflessly battling evil as the student of the Ancient One, does Strange begin moving towards redemption.

I have no problem within Favreau and his collaborators turning Iron Man’s origin into a similar take of pride going before a fall, and that fall leading to moral rebirth. This is true to the overall themes of Stan Lee’s Marvel work, and it is an excellent way of making a hero whom Lee portrayed as a munitions maker and playboy acceptable to contemporary audiences.

Even in Stan’s and Larry Lieber’s original version of Iron Man’s origin, I perceive a theme that crops up repeatedly in Lee’s work. Tony Stark is a man who has everything, who seems to lead a perfect, charmed life, when it is abruptly taken away from him without warning: the multimillionaire genius is unexpectedly felled by a booby trap in Vietnam and left near the point of death. Similarly, Peter Parker did not expect that the Burglar would kill Uncle Ben, Reed Richards did not anticipate the radiation storm that struck his spaceship, Stephen Strange did not realize he would be in a car crash, and Bruce Banner did not predict that his assistant would try to kill him in the gamma bomb test. There is a disturbing side to Stan Lee’s classic origin stories: happiness and security and life itself are unstable and ephemeral, and can end at any time.

As a comics historian. I am impressed at how the Iron Man movie skillfully weaves together elements from throughout the character’s history. I do not expect movie adaptations to literally transfer every detail from the comics to the screen. It does not bother me that the site of Iron Man’s origin has been moved from Vietnam to Afghanistan: that is an intelligent updating. Moreover, given the shift in venue, I could not have hoped for a better, more powerfully effective dramatization of Stan Lee and Larry Lieber’s Iron Man origin story. The fact that in the movie the terrorists have gotten hold of Stark’s own technology makes it easier to believe that Stark could have created the original Iron Man battlesuit in primitive surroundings than it is in the original comics story.

The movie’s terrorist group is called the Ten Rings, an obvious allusion to Iron Man’s archenemy, the Mandarin. It was John Byrne, in reworking Iron Man’s origin, who first established that the Mandarin was the mastermind behind Wong Chu. Some have speculated that the bald terrorist leader in the movie will turn out to be the Mandarin in the sequel, although I would think that the filmmakers would try to cast a leading Asian star in the role. Stan Lee’s Mandarin is one of the great Marvel villains if the 1960s. But he is clearly inspired by Fu Manchu, and it will be interesting to see how Favreau and company can revamp the Mandarin to keep him from seeming to be a racist stereotype. (To Stan Lee’s credit, I never got the sense reading his stories that he meant the Mandarin to represent the Chinese in general.) with China as a rising economic power, perhaps it makes sense to portray the Mandarin as a Chinese counterpart to Tony Stark as high tech entrepreneur.

Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow even visibly has Pepper’s freckles in some close-ups) and Happy Hogan (played by Favreau) come from Stan Lee’s Iron Man stories from the 1960s. Stark’s decision to stop making munitions reflects Mike Friedrich’s Iron Man run in the 1970s. James Rhodes comes from the David Michelinie/Bob Layton collaboration that began in the late 1970s. Editor Mark Gruenwald challenged Denny O’Neil to come up with an Iron Man villain who would rival O’Neil’s great Batman villain Ra’s al Ghul: the result was Obadiah Stane. (So O’Neil has co-created the main villains for both the Iron Man movie and Batman Begins.) Initially, Jeff Bridges’s portrayal of Stane as a glad-handing corporate master of spin doesn’t seem anything like O’Neil’s sinister, enigmatic figure, but in the film’s final half hour, Bridges’s Stane projects evil worthy of O’Neil’s character. I like the fact that the movie turns Stane into the business partner of Tony’s late father. This makes Stane into a symbol of the dark side of Tony’s father, a morally ambiguous figure who went into the munitions business. Initially Tony reveres his father’s memory in the movie, but he must turn against his business.

