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Having spent the last several months covering this summer’s major movie and DVD releases associated with comics, animation, and megaheroes, and reviewing comics exhibits at two museums, I can at last turn to a subject that I’ve wanted to address for a long time: Neil Gaiman’s revival of Jack Kirby’s The Eternals, illustrated by John Romita, Jr., which was collected into a hardcover edition earlier this year. It’s been a long time since I’ve done one of my close readings of a comics series in this column, and Eternals affords me a perfect opportunity.

Last year, to pave the way for the Gaiman revival, Marvel reissued Jack Kirby’s original Eternals series from 1976-1977, collected into a handsome hardcover edition. This was long overdue, and I suspect that it would not have happened when it did if Gaiman had not agreed to write an Eternals series. In the course of critiquing the Gaiman series, I will be referring to and critiquing the Kirby Eternals as well.

One of Kirby’s inspirations for The Eternals was Erich von Daniken’s 1968 book Chariots of the Gods?: Unsolved Mysteries of the Past, which purported that extraterrestrials visited Earth in ancient times, that they became the “gods” of ancient religions, and that they were responsible for amazing achievements such as the construction of the Egyptian pyramids and Stonehenge. One of my friends in my school days was a staunch believer in von Daniken’s book, and I found his efforts to convert me tiresome and irritating. The book is scientific nonsense, but it provided Kirby with a fruitful basis for his fantasy epic.

According to The Eternals, in prehistoric times the First Host of the Celestials, enigmatic aliens of colossal size and tremendous power, came to Earth and experimented on humanity’s apelike ancestors. Although the phrase did not exist in the 1970s, as far as I know, the Celestials were engaging in genetic engineering. As a result, the Celestials created three species of humanity. There were the Eternals, immortal, handsome beings who could not be killed, who lived upon mountaintops, and who developed superhuman abilities, enabling them, among other things, to fly through the air. There were the Deviants, grotesque creatures who lived beneath Earth’s surface, and who were genetically “unstable”: whereas a normal human child may resemble his or her father and mother, a Deviant child was radically different genetically from his parents. Finally, there were the “ordinary” human beings, like you and I, who lived on Earth’s surface, midway between the Eternals of the sky and the subterranean Deviants.

Humans of ancient times thought of the Eternals as gods or superhuman heroes. Hence, the ancient Greeks thought that Zuras, ruler of the Eternals, and his daughter Thena, were Zeus, ruler of the gods, and his daughter Athena. The people of ancient Rome mispronounced the name of the Eternal called Makkari as “Mercury.” Ordinary humans thought of the grotesque Deviants as devils and demons.

In The Eternals Kirby further developed certain concepts he had been developing since the 1960s. He previously demonstrated his interest in genetic engineering by co-creating the High Evolutionary, who debuted in Thor #134 (November, 1966). This master geneticist accelerated the evolution of animals, transforming them into his “New Men,” who had human intelligence, the power of speech, and semi-human physiques. In Thor #146-152 (1967-1968) Kirby and Stan Lee revealed that the Inhumans were the result of genetic experimentation by the extraterrestrial Kree. Later, in stories for DC’s Jimmy Olsen, Kirby created “The Project” (later dubbed Project Cadmus) and its sinister counterpart, the “Evil Factory,” both of which experimented in genetic engineering and cloning.

More importantly, through the 1960s and 1970s, Kirby returned time and again to the concept of two warring races of “gods” or “superhumans,” with ordinary humanity caught in the middle. There were Thor and his Asgardian allies against Loki and the forces of evil. There was Professor Charles Xavier and his team of X-Men pitted against Magneto and his Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. There were the “good” Inhumans such as Black Bolt arrayed against Maximus the Mad and his Inhuman allies. There were the HIgh Evolutionary’s noble New Men, called the Knights of Wundagore, and his archfoe, the Man-Beast, an wolf that evolved superhuman powers, who would lead other renegade New Men. Most prominently, in his “Fourth World” comics, Kirby depicted the benign New Gods of New Genesis in conflict with the satanic Darkseid and his fellow gods of the planet Apokolips.

In various respects the Eternals and Deviants are similar to the New Gods of New Genesis and Apokolips. Darkseid and his minions seek the Anti-Life Formula and conquest of the universe. In Kirby’s Eternals series the Eternals go to war with the Deviants to prevent them from conquering the Earth and attacking the Celestials.

But if the focus of the Fourth World books was on thwarting Darkseid’s quest for ultimate domination, in The Eternals Kirby appeared less interested in the battles between the Eternals and Deviants than in a more challenging subject: the nature of God. In my columns about the second Fantastic Four movie (see “Comics in Context” #184–185), I have investigated how in Lee and Kirby’s “Galactus trilogy,” the Watcher and Galactus represent different visions of God: a benevolent God who is unwilling to interfere directly in human affairs, and a God of wrath who has sentenced all of humanity to death. In the Fourth World books God is represented by “the Source,” who is unseen and mysterious. The gods of New Genesis consider the Source to be benevolent, and their leader, Highfather, who significantly resembles an Old Testament patriarch, can communicate with him. But those who attempt to breach the Wall in outer space which separates us from the realm of the Source are punished by being transformed into “Promethean giants,” imprisoned, immobile, on the wall.

The Eternals represent the gods with a small “g” of ancient mythologies, who possessed human-like personalities and emotions, whose powers, though vast, were nonetheless limited. The Celestials represent God with a capital “G”: all-powerful and beyond human comprehension. The Source was mysterious, but was nevertheless clearly benevolent towards the New Gods of Apokolips. In contrast, the motivations and goals of the Celestials are almost wholly enigmatic. In the present day of Kirby’s Eternals series, the Fourth Host of the Celestials arrive on Earth, apparently to spend fifty years studying human civilization. At the end of that time, the leader of the Fourth Host, Arishem the Judge, is to deliver his verdict. If it is negative, humanity and the Earth will be destroyed. The odds do not look good: the series’ omniscient narrator tells us that over the ages the Celestials have performed genetic experiments on numerous worlds, and that not one world so far has received a favorable judgment.

But what is the basis for Arishem’s judgment? What do the Celestials expect of us? In Kirby’s vision the Celestials created humanity for reasons that remain unknown and expect us to fulfill some purpose that likewise remains unknown. This is the human dilemma in real life. Why are we here? If God exists, what does He expect from us?

Like the Galactus trilogy, Kirby’s Eternals is a tale about the possible end of the world. According to Christianity, the end of the world is the time of the Last Judgment; “Arishem’s” name looks as if it were a Hebrew word, but he too is to deliver a Last Judgment. Moreover, as I’ve suggested in the past, the end of the world can serve as a metaphor for one’s own mortality. Arishem’s “fifty-year judgment” fits the metaphor. One’s own death may seem a long way off–perhaps fifty years–but within a period of time that nonetheless seems uncomfortably short.

Although Kirby is considered an icon today, and his Eternals remains a remarkable achievement, back in the mid-1970s it was a commercial flop.
But why?

One reason might be that, when it is read one issue at a time, the series seems to meander. As with the Fourth World, Kirby had created a vast tapestry, and would move from one set of characters in one issue to another set in the next issue. So, for example, the efforts of Ikaris, Thena, Sersi and Makkari of the Eternals to thwart Deviant Warlord Kro’s attack on Manhattan in issues 3-5 are followed by Ajak’s confrontation with three SHIELD agents in issues 6-7, and then Kro and Thena’s journey to undersea Lemuria in issues 8-10, which introduce two new significant characters, Karkas and the Reject. This series isn’t like, say, Spider-Man, which keeps its star, Spider-Man, in the spotlight in every issue.

Nor do Kirby’s Eternals storylines always receive conventionally satisfactory conclusions. Kro’s invasion of Manhattan halts not because he was defeated, but because he meets his former lover Thena and, his feelings for her aroused, he agrees to a truce. In Kirby’s Eternals Annual #1 a super-strong being named Tutinax is transported through time to the present, where he begins a titanic battle with the Reject. But the fight abruptly ends when Tutinax simply fades back to the past, and possibly because the story had run out of pages. Though Kirby’s dynamic battle scenes in Eternals make fight scenes in contemporary superhero comics look tame, he understandably seems less interested in standard superhero combat than in unveiling the next set of wonders he has devised for the audience.

It should be no surprise that the Kirby Eternals reads better collected into a single volume than it did as separate issues. I wouldn’t be surprised if Kirby thought of it as a serialized version of what we would now call a graphic novel, in the days before that format existed.

There’s also the problem that Kirby was less adept at dialogue than Stan Lee, or Roy Thomas, or various other writers who were working at Marvel and DC in the 1970s. At times Kirby definitely shows a tin ear for dialogue: “That’s funky corn,” Makkari tells Sersi (Kirby Eternals collection, p. 73), as the rest of us go “Say what?” However, rereading the Kirby Eternals, I find the dialogue to be much better than I remember, sometimes producing truly well-turned phrases, as you shall see. It’s true that the dialogue may seem dated by today’s standards, but Kirby was working in the melodramatic style that was standard in superhero books at Marvel and DC at that time. (I recall one editor instructing me in the 1980s, “Write more purple.”)

