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Months before comics writer Steve Gerber passed away, I had already been planning to write about him in “Comics in Context” this year. My subject was going to be the original Omega the Unknown comic book series, which Gerber and his collaborator Mary Skrenes jointly conceived and wrote for Marvel over three decades ago.

I first read Omega when it was originally published in 1976, but I didn’t particularly like or understand what Gerber and Skrenes were getting at. Still, I was a devoted follower of Gerber’s work and kept reading the series till its abrupt end with only its tenth issue. A few years later in 1979, after Gerber had left Marvel, writer Steven Grant devised an ending for Omega in the pages of The Defenders, whereupon the character sank into nearly total obscurity, remembered only in an entry in the 1980s version of The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe‘s “Book of the Dead.” (Rereading that entry, I realized that I probably wrote it: the style seems like my own.)

Probably Omega would have remained forgotten had it not been for the highly acclaimed mainstream novelist Jonathan Lethem, whose past work, including a 2003 book titled The Fortress of Solitude, after Superman’s arctic headquarters, demonstrates his knowledge and love of superhero comics. Fortress also mentions Omega, whose series Lethem read as a boy, and when Marvel invited Lethem to write for the company, he chose to revive Omega. The project was announced in 2005, although the new series did not appear until late 2007. Marvel’s editor in chief explained that “winning the MacArthur Grant”–known as the “genius” grant–“put additional and unexpected demands on [Lethem’s] time”. Here’s yet another way the world of comics has changed in the 21st century: how often has winning a “genius” grant served as an excuse for a writer delaying a comics project?

But the fact that Lethem would be doing a high profile revival of the character provided sufficient impetus for Marvel to reprint the entire original series, and even the Defenders wrap-up and my Handbook entry, in a full color trade paperback titled Omega the Unknown Classic in 2005. Had it not been for Lethem’s interest, Marvel would not have awarded “Classic” status to Gerber and Skrenes’ original Omega stories. They would surely have remained neglected rarities in back issue bins, just as I expect that Marvel finally got around to reprinting Jack Kirby’s Eternals after three decades because Neil Gaiman was going to revive them.

Moreover, I notice that Gerber and Skrenes’ names don’t appear on the front cover or spine of the paperback. I presume Marvel’s rationale is that if it listed Gerber and Skrenes and Mooney, they’d have to list Scott Edelman and Roger Stern, who each wrote a fill-in issue, and Grant for the Defenders issues, and every artist who worked on any of these stories. I see the point, but Gerber, Skrenes and Mooney created the series and did the majority of work on the stories in this book. When Marvel has been trumpeting its association with mainstream novelists like Lethem and Stephen King, it seems unfortunate to me that the “Classic” Omega paperback’s front cover and spine treat the series creators as if they were anonymous.

I had decided to wait until Lethem’s ten-issue series ended later this year, and then write a “Comics in Context” installment comparing and contrasting Lethem’s series with Gerber and Skrenes’. But since Gerber died a few weeks ago, it makes more sense for me to write about the original Omega now, thereby concluding my trilogy about his groundbreaking comics work in the 1970s.

Rereading the original Omega after so many years was eye-opening: I had grossly underrated the series, and I can understand why Lethem found it so intriguing.

Perhaps what made Omega most challenging to the comics audience of the mid-1970s was that it depended upon mysteries that Gerber and Skrenes were in no hurry to resolve, and that, indeed, were left unsolved when the series met its untimely end.

The central enigma was the nature of the connection between Omega‘s two protagonists: the mysterious title character, an alien humanoid who rarely spoke and became a superhero on Earth, and a strange, precocious yet emotionally distant 12-year-old American boy, James-Michael Starling (named after comics writer/artist Jim Starlin). Gerber and Skrenes continually offered tantalizing hints and suggestions in their scripts but never an explanation.

Perhaps Gerber and Skrenes were attempting to draw their readers more fully into the stories and the characters through Omega‘s riddles, inducing the members of the audience to devise their own, personal readings of Omega‘s mysteries and metaphors. For years comics readers and even many comics pros have insisted on exposing secrets, even when the mystery is far more dramatically resonant than the rather prosaic eventual solution (as in Wolverine: Origin). Perhaps television series such as Twin Peaks, The X-Files and Lost have now made the popular culture more appreciative of works that draw dramatic and thematic power from their ongoing conceptual puzzles. This is one of the ways in which Gerber and Skrenes were ahead of their time in Omega. (On the other hand, Omega followed the television series The Prisoner, whose meaning continues to be debated four decades later.)

For the sake of argument, I’m going to ignore the Defenders‘ explanation of the Omega mysteries, which Gerber and Lethem both reportedly disliked. I prefer to speculate about other, more rewarding possible solutions, for which Gerber and Skrenes laid the groundwork.

The opening pages of the first issue (March 1976) show the costumed figure of Omega, on a clearly alien world, running towards the unseen source of destructive ray blasts. On the next page we will discover that Omega’s assailants are robots. Captions have fallen out of favor in today’s comics industry, but in Omega Gerber and Skrenes demonstrate one of the ways they can be used effectively. Omega‘s omniscient narrator provides a running commentary offering an interpretation of the characters and events we witness, thereby provoking us to raise further questions about them. The first caption tells us, “Some unforeseen factor interrupts the orderly flow of events, and without warning, a finely-tuned organism erupts in discord, violence.” In other words, Omega existed in a state of peace and order, which was suddenly disrupted by something–the robots’ attack–beyond his control. Not only do his enemies indulge in violence, but Omega must also turn violent in order to stop them. Although violence is a familiar, perhaps essential element of the superhero genre, Gerber and Skrenes nonetheless continually question the use of violence in their Omega series. In this opening scene, Omega may need to employ violence to defend himself, but the “finely tuned” is nonetheless thrown into “discord” by using it.

But why refer to Omega as an “organism,” rather than as a person? Gerber and Skrenes are distancing their narrator–and us–from both Omega and the action, encouraging us to adopt an analytic perspective–not unlike that of Omega and James-Michael, as we shall soon see.

Atop page two, as Omega hurtles at the robots, as the caption tells us, “The mind searches furiously for a key to it all: what is it? What went wrong? Why? How?” As noted, Gerber and Skrenes deny the readers such keys to the series, forcing them to hypothesize their own.

The narrator continues, “The body, meanwhile, does what it must, to survive!” as we see Omega smashing some of the robots with his superhuman strength. Notice that the narrator describes Omega’s body as if it operates independently of his mind.

That mind is portrayed as questioning and analyzing, while the body is driven by the primal need to survive, which animals share. That is an emotion, and, as we shall see, both Omega and James-Michael have analytical minds that usually seem disconnected from their capacities for emotion. One of Gerber’s recurring themes is that of the human being who distances himself or herself from certain emotions. Remember that in Gerber’s Man-Thing classic “Song-Cry of the Living Dead Man” (see “Comics in Context” #214: “The Essential Steve Gerber”), protagonist Brian Lazarus, despite the terrors that overwhelmed him, believed that he was becoming like a “computer,” unable to connect emotionally with others. The story’s female lead, Sybil Mills, made a habit of suppressing her own capacity for empathy and love. Are the attacking robots, with their inhumanly analytical, emotionless minds meant as metaphorical mirror images of Omega?

Next the narrator describes this black-haired, super-strong costumed alien as “this last of his superior breed.” Did Gerber intend Omega to be a variation on Superman, just as his earlier character Wundarr, from Adventure into Fear #17 (October 1973), more explicitly had been? Omega too will escape to Earth in a spacecraft, although as an adult, and live on his adopted planet as the sole survivor of his race.

Puzzlingly, the narrator then informs us that the “chaos” surrounding Omega is the result of “the pain and the passion and the fire“ (all terms indicating emotions) “to which he alone remains heir.” Do Gerber and Skrenes mean that Omega somehow induced the robots to attempt to destroy him? Or did they intend the robots to be externalized representations of the capacity for violence within Omega himself?

As Omega shoots energy blasts from his hands, the narrator continues, “The energy–the creative force–could be disciplined only so strictly, held seething in check only so long, before it burst forth–ravaging, mindless, uncontrollable.” Gerber and Skrenes seem to be saying that Omega only has a limited ability to discipline and even suppress his capacity for violence, which will inevitably “burst forth,” overwhelming his rational control.

What do Gerber and Skrenes mean by referring to Omega’s energy as “the creative force”? I confess I feel perplexed by this. Does Omega somehow represent the creative artist, whose abilities can either be used constructively or twisted to negative ends?

Omega realizes that there is a solution. He falls to his knees, rendering himself vulnerable to attack, as the omniscient narrator, apparently describing Omega’s thoughts, informs us that “An organism ceases to live when it ceases to grow.” In the next panel a robot blasts Omega with its ray gun. The narrator, unperturbed, goes on: “The element of change, which loomed so terrifying”–like a robot assassin, or death itself?–“was in fact the only hope of salvation.” So as the robot launches a attack on the hero, the narrator invokes a term that could refer to Omega’s fate in the hereafter. “To resist, to dam the flow, to go rigid“–as in repressing emotion?–“was to abandon all hope,” a phrase associated with Dante’s gateway to hell. This sequence closes with a close-up of Omega screaming in pain, as the narrator tells us that Omega must “wait for the ordeal to be over.”

What sort of “growth” and “change” is it that entails an “ordeal” that seems to entail submitting to possible death? Of course, the Joseph Campbell “hero’s journey” involves symbolic–or even real–deaths and resurrections. In submitting to the robot’s attack, Omega may be crossing a Campbellian threshold from his old life through actual or metaphorical death into a new sort of existence.

This sequence also reminds me of the climax of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, a decade and a half later (and if you haven’t read it, skip the rest of this paragraph). Responsible for the death of his son, and incapable of change (in conventional terms, anyway), Morpheus allows himself to be slain in punishment. A new embodiment of Dream, a young boy, takes his place. Gaiman depicts the new Dream ambiguously: the new Dream is simultaneously Daniel, a human boy who has been elevated to this supernatural status, and is the old Dream reborn under what is termed another “aspect.” What coincidental relevance might this have to Omega?

Gerber, Skrenes and Mooney segue from the close-up of Omega screaming to the panel that introduces James-Michael Starling, in the exact same pose, wearing the exact same facial expression, “shouting,” as the narrator tells us that “the agony,” meaning Omega’s, “may span a universe.” James-Michael awakes, but cannot remember his dream apart from the “feeling” of “cold and “desolation.” But the implication is that through that dream James-Michael saw and perhaps somehow experienced what just happened to Omega. The series will explicitly confirm that James-Michael sees Omega in his dreams. So, at the very least, there is a psychic bond linking them.

But is there more than that? If James-Michael sees Omega in his dreams, is it possible that James-Michael somehow “dreamed” Omega into existence? Were Gerber and Skrenes commenting on the way that young boys imagine themselves to be the superheroes they read about in comics? Is Omega a projection of James-Michael’s fantasies of the ideal hero?

Certainly there are similarities between Omega and James-Michael. Omega is the last of his kind, and therefore has presumably been leading a solitary existence. James-Michael has been living in a home in the mountains with his parents, who have home schooled him. He says he has met other children, but they “bored” him. Hence, apart from his parents, James-Michael has likewise led a solitary life.

But now James-Michael’s parents are leaving the mountains and moving to New York, and they insist that he attend school there. His father tells him, “You must begin to interact with other children. . .meet other kinds of people. . . .” (With his black hair and glasses, James-Michael’s father looks something like Omega disguised as Clark Kent.) Later his mother asks him, “But the prospect of facing the unknown–learning, growing–don’t you find that exciting?” There’s that notion of growing, again. Omega and James-Michael each resists the idea of changing until outside factors abruptly alter his peaceful status quo.

James-Michael is precociously intelligent, and speaks in a formal, adult manner. As we shall see, like Omega he has an analytical intellect that is divorced from his capacity for emotion. In nearly her last words, James-Michael’s mother tells him, “The intellectual needn’t exist in scholarly isolation.” James-Michael may be only a boy, but Gerber and Skrenes seem to be signaling that he also represents the cerebral adult who cuts himself off from social interaction or experiences beyond his own, safe ivory tower. Remember that Brian Lazarus was a writer who lived alone.

James-Michael’s mother advises him, “Open up, James Michael. Your life is just beginning.” Gerber and Skrenes put that entire last sentence in bold lettering. I wonder if they might have intended it to be not just figuratively but literally true. There is no proof in the comics that James-Michael existed before that moment he woke up screaming like Omega. James-Michael may recall leading his life before that, but how can we be certain that those memories are real?

The narrator told us that the serene state in which Omega lived changed abruptly due to “some unforeseen factor.” You could describe what next happens to James-Michael the same way. A truck collides with the Starling family’s car. James-Michael revives to see the severed head of his mother, who turns out to be a robot. She warns him not to listen to “the voices,” and then her head melts into metal sludge before his eyes. The deaths of parental figures play a role in many superhero origin stories, but this is one of the weirdest and most horrifying.

Presumably James-Michael’s “father” was also a robot who met a similar fate, though, perhaps significantly, Gerber and Skrenes never show us the father’s remains. Is it possible that he was not a robot and survived? Is it possible that the mother who was in the car was human and survived, and left a robot duplicate of her head with her unconscious son. But why would they abandon James-Michael like this? And if James-Michael’s “parents” really were both robots, who were his real parents? Or didn’t he have any parents?