As in O’Neil’s storyline, the movie Stane dons his own armored battlesuit, becoming the Iron Monger. The movie’s Iron Monger is enormous, like a monstrous version if Iron Man himself, representing the dark side of Tony, had he remained a munitions merchant and acceded to Stane’s policy of selling arms to any buyers, including terrorists. After seeing the movie I realized that this enormous Iron Monger also reminded me of Iron Man’s Cold War nemesis, the equally gigantic Titanium Man, and their epic combats in the 1960s.

And then there’s Samuel L. Jackson’s surprise cameo as Nick Fury after the movie’s closing credits. Marvel had already been depicting the Fury of the alternate continuity of its Ultimate line as a Jackson lookalike. With all that has been written lately about the Jewish-American heritage of early superhero comics creators, and Mark Evanier’s observation in Kirby: King of Comics that Jack Kirby regarded Nick Fury as an idealized version of himself, casting Jackson as Fury seems to be missing a big point. On the other hand, if I had to choose between David Hasselhoff, who played Fury in a TV movie, and Samuel L. Jackson, well, of course I’ll pick Jackson!

CARTOON CENTENNIALS

I wound up the day by attending one of the “Monday Nights with Oscar” monthly screenings that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences holds at its theater at Lighthouse International on 59th Street in Manhattan. (Yes, this is the Academy that gives out the Oscars, and an enormous reproduction of an Oscar statuette looms in one corner of the theater.) This evening’s program was titled “Tex Avery, Michael Maltese: Putting Looney in the Toons: A Double Centennial Tribute.” Avery was the great animation director who pioneered the classic “Looney Tunes” style of comedy but who created his surreal, absurdist, even postmodern, and explosively funny animated masterpieces for MGM (see “Comics in Context” #100, 101 and 188). Animation writer Maltese worked on cartoons with Warners director Friz Freleng, and later in the early Hanna-Barbera TV cartoons, but reached his peak collaborating with director Chuck Jones in the 1940s and 1950s.

The Academy had already presented this program in Los Angeles, but for the New York screening it was hosted by animation historian and New York University Professor John Canemaker. (Apparently NYU students sign up for his classes!) In last years I’ve attended Canemaker’s lectures at the Museum of Modern Art, where he promotes one of his books and shows animation relating to it, including a program of Winsor McCay animation, Disney’s Peter Pan (1953), in which Walt Disney’s great animators known as the “Nine Old Men” all worked, and Disney’s Alice in Wonderland (1951), to illustrate Canemaker’s lecture on his book about the Disney conceptual artist Mary Blair. Canemaker always presents a well-spoken, informative lecture, and I keep meaning to mention them in my column; now I finally have. He’s also written a book about Tex Avery, hence his presence this evening.

But Canemaker also pointed out that 2008 was also the centennial year for Warners’ master voice artist Mel Blanc, and the program served as an admirable retrospective of his work as well.

I could quibble with the selection of cartoons. None of the Avery cartoons on the bill reached the manic energy and reality-warping heights of his Northwest Hounded Police (1946), King Size Canary (1947), or Bad Luck Blackie (1949). For dazzling dialogue and masterful gag construction, I would have picked one of the cartoons from Jones and Maltese’s Bugs Bunny-Daffy Duck-Elmer Fudd trilogy of Rabbit Fire (1951), Rabbit Seasoning (1952) and Duck! Rabbit! Duck! (1953).

But still, the selection we got was good enough, including Avery’s Porky’s Duck Hunt (1937), in which Blanc took over voicing Porky Pig and also played Daffy Duck in his debut cartoon.

The show also included Avery’s A Wild Hare (1940) in which the trickster rabbit from previous Warners cartoons finally became the Bugs Bunny we know, complete with a New York-accented voice provided by Blanc. It was wonderful to see this cartoon again and study how well constructed the gags were; even apart from Bugs’s debut, it demonstrated how far Avery had already come in defining and mastering animated cartoon comedy.

Avery’s sultry songstress Red and stoic Droopy turned up to good effect in Little Rural Riding Hood (1949) and the Western parody Drag-a-Long Droopy (1954).

Freleng’s You Ought to Be in Pictures (1940), combining animation with live action, was shown because Maltese turns up on screen vividly playing a nasty studio guard–with a voice dubbed by Blanc!