A particular problem with the Kirby Eternals may be that its heroes really did not conform to the Marvel mode. One thinks of a Marvel superhero as a seemingly ordinary human who lives a realistic daily life, but who assumes a costumed identity to go on fantastic adventures. Even Lee and Kirby’s Thor, a Norse god, transformed into the human surgeon Don Blake. The Marvel heroes’ everyday identities make it easier for the readers to identify with them. Kirby’s lead character in Eternals, Ikaris , may initially pose as a human called “Ike Harris,” but he drops this “secret identity” almost immediately. Kirby’s Eternals lack “normal” human identities and lives: they are full time “gods,” if you will. Normal humans, such as Margo Damian and Dr. Samuel Holden, may hang out with the Eternals, but very much remain subsidiary characters. Moreover, in classic Marvel series of the 1960s, the heroes had ongoing personal problems, which many have condescendingly referred to as “soap opera,” but that allowed for still further reader identification. Again to cite Thor, there was the thunder god’s doomed love for the mortal Jane Foster, forbidden by his father Odin. Kirby’s Eternals has no such subplots. Marvel introduced three-dimensional personalities to the superhero genre in the 1960s, but Kirby’s Ikaris, Makkari, Ajak, and Zuras, seem flat in comparison. This isn’t true of the entire Eternals cast: Thena, Sersi, Kro, the Reject, Karkas, and Sprite all develop multidimensional personae as the series goes along. But none of them is the central figure of the series. Indeed, Kirby’s Eternals really has no central figure, since not even Ikaris appears in each issue.

Recently in his blog Mark Evanier pointed out that Steve Ditko, co-creator of Spider-Man and Doctor Strange, disagreed with what became the classic Marvel approach to portraying its superheroes: “The company dynamic had evolved into offering a diet of “˜heroes’ who were either flawed or uncertain of their own heroism and values. That’s not the way Ditko saw the world.” (http://www.newsfromme.com/archives/2007_09_11.html#014000). And indeed, Ditko characters like the Question definitely don’t go in for self-questioning.

All of this suggests to me that it really was Stan Lee who was primarily responsible for something that is considered a quintessential Marvel concept–the flawed, self-doubting hero–since his principal collaborators in the 1960s, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, pursued a different direction when they subsequently wrote their own superhero comics.

So The Eternals was canceled in 1977, apparently so fast that Kirby did not have the time to devise a satisfactory conclusion to the series, or perhaps he simply did not want to; the final issue, 19, simply wraps up the concluding three-parter about Ikaris’s attempt to stop his evil cousin Druig from finding and using a Celestial weapon. As far as loyal readers were concerned, Arishem was still standing in the Andes, contemplating the forthcoming fifty-year judgment.

Marvel writer/editor Roy Thomas reintroduced the Eternals in Thor in the 1980s. In Thor #300 (for which I was a consultant on the plot) the gods of Earth’s pantheons, such as the Asgardians and Olympians, attempted in vain to defeat the Celestials, but Arishem delivered an early judgment in Earth’s favor, and the Fourth Host departed the planet. There was a twelve-issue Eternals series in 1985 and 1986, illustrated by Sal Buscema and initially written by Peter B. Gillis; editor in chief Jim Shooter disliked Gillis’s scripts, so Walter Simonson wrote the final four issues. Of all the attempts to portray the Eternals before the Gaiman revival, the Gillis-Simonson series was by far the most interesting and creative, but it has been grossly underrated and did not lead to an ongoing series. Subsequently Marvel demonstrated no interest in using the Eternals outside of one-shots and guest appearances, and certainly none in reprinting the original Kirby series. In 2003 Marvel even produced a ghastly mini-series called The Eternal, which utilized the names like “Eternal” and “Celestial” from Kirby’s series but otherwise had nothing to do with it. I expect that if Neil Gaiman had not accepted the offer to write a new Eternals series, the recent flurry of interest in the characters would not have occurred.

Gaiman’s first issue opens with a medical student named Mark Curry, and perceptive readers who already know the Eternals will realize that if you pronounce that name fast, you will get “Makkari.”

In interviews Gaiman has expressed amusement over the fact that in the Kirby Eternals series Ikaris used the transparent alias of “Ike Harris.” But “Ike” only uses that alias in the first issue, before he begins operating openly in the modern world as Ikaris. People are not about to suspect that “Ike Harris” is Ikaris, because at that time they don’t know that Ikaris exists.

Gaiman’s alias for Makkari, “Mark Curry,” is in the tradition of Kirby’s “Ike Harris.” When Makkari appeared in Marvel’s Quasar series, the late Mark Gruenwald gave him the alias “Mike Kahry.” Gaiman’s alias is an improvement.

And here’s an interesting coincidence–or is it? A while back I was watching a rerun of The Sopranos on A & E–the first episode of Season 3, “Mr. Ruggiero’s Neighborhood,” I think–and discovered that the nickname of a recurring character, FBI Agent Dwight Harris, is “Ike.” Well, that’s probably because President Dwight Eisenhower was nicknamed “Ike.” Then again, one of The Sopranos‘ writer/producers, Robin Green, used to work at Marvel and wrote the celebrated 1971 Rolling Stone cover story about the company (http://www.geocities.com/jonhulkholt/rs91.facefront.1.html). The first explanation is probably the correct one, but the second is certainly tempting.

Back on page 1 of issue 1, Mark Curry is “trying to remember why I want to be a doctor.” This may be because the Roman god Mercury, known to the ancient Greeks as Hermes, carried the caduceus, a wand that had wings at the top and that was encircled by two serpents. The caduceus has been adopted as a symbol of medicine by various organizations. However, these groups have confused Hermes’ caduceus with the staff of Asclepius, the Greek god of medicine, which has only one serpent and no wings (http://drblayney.com/Asclepius.html). Most medical associations, it seems, use Asclepius’s staff as their symbol, not the caduceus.

If Gaiman is aware of the difference between the caduceus and the staff of Asclepius, then perhaps that further explains why Mark Curry is questioning his decision to become a doctor. As we shall learn later in the series, another Eternal, Sprite, has removed Makkari’s memories and given him this new identity and role in life. But just as the caduceus is not supposed to be a symbol of medicine, Mark Curry/Makkari/Mercury is not meant to be a physician.

Curry states that “I’d hoped that I’d dream of racing a Ferrari down an open track forever.” Hermes/Mercury was the swiftest of the Olympian gods, and Kirby gave Makkari a “mania for fast vehicles” (Kirby p. 74). That’s reminiscent of Johnny Storm’s fascination with hot rods, come to think of it. It’s a bit strange that Makkari is so interested in “fast vehicles” since he can move at superhuman speed, but perhaps it’s because at times he needs to transport others at superhuman speed (as in Kirby’s Eternals #5).

Of course, Sandman readers should pay attention to Gaiman’s references to dreams, whether it is Curry’s dream or the Dreaming Celestial.

Mercury/Hermes is also the messenger of the Olympian gods, and this fact may explain why later in the series Gaiman turns Makkari into the “messenger” of the Dreaming Celestial.

The reader who realizes that Mark Curry is Kirby’s Makkari then faces an unexpected question. Why does Mark Curry have dark skin? Kirby made Makkari look Caucasian, which would be appropriate for someone who was mistaken for a Greco-Roman god, and all other artists who have portrayed Makkari have done the same, until now.

The likely answer is that Gaiman wanted his Eternals to have a multiracial cast.

In the interview in the back of the hardcover edition of this Eternals series, Gaiman states that he red the Kirby Eternals but acknowledges that he has not read all of the subsequent stories featuring the characters. It is possible then, that Gaiman is unaware that in the second series, Peter Gillis already supplied the Eternals with racial diversity.

In a brief sequence set in the Eternals’ city of Olympia (Kirby pgs. 184-185), Kirby introduced Kingo Sunen, an Eternal who dresses in samurai armor, and who associated with actual Japanese samurai in centuries past. Ikaris’s companion Margo Damian recognizes him as “a famous Japanese movie star,” and we are informed that he stars in samurai movies. In other words, what if Toshiro Mifune were one of the Eternals? Gillis gave Kingo Sunen a much larger role in the second Eternals series, which made clear he had Asian features.

Moreover, in the second series Gillis and artist Sal Buscema created a black Eternal, Phastos, who was based on Hephaestus, the blacksmith (get it?) of the Olympian gods.

However, in this same interview Gaiman explains that he did not want his Eternals to have as large a cast as his previous Marvel series, 1602. So perhaps he knew about Phastos and Kingo Sunen but felt he did not have room for them. So he turned Makkari non-Caucasian instead.