The newly orphaned James-Michael is understandably unable to cope mentally with the horror, and hs “body succumbs to its state of shock“; again, Gerber points to a disconnect between a character’s mind/logic and his body/emotions. “One reality recedes, another takes its place, equally grim, equally horrifying,” the narrator states, as the scene shifts from James-Michael to Omega. Is the narration implying that James-Michael and Omega share the same consciousness, which has just shifted from James-Michael’s world to Omega’s? (Think of Desmond in the February 28, 2008 episode of Lost, “The Constant,” in which his consciousness shifts between two different locations in time and space.)

James-Michael saw flames rise from the scene of his automobile accident. On Omega’s world “Here, too, columns of flame shoot skyward.” Throughout the original series, Omega and James-Michael’s lives repeatedly parallel each other in various ways. Forced to leave his homeworld, Omega has figuratively become an orphan like James-Michael. Both have unwillingly embarked on journeys to a strange new place, which, in both cases, turns out to be New York City.

The story again segues from a close-up of Omega to a close-up of James-Michael, as he awakens in he Barrow Clinic in New York City. Here he is attended by a nurse, Ruth Hart, whom attentive Marvel readers of the 1970s would recognize as the girlfriend of Gerber’s fictional surrogate, Richard Rory from Man-Thing. Although James-Michael was “thrashing” in his sleep, once he wakes up he is abnormally “calm” and “analytical.” Moreover, whereas a normal boy would be anguished over losing his parents, James-Michael seems to be almost indifferent to their deaths. He is capable of feeling emotion, as his dreams demonstrate, but in his waking life he seems cut off from his own feelings.

The solitary James-Michael also refuses to talk to Ruth, who confesses to clinic head Dr. Barrow that she has difficulty “relating” to people. Nonetheless, since Dr. Barrow is unable to keep James-Michael in the clinic as a charity case, Ruth agrees to let him live at the apartment she shares with her roommate Amber Grant.

Amber is a wonderful character: feisty, funny, liberated and sexy, she immediately hits it off with James-Michael and becomes his mentor in the ways of the world. (Is it a coincidence that Amber is originally depicted with the same color hair as James-Michael’s mother?) She’s such a good character that it’s surprising that, as far as I know, Marvel has not used her since the original Omega storyline, even though her job as a freelance photographer for The Daily Bugle could easily lead to appearances in Spider-Man and other series. In these dark and dismal times for the superhero genre, though, it may be a blessing in disguise for a character to remain safely in obscurity, lest one of today’s writers subject her to fates like rape, mutilation, madness, and murder.

When Amber first meets James-Michael, he is playing chess with himself. “I can’t play chess alone anymore,” Amber tells him. “I keep anticipating the other me’s next move before I turn the board around.”

James-Michael responds, “It’s easier. . .when you feel like two people all the time, anyway.” Aha. The divided self is one of the great themes of the superhero genre, with such famous examples as Clark Kent and Superman or Bruce Banner and the Hulk. You don’t have to have a literal secret identity to relate to the idea that there are different sides to your personality, as Amber indicates.

When James-Michael talks about feeling “like two people,” Amber replies, “Yeah, I can dig that. The voices get pretty loud sometimes, don’t they?” James-Michael becomes excited that she too hears the “voices.” James-Michael may indeed be “hearing” voices in his mind, as the story has previously indicated, whereas Amber is speaking figuratively. Presumably she is referring to the subconscious mind. Again Gerber and Skrenes are pointing out that the fact that certain characters in the superhuman genre literally have multiple selves is a metaphor for the multiple aspects of any person’s psyche.

So James-Michael and Amber have something in common, and they quickly bond. Not only that, but meeting Amber has aroused another sensation in the 12-year old James-Michael, on the verge of puberty: “Who is she?. . .Why does he feel. . .ever so slightly. . .aglow?”

His reverie is interrupted when one of the robots from his dreams invades his bedroom. In the manner of comic book robots, it talks aloud to itself: “Unmistakably the correct target. Yet it has altered its proportions. Smaller. . .more compact. . . .”

This is close as Gerber and Skrenes come in the series to explicitly defining the connection between Omega and James-Michael. The robots’ target, obviously, has been Omega. This robot identifies James-Michael as Omega, albeit in “smaller” form. In other words, James-Michael is Omega in a different form.

Yet the adult Omega immediately arrives and battles the robot, who notes, “Re-evaluation is called for.” The adult Omega and the child James-Michael exist simultaneously.

Yet they still seem to be, somehow, the same person in separate forms. There is another key passage in the next issue, in which Amber and James-Michael walk by Omega, who is wearing ordinary Earth clothing (and is unrecognized by the boy). “Grow up to look like that,” Amber tells James-Michael, “and I’ll forget my position on monogamy and marry you!” James-Michael is bewildered, asking, “Merely because I would resemble that man?” There we have it: Omega looks like an adult version of James-Michael.

Maybe the resemblance could be explained if James-Michael were Omega’s son, somehow displaced through time and space. But Gerber and Skrenes seem to be pointing in a different direction.

I wonder if Omega is Gerber and Skrenes’ variation on the original Captain Marvel. The child Billy Batson can magically transform into the super-powered adult hero Captain Marvel, who presumably looks like Billy all grown up. (In the original stories he cannot simultaneously exist in his Billy and Captain Marvel forms, although in Jeff Smith’s recent Shazam series, they can in certain circumstances.)

Gerber and Skrenes may supply another hint in issue 3 when they introduce Freddie, a crippled boy who heroically hits the supervillain Electro in the shin with his crutch, giving Omega the opportunity to defeat him. One of the original Captain Marvel’s allies is the crippled boy Freddy Freeman, who can magically transform into the superhero Captain Marvel Jr.

Let’s return to the final pages of issue 1. As Omega battles the robot, James-Michael, watching, “feels” a “cold, calculated loathing“ “as though it were his own“: “And yet, it is not his own. . .and yet, it is. . . .” James-Michael must be sharing Omega’s “loathing” of the robot, just as he feels the same pain that the robot inflicts on the costumed adult. (It’s like the title characters of Alexandre Dumas’ 1845 novella The Corsican Brothers, who share an empathic bond. Remember, too, how the Man-Thing’s empathic power enables him to feel the emotions of others.) James-Michael’s analytical mind is bewildered by this unexpected emotion. Finally, James-Michael unleashes energy blasts from his hands, just as Omega can, destroying the robot, and leaving burn marks on his hands resembling the Greek letter omega! If Omega and James-Michael are somehow the same person, these connections make more sense.

In the opening pages of issue 4 the narration makes clear that Omega does not know why he feels compelled to remain on Earth when he could leave in his spaceship at any time. (Indeed, of all the planets in the cosmos, why did Omega come to Earth if not for James-Michael’s presence there?) But the series repeatedly shows that Omega feels a responsibility to protect James-Michael. Why? Does Omega subconsciously sense a fatherly obligation to shield his younger counterpart from harm?

In the opening pages of issue 1, the narrator told us that “An organism ceases to live when it ceases to grow,” and that “the element of change” was “the only hope of salvation.” Had the adult Omega “ceased to grow” so he somehow triggered the creation of a new, younger self–James-Michael? It’s as if, instead of sending his son to Earth, Superman’s father Jor-El was himself reincarnated as a child on Earth. Was that the “change” that Omega found necessary?

In issue 2 James-Michael and Omega each finds a place to live in the dangerously downscale Manhattan neighborhood called Hell’s Kitchen. (This was years before Frank Miller turned Hell’s Kitchen into the main locale for Daredevil or its subsequent gentrification.) In general, in each story what happens to Omega somehow parallels what happens to James-Michael.

This hall of mirrors effect extends to other characters, as well. In the second issue James-Michael encounters Bruce Banner, who transforms into the Hulk and battles Omega. Banner/Hulk, of course, is a prime case of duality in the superhero genre, having two physical forms, one an emotionally repressed intellectual and the other embodying uncontrollable power. So it is very appropriate that the Hulk is the first guest star in the Omega series.

The original Omega series abruptly ended in issue 10 with a shocking cliffhanger (spoiler alert through the end of this paragraph), as Omega was gunned down by police. Steven Grant’s wrap-up of the Omega saga in Defenders cleverly connected the dots to solve the mysteries in a way that was true to the letter of the series but not its spirit. For example. he established that Omega and James-Michael were separate beings, artificially created by those alien robots. Omega really was dead (although he had easily survived a bullet to the head in issue 6!). James-Michael, unable to contain the “uncontrollable” Omega energies, went into an insane rage but finally incinerated himself rather than harm his friend Dian. (It’s rather like the later “Dark Phoenix Saga” ending, isn’t it?) For readers who cared about Gerber and Skrenes’ two protagonists, this was surely unsatisfactory and depressing.

In 2005, after Marvel announced that Lethem would be writing the new Omega series, Gerber wrote in his blog that “Omega was one of only two series from my early days at Marvel that I really did care about in a personal way. The other, of course, was Howard the Duck.” He explained that “Much of Omega‘s content was derived from personal experience, both mine and Mary’s. We drew heavily on our own childhoods for aspects of James-Michael’s story and on observation of our neighborhood – Hell’s Kitchen in New York, circa 1975 – for the setting of the book.”

Gerber was infuriated that Marvel planned to have someone other than himself and Skrenes revive Omega. His anger at Lethem subsided after he and Skrenes were put in contact with him. Gerber stated that “As best I can tell, Jonathan is a very nice guy who was acting with the best of intentions.” and that Lethem “claims he was unaware of my history with Marvel, including the lawsuit over Howard the Duck, until the present incident arose; I choose to believe him.”

But I find this disturbing. In the world of corporate comics, it seems that often it does not even occur to editors or writers that maybe the original writer of a property should get first crack at working on a revival. Or that it would be unwise for the company to alienate important creators from its past. Yet I know of case after case in which comics writers are slighted in this fashion. Didn’t Lethem ever wonder what Gerber and Skrenes would think of his writing the series they originated?

Despite making peace with Lethem, Gerber still contended “that writers and artists who claim to respect the work of creators past should demonstrate that respect by leaving the work alone — particularly if the original creator is still alive, still active in the industry, and, as is typically the case in comics, excluded from any financial participation in the use of the work.”

How workable would such a policy be? Should every Batman story have to receive the approval of Bob Kane’s widow? On the other hand, DC Comics doesn’t allow anyone to do new stories with Neil Gaiman’s Morpheus or commission sequels to Watchmen or V for Vendetta, even though Alan Moore is unlikely to work for DC ever again. (Sometimes, though, I wonder if some future DC administration will decide to do a Watchmen sequel or new Sandman series about Morpheus without the original creators. And I would bet that there would be writers lining up to work on them, while professing admiration for Gaiman and Moore.)

Gerber publicly proposed that Lethem “simply retitle the story and rename the characters”: “Make the book your own, and I’ll have nothing to complain about”. Lethem’s series is still titled Omega the Unknown, but whether because of Gerber’s request or not, he has renamed other characters: for example, the boy protagonist is called Alex, and his nurse is Edie. I would be unhappy if Lethem’s Omega is meant to supplant Gerber and Skrenes’ version in Marvel’s official continuity. But perhaps the use of different names means that Lethem intends these to be different characters than the original cast, and that history is now mysteriously repeating itself with variations.

I’ve only read the first four issues of the Lethem Omega so far, so it’s still too early to judge what he intends to do with the concept. So far, however, I am disappointed. The new version lacks the original’s rich subtext of metaphors, its psychological complexity, and its vivid characterizations and dialogue.

But I am grateful that Lethem’s revival of Omega redirected my attention to Steve Gerber and Mary Skrenes’ original version, which impresses me far more today than it did when I read it over thirty years ago. As Lethem described it at the 2007 New Yorker Festival, the original Omega does indeed seem like a potentially great work, left in a fragmented state. And “the Omega flap,” as Gerber called it, reminds me that Steve Gerber’s legacy to American comic books is not simply his collection of memorable characters and stories, but also his pioneering work throughout his career fighting for comics creators’ rights.

–Copyright 2008 Peter Sanderson

Inevitably when I write about the late Steve Gerber’s most celebrated comics series, I feel I have to make the following statement. Yes, most people only know Howard the Duck from the dreadful 1986 movie adaptation, which is one of the most notorious disasters in Hollywood history. Yet Steve Gerber’s Howard the Duck comics series was one of the most brilliant achievements in the medium of its time.

Introduced by writer Gerber and artist Val Mayerik in the Man-Thing story in Adventure into Fear #19 (December 1973), Howard immediately captured the imaginations of Marvel readers, and of Gerber, as well. The duck won his own backup series in Giant-Size Man-Thing, and soon graduated to his own comic book, which was a tremendous, if short-lived, hit.

Though he was a bad-tempered talking duck, like Donald and Daffy, Howard was also a cleverly conceived variation on the type of Marvel hero pioneered by Stan Lee. If Spider-Man felt alienated from society, Howard’s situation was even worse. Displaced from his otherdimensional world of talking waterfowl, Howard was marooned on the world of humans, or “˜hairless apes,” as he called them. According to his series’ catchphrase, Howard was “trapped in a world he never made.”

In his book Disguised as Clark Kent, Danny Fingeroth explores how Jewish-American comics writers’ sense of being outsiders informed the superhero series they wrote (see “Comics in Context” #200, 201, 202, 203, 204). Gerber shared this background and Howard is the ultimate outsider. Wherever he went, Howard encountered startled humans who disbelievingly exclaimed, “You–you’re a duck!” as if Howard was not already well aware of the fact. In other words, everyone he encounters reminds Howard that he is not like them. The principal exception is his companion Beverly Switzler, who accepts and loves Howard, despite the difference in their species.