Sometimes I feel uneasy about Pepe le Pew cartoons, since they’re really about sexual harassment, but I like it when the female cat turns the tables on Pepe as she does at the end of Jones and Maltese’s For Scent-imental Reasons (1948) in this program, providing another showcase for Blanc, channeling and parodying Charles Boyer.

By showing both the Freleng-Maltese Back Alley Oproar (1948) and the incomparable Jones-Maltese What’s Opera, Doc? (1957), the program enabled us to compare examples of Maltese’s ability to turn not only opera but even death scenes to humorous effect, as well as demonstrated Mel Blanc’s talent at conveying comedy through song, whether as Bugs acting Brunnhilde or Sylvester imitating Spike Jones (see “Comics in Context” #101 and 102). Putting A Wild Hare and What’s Opera, Doc? on the same bill also makes clear that the latter is, in effect, Jones turning his mentor Avery’s cartoon into an opera!

The program came to a satisfying close with Avery and Maltese’s collaboration on The Legend of Rockabye Point (1955) for Walter Lantz’s studio (see “Comics in Context” #189).

And what a pleasure it is to see these classic cartoons on a big theatrical screen with a large, appreciative audience, as they were originally meant to be experienced!

So: in the morning, an exhibit honoring superhero comics at America’s leading art museum, in the afternoon a critically acclaimed commercial blockbuster if a superhero movie, and in the evening, the Motion Picture Academy honors giants of the Hollywood theatrical cartoon. It was a good day for cartoon art.

But then I got the bad news about my comics course at NYU, and I thought, perhaps the cultural status of comics still hasn’t changed as much as I’d like to believe. Yet later that same week, I was invited to be a keynote speaker at an academic conference on superheroes, to be held next year. (I’ll tell you more about it when they’re ready to make a public announcement.) And I was invited specifically on the basis of my work writing “Comics in Context.”

We’re not in the Bizarro World. No, the world is changing around us, faster than we could have imagined. Many of us who have long taken comics and cartoon art seriously have dreamed that someday the world would recognize the true value of our artforms. Our dreams are now becoming realities.

LINKS IN THE AMAZON CHAIN

The Metropolitan Museum’s illustrated catalogue Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy, written by curator Andrew Bolton, is available at Amazon. com here.

As for the books by John Canemaker I referred to, their titles are The Art and Flair of Mary Blair, Tex Avery: The MGM Years, 1942-1955, Walt Disney’s Nine Old Men and the Art of Animation, and Winsor McCay: His Life and Art.

And you can find The Marvel Vault, by Roy Thomas and myself, here, and my Marvel Comics Travel Guide to New York City here.

–Copyright 2008 Peter Sanderson

“In about 2 hours 13 minutes and 14 seconds, any mention of last weekend’s New York Comic-Con will be thoroughly passé,” said the Beat two weeks ago in her blog. But of course I’m still writing about it, and will be for many weeks more.

But regular readers of this column know that my main interest in convention panels is not in reporting the kid of news that other comics websites would have posted within twenty-four hours after the panel took place. No, my intent is to record in detail what I witnessed that will be of lasting interest to comics fans, scholars, and historians weeks, months, and, I hope, years after the convention took place. I am a comics historian, and in this week’s column I give you a panel all about the history of comic conventions in the city of New York.

FRIDAY 1 PM
On the first day of the convention, the general public is not
admitted until 3 PM. Until then, the convention is for comics professionals, retailers, and press, enabling them to interact and relative calm before the crowds arrive to clog the aisles.

The programming before 3 PM is likewise aimed at professionals. It was the Beat herself who suggested that I attend the 1 PM panel, “Phil Seuling and the New York Con.” This was a good idea.

Perhaps most of you don’t know who Phil Seuling is. I see that his Wikipedia entry is a mere stub consisting of a single sentence. Wikipedia’s entry on “Comic Art Convention”  is considerably more informative.

There had been conventions for science fiction fans since the mid-1930s, which inspired small comics conventions starting in the mid-1960s, including the New York Comicon in 1964, a one-day event with roughly a hundred attendees.