I would have preferred sticking with Kirby’s visual depiction of the character, but this change doesn’t bother me much, since I can explain it away.

Sprite altered reality, transforming his fellow Eternals into seemingly ordinary humans, unaware of their true natures, by creating a “Uni-Mind” (a group mind) that drew power from the Dreaming Celestial. It’s possible that Sprite could thus have altered Makkari’s physical appearance, although then one must ask why he didn’t bother doing that to the other Eternals.

Another possibility is that since Eternals have “absolute mental control” over their bodies (as established in The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe), then each can alter his or her own physical appearance at will, at least within limits. So Makkari may have altered his own appearance at some point in the past. Later, Gaiman and Romita present a flashback showing Makkari in ancient Egypt, where he was believed to be the god Thoth (Gaiman issue 3 page 2, see also issue 4 page 8). Makkari has dark skin in this flashback, which would be appropriate for looklng Egyptian. So possibly Makkari has altered his physical appearance at various times in the past in order to match those of the people of the countries to which he travels.

Instead of dreaming about a Ferrari, Curry instead has on of his “weird dreams,” in which he is wearing his Makkari costume, is rescued by Ikaris from captivity by Deviants, and finally sees three immense Celestials (including Arishem on the left) in an extraordinary double-page spread drawn by John Romita, Jr (Gaiman issue 1, pages 2-3).

Far more successfully than any other visual sequence in the new series, this double-page spread captures the feeling of awe that the Kirby Eternals induces issue after issue. Perhaps the greatest difference between the two series is that the Gaiman-Romita Eternals tends to keep to a (comparatively) more human scale, since so many of the Eternals in Gaiman’s story have been reduced to living “ordinary” human lives. The epic grandeur of Kirby’s art and visual concepts for The Eternals is an essential part of that series. Perhaps Gaiman and Romita did not believe they could match Kirby in this regard for more than an occasional sequence like that double-page spread. But Gaiman takes a more psychological approach to his Eternals cast, making the relatively more human scale of his series more appropriate.

By the double-page spread even readers who have no previous experience of the Eternals may recognize that Gaiman is working a variation on a familiar trope of fantastic storytelling. This is what may be the archetypal story of the person who is seemingly ordinary and who leads a normal life, but who discovers that he has another, truer identity with extraordinary potential.

Gaiman’s novel Anansi Boys follows this pattern: the protagonist Charlie discovers that he is the son of the trickster spider god, and that he is the brother of another trickster deity, known as Spider, and Charlie ultimately wields the abilities of the spider god himself (see “Comics in Context” #105, 106, 107 and 108).

This is a variation on the traditional story device of the protagonist who is unaware of his true parentage and hence of his true station on life. Similarly, in Gaiman’s Stardust, the young hero Tristran does not learn until the story’s end that he is not a simple villager but the heir to the throne of Stormhold in the realm of Faerie (see “Comics in Context” #191 and 192).

According to Joseph Campbell’s monomyth of the hero’s journey, the protagonist starts out in a lowly position, perhaps having fallen from a higher one. So the protagonist may even be unaware of his rightful status. In the Star Wars films Luke Skywalker first appears as a farmboy, who does not know that his father was a Jedi Knight until Obi-Wan Kenobi tells him and, as herald in the monomyth, issues what Campbell terms the “call to adventure” for Luke to become a Jedi himself.

In Anansi Boys Charlie learns about his true identity from other characters, including Spider, just as Ikaris will inform Mark Curry that he is actually Makkari. But in other variations of this story pattern, the protagonist senses or glimpses his true identity through dreams or visions, or through having thoughts or exhibiting abilities that surprise even himself. His normal, everyday life is therefore a lie, preventing him from achieving his real, greater destiny. Hence Curry dreams about himself as Makkari, about Ikaris, the Deviants, and the Celestials.

It did not take me long to come up with an extensive list of other stories that follow this pattern. There’s Alan Moore’s Marvelman a. k. a. Miracleman, as well as Paul Jenkins’ The Sentry for Marvel: in both, middle-aged men have forgotten their past careers as superheroes, but reclaim their memories, powers, and heroic identities. There’s Moore and Dave Gibbons’ story “For the Man Who Has Everything” in Superman Annual #11 (1985), which was later adapted into an episode of the television series Justice League Unlimited: in the story, Superman is trapped in a fantasy of leading a “normal” life as a husband and father on Krypton that never exploded, from which he must wake to his real life as a superhero. Similarly, in the episode of Batman: The Animated Series titled “Perchance to Dream” (1992), in which the Mad Hatter captures Batman and gives him a dream in which his parents never died and Bruce Wayne never became a costumed avenger, and yet the dreaming Wayne comes to realize that this “life” isn’t real.

In live action television there was the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode “Far beyond the Stars” (1998), in which Benjamin Sisko finds himself as a science fiction writer in the 1950s who may only be imagining his life as a starship captain, and the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode significantly titled “Normal Again” (2002), in which Buffy is temporarily persuaded that she is an inmate in a mental institution who has only fantasized being a super-powered Slayer of vampires. This year there was the two-part Doctor Who story, “Human Nature” and “The Family of Blood,” in which the alien Doctor has transformed into a human being, and is living as a teacher in 1913 England, unaware of his true identity, but experiencing memories of his past through dreams. The Doctor’s companion Martha and ewven his enemies, the Family of Blood, attempt to convince him of his true identity, but he initially refuses to believe them and to give up his “normal” life.

Then there’s Philip K. Dick’s 1966 science fiction novelette, “We Can Get It for You Wholesale,” and the 1990 film adaptation Total Recall.

There’s even Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel The Last Temptation of Christ, adapted onto film by Martin Scorsese in 1988: these not only deal with a Christ who regards himself as human but struggles with the realization that he also has a divine nature, but also climax with the “last temptation”: a vision of a happy life as an ordinary human being, which proves to be merely a fantasy and a diversion from Christ’s true mission as Messiah.

So Mark Curry finds himself dissatisfied with his “normal” life, wondering why he is trying to become a doctor, while being puzzled by his “weird dreams” of being a superhuman in a world of superhuman beings and gods. On page 4 Curry seems in a lowly position in life, all right: he is exhausted, his girlfriend has left him, and he just got a phone call from a student loan company that “wasn’t good news.”

And then, the Campbellian herald arrives with the call to adventure: Ikaris, who tells Curry, “I’ve got some good news for you.” Curry replies, “Great. I need good news.” The word “gospel” means “good news,” and this religious allusion may be no accident.

Ikaris has come to tell Curry his true identity: “that you were an immortal, indestructible being” who has “power you’ve never dreamed of.” But Curry refuses to believe Ikaris and rejects the call. Those who know Campbell’s work know that rejecting the call to adventure is never a good thing.

Moreover, Curry tells Ikaris, “I’d say I don’t need a religion” (issue 1, page 5). Here Gaiman’s Eternals begins one of its major themes: the role of religion in a contemporary, rationalist world, as we will examine further next week.

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

Back in February at the New York Comic Con, during the panel about the forthcoming movie Will Eisner’s The Spirit, executive producer Michael Uslan recommended that we all go see the exhibit “Reflecting Culture: The Evolution of American Comic Book Superheroes,” that was opening at the Montclair Art Museum this summer (see “Comics in Context” #170). it turned out that Uslan lent a good number of comics and original comics artwork from his own extensive collection to the show. At the convention Uslan assured us that the museum, in Montclair, New Jersey, was merely “a half hour train ride” from Manhattan. Regular readers may recall that, as a result of my expedition to the Newark Museum to see the first section of “Masters of American Comics,” I was suspicious even then of Mr. Uslan’s assurance.

And I was justified. I decided to head out to the Montclair Art Museum on the show’s bright, sunny and delightful opening day, Saturday, July 14, and discovered from website research that on weekends there is apparently no direct route via public transportation from Manhattan to the museum. Moreover, I ended up not arranging to stay overnight with a friend who lived in a nearby New Jersey town, so my journey to Montclair was going to be a day trip. Getting out to Newark, New Jersey by train was simple enough. Waiting a long time in a grungy area of Newark as the summer sun beat down for the bus heading to Montclair was less appealing. But I was pleased to discover that Montclair itself is a rather pretty, upscale town, and that the bus stopped directly across from the museum. I disembarked, notebook in hand, ready to gather information for my column.

An introductory wall text, on “Definitions and Origins,” began promisingly by quoting a definition of the term “superhero” from Dr. Peter Coogan’s remarkable book Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre (see “Comics in Context” #162). The wall text goes on to state one of the themes of the exhibition: that superheroes are modern successors of the title hero of the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, of the heroes of ancient Greek mythology, and of legendary figures like Robin Hood. Moreover, “comic book superheroes became manifestations of American history, culture, and folklore.” And so, the exhibition shows visitors, during World War II superheroes battled the Axis powers. Wonder Woman became a feminist icon. In the 1960s Stan Lee and his collaborators created superheroes with more complex personalities, who felt alienated from the rest of society. In the 1970s superhero comics tackled social issues like drug addiction. The 1960s and 1970s saw the rise of non-Caucasian superheroes like the Black Panther and the John Stewart version of Green Lantern. The “deconstruction” of superheroes got under way in the 1980s, and numerous superhero comics stories were done about the 9/11 attacks. And I suspect that most of my readers are surprised by none of this.