Moreover, Howard is a talking duck, like those we see in animated cartoons and comics in our childhood, who has been transplanted into a world of adult humans. I suspect that Howard represents our inner child, thrust into the world of adulthood. As such, he had special relevance for Baby Boomers who continued reading comics as they grew into adults, shifting away from the innocence of children’s comics into material for more mature audiences.

Whereas so many humor comics produced by the mainstream comics companies for this maturing audience were second or third-rate imitations of Harvey Kurtzman’s MAD, Gerber’s Howard the Duck was a superb ongoing satire on various comics genres, American culture, politics, and even the human condition. Confronted by nonsense all about him, Howard vented his feelings through his favorite expletive, a quacking sound transcribed as “Wauugh!” which could express exasperation, dismay, anger, fury, and even despair. That last emotion might be surprising in a “funny animal” comic, but Howard was a funny animal comic aimed at discerning adults, and through comedy it dealt with many if the same themes that Gerber explored in his genre melodramas like Man-Thing and Omega the Unknown.

One test of great satire is its longevity. Will a satire on topical events and issues still be relevant, meaningful and funny years later to a new generation of readers? I decided to see for myself. In Howard’s most celebrated storyline, he ran for president in 1976 against real life candidates, incumbent president Gerald Ford and the eventual winner, Jimmy Carter. Marvel’s Essential Howard the Duck Vol. 1 paperback enables new audiences to read Gerber’s entire original run on the series, including the presidential campaign. Will the storyline hold up, over thirty years later?

The election story arc begins in Howard the Duck #7, cover-dated December 1976, although the issue came out months before the November election). But Gerber had to spend the first part of the issue wrapping up the story he began in the previous issue. So let’s start with the beginning of that storyline in Howard the Duck #6 (November 1976, the first monthly issue), “The Secret House of Forbidden Cookies!”

Part of Gerber’s modus operandi on Howard was to parody other genres in comics and popular fiction: hence, Howard the Duck #1 burlesqued sword and sorcery. This time the target is the Gothic romance, and so, of course, it begins in a dark and stormy night. Following the Joseph Campbell monomyth pattern, the story starts out with our protagonist, Howard, and his companion Beverly at a low point. Having embarked on that particularly American form of quest, the road trip, Howard and Beverly have been reduced to hitchhiking in a torrential rainstorm. The lone passing motorist on the road at that time of night might have given Beverly a ride, but he panicked upon seeing her companion, reacting as if he’d seen a monster out of, yes, a Gothic horror novel: “It–it’s hideous–inhuman–not a man at all.” In other words, it’s a duck. The driver would have killed Howard and Beverly had they not leapt inside–into the mud. Beverly, usually the more optimistic of the two, postulates that the driver “lost control” of the car. Howard, more cynical about human attitudes towards him, is sure that the driver intended to kill them. And this is far from the last attempt on his life in the course of these four issues.

But then Beverly understandably turns distraught, and she and Howard reverse roles. Now he is the optimist, assuring her that “somebody is bound to come along.” But right now their situation resembles a wetter version of Waiting for Godot. Furious at Howard for getting them into their plight (and giving him a good kick), Beverly turns to hyperbole (“Nobody’ll ever use this road again!”) and evokes a fate worse than death. “We’ll have to eat each other to survive!” she asserts, not explaining just how they could manage to simultaneously devour one another. “That’d be understandable in the Andes,” Beverly says, grappling with the ironically humdrum nature of their predicament, “but not in the Poconos!”

Their plight is ridiculous, yet suddenly Gerber and Colan succeed in making it affectingly real. Fed up with the turmoil of her life since she met Howard, Beverly leaves him. Her parting words are “I can’t tolerate your stubbornness or petty fits of rage anymore!” That could be a line from an entirely serious story about lovers breaking up. Howard’s reaction is both credible and nuanced. At first, emotionally devastated, he seeks to placate her by hesitatingly agreeing with her decision (“if that’s what ya really want“) and admitting his faults (“I can’t deny I’m hell to live with”), perhaps in the hope that his concessions will change her mind. But Howard is too brokenhearted to adhere to his strategy, and suddenly calls out after her. She answers, but this time her anger triggers Howard’s temper, and he literally turns his back on her.

Frank Brunner drew Howard’s initial solo stories, but to my mind Gene Colan is Howard’s foremost artist. From the first time I saw his work, I’ve admired Gene Colan’s handsomely realistic style, which surely owes a debt to the great American illustrators. Yet he also draws Howard with the proper cartooniness. What amazes me about his work on Howard the Duck is that he somehow seamlessly blends the cartooniness of the duck and the naturalism of the people and backgrounds into a credible whole, so that you can believe that Howard and Beverly exist in the same world.

Beyond that, Gerber’s Howard the Duck provided opportunities for Colan to demonstrate his ability to make the characters he drew “act.” In the aforementioned breakup sequence, Colan captures the shifts in Howard’s emotions from sympathy over Beverly’s despair to irritation to being stunned when she says she’s leaving him to a look of vulnerability with a hint of desperation, to his final angry resignation, captured in both the look in his eyes and his body language.

Wandering through the rain, Beverly eventually reaches the archetypal Gothic mansion in the middle of nowhere, where she is mistaken for the new governess, a role played by Gothic heroines from Jane Eyre to Dark Shadows‘ Victoria Winters. Having, in effect, walked into a Gothic novel, the exhausted Beverly accepts the role that is assigned to her (“Oh, heck–why not? Anything that’ll get me in the door!”).

The next morning Howard awakens to the latest variation on Gerber’s “You’re a duck!” trope. This time he is found by Reverend Joon Moon Yuc and his young followers, the “Yucchies,” who regard Howard as a “devil-duck,” a creature of Satan, and a sign that “the last days” are upon them. Reverend Yuc and his followers are parodies of Reverend Sun Myung Moon, who moved to the United States in 1971, and the members of his Unification Church, called the “Moonies.” Reverend Moon is no longer as prominent in the news as he was in the 1970s, but Reverend Yuc and the Yucchies still work as parodies of religious cultists and fanatics.

Professing to be “a servant of the Lord,” Reverend Yuc abandons his feigned humility a few panels later, asserting that he knows the will of God. “My word is as the Lord’s,” he declares, and he begins to lead his acolytes in praying to God “to strike this creature dead with a bolt from heaven!” Howard gulps nervously, doubtless fearing what will happen if lightning does not strike and the Reverend decides to take divine vengeance into his own hands.

Who would be the contemporary counterpart of Reverend Yuc? I am reminded of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson’s infamous agreement that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were God’s punishment on America for harboring feminists, gays, and pro-abortion activists.

In bringing Reverend Yuc onstage, Gerber has not diverged from this issue’s overall satiric theme. Reverend Yuc fills the role of the fanatical clergyman who leads the witch hunt (like the Reverend Trask in Dark Shadows), and the Yucchies are his congregation.

Luckily, the Yucchies are diverted from attempting to destroy Howard by the arrival of a bearded horseman in period dress, Heathcliff Rochester (whose names reference the brooding leading men of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre), who turns out to be a representative of the Seven Gables real estate company (in a shout out to Nathaniel Hawthorne). Having apparently been misinformed as to the name of his prospective client, Rochester addresses Howard as “Reverend Duck.” Like Beverly, Howard accepts the proffered role, which at least enables him to escape Reverend Yuc’s clutches.

Meanwhile, Beverly and her new pupil. Patsy, are having breakfast at opposite ends of the typical long table in the mansion’s typically immense dining room, forcing them to shout in order to hear each other. Patsy’s mad mother (another allusion to Jane Eyre, and other Gothic and romantic works) alerts her that the local villagers are charging up the hill to destroy her. (Rochester later explains that they regard Patsy as “some sort of witch.”) Beverly comments that it reminds her of Frankenstein “with a few contemporary touches”: the leader wears a hard hat, and they’ve brought a crane with a wrecking ball to demolish the mansion. To protect the house, Rochester unleashes the hounds, who proceed to trample Howard in pursuing the villagers.

Watching this, Beverly initially reacts with concern for Howard and rushes out to him, before remembering they had split up and striking an appropriately defiant pose. Mirroring her anger, Howard launches into an inner monologue in thought balloons: “Why should I care if I never see her again? What possible mutual attraction could rationally exist between a duck and–that? It defies every law of nature!” Howard continually faces bigotry from the humans he encounters; now he is giving in to anti-human prejudice against Beverly.

But then Beverly provides him with an opening (“I’m not inflexible. I might be persuaded. . .or charmed. . .”), and Howard immediately seizes it (“On the other hand, I’ve never felt constrained to follow convention”) and rushes into the equally overjoyed Beverly’s arms. Howard’s anger and even anti-human bigotry towards Beverly were merely defense mechanisms for coping with the pain of her rejection. As they hug, Howard thinks, “How could this be wrong–or insane–when it feels so good?” Absurd as the relationship between a woman and a talking duck may be on the surface, this scene is surprisingly moving. Through it Gerber has mounted a touching defense of any unconventional form of love. Readers may choose to interpret the bond between Howard and Beverly as a metaphor for whatever kind of relationship they like. As both Beverly and Howard weep with joy, he tells her, “I know how it goes. Love is strange, an’ all that!”

Howard and Beverly return to the mansion, where Reverend Yuc and his witch-hunting cultists soon arrive to “exorcise” the mansion. Patsy leads everyone to (where else?) the mansion’s tower room, which contains equipment out of a Frankenstein movie and an ominous, enormous figure concealed beneath a sheet. Patsy contends that she is “just baking cookies” and “this whole set-up is nothing more than a glorified Suzy Homemaker oven!” Gerber has hit upon a sharp satiric idea here, comparing the archetypal mad scientist creating his monster to a child baking cookies or playing with dolls. A little girl will pretend that her Barbie doll is real, and Dr. Frankenstein brings his own “plaything” to life. And so this issue concludes with Patsy, defying the “ignorant, unscientific rabble” in the best mad scientist tradition, pulling the archetypal lever, and bringing to life–her gigantic Gingerbread Man! (This, by the way, is eight years before the 1984 movie Ghostbusters and its colossal Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.)

Gerber quickly winds up this storyline within the first five pages of the following issue. Howard has a knack for pursuing different strategies than you might expect from the conventional genre hero. Faced with the enormous walking Gingerbread Man, Howard reasons that “It can’t eat us—if we eat it first!” and begins “ruthlessly chomping” through the creature’s leg. Soon thereafter the Gothic mansion, like Rebecca‘s Manderlay and Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory, has gone up in smoke, and Howard and Beverly resume their road trip to the Big Apple.

They get a ride from country western singer Dreyfuss Gultch, a country singer who has been invited to sing the National Anthem at the convention for a third political party, called (get this) the All-Night Party. Gerber had obviously noticed how presidential campaigns enlist popular singers to perform at rallies and conventions, using country singers to appeal to the South.

Beverly asks Gultch if he can get them jobs at the convention, and he complies, although not from a sense of charity: Gerber and Colan visually make it plain that when he offers to do a favor for “such an exceptional pair as you,” he’s not thinking of Howard and Beverly, but of Beverly’s decolletage.

Beyond Gultch’s leering, Gerber continues to make a point of the sexism underlying the male-dominated world of politics. He gets Beverly a job as “Bev, your hospitality girl,” complete with miniskirted costume. “How’s that sound?” she asks Howard, “Like a come-on,” he replied, and indeed, by evening she’s been pinched so much she can’t sit down. Gultch gets Howard a job as a security guard, but when he reports for duty, his superior has a female employee on his lap.

So here are Howard and Beverly in newly assigned roles once again, and Howard’s might seem an unlikely fit. “You know I’m uncomfortable as an authority figure,” he tells Beverly, who knows better: “That’s what they all say–till they put on the uniform! You revel in that sense of power–and you know it.” Howard mulls this over, reflecting, “Sure, even on my world folks costumed themselves to achieve or reinforce a sought-after self-image. . . !” That’s interesting phrasing Gerber used, describing a guard’s uniform as if it were a superhero costume. But that’s something that is important to understand about costumes in the superhero genre: they are like uniforms that people wear in real life to convey an impression of authority. You could say that policemen put on costumes in order to fight crime. Moreover, in general people create a “self-image” through the clothes they choose to wear.

Dismissing the idea that clothes make the duck, Howard tells himself, “ya don’t immediately internalize–“ presumably meaning the image projected by a uniform. Waterfowl, know thyself! Garbed as an authority figure, Howard starts acting the part, imposing common sense solutions on the quarreling politicians he encounters. He has “internalized” his new role, after all.

First Howard wanders into a committee meeting, where a conservative is insisting that “This is the real world–where the Russkies will kill their own people in the name of national security! Our intelligence agencies must have the same freedom to operate. . . .” What, to kill our own people in the name of national security, that all-purpose rationale? A liberal rebuts him, declaring that “our men in mufti deserve our support” (as if anticipating the standard early 21st century rhetorical boilerplate about “supporting the troops”) but contending that “we cannot stoop to condone assassination. . . .” That’s a strong stand that the liberal immediately undercuts by adding, “except in self-defense!”, another all-purpose excuse. Gerber was writing this scene in 1976 about the Cold War, but with just a few alterations it could be a 2008 debate about terrorism between a hard-line right-winger favoring torture “in the name of national security” and a liberal who blusters about human rights but still lets the administration violate them at will.