It was a Brooklyn high school English teacher named Phil Seuling who organized the first large scale comics convention, held in New York City in 1968. In 1969 Seuling held his first in his series of “Comic Art Conventions,” which usually took place in New York City over the Fourth of July, and which continued through 1983; Seuling passed away the following year.

The Seuling conventions set the mold for all the major comics conventions that followed, including the San Diego Comic Con.

Inventing the modern comics convention would be enough to earn Seuling a place in the medium’s history, But Seuling was also the visionary who pioneered the direct sakes market for comics distribution.

From the 1930s into the 1970s, comic books were primarily sold on a returnable basis through newsstands and in small “mom and pop” stores. (In high school, I bought my first Marvels at a small store owned by a classmate’s father; in my college years I bought comics at a tiny luncheonette near Columbia University.)

But over time, probably due to the usual suspects like the rise of television, comic book sales fell from the heights they had achieved in the Golden Age, and as the decades passed, fewer newsstands carried them, and their owners realized they could make more money selling higher priced magazines. Moreover, the “mom and pop” stores were dying out, supplanted by chains. The comics industry might not have survived, had Seuling not pioneered a system by which the publishers sold their comics through distributors like himself to comic book specialty shops. This is the system with which we are familiar today, even though nowadays there is essentially only one specialty shop distributor, Diamond.

Moreover, whereas comics publishers felt they had to appeal to mass tastes through the newsstands, they could aim at dedicated comics fans through the direct sales shops. This was both good and bad: comics became a niche market, but the shops also made the rise of independent comics and lines like Marvel’s Epic and DC’s Vertigo possible. Thus Seuling spurred the evolution of American comic books towards appealing to an older readership and readers with more discerning, sophisticated tastes.

So Phil Seuling definitely deserves more than one sentence from Wikipedia. If you want to see what he looked like, I refer you to this entry in Mark Evanier’s blog, with a photo of Seuling appearing on television’s The Mike Douglas Show in the 1970s alongside Elfquest co-creator Wendy Pini, costumed, as she regularly was at conventions, as Red Sonja. (You don’t want to miss this, I assure you.)

I only attending the Seuling cons in their final years, and, although I was aware of their historical importance, I had the sense that I had already missed their golden age. By that point Creation was holding its own conventions in New York, notably a big one on Thanksgiving weekend, and in other cities. Between the monthly dealers’ shows, several annual Creation cons, and the Seuling show, comics conventions in New York City were already losing the sense of a being special. The San Diego Con took over that aura of a special, once-a-year event, perhaps in large part because attending the San Diego Con, back in the 1980s, when it was far less crowded and hectic. was like going on a summer vacation with your friends to a gorgeous locale with perfect weather. (This was back when comics pros could actually take the time during the Con to hit the beach.)

Considering how expensive attending San Diego has become, consider this Wikipedia factoid, if indeed it is true: “That 1969 convention, held Independence Day weekend at the Statler Hilton Hotel in New York City, cost $3.50 for a three-day ticket, with daily passes at $1.50. Admittance was free with a hotel room rental, which cost $15-and-up per day.”

Creation, then Fred Greenberg, then Dynamic Forces, and currently Big Apple kept the New York comics convention tradition going. But they could not afford the space for a truly major convention. Only now, with Reed Exhibitions’ New York Comic Con in its third year, successfully surmounting its growing pains of the past, has the sense that New York City has a potentially world-class comics convention begun to return.

So what were the Seuling conventions like in their early years? That’s what I attended the panel to find out. When I arrived, it had already begun. Milton Griepp, CEO of ICv2, was the moderator of a panel that included DC Comics president and publisher Paul Levitz; Diamond vice president (and former Pacific Comics co-founder) Bill Schanes; Greg Goldstein, recently vice president of gaming and entertainment at Upper Deck; and Michael Uslan. the comics writer who became executive producer on the Batman movies and producer of the forthcoming Spirit film.