Unfortunately, the Montclair show doesn’t move much beyond what one might term Superhero Comics 101, the most basic kind of course in the genre. Certainly there must be many visitors to the show who know little about the history of the superhero genre, to whom much of this information will be new. But walking around the exhibition, I was reminded of mainstream media articles about superhero comics circa 1970, marveling that they were dealing with social and political issues: comic books had suddenly become “relevant.” Over thirty-five years have passed, but the Montclair show delves little more deeply into the genre. “Masters of American Comics” raised the bar for museum shows about comics considerably. In co-curating a show dealing with Stan Lee’s superhero comics for MoCCA, the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (www.moccany.org), I was careful in writing the wall texts both to provide the basic information for people who knew little about the Marvel series of the 1960s, but also to provide insights that I hoped that even longtime Marvel aficionados would find illuminating and different.

What was most rewarding about “Reflecting Culture” was looking at the original artwork and vintage comic books on display. I continue to be amazed that actual comic books that I bought as far back as the 1960s–and even some comics from the early 21st century–are now displayed as museum pieces. But I was pleased with the selection of vintage comic books on display here, ranging as far back as the Golden Age of the 1940s, and, unlike in Geppi’s Entertainment Museum (see “Comics in Context” #176), the accompanying texts provided satisfying explanations of each book’s significance. There was original comics artwork on display by Neal Adams (from a Batman story and Green Lantern), Dave Cockrum (from Uncanny X-Men), Gene Colan, Amanda Conner, Steve Ditko (from The Amazing Spider-Man), Will Eisner (from The Spirit), Carmine Infantino (from The Flash), Gil Kane, Jack Kirby (from Captain America’s Bicentennial Battles), Joe Kubert, Frank Miller (from Batman: The Dark Knight Returns), Jim Lee, H. G. Peter (an unpublished Wonder Woman splash page), and John Romita Sr. (from The Amazing Spider-Man). Certainly there were many major superhero artists whose work was not represented, but the examples of art by the artists I’ve just named was all worthy of close inspection. There was even Superman co-creator Joe Shuster’s own 1971 recreation of the cover of Action Comics #1, Superman’s first appearance.

I was particularly delighted with Joe Kubert’s cover art for Batman #310 (1979), showing Batman battling the Gentleman Ghost atop a runaway horse-drawn carriage. Daringly, Kubert put the hero and villain in the background, while the horses powerfully hurtle into the foreground, as if to burst from the printed cover and trample the reader. The dynamic power of the galloping horses reinforces the sense of action conveyed by Batman’s fight with the Ghost. The accompanying label commends Kubert’s “powerful, naturalistic style” and “his masterful eye for realistic detail.” But the secret of Kubert’s artwork in “Reflecting Culture” is his ability to make his heroic figures, whether it is Batman, Hawkman, or Sgt. Rock, appear larger-than-life and iconic and simultaneously seem realistic and credible. In his own way, Alex Ross also achieves this same amazing alchemy. (During the run of “Reflecting Culture,” the Montclair Art Museum is also featuring a commendable exhibit, “Comic Book Legends: Joe, Adam, and Andy Kubert,” honoring these three New Jersey residents, just off the entrance lobby.)

Another of my favorites was the original artwork for Gil Kane and Murphy Anderson’s cover for Green Lantern #26 (1964), in which Star Sapphire, shooting an energy beam into Green Lantern’s power battery, triggers another beam which unmasks the superhero as Hal Jordan. (It is reproduced on the cover of the recent Showcase Presents Green Lantern Vol. 2 paperback. It was a pleasure to be able to study Kane’s elegant linework, as inked by Anderson, up close. This also gave me the opportunity to consider the composition of the cover drawing. Star Sapphire’s downward descent, at a slight angle, is roughly echoed by her power beam. Green Lantern’s stance exactly parallels the other power beam which snatches off his mask. While Star Sapphire’s figure is nearly vertical and exudes confidence, Green Lantern/Hal stands at a decided slant, as if he is literally taken aback by his sudden unmasking. She is triumphant; unmasked, he is vulnerable and seems defeated. The two figures form a classical triangular composition, mirrored by their respective power beams.

The argument has been made that hanging pages of original comic book art on the wall of a museum distorts the experience of reading comics because each individual page is only a segment of a longer work. The “Masters of American Comics” exhibition displayed some entire Spirit stories by Will Eisner and an entire EC war story by Harvey Kurtzman, but only excerpts of one or a few pages from Marvel and DC stories drawn by Jack Kirby.

On the other hand, by displaying a single page, or a two-page sequence, a museum focuses the viewer’s attention on that specific segment of the overall story. Whereas in reading the comics story, the reader will probably get caught up in the narrative, if he sees one or two individual pages on a museum wall, he may notice details and nuances that might otherwise have slipped his conscious notice.

The pages in Montclair that most impressed me were pages 15 and 16 from issue 12 of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ masterpiece Watchmen. In the Watchmen trade paperback, page 16 is the reverse side of page 15. Arguably, these two pages work better as a unit within the issue when they are seen side by side. This is how the Montclair Art Museum presents the original art for these pages.

These two pages make up a short scene within a larger story sequence in the twelfth issue. Since Alan Moore notoriously writes extraordinarily lengthy and detailed scene descriptions in his plots, I do not know which visual aspects of this scene should be attributed to writer Moore and which to artist Gibbons. Together, however, they created a two-page sequence that is a masterpiece of comics storytelling, and which whets my interest in someday embarking on a panel-by-panel analysis of the entire Watchmen series.

(And if you have not read Watchmen, I am about to give away one of the secrets of its plot, so you may wish to skip ahead twenty-seven paragraphs.)

In the first panel Adrian Veidt, alias Ozymandias, stands inside his Antarctic headquarters, gazing into a doorway. Veidt has modeled himself after Alexander the Great, his costume evokes the garb of classical civilization, and he looks rather like an ancient Greek statue as he stands in profile. He wears a placid expression, looking perhaps as if he is lost in thought. If you have the book, then you know the context: he is looking into his “intrinsic field subtractor” chamber, which he just employed to (apparently) disintegrate the godlike Doctor Manhattan, and in the last panel on the previous page he was mulling over the scientific aspects of destroying the Doctor, apparently oblivious to the moral cost of murder.

In the background of this first panel the alert reader will see the silhouetted figures of the superheroes Nite Owl and Rorschach, as if they embody Nemesis, out to avenge the murder of their colleague. They stand in another doorway, and perhaps are merely watching at this point, and not coming forward,

But revenge will come sooner than they could reach him. A balloon, containing the word “Veidt,” hovers to the right of his head, its tail leading offpanel, towards the second panel in the page’s top tier.

This second panel shows another of Watchmen‘s superheroes, Laurie, the Silk Spectre, who was once Doctor Manhattan’s lover, who has surely just witnessed Veidt’s seemingly successful attempt to murder him, and who knows (as do Nite Owl and Rorschach) that Veidt is the mastermind behind the massacre of half the population of New York City. (As I have pointed out in my “1986: The Year That Changed Comics” lectures at MoCCA, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, issue 12 of Watchmen takes on new resonance.) Whereas Veidt was shown turned in profile, Laurie faces the reader, angrily aiming a gun and telling Veidt, “You’re an asshole” (a line which should confirm to the museumgoer who hasn’t read Watchmen that this isn’t a book for small children).

Circular lines curve around Laurie: these are the walls of a circular tunnel (as shown two pages earlier), leading in from the Antarctic snows (accounting for the puddles marking Laurie’s footsteps). The circular lines also serve to emphasize Laurie visually, perhaps harkening back to the occasional circular panels used in comics of the 1930s and 1940s. (Look at an early Batman story, for example.) If Laurie is enacting the role of avenging angel here, the circular lines might even suggest a halo.

Laurie is aiming her gun right at the reader. What this actually signifies is that in this one panel the reader has been given Veidt’s point of view as he, off-panel, turns his head and sees Laurie pointing the gun at him. Moore and Gibbons hardly encourage the reader to identify with Veidt in Watchmen, but by giving the reader Veidt’s literal viewpoint for this one panel, they encourage the reader to consider what it would feel like to see someone about to kill him or her.

Subtly the top tier heightens the intensity of the drama by bringing the reader closer to these two characters, panel by panel. The initial panel on the top tier shows Veidt from his head down to his knees. The second panel gives a closer view of Laurie, from her head to the top of her thighs. The third panel brings us even closer to Veidt, starting from the middle of his forehead, as he raises his left leg, as if that is the only way it could be seen in this close-up.