Exasperated, Howard asks the committee members, “Any of you turkeys know anything about intelligence?” “Not firsthand,” one admits, as if he were in 2008 talking about alleged weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Later, Howard breaks up an actual physical fight between delegates for presidential candidate Wauldrap (with two “a’s”) and delegates for the rival candidate Wauldrop (with one “a” and an “o”) over who will vote for whom on the third ballot. Gerber was writing about when ballots taken at the Democratic and Republican conventions determined who their presidential candidate would be. After the 1970s one candidate from each of the two parties had accumulated enough delegates in the primaries that his nomination was a foregone conclusion going into the convention. But Gerber’s sequence turns out not to be dated. after all, inasmuch as political commentators have lately been predicting that neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton will have enough delegates before the convention to win on the first ballot. So the political horse-trading that Gerber mocks here will play a role in the 2008 Democratic convention. And, of course, there are few policy differences between Clinton and Obama: in that sense they are the Wauldrap and Wauldrop of the 21st century.

Despite his characteristic desire not to get involved, Howard heroically saves Wauldrop (the one with the “o”) from being killed by a bomb planted on the convention floor (“I can’t knowingly let even a politician die!”). Gerber was doubtlessly thinking of the political assassinations of the 1960s, but now this sequence will make readers think of the current threat of terrorist attacks. Wauldrop understandably resigns as the All-Night Party’s presidential candidate, and Gultch nominates their new hero Howard to take his place. And if some individuial singlehandedy thwarted a terrorist attack at a national poliical convention in real life, wouldn’t there be a move afoot to promote him for political office?

It’s interesting that, as much as Howard agonizes over making decisions, and as much as he wants to avoid getting involved in other people’s trouble, when someone presents him with a new role to fill in life, whether it’s a reverend or a guard or President of the United States–he passively, unenthusiastically goes along with it. It’s as if he’s drifting through life, taking whatever opportunities present themselves. “I guess I got nothin’ planned between now and November,” Howard says, “but–“ No buts. Howard didn’t say no, and he is nominated by acclamation. Thus a political legend is born.

Recall that in Gerber’s story about the life of Darrel Daniel in Man-Thing #5 and 6 (1974), Darrel reacted to the assassination of Robert Kennedy during the 1968 presidential campaign by deciding to become a clown, to try to make people laugh again. The assassinations of the 1960s must have haunted Gerber, as well, but in Howard the Duck #8 (January 1977) he blows the threat up to absurd propottions. Rival assassins kill one another for the chance to assassinate the duck, and a street in Greenwich Village turns into a sort of shooting gallery as Howard and Bev make their escape in Gultch’s bulletproof limousine.

Mind you, according to Howard’s campaign manager, G. Q. Studley (whose name denotes a preoccupation with fashionable images), the fact that “Howard’s assassination quotient” is higher than the Democratic and Republican candidates for president is a plus: “it means that people care!” There’s nothing dated about Gerber’s satire on professional political consultants like Studley, who insists that candidates recite “nice, safe, pre-tested bromidic bombasts,” which were “compiled by out expert equivocators.” Howard contemptuously bites Studley on the nose and walks out to conduct his campaign his own way.

Gerber and Colan segue to a newscast by a familiar-looking anchorman called “Walter Klondike,” who reports on the astonishing success of Howard’s presidential campaign. “According to Klondike, “his relentless candor set him apart at once. In the words of one astonished listener: “˜My God, he’s telling the truth! He’ll be dead in a week!’”

Howard has become a new incarnation of that archetypal American figure, the political outsider who hasn’t been corrupted by the system and who speaks the plain truth. This is a figure of such appeal to Americans that politicians from Eugene McCarthy to Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton to George W. Bush to John McCain to Barack Obama have all presented themselves as this sort of candidate at some point during their careers. Howard is like a Frank Capra hero, only with feathers and without the naivete. And in bad times the American public fervently responds to a candidate who convincingly stands for change from a rotten status quo; Klondike reports that Howard has won “millions” of supporters.

Howard also proves to be a political performance artist who anticipates Michael Moore. (Gerber even has President Ford comment about Howard’s “theatrics.”) For example, to make his point against pollution, Howard “collected a steam-shovelful of non-returnable containers” and dumped them on their manufacturer’s property.

Klondike presents (fictional) comments on the HTD candidacy from the real life 1976 candidates: Jimmy Carter, depicted as a Democrat uncomfortably straddling both sides of the issue, and Gerard Ford, who seems a clueless Republican president. The names may have changed by 2008, but the character types that Gerber pinpoints here are still with us.

What makes Howard decidedly different from other candidates, apart from his species, is that he really isn’t motivated by the lust for power that drives other politicians. Again mixing his media, Gerber inserts a prose transcript of one of Howard’s press conferences, in which he explains that “I didn’t particularly wanna be president of this coast-to-coast funny farm you hairless apes have set up. When they asked me to run, I’d just been hit on the head an’ didn’t really understand what I was agreein’ to.” But as he tells a fat cat lobbyist, “Well, s’pose I toldja I don’t care if I’m elected? That I’d rather lose than sell out to you oily guys with steel brains and exhaust pipe mouths?” Free from personal ambition, Howard’s candidacy has a purity that other politicians don’t match.

In Howard’s press conference, Gerber continues to rework themes that we examined last week in his Man-Thing stories, but from a comedic perspective. Darrel the clown and Brian Lazarus both rejected the rat race of the business world and its goals of material success. Lazarus feared he had lost his capacity for emotion. Darrel found his true vocation in making people laugh in an unhappy world. Howard tells his audience, “you’ve fashioned an emotionally and intellectually sterile culture. . . .If an individual is unwilling to spend his life in the plodding pursuit of possessions, there’s nothing for “˜im to do! The United States is one big dateless Saturday night! If I’m elected, I’m gonna inject a little life back into you anesthetized Americans! For four years this country’s gonna get down an’ boogie, see?” Indeed, the campaign slogan on the real Howard the Duck campaign buttons that Gerber sold in 1976 was “Get down, America!” which also was a sly reference to the candidate’s downy feathers.

In the concluding pages of issue 8, Howard and Beverly run a “gauntlet” of assassination attempts by “special interest” groups. Whether Gerber thought that special interests would really resort to murdering a candidate they opposed, I do not know. I prefer to think of this sequence as employing hyperbole to satirize the lengths to which political “attack machines” will go to figuratively destroy a candidate.

What finally does in Howard’s candidacy is, beneath its comedic aspect, believable indeed, as politicians such as Gary Hart, Bill Clinton, and now maybe John McCain could attest: a sex scandal. The media publishes a (faked) photograph of Howard and Beverly taking a bath together.

Exactly why this is so scandalous is left up to the readers. Is it because Howard and Bev aren’t married? Here Gerber is puncturing the hypocrisy of the political world, since he took pains to depict the convention as a hotbed of covert sex. Or is Gerber suggesting that the general public is less open-minded than Howard and Beverly about the unconventional relationship between a human and a waterfowl?

Beneath the bathtub photo, Gerber ran a caption promoting the title of the next issue’s story: “The Bite of the Beaver! (Chomp!)” I confess that in 1976 this reference to vagina dentata went right over my head–and obviously, over the heads of Marvel editorial and the Comics Code as well!

In the next issue, Howard the Duck #9 (Feb. 1977), it turns out that the photo was faked by a hotel bellboy, a fanatical youth who is in the employ of Pierre Dentifris, an even more fanatical foreign mastermind from, of all places, Canada. So Howard and Beverly head up north, where they meet a square-jawed Mountie named Sergeant Preston Dudley, whose name alludes both to Jay Ward’s Dudley Do-Right and to the now nearly forgotten radio and television series, Sgt. Preston of the Yukon (which was–what a small world!–originally produced by George W. Trendle, who also presided over the creation of The Lone Ranger and The Green Hornet).

When Howard and company finally encounter Pierre Dentifris, “Canada’s only super-patriot,” he turns out to be a bearded recluse who rants against America and the “way you barbarians invaded and polluted us with your industry, your so-called culture–!” Surely Gerber was satirizing rabidly anti-American foreign critics. But in 2008, I think that Dentifris has a new relevance that Gerber could not have anticipated. Now to me Dentifris looks like a satiric foreshadowing of Osama bin Laden, raving from his isolated hideaway against American culture and employing fanatical youths to carry out his plots against the United States. Dentifris is conducting his own sort of secular jihad against America. Coincidentally, he even takes control of an airplane as part of his scheme; Sgt. Dudley comments that this is “his modus operandi. . .Pierre always uses bellboys and robot planes.”

Ultimately Dentifris, costumed as “Le Beaver,” has a showdown with Howard on a rope suspended over Niagara Falls. And yes, Gerber even makes an allusion (“Slowly he turns. . . .”) to the classic vaudeville routine about Niagara Falls, probably best known to Baby Boomers from the 1944 Three Stooges short Gents without Cents. Once again choosing a rational but unexpected alternative to standard heroic behavior, Howard decides that the fight is stupid and waddles off the rope back to safety, while Le Beaver falls to his apparent demise. (But considering that the Canadian dollar is now worth more than the American one, I’d say that Le Beaver has finally gotten his revenge.)

Howard’s harrowing experiences leave him on the brink of a nervous breakdown, and Howard the Duck #10 (March 1976) consists of an issue-long surrealistic dream sequence which Gerber titled “Song-Cry of the Living Dead Duck,” kidding his own Man-Thing classic. I could easily keep on going analyzing this brilliant series, but this week’s column is long enough, and this is a good place to stop.

So, yes, Gerber’s Howard the Duck not only stands the test of time, but its satire even proves unexpectedly relevant to current events.

In the 1950s and 1960s Walt Kelly’s Pogo ran for President every four years, and over the decades I hoped that Howard would likewise run–or waddle– again for the Presidency, but he never did, Mind you, this would only have worked if Steve Gerber had written the stories. Others have tried, but Howard is so personal a creation that no one but Gerber ever truly captured the character or the feel of his series. Some years back, Gerber wrote a new Howard the Duck miniseries for Marvel’s MAX line, and I worried that, after so many years, he would be unable to recapture the magic of the original. But he did, and the MAX series matched the standards Gerber set in his 1970s Howard stories. One of my only regrets was that Gene Colan didn’t draw the mini-series.

My other regret was that Gerber never did a follow-up Howard series, for reasons I do not know. And now it’s too late.

Its like the new Batman mini-series that Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers were working on when Rogers passed away, and that now will never come to be. It’s disconcerting to think of the stories that could have been done by comics creators who died too early, if only they had been asked when they were still here.

Imagine if Steve Gerber had written about a new Howard presidential run during the Reagan years, or the Clinton administration, or during the regime of George W. Bush? But the point is that we can’t. No one else as yet has fully recreated Gerber’s unique satiric vision.

–Copyright 2008 Peter Sanderson

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

Recently I attended a performance of Frank Conniff and Jerry Beck’s Cartoon Dump stage show, featuring screenings of atrocious cartoons from 1950s and 1960s television, and then watched more of the same sort on the Worst Cartoons Ever! DVD, which Beck hosts (see “Comics in Context” #209: “Down in the Dump”). That set me wondering how I would react to seeing other cartoons from my childhood. As an adult I’ve watched Warner Brothers and Popeye theatrical cartoons. which are available on DVD, and seen Hanna-Barbera TV cartoons on Boomerang. But what about the more obscure cartoons that don’t get shown on television anymore, that I have not seen since I was in grade school? I decided to start hunting them down on YouTube and other Internet video sites.

One of the first that I located was “Master Cylinder, King of the Moon“ (1959), an episode of producer Joseph Oriolo’s Felix the Cat cartoon series. Herein Felix and his friend Poindexter, the genius nephew of Felix’s archfoe, the Professor, journey into a jungle environment beneath the surface of the moon, where they first encounter the villainous Master Cylinder. I remembered the Master Cylinder as being a sinister alien robot, which proved not quite true. It turns out that he’s a cyborg: indeed, he’s a former student of the Professor, who accidentally destroyed his body in an explosion, and his brain was transplanted into this cylindrical robot form. That’s rather a ghastly concept to inflict upon child viewers, but the cartoon doesn’t play the revelation for horror. Something else I didn’t remember was that the Master Cylinder is also a rather goofy villain. His eyes appear in what is essentially a thin television screen, and he keeps losing the vertical hold. Moreover, despite all of the Master Cylinder’s blustering threats, he is defeated quite easily, when his robot body is simply unplugged from a nearby electrical outlet while he is busily ranting away.

As you can see, this cartoon is an adventure story with some clever comedy elements. In another example, the Professor, piloting a spaceship to the moon to rescue his nephew, sights an alien hitchhiker in space and puts up a sign reading “No Passengers.”

As for Felix, he speaks in a falsetto voice and seems blandly nice; he’s given to laughing and his trademark line is “Righty-O.” In short, he’s boring, and it’s lucky that the presence of characters like the bad-tempered Professor, the cheerfully brilliant Poindexter, and the monomaniacal Master Cylinder compensate for his lack of personality. Watching this cartoon I realized that this version of Felix is really a watered-down Mickey Mouse with pointy ears.