When I came in, Milton Griepp was asking the panelists to recall their “favorite moments” from the Seuling conventions.

Paul Levitz recalled what he termed “an important point in my education.” At this point, 1971, “there was no Artists’ Alley, per se,” but some artists would do sketches for fans. “Neal Adams was at perhaps the first crest in his career,” and “I got him to do a sketch of Superman. a very, very quick sketch. . .for the enormous sum of six dollars.” Levitz ran it on the cover of his fanzine, and “I got an energetic lecture from Mr. Adams educating me on the difference between original sketch purchase price and reproduction right purchase price.” Levitz commented that this “has served me well in my understanding over the years, as I started to learn that original art should be returned to artists. . . .”

Schanes said that he “drove for three thousand miles” to attend Seuling’s con. “I was literally a teenager, and Phil was a very imposing figure” with “big bushy eyebrows” who “looked down at you. . .as he yelled at you–with love and affection.”

Schanes continued, “He scared the bejeebers out of me for years because he was such a big guy. . . .” But, as you might guess, beneath this fearsome facade, “he was really a very affectionate person once you knew him. And took us under his wing and really shepherded us. He took me into his house that night,” where Schanes gazed in wonder at the “very spectacular” collection of original comics art on his walls.

Greg Goldstein agreed that Seuling “was an imposing figure” who sternly ruled his convention and his monthly dealer shows. (As a former English teacher myself, I enjoy hearing that one of my kind can be this formidable.)

It was at one of the latter, Goldstein said, that “I recall Phil being arrested because of the “˜obscene comics’–quote-unquote–which were the underground comics.” (An audience member later identified the comics in question as Zap #4 and Armageddon.) Goldstein continued, “that was quite an education for me, because some guy just got arrested for selling comic books.”

This was like a flashback to the anti-comics hysteria of the 1950s, and as the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund will tell you, this sort of thing still happens today.

“It was very sad,” added Paul Levitz. “Because he was an English teacher” the Board of Education put him “on desk duty” for “a stretch” “until he gave it up.” Levitz observed, “That’s what really moved him into full time distribution at that point. It was in many ways probably good for the business, because he became more of an entrepreneur as a result, but it was certainly one of the tragedies of his life.” And people now and in the future will hear or read this story and be appalled and amazed at the blindness of years past towards the comics medium and those visionaries who were associated with it.

Michael Uslan sought to establish “the proper context” to explain exactly how Phil Seuling changed comics conventions. When Uslan was thirteen years old, he went to his first comics convention, which was run by a guy named Bernie. “He was in a black leather jacket with a duck tail, pompadour, and I seem to recall chains. . . .I was sure this guy was going to pull a switchblade on me if I didn’t cough up the right money at the right time.” And Schanes and Goldstein thought Seuling seemed intimidating!

“But back then, very few pros would come to the conventions. Stan–it was beneath him. He sent Flo Steinberg,” his secretary who didn’t mind interacting with fans. “Julie [Schwartz, DC editor–and a pioneer of science fiction fandom in his youth] didn’t show up.. . .But the pros looked down on this, They said, “˜These guys are nuts, they’re fanatical,’ and they kept their distance.” (This, of course, is before comics fans started becoming comics professionals in significant numbers.)

“In the early days,” Uslan continued, “we’d have people like. . . John Benson tell us how to behave and present ourselves, and how to dress on some occasions, He said, “˜There’s going to be press here. There’s going to be TV cameras. . .and it’s really important that people out there in the public take us seriously. . . . Let’s give them the impression that we are. . serious about our hobby, and what we’re doing, and our profession.”

When Seuling started running cons, Uslan continued, “There was a sophistication to it. Because all of a sudden I was going to a con and Stan Lee was here, and Will Eisner was there, and Burne Hogarth [of the Tarzan comic strip] was there, and Milton Caniff [of Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon] was there.” This was interesting to me for a couple of reasons. Newspaper comic strips were long considered to be a superior field to comic books (like movies were vis-a-vis television, I suppose), so it’s interesting that Seuling managed to persuade comic strip giants like Caniff and Hogarth to attend a convention for comic book fans. And it’s also intriguing that comic book convention attendees of that time apparently would have been interested in Caniff and Hogarth as special guests. What percentage of today’s comic con attendees care about classic newspaper adventure strips?