With the third panel the point of view shifts to Laurie’s. (The first panel was from an “objective” point of view, not that of any of the characters.) Veidt is in the process of turning from his profile position in the first panel to a position facing her. What is most notable about this panel, though, are the multiple images of his hand, held as if to administer a karate chop, and of his left leg, moving up as he is about to launch himself into the air. In contrast with the characters’ static poses in the first two panels, the third panel suggests that Veidt is moving to the attack so quickly that it his movement cannot be “caught” by the artist: it is the equivalent of a blurred movement in a photograph. It’s the kind of multiple image effect one might expect to see in The Flash, and presumably Moore and Gibbons are suggesting that Veidt, though he lacks super-powers, is somehow moving almost too quickly for the human eye to register fully. Even the transcription of Veidt’s battle cry (“Hhhhiiiiiii. . . .”) suggests movement.

The second tier consists of a single, long panel. It unites all four characters in the same visual space and serves as an establishing shot, marking the location of each within this chamber. The characters are divided into groups of two. In the background Nite Owl and Rorschach have moved forward, enough so that Nite Owl’s figure is now partly in the light, whereas Rorschach remains mostly in silhouette. The positions of their legs shows that they are now walking. In the foreground Veidt and Laurie are united by the bright blast of her gun, which not only connects the two figures visually but illuminates them both amid the shadows that have swallowed up much of the chamber (as well as Nite Owl and Rorschach).

The figures of Veidt and Laurie are sharply contrasted, and not simply because they are of different sexes. (This panel provides a clear view of Laurie’s microminiskirted legs, for example. Laurie becomes an archetypal female resisting Veidt’s personification of male aggression.) Veidt has no leapt into the air towards Laurie to attack her, thrusting forward his left leg (which he was raising in the previous panel), which looks as if it would have hit her in the lower abdomen (raising some nasty sexual implications). Veidt’s cape flows outward behind him. Hence Veidt is a basically horizontal figure here, whereas Laurie, firing her horizontal gunshot, stands vertically, in opposition to him.

Yet though Veidt and Laurie are in opposition to each other, their figures also echo each other. Veidt continues to utter his battle cry from panel three as Laurie fires her shot, whereupon it continues in the second tier as a cry of pain (“Yaaa. . .”). Whereas in panel three Veidt was extending his left arm to deliver a karate-style blow, in the second tier he holds his arms closer to his body, bringing his hands together, seemingly to clasp them over a gunshot wound. This pose echoes Laurie’s as she holds her arms together, as her hands hold her gun. As Veidt’s left leg extends forward in attack position, his right leg bends, perhaps in reaction to the pain he feels. Laurie extends her right leg forward, anchoring herself to the floor as she fires the shot, but her left leg bends back, perhaps in response to the recoil effect of the gunshot.

Moreover, whereas in the top tier Laurie and Veidt both wore facial expressions of anger, now their reactions are quite different. Veidt looks somber, as if reacting to the pain, while Laurie looks somewhat anguished, perhaps feeling some fear as she saw Veidt hurtling towards her, or perhaps distressed by the act of shooting at him, however much he deserves it.

The bottom tier continues the visual opposition of Laurie (vertical) and Veidt (horizontal): Veidt lies on the floor, seemingly dead, with his left hand over his heart, with blood staining his costume over his heart, and with his right hand, partly clenched, resting in a small puddle of blood on the floor. Laurie stands upright, although not entirely confidently: her head looks down towards Veidt’s body, and her left knee is bent. The bright light from the gun has been supplanted by smoke which curls eerily upward from the barrel.

In the background, Nite Owl and Rorschach continue their advance forward, both now mostly in the light. Shadow covers Nite Owl’s face, though, masking his reaction to what he’s seen; Rorschach, of course, wears a mask which conceals his facial expressions.

The first panel of the bottom tier hides the facial expressions of Veidt and Laurie as well. The seemingly dead Veidt’s face is turned away from us. Laurie has moved, standing beside Veidt’s head, with her back to the reader. We cannot see her face, but her body language–her stance, the position of her head–suggests her uncertainty as she carefully studies the seeming corpse.

Again, the “camera” is being moved subtly closer to the figures. Whereas the middle tier gave us a full figure shot of Laurie, in the third tier’s first panel we see her from the lower third of her head to just above her ankles. We still see the full length of Veidt’s body. In the second panel of the bottom tier, we draw still closer, seeing both Veidt and Laurie from the waist up. Now we can see Veidt’s face, which is once again in profile, but still not Laurie’s. This has the effect of focusing our attention more on Veidt. From the position of her head, Laurie is clearly looking at Veidt’s bloodied clenched hand, and we are being directed to do the same. The starlike points of the puddle of blood further emphasize Veidt’s hand, and oddly contrast with the rounder contours of the puddle of water marking Laurie’s path.

In the Watchmen paperback, one must turn the page to see what comes next, creating more of a feeling of suspense. But in the museum, pages 15 and 16 hang side by side, so the movement of the “camera,” coming increasingly closer to Veidt’s hand, is unbroken (save for having to shift one’s eyes to the top of page 16).

This pattern of slowly zooming in on something, or slowly pulling the “camera” back from it, is a characteristic Watchmen technique. Issue one begins, on the cover, with an extreme close-up of the Comedian’s trademark happy face button, with blood on it, as if from a head wound, and surrounded by a rivulet of blood, from the Comedian’s body. In each succeeding panel on page one the “camera” pulls further up and back, until it reaches the level of the window from which the Comedian fell to his death. Similarly, issue one closes with the “camera” pulling up and back from Laurie and Dan (Nite Owl) standing on a balcony.

The sequence with Veidt’s hand here in issue 12 creates a reverse effect from the opening page of issue 1. In the first issue the “camera” pulled up and back from a small object, amid blood, that was the symbol of the killing of one superhero (the Comedian) by another (Ozymandias). In issue 12, the “camera” step by step moves closer to Veidt’s clenched hand, lying amid blood, giving us a close-up of the hand in the first panel of the top tier of page 16. In the next panel the “camera” moves in still further, as Veidt opens his hand and reveals the bullet, covered with blood, that Laurie shot at him. Earlier, on page 9, Veidt had implied in conversation with a disbelieving Nite Owl that he was capable of catching a bullet that had been fired at him; now we see the proof. The blood-covered bullet becomes not the symbol of death but the symbol of one superhero’s (Veidt’s) ability to survive a murder attempt by another superhero (Laurie).

The third panel cuts to a closeup of Laurie, aghast at realizing what Veidt has done. Then the rhythm of three panels per tier is abruptly interrupted by the second tier, which consists of a single long panel, in which Veidt just as suddenly comes fully to life, raising himself on one hand and kicking Laurie in the abdomen with his left leg. Notice that this parallels the structure of the previous page, in which the top tier of three panels was followed by a second tier consisting of one panel, in which the figures of Veidt and Laurie were joined by the gunshot with which she attacked him. In the second tier of page 16 the figures of Laurie and Veidt are again joined, this time by Veidt’s leg connecting with her stomach. Thus Veidt succeeds in the kicking attack that Laurie thwarted on the previous page. Veidt still occupies a horizontal position and Laurie is in a vertical one, but Veidt is in the process of raising himself to a standing (vertical) position, and Laurie is toppling to a horizontal position, lying on the floor.

Thus Veidt and Laurie exchange positions, both literally and figuratively: he stands up, triumphant, while she lies down, in pain and defeat. This sequence is also a sinister variation on the archetypal pattern of symbolic death and resurrection, as Veidt, who sees himself as a hero but actually fills the role of Watchmen‘s primary villain, rises from apparent death.

In this second tier we see Veidt and Laurie from the same direction as Nite Owl and Rorschach do. This subliminally prepares us for the third tier of panels, in which Nite Owl confronts Veidt. With the violent assault over, the third tier returns to the steady three panel per tier pacing thatWatchmen usually employs.

Veidt’s first line in this tier is “There. Something else I wasn’t sure would work,” presumably about his success in catching the bullet, and echoing his comment about his seeming murder of Doctor Manhattan on page 14. This suggests that Veidt cares as little about Laurie’s pain as he did about the moral horror of murdering his former teammate Doctor Manhattan. Veidt’s figure is cropped in this panel so that we do not see his head, but we can imagine his indifferent expression from his dialogue. Instead the “camera” turns our attention to Laurie’s facial expression, reflecting her intense pain, as she lies on the floor, her arms positioned so that her unseen hands clasp her abdomen, just as Veidt’s seemed to cover his seeming wound on the previous page.

On rereading Watchmen the reader may observe that, despite Veidt’s confidence, he is as wrong in believing that he succeeded in killing Doctor Manhattan as Laurie was wrong in thinking she had shot Veidt.