I was in grade school when I saw Oriolo’s color Felix cartoons, but, before that, among the very first cartoons I recall seeing on television were from the original, silent Felix the Cat series of the 1930s, which are credited to their producer Pat Sullivan but were actually the work of the brilliant early animator Otto Messmer (1892-1983). Since they are now in the public domain, you can find plenty of these cartoons on the Net, and their Felix is far more interesting than the talking late 1950s version: he’s got a mean streak.

Take, for example, Felix Revolts (1923). This early animated cartoon demonstrates that its makers thought of it as an outgrowth of newspaper comic strips: dialogue for Felix and other characters appears on-screen in rectangles that are equivalent to word balloons. Felix looks much more like a real cat in this cartoon, and is frequently shown walking on all fours. Nevertheless, even in this early cartoon, Felix also engages in his characteristic walk, pacing back and forth on his hind legs, his front paws clasped behind his back, wearing a grimly thoughtful expression. After Winsor McCay’s Gertie the Dinosaur, Felix was the first great star of animated cartoons, and like Gertie, he vividly registered personality on-screen.

In this cartoon Felix undergoes a series of humiliations at the hands of humans. First shown foraging for food in a barrel, Felix swipes a fish from a fish market, only to be beaten up by the owner. Later, another man cruelly feeds Felix red hot mustard, causing the cat to spin about like a propeller: he has to drink an entire small pond to relieve the agony. Subsequently, Felix passes by the town hall, where he hears the town officials declare that “Cats are useless” and plan to “starve ” the cats “out of town.” Like later cartoon characters such as Bugs Bunny, Felix has been pushed to the brink and now unleashes comic vengeance on his oppressors.

Felix summons the town’s other cats, a horde mostly consisting of Felix lookalikes and delivers a rabble-rousing speech. “We’ve had a dirty deal long enough!” Felix declares, “So let’s make life miserable for them!”

That night Felix keeps the whole town awake by leading a chorus of felines in coordinated yowling. Yes, it’s another example of the image of the conductor that I’ve found in so many classic animated cartoons, as well as a forebear of later cartoons about noisy cats “singing” at night, like Friz Freleng’s Back Alley Oproar (1948). Felix’s initial move may have been counterproductive though: the angry townspeople shout things like “Kill those cats!”

But Felix is far from finished. Next he takes personal revenge on the fish market owner by using worms as bait to lure the store’s fish, who come back to life (if indeed they were dead) and dive off a pier. Felix laughs triumphantly, but, unlike the laughing of his late 1950s TV counterpart, this is laughter with an edge of aggressiveness.

Finally, holding a white flag of truce, Felix meets with a bunch of mice–or are they rats? “The town is yours,” he tells them, adding, “We’re all on strike.” Yes, this is a cartoon about the importance of unions. (It’s also an inspired variation on the fable of the Pied Piper.) This is the perfect cartoon for sympathizers with the current Writers Guild of America strike.

According to the cartoon, the “ruthless rats run rampant” through town. We see rats chasing a policeman, a visual symbol of the rule of law disintegrating into chaos. So perhaps Messmer is signaling that the cats’ strike is not wholly a good thing.

The strike ultimately forces the town officials to surrender to the cats’ demands. The mayor presents Felix with a document guaranteeing that cats will be treated with “courtesy” and afforded access to kitchens and garbage cans. Amazingly, Felix Revolts concludes with Felix and his fellow cats victoriously raising clenched fists into the air, a traditional signifier of radical politics and revolution.

A few years later, Felix has evolved into the more familiar, round-headed figure walking on his hind legs in Felix Trifles with Time (1925). This cartoon also opens with Felix scrounging for food, this time in a garbage can. This cartoon likewise emphasizes humans’ cruelty to cats: one man throws him off the roof of a building, resulting in an amazing overhead shot of Felix plunging towards the ground, reminiscent of Wile E. Coyote’s later vertiginous falls. Upon landing, Felix, as a typical silent cartoon character, is unharmed, and even temporarily detaches one of his legs to examine it for injury. But he is angry.

This time, rather than attempting to change the system, Felix escapes from it. Felix encounters the allegorical figure of Father Time, an elderly, bearded man carrying a clock, persuades him to send him back to “a better age” for a day, and thus Felix ends up in prehistoric times. In sending Felix into outer space, the Oriolo series was true to the original silent series, which likewise placed Felix in fantastic settings.

But Felix discovers that prehistoric times are far worse than his own period. Felix discovers a gigantic dinosaur bone, the answer to his hunger, only to be chased away by a doglike dinosaur.

Worse, Felix encounters a Stone Age tailor, who beckons to him. Here Messmer gives us a close-up of Felix looking sadly wary and vulnerable. For a long moment Felix is no longer the combative trickster but the pathetic perennial victim of man’s cruelty: no wonder Felix won audiences’ hearts. Felix’s fears prove justified. The tailor strips him of his fur, and his caveman customer walks out in a new black fur coat. You might expect the typical gag of the hairless animal shown wearing underwear. But no, instead Felix, except for his intact head, has become a living skeleton! This is the sort of grotesque gag you are far less likely to see after the silent era, with its characters whose bodies easily come apart and reassemble. Luckily for Felix, the tailor’s customer soon goes skinny-dipping at a nearby beach, and Felix reclaims his fur.

But Felix is still not out of trouble, as he is next menaced by an elephant as colossal as those in the Lord of the Rings movies. Luckily, it is now that Father Time returns Felix to his own time. The cartoon ends with Felix back in the garbage can from the beginning, happily finding a tiny bone to eat. “No more Stone Age for me,” says Felix in a title card; “Give me the garbage.” If Felix Revolts advocated revolutionary change, Felix Trifles with Time takes the opposite position, preaching satisfaction with what you have, even if it amounts to “garbage.”

At the end of the silent movie era comes a little masterpiece for Felix: Comicalamities (1928), an exercise in animated metafiction. Not only is Felix very much aware in this cartoon that he is a cartoon character, but he even participates in the creation of the cartoon.

Comicalamities opens with a live action artist’s hand (or, rather, an animated photograph of one) drawing Felix, just the way that Koko the Clown first appears in the Out of the Inkwell cartoons. Felix acknowledges the audience by bowing to us, but then characteristically gets angry when he realizes that the artist failed to draw his tail, and shouts at him. in response, the artist draws Felix’s tail; in effect, Felix has started “directing” the cartoon he is in. Felix breaks into a happy smile until he notices that the black areas of his body haven’t been filled in with ink. Again Felix angrily calls to the off-screen artist, but this time receives no response. The cat walks off the blank background of this scene into the next scene, set on a city street, where he employs a “bootblack” to color in his fur, as if he were polishing shoes.

Subsequently, Felix encounters a female cat sitting on a park bench, her hands covering her face as she weeps. When she removes her hands, Felix is visibly revolted on seeing how ugly she is. But then he turns sympathetic again, and beckons to the off-screen artist, who hands Felix an eraser. Felix then uses the (photograph of a) real eraser to obliterate the female cat’s face. The artist next hands Felix a (photograph of a) pen, which Felix uses to redraw the girl cat’s face to look considerably prettier. So now Felix has become a cartoonist himself, altering reality within his cartoon world.

Felix then uses a mirror, the traditional symbol of vanity, to show the female cat what she now looks like: this proves to be a mistake. Earlier in the cartoon Felix turned a small fir tree into an umbrella. This is a standard gag in the series by which one object is used as a similar-looking but different one. Similarly, Felix finds an enormous lily and turns it into a dress for the girl cat.

But now she starts making demands: she wants jewelry. Felix goes to the edge of the sea and beckons to the off-screen artist, who creates a line of ink with his on; Felix then climbs down the line into the sea. There he finds an oyster bed, consisting of oysters in actual beds, a gag that will recur in Disney’s Alice in Wonderland (1951). Tickling the “baby” oysters, Felix finds one whose teeth’ are actually pearls and steaks them. Then we see the oysters’ mother, who has a human body but an enormous oyster shell for a head. The detached head goes after Felix, who encounters other sea monsters as well. Felix gestures upward for help, as if beseeching aid from God; in response, the animator pours ink into the ocean, turning it pitch black, and Felix escapes back to land under cover of darkness.

Felix gives the pearls to the female cat, but now she wants a fur coat. So Felix finds himself in the Arctic, where he sights a rather friendly-looking bear, wrestles with him, but gets overpowered. The screen begins doing an “iris out,” with the aperture closing around Felix, as if his defeat marked the end of the cartoon. But Felix hasn’t given up “directing” his own cartoon, and holds onto the closing iris with both hands (like Daffy Duck in a similar situation in Chuck Jones’s 1951 Duck Amuck), shouting (silently) to the cartoonist. The hand of the cartoonist, as if it were the giant hand of God, picks up the bear, who falls out of his fur (but not, thankfully, in skeletal form), and then presents the fur to Felix, who returns to the female cat.

Wrapped in her new fur coat, the female cat snubs her benefactor Felix. Enraged after all the effort he went to, Felix does something I’ve never seen Koko do. As if everything on screen were a single drawing, Felix tears off the part containing the female cat and rips it into shreds! It’s a startlingly misogynistic ending that one would never see in a contemporary cartoon intended for kids. Moreover, although Comicalamities, like the Inkwell shorts, openly acknowledges it is an animated cartoon, this climactic act by Felix shatters the illusion of the on-screen “reality” more shockingly than any other animated film I know. More than any other silent cartoon I’m aware of, Comicalamities dramatizes the paradox of animated films of that period: they invite the audience to suspend disbelief in the reality of the characters on-screen, while simultaneously flaunting the artificiality and unreality of the animation medium.

You see, I told you back in column 200 that I would eventually get around to the silent Felix the Cat cartoons, and I keep my word to my readership!

What other silent cartoon classics could I find on the Internet? Several examples of the work of animation’s–and comics’–first great master, Winsor McCay, are available on YouTube, including the celebrated Gertie the Dinosaur and the animated documentary The Sinking of the Lusitania. I chose to watch one of McCay’s animated versions of his Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend comic strip, Bug Vaudeville (1921). While a rather torpid man sleeps in a lovely wooden glade, he dreams of himself watching and applauding, with youthful enthusiasm, a circus with giant insects as performers; there are bug acrobats, bugs who engage in a boxing match, and even a butterfly standing atop a giant beetle, like a bareback rider on a circus horse. We see the dreamer in silhouette, sitting in a row of seats in the foreground, as if he were seated in front of us in a vaudeville–or movie–theater. The final act on the “bug vaudeville” bill is an immense spider, who, instead on remaining on-stage, swings out over the seats and attacking the dreamer, who, of course, wakes up.

Have any of you attended a circus or live theater of some sort in which one of the performers comes down into the audience to inveigle someone to become part of the performance. If you don’t want to be picked, this can be scary. Bug Vaudeville builds upon that sort of fear. What if the wonders–and horrors–that we safely watch on the movie screen came down from the screen?

I wrote about a number of early examples of Max and Dave Fleischer’s silent Out of the Inkwell series, starring Koko the Clown, when I reviewed Warner Home Video’s Popeye Vol. 1 DVD set last year (see “Comics in Context” #190: “Pop Eye-Con”). My favorite cartoon in this series, though, is one of the last, Koko’s Earth Control (1928), starring “The Inkwell Imps,” Koko and a dog named Fitz.

According to the usual Inkwell formula, the cartoon begins with Max Fleischer (in live action) drawing Koko, who comes to animated life. Max and Koko interact, with Max acting as a dictatorial father/superego figure and Koko as a rebellious child–or the id incarnate.

Although Koko’s Earth Control begins with a live action artist’s hand (or, rather, an animated photo thereof) drawing Koko and Fitz, Max never appears on-screen. Perhaps that’s because he’s not needed. In this cartoon Fitz becomes the embodiment of id, while Koko attempts, unsuccessfully, to restrain Fitz’s rebellious impulses.

At the start of the cartoon, the animator’s hand draws Koko, in his clown outfit, and Fitz wearily trudging along the rim of a rotating Earth. If Samuel Beckett had done animated cartoons, maybe this is what he’d draw.

But the emptiness of Koko and Fitz’s existence ends when they come across the “Earth Control” building. Koko experiments with levers that control the weather or turn day into night. Meanwhile Fitz discovers a lever with a sign warning forbidding anyone to touch it, since pulling this lever will bring about the end of the world. But Fitz represents the side of ourselves that rebels against authority, that wants to do what we are forbidden to do, exactly because it is forbidden, no matter what the consequences. This lever is like the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden, and Fitz needs no serpent to urge him on. Despite heroic efforts, Koko cannot stop Fitz from pulling the forbidden lever.

As I have written before in this column, there is a large body of works, in comics and other media, that deals with the end of the world. Koko’s Earth Control is one of the relatively few tales of the apocalypse that is a comedy.

First the animated world around Koko and Fitz is thrown into chaos. These are literally unnatural disasters: the cartoon is making the point that the rules of reality have been overturned. Inanimate things come to life: Koko sees an erupting volcano that, before his horrified eyes, transforms into the gigantic face of a man puffing on a cigar.

Whereas in the typical Inkwell cartoon, Koko escapes into the real world to pull pranks, this time the worldwide chaos in the animated world spreads into the real one. In a shot I’ve always found amusing, two men on a sidewalk desperately hold onto each other as the ground beneath them tilts in one direction and then the other. What’s clearly actually happening is that the camera is being tilted, and I wonder if the Fleischers expected the audience to realize that, and thus were giving an ironic wink to their viewers. More startling is a shot in which Koko watches out the window as New York City skyscrapers (or cut-out photos thereof) collapse against each other.