Uslan continued, “the one thing Phil Seuling really brought us as fans and as comic cons was respectability. It was respectability for the fans, it was respectability from the pros, and I think that changed everything forever.”

I don’t know that the mainstream media considered comics conventions respectable in the 1970s or 1980s. Even quite recently mainstream news reports on the San Diego Con often seem to belittle the attendees as a community of geeks and act as if virtually everyone comes in a wacky costume. Only now, I think, is the tone of mainstream press coverage really starting to change. But yes, it was important that Seuling brought comics fans and pros together. It’s rather startling to realize there was once a gap between them that had to be bridged.

Schanes explained that in the old days, it was New York’s comic con, not San Diego’s, that was acknowledged as the country’s greatest. Schanes was from the West Coast, “But In “˜71 San Diego was a very small show, and we had hundreds of people, not thousands. So we wanted to go to the mecca. We wanted to go to New York City and see the famous New York comic con. They were actually putting original artwork on the covers of the program books,” something else that we take for granted now, but was a big step to take at the time.

Moreover, “we were always very, very envious, being in the West,” Schanes went on. “We knew Jack [Kirby] was in Sherman Oaks [California], but. . . that’s where all the [other] artists were, was in New York City.”

Paul Levitz added, “Most of them were within fifty miles.” Nowadays comics writers and artists for American comics live all over the country and even in Britain, But in those days before FedEx and the Internet, the American comics industry was almost entirely centered within easy commuting distance of New York City.

Summing up, Schanes told us, “it was a very zen thing to go to New York and make the pilgrimage and see all the famous people. . . .”

Then Paul Levitz expounded a theory I find quite impressive. ” At dinner with Stan [Lee] about six months ago,” he began, “I made the argument that everything that’s going on here in comics today is his fault. . . . ” Well, that’s indeed true, not only in that Stan pioneered three-dimensional characterization in mainstream adventure comics, and demonstrated how genre comics could be used as a mode of personal expression, but also because without his Marvel revolution, American comics might well have virtually died out decades ago.

Levitz continued, “I think there’s a domino theory of the evolution of the comic book business that takes in both Stan’s work and the comic convention. . . .In the 1960s you have Stan. Julie Schwartz, really a very short list of people, starting to do comics for intelligent kids. They didn’t view it as something you could do for adults. This was just, “We’re going to do this for the bright kids instead of the stupid kids, because we’re going to have some fun doing this.

“Egotistically, we’ll all describe ourselves as being among that generation of smart kids who found this interesting, ” Levitz continued (Well, of course!), “and mostly those were the smart kids who showed up at the comic conventions. Those kids are the ones who came into the business, whether they came in as marketers, distributors, publishers”–apparently alluding to Griepp, Schanes, Goldstein and himself–“working for the publisher for two minutes and then teaching a course in it and then going off on the film side”–and this is a concise description of Uslan’s career– “however and in whichever fashion, and began agitating for change.” Of course, though he didn’t mention this, lots of these convention attendees became comics writers and artists as well.

Levitz told the audience, “We said, “Comics can be great; we want to do great comics. We don’t want to be screwed like the guys before. We want to do wonderful work, and we want to make money doing it, and we want to have a good time doing it.’”

As regular readers know, I gave a lecture series at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art titled “1986: The Year That Changed Comics.” Paul Levitz likewise regards the mid-1980s as a key transitional period for American comic books. “When that broke through in the early “˜80s from all of these forces–and it would have happened without any one individual or any group of individuals, but it happened to be the bunch of us who were there at the time who were pushing for it–you very swiftly have a quantum leap in the creative quality of what happened in American comics. What’s going on here in this hall today is largely happening because of the group of people who read those books in the mid-80s. They became journalists and said, “˜Of course comics can be great. I read Maus, Watchmen, Dark Knight, Elektra, Daredevil,’ whatever it was that gave them the passion. ‘I’m going to judge by that standard.’ It’s not going to be, “˜Isn’t it amazing that they did a comic book that makes some sense?’ They said, “˜Of course, this is genuine art.’