Nite Owl and Rorschach have come much further into the chamber, while the “camera” looked elsewhere in the previous five panels, and they now stand fully in the light. As Laurie did in the first panel of the previous page, Nite Owl demands Ozymandias’s attention by calling his name: “Veidt!” But Veidt will defeat Nite Owl’s attempt at confronting him much more easily than he survived Laurie’s.

In the final tier’s second panel the “camera” radically changes position, so that we now seem to be standing behind Nite Owl and directly behind and to the immediate right of Rorschach. Whereas the previous page showed Nite Owl and Rorschach slowly advancing from the background, now we see Ozymandias advancing towards the foreground. This time the figure in the far background is Laurie, who begins to rise to her feet.

Nite Owl insults Veidt (“Veidt, you bastard. . . .”) and begins to threaten him, but his insult and threat seem standard melodramatic clichés, and his voice trails off (“I’ll. . .”). As if wearily scolding a child, Veidt calls him by his first name over and over (“Oh, Daniel, Daniel, Daniel, Daniel. . . .”), thereby failing to acknowledge his costumed persona. Then, in the page’s final panel, Veidt walks right past Nite Owl and Rorschach and out of the panel: the panel crops most of Veidt’s figure, as if he has already mostly passed out of the scene. “Do grow up. . . .” Veidt tells Nite Owl, who turns, looking bewildered at him. Not only has Nite Owl utterly failed to stop him, but Ozymandias has verbally reduced his would-be opponent to the level of a small child. Rorschach’s cropped figure has slightly turned to watch Ozymandias as he passes, showing us part of his mask: Rorschach’s thoughts on the scene he has witnessed these last two pages remain characteristically enigmatic. In the background Laurie stands upright, but her head is bowed, presumably in pain and defeat.

Nearby hung the original art for a page from another classic Alan Moore story, Batman: The Killing Joke (1988), illustrated by Brian Bolland. This page was from the sequence in which the Joker recounts his (possible) origin, based on the 1951 story “The Mystery of the Red Hood” from Detective Comics #168. In Moore’s version an unnamed comedian is forced by criminals to pose as their supposed masked leader, the Red Hood, but while they are robbing a chemical plant, they are confronted by the Batman. This page has numerous superb visual effects. In one panel we see double images of the Batman in the Red Hood’s goggles, magnifying the threat perceived by the frightened comedian. Bolland takes a surprising but effective minimal approach to the key moment when the Red Hood, desperate to escape Batman, falls into a vat of chemical wastes: the artist represents the two antagonists by only a glove and part of a cape. Best of all is the large panel in which the Red Hood, still masked, climbs out of the chemical wastes outside the factory. Bolland depicts the barbed wire and vegetation in highly detailed, naturalistic fashion, but what is most impressive are the concentric circles in the tainted water, marking when raindrops fall: the patterns are at once beautiful and eerie, thus setting the stage for what will happen on the next page, when the Red Hood unmasks to discover the wastes have given him the garishly colored hair and face of the Joker.

My final favorite artwork in the show was Alex Ross’s gorgeous painted cover for a reprint edition of The History of the DC Universe. Strangely, the accompanying label at the museum claimed that the painting exemplified the influence of Surrealism on Ross’s work, offering Salvador Dali’s work as an example. No, no, no, Ross does not deal in distortions of reality but in endowing the fantastic figures and places of comic book universes with a persuasive semblance of reality. His History of the DC Universe cover really demonstrates the influence on Ross of both the great artists of the Golden Age of Illustration, such as his hero Norman Rockwell, and of cinematic montage.

There is so much in this painting to admire. My favorite section shows the head of the Batman; as usual, Ross makes him look like a real man, wearing a mask made of real fabric, his eyes visible through slits, and simultaneously like a formidable, iconic figure who is larger than life, rather than, say, a guy going to a costume party. Ross makes the bat “ears” on Batman’s cowl so long that they conjure the image of devil’s horns, for the Batman is a man who takes on the image of a fearsome bat–or a devil–to defend us from truly devilish menaces. Look how the tall, thin “horns” of Batman’s cowl are echoed by the tall, thin spires of Gotham City’s skyscrapers to the left of his head. Bats, his symbol, fly amid the skyscrapers, and simultaneously over a scene of the boy Bruce Wayne sitting in darkness behind the slain bodies of his parents. The bats hover over the scene, like omens of the boy’s eventual transformation into Batman. Ross’s positioning of this scene near the head of Batman may suggest that this is something that the adult Batman is constantly thinking about: it is his motivation for his endless war on crime. I am also struck by the pose of the kneeling young Bruce. His body language doesn’t suggest the initial shock and horror of witnessing the murders of his parents. Rather, this scene seems to be set moments later, when that initial shock has passed, and young Bruce has relaxed into a state of quiet mourning, and perhaps contemplation, which will eventually lead to the decision that will shape the rest of his life. The blue colors of the Batman section of the painting suggest both night, which is Batman’s realm, and the “blues”–his endless sorrow.

Ross places Wonder Woman’s head against a background of classical architecture, suggesting both her home among the Amazons on Paradise Island and her series’ background in Greek and Roman mythology. Ross pursues the mythological theme with the section of the painting devoted to Captain Marvel. I like his depiction of the Captain shouting as lightning dances over his body. It is as if moments before, young Billy Batson shouted the magic word “Shazam,” and the enchanted lightning transformed him into his superhuman counterpart. Even better is the background: pyramids amidst the desert, reminding us that the Captain derives his powers from the wizard Shazam, who came from ancient Egypt. The orange palette of this area of the painting suggests the desert sands.

For the section of the painting devoted to DC’s World War Ii heroes, including Sgt. Rock, the Haunted Tank (complete with the specter of the Civil War’s General Jeb Stuart), and the Blackhawks in their planes, Ross chooses the color red, perhaps as a reminder that war involved death and blood

I love the visual parallels and echoes in this painting, such as the way that the large foreheads of the Guardians of the Universe, who protect the cosmos from injustice and danger, parallel the enormous brow of Darkseid, the DC’s Universe’s foremost embodiment of all that the Guardians oppose.

I also greatly admire the way that Ross unifies the entire composition with circles: the twin planets New Genesis and Apokolips from Jack Kirby’s The New Gods, the time bubble holding three members of the Legion of Super-Heroes, the encircled swastika representing the foes of the World War II heroes, the circular body of the Guardians’ giant power battery, reflecting the images of their Green Lantern Corps. The right of the painting, which would have appeared on the front of this wraparound cover, is dominated by the face of Superman against what is really an exploding circle: the destruction of the planet Krypton. But shooting above the cataclysm is a small, nearly circular object: the tiny spacecraft bringing the future Superman to Earth.

There was more than just comics art to see at the Montclair Art Museum, and I also explored its galleries of 19th and 20th century American art, its gallery devoted to the Hudson River School painter George Inness, and its collection of Native American artwork. Pleased with my visit, I exited the museum, had only a short wait at the bus stop just outside, and embarked on my expedition back home.

But I got off the bus only about five minutes after I got on. Where was my notebook? It was not in my pockets or my bag or on the floor in front of me. I asked to get off the bus and trudged uphill back to the Museum (How did that bus cover so much ground in such a short time?). The notebook wasn’t at the bus stop, or along the path to the Museum, and although the Museum staff was very helpful, we couldn’t find it anywhere on the floors of the Museum either. So I ended up going back through the exhibit, reconstructing my notes on the pages of a magazine I’d brought. I left my phone number at the Museum, in case the notebook turned up, and checked with New Jersey Transit the next day, but the notebook had seemingly dematerialized.

Could it be that some museumgoer spotted it and gratuitously decided to steal it? But why? One of the guards suggested, “Maybe you take good notes.” Hmm.

To cheer myself up upon returning to Manhattan from Montclair, I went to see the movie Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. In it Luna Lovegood tells Harry about nargles, creatures that she claims have stolen many of her belongings. Harry doesn’t believe in them, but he may be mistaken.

I say that Montclair suffers from an infestation of nargles, who are even now attempting to use my notes to become celebrated Internet columnists on comics! Readers, feel free to visit “Reflecting Culture,” which remains at the Montclair Art Museum through January 13, 2008 but beware: the nargles of Montclair may exact a heavy price.

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

Here’s yet another marker of how much popular culture is changing. Sir Ian McKellen has a large repertory of roles that ranges from Richard III and King Lear to Gandalf and, of all people, Magneto in the X-Men movies. And now, as the narrator of the film adaptation of the fantasy novel Stardust, he has taken on the part of the voice of Neil Gaiman. Or, rather, the authorial voice that Gaiman adopted as the narrator of Stardust the novel.

This week I am continuing my comparison between Stardust the novel and Stardust the motion picture, which I began in last week’s column. As usual, I alert those who have not experienced them to go no further if they don’t want to encounter spoilers.