At the end of the short, Koko and Fitz try to keep their balance on a real world table as it rocks back and forth, and finally collapse into immobile pools of ink. It’s as if they had died: ashes to ashes, and ink to ink. Maybe Beckett would have liked this ending, too.

Returning to my search for cartoons that have stick in my head since boyhood, I located Tulips Shall Grow (1942), part of George Pal’s series of Puppetoons, stop-motion animated films that employ wooden puppets. This short is set in Holland, and the lead puppet characters are the cutely named Jan and his girlfriend Janette. They both traditional native Dutch costumes, complete with wooden shoes, and perform a charming clog dance together. To complete the charming stereotypical image, Janette lives in a windmill, and there are tulips everywhere. As a small boy I thought, yes, this must be what life in the Netherlands is like.

But it wasn’t Jan and Janette I remembered from this short; it was the Screwball Army, an implacably advancing legion of literal screwballs–metal balls with screws for heads. They had a threatening, robotic way of marching, and Pal made clear to his 1940s audience what they were doing: he shoes us one of the marching Screwballs and then shows a goose waddling right behind it. Yes, the Screwballs represent a goose-stepping Nazi army, invading the Netherlands, just as the actual Germans did. But as a child I didn’t make the connection, and probably didn’t even know about the Nazis when I first saw Tulips Shall Grow. Instead I regarded the screwballs as if they were the Terminators of their day. Today, watching the short again, the Screwballs seem absurd and ominous in equal measure. When I was a child, they weren’t funny at all, but truly alarming.

I didn’t recall that the Screwballs weren’t alone; there were also enemy planes that resemble birds of prey, which drop bombs, and tanks, one of which smashes through Janette’s windmill. The tulip fields are devastated and, once the windmill is wrecked, Jan searches for Janette in vain. To my astonishment, Pal makes it seem as if she perished in the onslaught.

Next comes an even greater surprise. Pal shows the mournful Jan kneeling in prayer. Then a massive storm erupts overhead. it is as if God Himself is responding to Jan’s prayer and wreaking an Old Testament style of vengeance upon the evildoers. Lightning strikes down the warplanes. Torrential rains cause the mechanical Screwballs to rust, incapacitating them. Then comes an image I still remember after decades: one of the tanks, bearing the Screwball army flag, slowly sinks into the mud–and oblivion.

With the invading forces defeated, sunshine returns, and Jan finds Janette back at the windmill, which miraculously reconstructs itself before their eyes. They reprise their clog dance off towards the horizon, as row upon row of tulips sprouts up behind them. It’s as if the love between the hero and heroine restored fertility to the devastated land of Holland, and as if the rain that brought destruction to the Screwballs brought new life to the countryside. I may no longer find the Screwballs scary, but I appreciate Tulips Shall Grow more now than I did as a boy.

I decided to see just how good a tool the Internet is at locating obscure cartoons from my childhood. There is one that particularly haunted me in my early grade school days. I didn’t know its name, but it was about a mad musician who stole a dinosaur skeleton and kept shouting a rhymed couplet that I still remember in middle age: “The best bones of all/Go to Symphony Hall!” whereupon he launched into long, insane laughter.

One thing that the Internet quickly teaches you is that you are not alone. Googling, i discovered that others vividly recalled that cartoon’s catchphrase, although they, too, did not necessarily know its name. But finally I tracked it down, and its title proved to be as inexplicably absurd as its plot: The Case of the Screaming Bishop, released by Columbia Pictures in 1944.

What the hell could this title mean? My further research suggests that the title The Case of the Screaming Bishop parodies that of one of Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason novels, The Case of the Stuttering Bishop, which Warners turned into a movie in 1937. However, there is no bishop, screaming or otherwise, in this cartoon, though everything else but the kitchen sink seems to be.

Watching the cartoon again after so long, I can understand why it seemed so strange to me as a child, not frightening but fascinatingly bizarre and disconcerting. Instead if the bright palette of most animated cartoons of this period, Screaming Bishop is literally dark, taking place almost entirely at night, mostly in nearly deserted streets or in rooms nearly empty of people.

Soon after the start of the cartoon, the villain appears crying “I did it!” and uttering that boast for the first time, “The best bones of all/Go to Symphony Hall” and laughing hysterically. What does he mean? “Bones” certainly sounds macabre. And who is this? His physical appearance, with a mane of hair like Bozo’s and grotesquely comic features, is at once clownlike and sinister. I first saw this cartoon years before I first learned about Batman’s foe, the Joker, but Bishop’s bad guy seems like his distant relative.

Moreover, this cartoon turns out to be a spoof on Sherlock Holmes, whose counterpart in Bishop is named Hairlock Combs. If I heard correctly, the detective’s sidekick, who acts and sounds like Nigel Bruce’s classic portrayal of Dr. Watson, is named Gotsome. (You can see them at here) When I saw this cartoon repeatedly as a child, it was years before I first knew about Holmes. Since I was unaware of the foundation for these caricatures of Holmes and Watson, their behavior must have seemed all the stranger to me.

When Gotsome arrives at Combs’s Baker Street home to tell him about the theft of the dinosaur skeleton, he finds the flat seemingly deserted, and yet he hears Combs’s voice. Finally, Combs’ head emerges from a lamp (presumably parodying Holmes’s mastery of disguise). Combs warns Gotsome that they are being watched, and the “camera” searches Combs’ darkened flat, showing all manner of things with staring eyes: a stuffed bird, a fish mounted on a wall, a Chinese lion statue, a bear rug, a moose head. Finally, there is a portrait of a man from a previous century, and as we watch, the mad villain knocks him out and usurps his place.

Later, Combs answers his front door and the villain is there and hands Combs a telegram reading, of course, “The best bones of all/Go to Symphony Hall.” The villain then literally fades away into nothingness. Combs looks for him and we see a huge target on his back. Arms reach out from behind a wall, holding a bow, and fire an arrow. Gotsome cries out a warning, we see the arrow hit the target, and then see Combs standing to one side, admiring the shot. Now imagine that you are a second grader trying to make sense out of this. One deduction you might reach is that in the world of this cartoon, potential death and madness lurk everywhere.

Disguised as a pantomime horse, Combs and Gotsome visit the scene of the crime, the Museum of Unnatural History. (I’ve been to London’s real Natural History Museum, and the exterior in this cartoon bears no resemblance to the real thing, but the old-fashioned exhibit cases shown within are dead on.) There Combs and Gotsome (removing their disguise) decide to reconstruct the crime by building a imitation dinosaur skeleton, at full scale, out of a pile of scraps of wood. (The real skeleton resembles the Diplodocus skeleton in the entrance hall of London’s real Natural History Museum, but this may be mere coincidence.) Somehow lifting the enormous fake skeleton, they rush with it towards the door, which is way too small, and the skeleton smashes into bits with a sound like that of a bowling ball hitting tenpins. Somehow Combs and Gotsome do not find this discouraging, hurriedly rebuild the fake dinosaur, and try to take it out through a window, which is even smaller. The bowling ball sounds again. Gleeful in his obsessiveness, Combs has them rebuild the fake dinosaur again, and this time proves to be the charm. He still hasn’t figured out how the villain got the real dinosaur skeleton out of the museum. but he has discovered that, when struck, the “bones” of the fake skeleton sound like the keys of a xylophone (which he pronounces “sillyphone”). Eureka!

And so the scene shifts to a concert at London’s “Symphony Hall” (which probably should be the Royal Albert Hall, but never mind) where we find the villain, identified as Professor Streptokowsky (a combination of Leopold Stokowski and a strep throat?) onstage playing “the world’s largest xylophone”–the real dinosaur skeleton. Combs and Gotsome rush in with a bobby, who puts Streptokowsky under arrest.

Back at Baker Street, Gotsome asks Combs how he solved the mystery. “Elementary, my dear Gotsome,” Combs replies, removing his mask to reveal the face of Streptokowsky’s face who reiterates, “The best bones of all/Go to Symphony Hall!” That’s the end, which never failed to leave my grade school self in a state of befuddlement. It’s as if law and logic have been supplanted by absurdity, anarchy, and–since the villain is a musician–art.

This is still the strangest theatrical cartoon from the Hollywood studio era that I’ve ever seen. Even the most surreal Tex Avery and Bob Clampett cartoons follow their own sort of logic. But now, as in my childhood, I admire this cartoon’s sheer imaginativeness and its absolute commitment to the idea that anything goes, as long as it’s funny. It is a monument to utter comedic absurdity.

But, as Daffy Duck asks at the end of Duck Amuck, who is responsible for this? Screaming Bishop was written by John McLeish, who also, it seems, performed the voice of Combs, and was directed by Howard Swift, about whom I knew nothing–until I took my Google search still further.

It turns out that Howard Swift directed another cartoon that I saw over and over again in my early grade school years: Kickapoo Juice (1944), from Columbia’s short-lived attempt to adapt Al Capp’s Li’l Abner comic strip into animation. Abner and his leading lady Daisy Mae only appear briefly in a framing sequence for this cartoon. Its real stars are Abner’s mother, the feisty Mammy Yokum, and two of the strip’s supporting characters: the ironically named Hairless Joe, a shaggy hillbilly, and Lonesome Polecat, a politically incorrect caricature of a Native American, who specialize in brewing their literally explosive “Kickapoo Joy Juice.” Here is further evidence that Hollywood theatrical cartoons were aimed at adults as well as children. Not only is this cartoon center on alcohol, but Hairless Joe and Lonesome Polecat spend a good part of it sampling their own wares. Believing that they’re setting a bad example to Abner, the apparently super-strong Mammy attempts to steal the colossal vat of Kickapoo Juice. This leads to sequences with either Mammy or HJ and LP running back and forth, carrying the enormous vat. Yep, it’s just like Combs and Gotsome carrying their wooden dinosaur skeleton mock-up. The animation auteurists among us here can find a gag that serves as Swift’s directorial signature.

Kickapoo Juice has the same propulsive energy as Screaming Bishop, but it doesn’t plunge into utter, reality-shattering nonsense the way that Bishop does.

To me the most remarkable thing about Kickapoo Juice is its subject. Most of the audience for its original theatrical run may have been adults. But when Kickapoo Juice was part of a package of Columbia animated shorts sold to television, its new audience was small children like myself. And this is a cartoon that memorably shows two of its lead characters joyously getting drunk! Recently a DVD collection of early Sesame Street episodes was designated for adults only, because some of its humor is no longer considered fit for children: for example, allegedly, the Cookie Monster’s obsession with cookies is now regarded as an inducement to childhood obesity. Is it even imaginable that Nickelodeon or PBS or Cartoon Network (before 11 PM) would run a cartoon about two backwoods brewmasters getting bombed?

And yet I survived seeing Kickapoo Juice over and over in my early grade school years, though, of course, back then I probably had no idea what alcohol was. Next week I’ll look at still more cartoons from my early memories.

–Copyright 2008 Peter Sanderson

One of the questions on The Beat’s annual survey for her Publishers Weekly blog is to ask what “guilty pleasures” her contributors are anticipating in the new year. Last year I named the forthcoming Disney DVD release of The Adventures of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, collecting the silent cartoon series that Walt Disney made just before the creation of Mickey Mouse. This DVD set finally came out in December, and I now realize that there’s nothing “guilty” about the pleasures these cartoons provide. I expected they’d be interesting as foreshadowings of Disney’s later work, but not particularly good in and of themselves. But the Oswald cartoons turned out to delightful period pieces from the early history of animation. Watching these, you can see that Disney was already well on his way to the success he would achieve only a year later with Mickey Mouse.

The Disney company hadn’t released the Oswald series on home video earlier because it didn’t own the cartoons or the character until recently. Back in the 1920s Walt Disney made the Oswald series for distribution by Universal. But then, as a featurette on the DVD explains, Universal sprang surprises on the young Disney: not only did they own Oswald, but they had also hired Disney’s animation staff away from him–except for his best animator, Ub Iwerks, who remained loyal–and would produce the Oswald series without him. This proved to be a blessing in disguise, since Disney was now determined to remain independent and own his own intellectual property; soon he and Iwerks jointly created Mickey Mouse, and Disney was on his way to becoming a cultural colossus. Recently, Disney’s new, enlightened management made a deal with NBC Universal in which Disney regained control of Oswald, and this DVD set soon followed.

Not only does the Oswald DVD set contain copies of all the extent Disney Oswald cartoons (which apparently took some hunting), but also some 1920s Disney cartoons that preceded and followed the making of the Oswald shorts.

The three cartoons that preceded Oswald are from Disney’s Alice Comedies series. Whereas in Max and Dave Fleischer’s silent animated series Out of the Inkwell, a cartoon character, Koko the Clown, entered the real (live action) world, in the Alice shorts a live action girl, Alice, appears within a cartoon world populated by anthropomorphic animals. Hence the evocation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in the series’ title is quite appropriate.

In watching the first Alice short included in this set, Alice Gets Stung (1925), I was initially surprised by how little Alice appeared in it, though perhaps I shouldn’t have been, since I presume that it was harder and more expensive to combine live action footage of the girl portraying Alice with the animation than it was to do the animation alone.

Making Alice’s regular costar, Julius, a cat who looks an awful lot like Felix the Cat seems too much like imitating the competition. (It seems that Disney’s distributor insisted on having a cat in the cartoons: see here) But, as noted, even the premise of Alice is simply taking the Fleischers’ idea for Inkwell and reversing it. At this point Disney is still reacting to his competitors’ ideas rather than heading in a brand new direction.