“Some came into field as creators; many became the journalists who wrote about it; many became the booksellers. We had a couple of guys up two minutes ago who were Random House salespeople who just started handling our line. They said, “˜We love comics, we’re happy to be doing it.’ That generation really comes from all of it. The conventions brought us together. It’s where we met. I walk through this hall, and I have so many friends who go back to when I was 14, 15, 16 years old, with a shared sense of purpose. We might have been on the opposite side of business deals along the way, we might have been competing companies, certainly had our share of arguments, but we all shared a very high sense of common purpose and the conventions crystallized all of that.”

Schanes agreed, “It was the first gathering point.”

Then Levitz summarized, “It’s like, “˜We’re here. We’re the tribe.’ And he concluded, “we pulled together in all of that in a really unique fashion in American culture at that time. And we changed the culture, as a result.”

Michael Uslan then said, “I’m going to take the position as the crotchety old man for a minute, which I often do. I’m elated. As I had a chance to walk around for the last hour up here, my comment was, “˜Oh my God, I’m at a huge comic con and look, there’s comic books. There’s original artwork.’ My biggest complaint has been that so many of them have gotten so big and so diluted that you can walk through endless hallways and see no comic books and see everything else but comic books.” Do you suppose he could be referring to San Diego? Uslan continued, “For a comic con, especially for a New York comic con, to pull back to the roots and really get the old comics and the new comics and the art out there again is something I’ve been looking for for a long time, that I felt has been significantly missing.” In other words, Uslan seemed to be suggesting that the current New York Comic Con was recapturing something of the spirit of Seuling’s original New York comic cons.

“I couldn’t agree more with what Paul said,” Uslan told us. “It It goes back to what I said initially, finding out that there were other geeks like me out there,”–oh, no, not another comics person who uses this word!– “that I wasn’t alone in the universe and there were people who shared this passion and shared this joy and had this thirst for knowledge in the history of the subject matter. . . .” Now that part I agree with.

“And here we sit today,” Uslan continued. “The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is going to open an exhibit on May 7th showing how comic book superheroes have influenced fashion, and Action #1 [the first appearance of Superman] will be on display, and Detective #27 [the first appearance of Batman] will be on display, along with many other comic books.” This is the exhibition “Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy,” and I’ll be attending the press preview.

“And you’ve got to give the credit to the comic book conventions, to the tribe,” Uslan concluded, “for having gotten the message out that this is an indigenous, legitimate American art form and that this is our modern day mythology.”

For Greg Goldstein, who described himself as being “a young guy who was into writing and art” in the early 1970s, it was a revelation to go to the New York Cons and see the new comics pros of that time. “Stan and Jack and those other guys were in the legendary hall-of-famers category,” Goldstein said. But then there was the new generation: “There’d be Roy Thomas. . . and Len Wein and Marv Wolfman. It felt more attainable. But the whole thing felt like we were next. There were these guys; they weren’t much older than us; they had the same sensibilities; they had long hair; they dressed the same way we did. And it felt like, boy, they can do it and they can do some really wonderful things in comics, and therefore we had a shot.”

Returning to the subject of why comics professionals used to avoid conventions, Paul Levitz explained that “remember that as late as the late 60s, the characters in comics weren’t even WASPs. They were white Anglo-Saxons. They weren’t even allowed to be Protestants, much less have any sense of religion. They had no ethnicity. They had all been whitewashed into the blandest possible form, the creators, largely, too. Stan Lieber became Stan Lee.” Listing other Jewish-American comics creators who had changed their names, Levitz mentioned Jacob Kurtzberg, who became Jack Kirby), Batman co-creator Bob Kahn, who renamed himself Bob Kane, and artist Eli Katz, who took the name Gil Kane. “They were embarrassed,” Levitz said, apparently suggesting they feared how people would react if they knew their true ethnicity.