Before seeing the movie, I was wary about the reports at the 2006 San Diego Comic Con (see “Comics in Context” #144) and in the press about changes to the novel, notably the conversion of Gaiman’s Captain Alberic, a minor character who hunts and captures lightning from his flying ship, into Captain Shakespeare, a pirate captain with a fondness for dressing in drag. Upon seeing the movie, I rather enjoyed Robert DeNiro’s performance as the captain, with the comedic contrast between his threatening macho swagger when he is commanding his crew to his gentler, courteous manner talking with hero Tristan (Tristran in the book) and heroine Yvaine when they are alone in his cabin. In an August 5, 2007 article in The New York Times, Stardust director Matthew Vaughn compares the film to DeNiro’s 1988 comedy adventure film Midnight Run, so no wonder he cast DeNiro as the Captain.

I found Captain Shakespeare amusing, but only mildly so. For me his entertainment value is outweighed by the problems his presence creates for the movie. Stardust presents a world in which supernatural elements like magic and witches and a fallen star in human form (Yvaine) exist, but the book aims at giving the characters psychological credibility. To my mind, Captain Shakespeare just doesn’t fit.

If Captain Shakespeare is so thoroughly in the closet, why does he make Tristan and Yvaine his confidantes? I suppose that anyone who has kept a big secret for so long feels an urge to confess it to somebody. Moreover, the Captain just saved Tristan and Yvaine’s lives, so they owe him the obligation to keep his secret. But still, how can the Captain be sure that he can trust these two individuals whom he just met?

The Captain Shakespeare storyline strikes me as an example of anachronistically projecting contemporary attitudes into the past. Stardust is set in Victorian times, a period not generally associated with tolerance towards homosexuality. Moreover, Tristan is a youth from a small town, not from London, so his openmindedness on the subject seems more surprising. As for Yvaine, she presumably would not share any cultural prejudices towards sexual orientation. Here I again recall Cloud, the nebula who took the form of a teenage girl in Marvel’s Defenders series, who later shifted into male form, to her teammates’ surprise.

Later in the film Captain Shakespeare dances about in his cabin, wearing a tutu, while playing a recording of Jacques Offenbach’s music. I found myself wondering, if he’s trying to keep his sexual orientation secret from his macho pirate crew, why is he playing this music–the 19th century counterpart to Broadway show tunes–so loudly that the crew cannot help hearing it? Then I began wondering, if the Captain is unable to fulfill his wish of crossing over into the “real” world and visiting England, how did he get hold of a recording of French music? And why does the recording sound so good? Have you ever heard, say, the tinny sound of one of Enrico Caruso’s early recordings? Why does the Captain’s Offenbach recording sound as perfect as a 21st century CD? If this scene were actually as funny as it was surely intended to be, I wouldn’t be speculating about such matters while I was watching it.

Soon afterwards, when the Captain’s crew of macho pirates finally find the Captain wearing a tutu, it turns out to be no big deal. One of them tells the Captain that they always knew he was a “whoopsie.” Here I recalled the outing of the gay mobster Vito Spatafore in the first half of the final season of The Sopranos. Although Tony Soprano considers taking a tolerant attitude, since Vito is his best “earner,” the other mobsters’ reactions range from disgust to intense hatred, Tony gives in, and Vito is ultimately brutally beaten to death by other gangsters. So is it credible that a crew of pirates, who were perfectly willing to make Tristan and Yvaine walk the plank, would accept a “whoopsie” as their leader?

Besides, what is so funny in 2007 about a pirate captain in drag? For one thing, by the time the Stardust movie came out, there had already been three Pirates of the Caribbean movies centered on Johnny Depp’s sexually ambiguous pirate Captain Jack Sparrow. (In these films, furthermore, the suggestions of Jack’s bisexuality are less important than his ironic, antiheroic attitude towards the genre in which he finds himself.) Moreover, the basic joke of a figure of macho power and masculine authority turning out to be gay goes back at least thirty-eight years to the debut of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The Pythons were continually revealing characters who were judges, policemen, or who held similar traditionally “masculine” roles as gay. Back in the 1970s, when Python arrived on American television, this sort of gag was groundbreaking in American popular culture. Now the joke seems predictable and tired. Instead of being subversive, Stardust‘s Captain Shakespeare seems all too conventional a comedic figure. In 2007 the idea of a gay pirate even seems rather old-fashioned as a comic conceit.

Then there’s a character who was invented for the movie, Ferdy the Fence, who is played by Ricky Gervais, co-creator of the original BBC version of The Office and of the BBC series Extras, which is seen in the United States on HBO. I’m always glad to see–or hear–Gervais doing comedy; his vocal performance was what I liked best about the animated film Valiant (see “Comics in Context” #144). In Stardust Gervais performs a variation of his familiar comic persona, attempting to hold his own (in negotiations with Captain Shakespeare) but unable to conceal that he is in way over his head. This is entertaining.

But I wish that the filmmakers had realized that just casting Gervais and having him play this sort of role already served as an allusion to The Office and Extras. Instead, they gild the lily by showing us a sign reading “Ferdy’s Office” (get it?), and having Gervais utter a variation on his “Are you having a laugh?” catchphrase from Extras. This blatant sort of winking to the audience seems to me to be inappropriate to Stardust. According to the August 8, 2007 article in The New York Times, the novel “Stardust is also written in a consciously old-fashioned manner. [Gaiman’s] aim was to evoke the manner of early-20th-century writers like Lord Dunsany and Hope Mirrlees, who wrote fantasy stories of a sort that was sometimes called “˜faerie’. Hence, Stardust the novel should convey the impression to the reader that it could have been written in the 19th century, and ideally the movie would seem to be adapted from a Victorian work. Explicit references to 21st century pop culture break the illusion.

Ferdy eventually gets killed onscreen when the evil Prince Septimus thrusts his sword into his gut. This sequence was shown during the Stardust preview panel at the 2006 Comic-Con in San Diego (also in “Comics in Context” #144), and I still do not understand why. Why would seeing a popular comedy actor, playing a variation on his usual comedy persona, getting brutally slaughtered onscreen want to make us go see the movie? This scene was a downer when I saw it in San Diego, and it was a downer when I saw it in the complete movie. It’s a miscalculation on the filmmakers’ part.

To digress for a moment, this reminds me of the promo on Warner Home Video’s great new Popeye DVD set for its forthcoming direct-to-video animated film Superman: Doomsday, based on the 1990s “Death of Superman” storyline in the comics. The promo tells us that in the story Superman will be beaten to death onscreen. Now, I expect that this is partly intended as a warning to parents that this film is not intended for small children. On the other hand, it also seems intended as a come-on: watch Superman get beaten to death! (And in animation, which will make it seem more real than it did in static panels on the comics page. The promo makes no mention of any triumphant resurrection for Superman; perhaps that is not considered a selling point.) So I ask myself, why would I want to see this? Why should I find the film’s logo–a Superman emblem dripping blood–appealing? I suppose I’m just not sadistic enough to be part of contemporary superhero comics’ intended demographic.

What I find intriguing about Stardust the book is Neil Gaiman’s unusual approaches to familiar elements of fairy tales and fantasy stories. What bothers me about Stardust the movie is that although it is admirably faithful to the novel in many respects, it makes changes that make the story feel much more conventional and ordinary. Even such seemingly eccentric personalities as Captain Shakespeare and Ferdy the Fence really embody conventional comedy ideas–the macho figure in drag and the TV character doing a walk-on–that one might expect to see in any standard issue comedy movie nowadays.

I can see why the fates of Stardust‘s two major villains, Septimus and the ancient witch, known as Lamia in the film, get changed in the movie. In the book Septimus sets fire to the witch’s hut and plans to beat her to death with a club; instead a small venomous snake bites Septimus’s heel, causing him to die in terrible pain. Since Septimus had posed such a formidable threat through the narrative, it is ironic that he should prove to have a proverbial Achilles’ heel and be brought down not by the sort of brute force he wields but by such a tiny foe.

As for the witch, she was rejuvenated by magic, but every expenditure of magic by her ages her until by the book’s end she has become more ancient than she was at the start. Having cast Michelle Pfeiffer as Lamia, the filmmakers are understandably averse to having her spend most of the movie in old age makeup. At one point she creates an entire inn and transforms a goat into a human being, with seemingly little or no physical effect on herself.

The witch is determined to find the star and cut out her heart in order to rejuvenate herself and her sisters. Towards the end of the book, the witch, having “shrunk by age and time to little bigger than a child” (p. 239), confronts Yvaine, who “realized that she felt nothing but pity for the creature who had wanted her dead” (p. 240). Yvaine explains to the witch that she cannot steal her heart because “I have given my heart to another” (p. 240), namely Tristran.

This is solving a problem through the manipulation of language. The witch intended literally to take Yvaine’s heart, by killing her and physically carving it out of her corpse. Yvaine is pointing out that she has figuratively given her heart to the young man she loves. Metaphor is treated as reality: the witch reluctantly accepts the defeat of her scheme.