Alice Gets Stung begins with a lengthy sequence with Julius the cat chasing a rabbit (which doesn’t strike me as being a cat’s natural prey) and the rabbit’s efforts at thwarting him. For example, Julius reaches down into one rabbit hole, while the rabbit emerges from another hole behind him. This is a variation on what became a standard gag in Bugs Bunny-Elmer Fudd encounters. Watching this cartoon, I felt that Disney had stumbled onto the idea of the rabbit as trickster–but perhaps didn’t yet know what he had. Shouldn’t the rabbit be the star animal of this cartoon, not the cat, who, as the predator, seems to be playing the bad guy? Maybe this rabbit points to the creation of Oswald, though it would be Warners that perfected the idea of the animated trickster rabbit with Bugs Bunny.

Even though Daffy Duck can get blasted by Elmer Fudd over and over without suffering greater harm than a temporarily displaced beak, many classic Warners cartoons still depend on the audience’s belief that the hunter or predator could potentially do harm to the animal hero: Wile E. Coyote does indeed want to eat the Roadrunner, and Elmer Fudd does indeed want to kill the wabbit. In the world of Alice Gets Stung, there seems to be no real threat of death or even injury. At one point Julius pulls off the lower half of the rabbit, but the halves soon rejoin, and the rabbit seemingly suffers no pain whatsoever. Later, Julius removes his own eyes and mouth and positions them over one of the rabbit holes; when the rabbit emerges from the other hole, the eyeless cat captures her. This is a rather grotesque extension of the convention of the Felix the Cat silent cartoons, whereby Felix can detach part of his body, like his tail: at another point in this cartoon, the rabbit uses her tail to powder her face. Amusing as this sort of thing can be in silent cartoons, it also makes the characters seem overly unreal, and one can see why later funny animal cartoons mostly disposed of this convention of detachable body parts.

You’ll notice I refer to the rabbit as “she”: this was a surprise, too. Once caught, the rabbit pours out a sob story about her infant children–whom we see in a brief vignette, all in the same cradle and wailing for “Mama”–as two other rabbits play violins, with heart and flowers appearing onscreen as substitutes for music. Moved, Julius lets the rabbit go, whereupon the rabbit laughs at the cat–presumably her story was all a lie–and the chase resumes. This time Julius pursues the rabbit down the rabbit hole where, with no evident cause, the rabbit suddenly grows to giant size and the tables are turned. There is no logical reason why this should happen, but I suppose the rabbit’s increased size might be a metaphor for growing braver and more aggressive, having gaining the advantage once she is on her home ground.

The live action Alice shows up and, in a neat trick, is shown carrying a cartoon fire hydrant. which she and Julius then use literally to flush the rabbit out of her hole. But again this struck me as misjudgment by Disney. Why is our heroine joining the cat in pursuing the rabbit? Shouldn’t we root for the rabbit, as the predator’s potential victim, and admire her cleverness?

The “hearts and flowers” sequence suggests that Disney might already have been longing for the opportunities that sound could provide for his cartoons. So does the next major sequence in Alice Gets Stung, which shows animals playing music as members of a band. This prefigures Disney’s The Band Concert a decade later. Moreover, in Alice Gets Stung animals’ tails get pulled to cause them to emit musical notes, a gag that would be much more famously used in the first Mickey Mouse cartoon to be released, Steamboat Willie. Alice Gets Stung also uses the image of the conductor–in this case, a bear-that would keep recurring in classic Hollywood theatrical cartoons, including The Band Concert.

Alice shoots a gun at one of a pair of dancing bears. This is another misjudgment by Disney; why should the heroine attack an animal that has been entertaining the audience? In the world of the Alice shorts, however, even being shot repeatedly does not harm the bear, who begins dancing in time to the (silent) gunshots. But after bullets sever his head and limbs, once his body parts rejoin, the bear is understandably enraged. Frightened, Alice and Julius shrink in size (reversing the previous bit of the rabbit growing gigantic with courage) and Alice becomes a cartoon character herself. In the end she and the cat are beset by bees, thus finally providing an explanation for the cartoon’s title.

Death seems to be real in the next Alice cartoon included, Alice in the Wooly West (1926), although the rules by which it operates are unclear. This time Julius looks even more like Felix and he is cast as a Western gunfighter. Bandit mice hold up the passengers of a stagecoach, but Julius rides to the rescue and shoots the mice dead. This is even more startling if you consider that with the creation of Mickey Mouse, Disney would soon firmly establish the convention that in funny animal cartoons, mice are the good guys and cats are the bad guys.

The head of the bandits looks like a bear in a top hat, who seems to be, yea, the forebear of the principal villain in the Oswald cartoons, the top-hatted Putrid Pete. The bear kidnaps Alice, and in the ensuing battle, Julius separates the bear’s head from his body with repeated blows. This causes the bear no harm, his head and body rejoin, and the conflict continues.

In a reworking of a gag from the previous cartoon, this time Julius removes not his eyes but his black fur to use as a decoy. Julius not only clobbers the bear from behind but actually buries him on camera, leaving a flower on his grave! It’s as if Bugs Bunny literally killed Yosemite Sam! So here’s another mistake that Disney would avoid in years to come.

But Alice rejoices, although Julius is embarrassed at her seeing him in his underwear. It’s an odd gag if you think about it, since it evokes the human taboo on nudity by using an animal, to which the taboo would not apply. Variations on this gag would get stranger still in the Oswald series.

The third Alice cartoon in the set, Alice’s Balloon Race (1925), foreshadows the airplane race in the Oswald cartoon, and in both the villain is a bear in a top hat whom the Oswald series would call Putrid Pete. (What an unfortunate adjective to apply to someone with such an appealing first name!)

I was particularly impressed by a bit in which Alice’s balloon crashes in the background and she bounces out into the foreground. Running the sequence back on my DVD player, I could see the point at which the tiny cartoon Alice who is bounced out of the balloon turns into the live action Alice who lands in the foreground. But it happens so quickly that the audience surely had the illusion that it was the real Alice all the time.

Bodies are even more malleable and unkillable in this short than in the others. Falling from the sky, Julius smashes into bits upon hitting the ground, and immediately resumes shape and life. Later Julius enacts a typical Felix-style gag, detaching his tail and turning it into an umbrella. But then this cat goes way further into the grotesque: he eats his tail, which then emerges from the back of his head and then slides down his back until it reaches its proper position. Even the animation experts on this cartoon’s commentary track reacted as if they nearly couldn’t believe their eyes.

The first Oswald cartoon in the DVD set, Trolley Troubles (1927) presents its hero as the driver of a means of public transportation, picking up passengers, just as Steamboat Willie does with Mickey. Oswald looks chubbier here than heroes in the other cartoons. He’s also the visual missing link between Felix the Cat and Mickey Mouse. All three are short and black, with white “faces,” black noses, and round heads: the major difference is in the shape of the ears. In Trolley Troubles Oswald also proves to have detachable body parts, using his tail as a brush. More disturbingly, he detaches his lucky rabbit’s foot and rubs it on his head for luck.

In these cartoons Oswald displays a range of emotions that foreshadows Mickey and later animated characters. Unlike many later animated stars, with the major exceptions of Donald and Daffy Duck, Felix, Oswald and the early Mickey were easily prone to anger. In Trolley Troubles Oswald literally hits an obese passenger off the vehicle.

In the most striking sequence, Oswald’s trolley plummets through a series of tunnels. Oswald stands in the foreground, his back to the audience, so we are essentially watching the sequence from his point of view, or, to put it differently, it is as if we are riding the trolley along with him, as the cavernous openings to the tunnels engulf the screen. It’s reminiscent of riding a roller coaster; it’s an early version of the sort of effect that today one might expect to find in a video game.

With the next cartoon, Oh Teacher (1927) Oswald embarks upon a theme that was not often to be found in Felix or Inkwell cartoons: love. here Oswald has a girlfriend, a female rabbit; this obviously prefigures the relationship between Mickey and Minnie Mouse, which is so important to the early Mickey cartoons.

When she accidentally tumbles into a lake, the unnamed girlfriend cries “HELP!”; not only do the letters appear onscreen, but Oswald rides them. as if they were a horse, to the lake to try to rescue her. Earlier in the short a question mark, used to denote a character’s puzzlement, was employed as a hook by the cartoon’s villain. These silent cartoons thus emphasize their own artificiality by taking an written word or a punctuation mark and turning it into a physical object. Maybe the detachable body parts in these cartoons serve a similar purpose: reminding the audience that Oswald and company are pen and ink creations, just as when Koko devolves back into ink at the end of his cartoons.

The girlfriend mistakenly thinks that it was the cat who saved her and snubs Oswald. The cat literally knocks Oswald’s head off, and though the head bounces back onto Oswald’s body, this still seems unintentionally disturbing. It is somehow easier to suspend disbelief and accept an anthropomorphic rabbit as real than it is to accept the idea that a living being can survive beheading.

In the standout sequence of Oh Teacher, Oswald angrily waits behind a schoolhouse to clobber the bullying cat with a brick. The cat unexpectedly comes up behind him, and Oswald nervously tries to hide the brick behind his back, switching it from one hand to the other. When the cat spots the brick, Oswald desperately starts lifting the brick with one hand, as if he is using it for weightlifting exercise. All of this happens in pantomime without a single word onscreen. This is real animated acting; the three Alice cartoons did not even attempt anything like this.

The next cartoon, Great Guns! (1927), suggests that even a decade after the devastation of World War I, Americans had a different attitude towards war than they do today. When war is declared in this cartoon, animals immediately enlist in the armed forces en masse, including Oswald.

Oswald is very much in love in this cartoon: in its most astonishing segment, the shot of Oswald kissing his girlfriend goodbye dissolves into a shot of Oswald kissing a photograph of his girlfriend, as he sits in a World War I-style trench, with rain pouring down around him.

There’s a good touch of Fleischer-style risqué visual humor that I hadn’t expected to find in a Disney cartoon: as soon as the enormous war cannons fire, they immediately collapse into a flaccid state.

Most of the cartoon is taken up by an aerial battle between Oswald and an enemy combatant, each piloting a plane; once again, Disney has cast a mouse as the bad guy.

At this cartoon’s end Oswald is reduced to what looks like shrapnel by a cannonball. His girlfriend, serving as a nurse, sweeps up Oswald’s remains, pours them into a giant shaker, as if she were mixing a drink, and pours out a pool of black ink, which (in the manner of Koko in the Inkwell cartoons) takes form as Oswald. Thus Oswald undergoes death and resurrection, and he gets the girl!

Walt Disney and his principal animators came from Kansas City, and the early Mickey cartoons have rural or barnyard settings. So it’s not a surprise that the next Oswald cartoon teams the rabbit with a cow, but the title character of The Mechanical Cow (1927) is, inexplicably, also a robot! Can we see the seeds of Disney’s future interest in audio-animatronics here? The flaccid cannon joke is repeated here, and Oswald again has a rabbit girlfriend, who is abducted by the bad guys.

In this cartoon the bad guys are ultimately devoured by sharks. I suppose that, considering that characters can survive dismemberment and beheading in the silent Disney cartoons, we shouldn’t take deaths in them seriously. Still, the Alice and Oswald cartoons certainly operate on a harsh moral code.

In The Ocean Hop (1927) Oswald competes against Putrid Pete, with top hat and peg leg, and others in an airplane race across the Atlantic. This updates the theme from Alice’s Balloon Race while probably alluding to Charles Lindbergh’s groundbreaking transatlantic flight, which also inspired the later Mickey Mouse cartoon Plane Crazy. Putrid Pete uses chewing gum to glue Oswald’s plane to the runway so it can’t take off. Instead, Oswald and some mice–friendly ones, this time–turn an unusually long dachshund into a substitute plane, utilizing balloons to lift him into the air. In another Felix-style gag, Oswald uses a word balloon containing a question mark as one of the balloons, employing the question mark to hook it onto the dachshund. (This is a more elaborate version of a similar flying dachshund gag from Alice’s Balloon Race.)

In the best moment of this film, a title card announces, “Then Night Falls,” and we see huge black raindrops falling around Oswald’s plane, which then merge into a sort of black sea of night. This has nothing to do with how night falls in the real world, but it makes a lovely alternative.

At the end Oswald falls from the sky to land safely in Paris, where he looks distinctly uncomfortable as Frenchmen congratulate him by kissing him on the cheek. Was Disney hinting at homosexuality here?

In All Wet (1927), set at the beach, Disney tries an interesting experiment with Oswald’s leading lady. Usually Oswald’s girlfriends, who are sometimes rabbits and sometimes, strangely, cats, are flat-chested; lacking breasts, they tend to go topless, like the early Minnie Mouse. What identifies them as female are things like hats with flowers or skirts and even visible panties. But the lady rabbit in All Wet not only wears a dress but is drawn with the suggestion of a bust. Indeed, at one point in the cartoon, she hides from the camera in order to change from her dress into a one-piece swimsuit. She even strikes flirtatious poses. She’s by no means built like a Jessica Rabbit or even Betty Boop, but she’s certainly preferable to the androgynous female leads of so many early cartoons.