And then there was what had happened only a decade before: “They were recovering from the 1950s and Wertham.” Levitz was referring to Dr. Fredric Wertham, the man most associated with the anti-comics crusade of the 1950s, which claimed that comic books of various sorts contributed to juvenile delinquency, and which devastated the comics industry and the lives of its writers and artists. The story has recently been retold in the new book The Ten Cent Plague by author David Hadju.

Levitz recalled that “Joe Orlando”–one of the artists at EC Comics in the 1950s, who later worked at DC–“would tell the story, when I was working for him, that in those years [the 1950s] if he went to a party and a girl was asking him what he did for living, he was an artist. If pressed, he was an artist of things for children. Maybe somewhere between his picking up the girl or his despairing of any hope of picking up the girl, he’d finally admit that he was a comic book artist.” Back then comics were considered the bottom of the artistic barrel.

“The conventions have had an astounding power in all of this,” Levitz continued. ” ” It’s the first time anybody told these guys that what they did meant a damn thing. It’s still has that power for some of the older ones as they get to places like San Diego and they get an Inkpot [Award from the San Diego Con], or they come here. Arnold Drake”–the recently deceased co-creator of Deadman and the Doom Patrol–“was here a year or two ago and just delighting in the fact that, “˜People care about what I did? You remember who I am?’” Levitz pointed out that artist Jim Mooney, who passed away earlier this year, had not received credit on his work at DC for decades; he too finally got to meet his fans at comics conventions.

“But in the history of comics, when we start these early conventions,” Levitz asserted, “these brilliantly talented people are still battered children. They really are totally unrecognized. And the conventions were a vital part in the step of acknowledging them as the artists that they are.”

With the panel nearly at a close, an audience member asked if the panelists had any regrets about the old New York conventions.

Michael Uslan told an amusing story that also bore witness to just how worthless comics were considered only three decades ago. “We had a treasure trove down the shore in New Jersey: Collingswood Auction. It was a flea market. My friend Bobby and I would get my parents to take us every Friday night because . . . the guy would come in every Friday night with boxes from New York loaded with old, old, old comic books, and because they were so old, he sold them for a nickel a piece. Bobby and I returned every soda bottle we could find within three towns. We brought in the nickels, and over the course of a couple years, we walked off with literally thousands and thousands of comics dating back to 1936 that we bought for a nickel apiece.”

Great, huh? But then television started to report on the New York Comic Con and the prices collectors were paying for old comics. “And the word goes out, “˜comic books selling for $100 apiece,’”–which, from today’s standpoint, seems cheap for Golden Age material–“and that was the end. My supply was cut off.”

Paul Levitz had a different, more somber regret: “the questions I didn’t get around to asking. I was too busy running tables, but the history that we’ve lost. I constantly say to myself, I wish I had asked this guy about that. And I’m probably still not getting around to doing nearly enough of it.”

Back in the 1980s I was asked if I wanted to be part of an oral history project about the history of comics. I said yes, but it never happened. And that was back when Jerry Siegel. Joe Shuster, Bob Kane, Jack Kirby, Will Eisner, Julie Schwartz, John Broome, and, indeed, most of the giants from comics’ Golden and Silver Ages were still alive.

But in my next New York Comic Con report, I’ll tell you about a panel that brought together many of the surviving giants of early comics history, right here in New York City in April of 2008. But i may be tempted to write about the Iron Man movie first!

LINKS IN THE AMAZON CHAIN

You can get David Hadju’s The Ten Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America at Amazon.com here. I shall soon be reviewing it in my column “Books about Comics” in Publishers Weekly‘s online newsletter Comics Week.

And since I’ve promised to mention each week one of the books my own work appears in, how about Marvel’s Daredevil by Frank Miller and Klaus Janson Omnibus (as opposed to the Bendis Daredevil Omnibus), which collects much of Frank Miller’s work on the character, as well as an interview I did in the 1980s with Miller and Daredevil collaborator Klaus Janson? You can find the Miller-Janson Omnibus at Amazon here.

–Copyright 2008 Peter Sanderson