Trying to impress her, Oswald bribes (!) the lifeguard into letting him substitute for him; she rows out to sea and feigns distress, but ends up in real danger. In a clever sequence, Oswald and the girl rabbit are continually being separated as waves lift him or her high up out of the other’s reach. But the girl rabbit seems less than real when Oswald, in giving her artificial respiration, rolls up her body and legs, as if she were a rug!

The Rival Romeos (1927) are Oswald and Putrid Pete, this time without a peg leg. Early Fleischer cartoons depict a world in which everything could be alive and mobile. The silent Disney cartoons in this set generally steer away from this approach, but in Rival Romeos Oswald and Putrid Pete drive cars with faces and personalities. Putrid Pete’s car refuses to drive into mud, and Oswald’s car joins Oswald in laughing at Pete.

With the opening of Bright Lights (1928), Disney and his team are obviously setting themselves new visual challenges and meeting them. This short opens with an animated version of an electric sign such as one might have seen in Times Square, with dancing stick figures, advertising “Mlle. Zulu, shimmy queen,” an exotic dancer. Then we go inside the theater to find yet another example of a conductor in classic animation, this time an ape leading an animal orchestra. There’s a chorus line of scantily clad dancing girl cats, followed by Mlle. Zulu herself, who performs her shimmy dance in an impressively animated serpentine manner.

All of this is before Oswald even makes his entrance. When he does, Oswald proceeds to demonstrate his growing range as an animated actor. His heart bulges from his chest as he thinks about the sensuous Mlle. Zulu, and he grows embarrassed when he unconsciously rests his hand on the derriere of a poster image of Mlle. Zulu, which then angrily comes to life.

Though Oswald’s personality grows fuller and more believable, the characters bodies remain unbelievably malleable. A theater guard hits Oswald so hard that he turns into a mass of tiny Oswalds, which merge back into the full size version; this is a recurring gag in the Oswald series. Oswald retaliates by tying the guard’s legs around a lamppost, as if he were made of rubber. I also like the clever bit in which Oswald tries to sneak into the theater by hiding under a patron’s enormous shadow as if it were a carpet.

With Ozzie of the Mounted (1928) Disney shows ambition as a storyteller by moving away from familiar rural and urban settings into the Canadian wilderness, parodying the same tales of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that later served as fodder for Jay Ward’s Dudley Do-Right. In this cartoon the familiar furry villain in the top hat is identified as Putrid Pete alias Kid Pete alias Peg Leg Pete, a name later given to Mickey Mouse’s feline adversary. Oswald’s horse is another robot, although why Disney was so interested in mechanical farm animals remains a mystery.

My favorite of the Oswald cartoons in this set is Oh What a Knight (1928). On the commentary track Leonard Maltin and Mark Kausler suggest that this is a parody of Douglas Fairbanks’ Robin Hood (1923), which makes sense since the early, adventurous Mickey has also been compared to Fairbanks. So Oh What a Knight is a parody of the swashbuckler genre in film, with Oswald as a kind of heroic singing troubadour: we can’t hear him sing, but there are plenty of musical notes drawn on screen, as Oswald makes his entrance, singing, while his donkey dances along. Robert Israel, a veteran composer of scores for silent films on video, created the musical accompaniment for the Oswald cartoons. I’m especially pleased that he sets Oswald’s singing entrance in Oh What a Knight to music from Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg, which deals with medieval singers. Later in the cartoon, Israel quotes from Tannhauser, another Wagner opera about a singing knight (and possibly Israel’s nod to Chuck Jones’s What’s Opera, Doc?, which extensively uses music from Tannhauser).

It’s been two decades since I saw Fairbanks’ Robin Hood, but the most astounding segment in Oh What a Knight reminds me of Errol Flynn’s much more familiar The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), co-directed by Michael Curtiz, which was made a full decade after this cartoon. Both the Flynn Robin Hood and Curtiz’s The Sea Hawk (1940) culminate with swordfights in which the combatants cast enormous shadows on the walks behind them. Was this a swashbuckler movie tradition that predated Curtiz’s films? For, lo, in the greatest segment of Oh What a Knight, Oswald and an armored Putrid Pete wage a swordfight complete with ominous shadows behind them. Moreover, at one point Oswald exits the battle to go kiss the leading lady, while his shadow continues the duel with Putrid Pete in his place!

As the cartoon’s commentary track says, Oswald “recharges” his energies during the battle by continually returning to his lady love for a kiss. In this cartoon and some others, Oswald’s leading lady is not a rabbit but a cat. It would seem strange if Mickey Mouse’s girlfriend were not also a mouse, but then again, in more recent times Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy have gotten away with interspecies romance. I like the way that Disney and his animators kept devising new ways in these cartoons to portray Oswald’s sexual arousal. For example, at one point in Knight, his leading lady’s kiss causes Oswald’s feet to rotate in ecstasy.

Like Bright Lights, Sky Scrappers (1928) places Oswald in a then-contemporary urban setting: a skyscraper under construction. Putrid Pete sexually harasses Oswald’s girlfriend, a female cat, leading to an energetically staged battle between Oswald and Pete on a girder suspended high above the ground. Still, the cartoon disappointingly fails to evoke the suspense of the live action “thrill comedies” with similar settings that surely inspired it, like Harold Lloyd’s Never Weaken (1921) and Safety Last (1923) or Laurel and Hardy’s later Liberty (1929). It certainly pales in comparison to the split second timing of Popeye and company sleepwalking on and off girders in A Dream Walking (1934), whose complex visual choreography and split second timing was presumably beyond the capability of animators in the 1920s. The main problem, though, is that there’ not enough sense of potential sense of danger from falling in Sky Scrappers. At one point Oswald, climbing a rope, falls several stories, squashes on impact, but immediately resumes normal form, seemingly feeling no pain. He’s so rubbery that if he fell off the girder, one wouldn’t be surprised if he bounced.

The Fox Chase (1928) is another example of misjudging audience sympathies. Surely the audience would side not with Oswald the fox hunter but with his intended victim, the clever fox who outwits him. This fox is not only a trickster but a shapeshifter, adopting a disguise in the cartoon’s final moments that thwarts his hunters once and for all. In the high point here, Oswald tries to drive the fox out of a log by rolling it up like a rug–or like his leading lady from All Wet.

The last Oswald short, Tall Timber (1928), utilizes another ambitious setting, opening with Oswald rowing a canoe down a river, past a wilderness, down waterfall and, excitingly, through rapids. This time Oswald is a duck hunter, but, once again, I found my sympathies going to the duck. But then the cartoon resumes thrill comedy mode. Oswald finds himself riding a moose and being catapulted towards the screen–and the audience–until his face fills the frame. Then Oswald flees from an onrushing, rolling boulder, which finally, literally flattens him against a tree. The result is that Oswald is literally rail thin, but far taller. Oswald tries to restore his true shape by hitting himself with another heavy rock, but this impact distorts his body to the opposite extreme. An amazingly weird closeup shows Oswald’s head, inflated like a balloon. In long shot Oswald now looks short and obese, and his ears are no longer long but rounded: in fact, he looks like a fat Mickey Mouse! Two bear cubs seize either end of Oswald and pull, finally causing the rubbery rabbit to snap back to normal shape. Nevertheless angry, Oswald pursues the bear cubs to what looks like an immense black rock, but proves to be their huge, ferocious mother. But after an offscreen battle in a cave, the mother bear flees, with a furless body in bra and panties (yet another of the various animal “nudity” gags in the Oswald series that falls flat). Oswald then reenters, wearing a resplendent fur coat; he dons a top hat and lights a cigar in triumph. That seems an appropriate final image for what amounts to his curtain call in this final Oswald cartoon.

On the second disc are three key cartoons, animated by Ub Iwerks, that Walt Disney made independently, after Universal took Oswald away from him. They include the Mickey Mouse cartoons, Plane Crazy (1928) and Steamboat Willie (1928). The opening credits for each cartoon call it “a Walt Disney comic by Ub Iwerks,” a description that’s interesting for two reasons. First, the phrasing indicates that Walt Disney was in charge, but that Iwerks was the actual hands-on creator of the film. Second, the phrase “Walt Disney comic” suggests that at this point Disney–and perhaps his audience, as well– regarded the animated cartoon as a cinematic kind of comic strip, rather than as a separate artform.

Plane Crazy was the first Mickey Mouse cartoon that Disney made, and it was originally created as a silent cartoon. But it was the third Mickey cartoon, Steamboat Willie, with its groundbreaking synchronized sound track of music, dialogue and sound effects, that was the first to be released. But watching Plane Crazy, I found myself thinking that even apart from the question of sound, it was a good thing that Mickey actually made his debut in Steamboat Willie instead.

Opening in a barnyard, Plane Crazy presents Mickey as rural rodent who, with hep from other animals, builds his own plane and models himself after Charles Lindbergh, the first pilot to fly solo across the Atlantic. (We even see a surprisingly realistic picture of Lindbergh in the film, which sharply contrasts with the “cartoony” style in which the animal characters are drawn; Mickey even musses his hair in imitation of Lindbergh’s.) Mickey invites Minnie Mouse to join him on his flight. Eventually Mickey starts flirting with her and puts his arm around her; she wags her finger and tells him no. Looking devilish, Mickey speeds up the plane and puts it through aerial maneuvers that frighten Minnie. then he forcibly kisses her, Minnie slaps his face and she jumps out of the plane to escape him, her skirt billowing into a makeshift parachute. In other words, Plane Crazy portrays Mickey Mouse as guilty of sexual harassment, acting no differently than Putrid Pete in Sky Scrappers!

Watching Steamboat Willie after the Oswalds, I realized that much of the first half of the cartoon and its final scenes is conventional for its time, nowhere nearly as inspired as the best of Felix, Inkwell and Oswald. Mickey is the pilot of a steamboat, and his boss is an enormous cat with a high hat, an early version of his archfoe Black Pete (whom we can now see as Putrid Pete’s descendant). The bullying Pete pulls Mickey’s body, as malleable as Oswald’s, out of shape, stretching it till Mickey’s midsection looks like a rubber hose. There’s some vulgar comedy business with Pete spitting. Too late to board the steamboat, Minnie runs alongside it until Mickey uses a winch and hook to lift hold of her panties, a rather demeaning way to treat the leading lady, and deposit her on the boat. At the end of the cartoon Pete forces Mickey to peel potatoes, a parrot laughs mockingly at the mouse, and Mickey gets angry, beans the parrot with at grown potato, and laughs. This material seems all too conventional. sometimes crass and even mean-spirited.

But the opening image of Mickey at the wheel of the steamboat shows why Steamboat Willie fired the public imagination. Mickey is smiling, happy, and whistles a tune we hear on the soundtrack. It’s not just the fact that Steamboat Willie had synchronized sound that made it a breakthrough: it’s the way that Disney adapted his characterizations and stories to the opportunities that music provided. By making music, either by whistling or by playing his improvised instruments later in the cartoon, Mickey becomes a source of pure joy.

The middle of the cartoon has no story: it’s just Mickey playing his instruments, whether they are spoons and pots or various animals. For example, the musical sequence begins when a goat eats the sheet music for “Turkey in the Straw”; Mickey discovers that by turning the goat’s tail like a crank, the goat becomes a living gramophone, with the music coming from his mouth. Steamboat Willie has incurred criticism for Mickey’s supposed sadism, pulling a cat’s tail, or stretching a goose’s neck, or, startlingly, pressing a female pig’s udders in order to produce musical sounds. But in the context of the Oswald cartoons, in which characters’ rubbery bodies rarely sustain any harm, this doesn’t seem so bad to me. Presumably viewers in the 1920s would accept the convention of the period’s cartoons that these animals are not really being hurt. Instead, the audience would be carried along by the music Mickey is playing with these animals, in an effect that is simultaneously comedic and pleasurable simply as music. The cartoon’s ending, with the reversion to expressions of violent anger, is a letdown: it would have been better had Steamboat Willie ended with a musical gag of some sort. It’s Mickey the music maker who first won audience’s hearts.

The final cartoon in this DVD set is The Skeleton Dance (1929), animated by Ub Iwerks, the first of Disney’s Silly Symphonies series. This cartoon is a little masterpiece even though it has no actual story. Whereas the “Turkey in the Straw” segment in Steamboat Willie was an extended interlude between more conventional story sequences, The Skeleton Dance is entirely founded on music. The cartoon begins as a sort of visual tone poem, establishing an eerie mood both through the music and through classic visual elements from horror tales: lightning, the ominous eyes of an owl, a seemingly deserted church and graveyard, a howling dog (who looks like Pluto in silhouette!), and flying bats. Soon the cartoon introduces notes of humor as well, with black cats battling by pulling each other’s noses as if they were rubber bands. This reversion to Oswald-style visual humor is abruptly interrupted when a skeleton looms from behind a tombstone separating the cats and then leaps directly at the “camera,” invading the viewer’s space. Four skeletons then begin their dance, which takes up the rest of the cartoon, sometimes entertainingly silly, sometimes macabre, sometimes both at once.

The success of The Skeleton Dance led to Disney’s long series of Silly Symphonies which were built around music, frequently classical music. I’ve written about a number of Silly Symphonies before after seeing them at Lincoln Center (see “Comics in Context” #136: “Before There Were Cars”). Last December I attended the Museum of the Moving Image’s four-part retrospective of Silly Symphonies, including The Skeleton Dance and demonstrating how Disney further developed his new invention, the musical cartoon, but that is a topic for a future installment.

–Copyright 2008 Peter Sanderson