I suppose there is a psychological subtext here. The witch may represent a Bad Mother figure, both for Yvaine and for Tristran. Recall that in Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), the Wicked Queen (who also ages into an ancient crone) initially not only orders the death of the younger Snow White but demands that her heart be removed from her body as proof that she has been slain. Stardust‘s old witch, as Bad Mother, proves unable to deprive Yvaine of her heart and thereby figuratively prevent Yvaine and Tristran from maturing and falling in love with each other.

The ending of Stardust the novel uses the manipulation of language to bring about other resolutions. Victoria had promised Tristran that if he brought back the fallen star she would give him “whatever I [Tristran] desire.” For most of the book, Tristran interpreted this as meaning Victoria’s hand in marriage. But upon realizing that Victoria loves someone else, Robert Monday, Tristran chooses to interpret the phrase differently: “Then I desire that you should marry Mister Monday” (Harper Perennial edition p. 226). It’s as if Tristran was a lawyer (or a critic), who carefully examines statements for alternate interpretations, as if looking for loopholes.

Similarly, Princess Una of Stormhold, Tristran’s mother, is bound to serve the old woman Madame Semele “until the day that the moon lost her daughter, if it occurred in a week when two Mondays came together” (p. 229). Yvaine is the lost daughter, and when Robert Monday marries Victoria, “there will be two Mondays together!” (p. 231). This is a typical fairy tale trope: the prophecy of a seemingly impossible event which nonetheless comes true. The key is to find the proper interpretation of the impossible-sounding prophecy. This is a lesson that Macbeth learns too late about the three witches’ prophecies about the seeming impossibility of his own downfall.

These examples of manipulating language to resolve plotlines reminds me of the denouements of various Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. At the end of The Mikado, the Lord High Executioner Ko-Ko concocts a justification for claiming he had executed the young hero Nanki-Poo when he hadn’t: “It’s like this: when your Majesty says, “˜Let a thing be done,’ it’s as good as done–practically, it is done–because your Majesty’s will is law. Your Majesty says, “˜Kill a gentleman,’ and a gentleman is told off to be killed. Consequently, that gentleman is as good as dead–practically, he is dead–and if he is dead, why not say so?”. Once sentenced, Nanki-Poo is figuratively dead, and Ko-Ko argues that for legal purposes, that’s the same as being literally dead. This logic doesn’t seem that much different from claiming that a witch can’t physically steal Yvaine’s heart because she has figuratively given it to someone else.

Moreover, Stardust the novel ends with a sense of forgiveness, even towards its principal villainess. The novel seems to argue that being reduced to a decrepit state of extreme old age is sufficient punishment for the old witch. It demonstrates how far Yvaine has evolved as a character that, although she was so consumed by ire against the comparatively inoffensive Tristran for much of the story, by the book’s end she feels only “pity” for the woman who sought to kill her, and even kisses her goodbye.

This fits with the way that Tristran saves the unicorn from the lion earlier in the book not through intervening with physical force but by simply offering the lion the crown for which the two beasts were fighting. Stardust the book seems to advocate nonviolent means of coping with potential danger.

This is an unusually merciful ending for the villain’s storyline in a fairy tale, and I don’t think it works. It’s a sweet idea that Yvaine has “given her heart” to Tristan, but I don’t find it psychologically credible that the witch would give up her quest so easily, when she was willing to murder to achieve her goal. I can certainly see how the witch’s simply abandoning her quest would seem anticlimactic in a dramatic medium like film.

Moreover, in both the book and the film Tristran/Tristan spends the last portion of his journey back to the town of Wall in an unusually passive state for a hero of a tale of adventure: Madame Semele transforms him into a dormouse. (This is yet another example of the manipulation of language: Tristran did not realize that his agreement with Madame Semele to guarantee his safety left a large loophole enabling her to turn him into an animal, as long as she turned him back at the end of their trip.) This provides Yvaine with further opportunity to show her growing affection for Tristran, since she watches over him in his dormouse form.

So it is no surprise that the filmmakers radically revised the ending of Stardust. In the movie Lamia captures Yvaine, a sword-wielding Tristan joins forces with Septimus to invade the witches’ lair, and there is a climactic battle in which Lamia hurls bolts of magical energy, Septimus and the other witches are killed, and Lamia even resurrects Septimus as a kind of zombie to do battle with Tristan the newly trained swordsman. Ultimately Yvaine defeats Lamia by embracing Tristan and glowing with bright starlight, which destroys the witch.

Well, light is certainly a familiar ploy to use against evil: sunlight disintegrates vampires, bright light would defeat the DC Silver Age villain Eclipso, Doctor Strange uses the light of his Eye of Agamotto to overcome his enemy Nightmare, and then there’s the effect that dawn has on the gargantuan devil Chernobog in the “Night of Bald Mountain” sequence in Fantasia (1940). But it seems rather unfair to use light to destroy Lamia when it hadn’t been established as her vulnerability earlier in the movie. I preferred it when Tristan hurled lightning at Lamia during the battle. Captain Alberic/Shakespeare used his skyship to capture lightning (presumably by magic), so it was reasonable to have Tristan carrying lightning that he had acquired on the ship, and anyone, witch or not, would be vulnerable to a ball of lightning; that was playing fair with the audience.

But Yvaine’s luminescence in the battle scene isn’t merely starlight: it is explicitly shown to be the expression of her love for Tristan. So it’s the power of love that destroys Lamia. But that strikes me as a sentimental notion, and the movie doesn’t come up with a sufficiently clever way of making it work for me. (Note that in the Harry Potter mythos, Harry’s mother’s love provides him with a measure of protection from Voldemort, but J. K. Rowling never contends that the power of love could utterly obliterate Voldemort or evil.)

But my biggest problem with this climactic action scene is that it seems–again–so conventional. Here’s Tristan, finally wielding a sword, just like so many other fantasy heroes, and there’s the witch, shooting her FX bolts of magic, and look, it’s a walking corpse, as if we’ve never seen that in a movie before. The only moment in this scene that surprised me was when Lamia abruptly claimed that the battle wasn’t worth it and called it off. I momentarily found myself astonished, wondering if the movie was going to echo the novel in letting the witch go free, and whether that would work dramatically. And then Lamia said, in effect, she was just playing a mind game with her opponents, and enthusiastically reentered the fray. The key to making these obligatory climactic battle scenes work is to find ways of making the audience forget that they’ve seen variations on this scene in every other action-adventure movie. Stardust the book simply omits the climactic battle in order to focus instead on the way that various leading characters–Tristran, Yvaine, and even the witch and Victoria–have changed over the course of the story. Stardust the movie only finds that one moment in the final combat when I didn’t think: been there, done that.

In the movie, before he embarks on his quest, Tristan knows that he has a rival for the affections of Victoria, the young woman he idolizes: a standard issue bully with a superior attitude. As soon as I saw this man appear onscreen, I sensed the presence of the all too familiar. So Tristan pledges to find the fallen star for Victoria in order to compete with this other man. In the novel Tristran is more naive and innocent, and makes grandiose offers to Victoria to perform extraordinary feats to win her love, out of an excess of romantic sensibility (which would fit the period in which the book is set, as well as the adolescent mindset). It comes as a surprise to both Tristran and the reader when towards the end of the book Victoria informs him that she had already fallen in love with his employer, Mr. Monday, when he offered to fetch her the fallen star. (Since Mr. Monday is a man in his forties, as well as an authority figure, I wonder if there is an Oedipal subtext here: Tristran could never marry Victoria because she is bonded to a father figure.) Is it possible that Tristran, had he been more emotionally and psychologically mature, might have figured this out before embarking on his romantic quest?

Stardust is about a quest that takes its protagonist from one place to another geographically, but it is also about a quest of the spirit, whereby Tristran matures from callow youth to responsible adult. Part of that quest entails learning how to see other people (figuratively speaking) clearly, and Yvaine and Victoria make this quest as well.

One aspect of the book that the movie entirely omits is the evolution of Victoria’s personality. During the months of Tristran’s absence, Victoria is tormented by guilt over “my foolishness, my idiocy, that sent you off on your journeyings,” in which she feared that he might lose his life (p. 223). Having developed a sense of obligation, Victoria pledges to keep her word and marry Tristran. This parallels Yvaine’s own sense of obligation to Tristran. After he saved her life, she is willing to journey with him out of Faerie into the normal world, even though she knows she will transform into an unliving meteorite in this world without magic. Although the film retains Yvaine’s decision to give up her life thus (though in neither book nor film does she have to go through with it), the movie never moves Victoria beyond her initial shallowness.

Just as Tristran is initially blind to Victoria’s true feelings towards him, he is at first blind to Yvaine’s worth as an individual person. Having realized that she is the fallen star in human form, Tristran makes her his prisoner, against her will, and intends to present her to Victoria as a gift. In effect, in the book Tristran makes Yvaine his slave, treating her as property.

In reading the book, I found it hard to sympathize with Tristran on this point. How could he treat someone who (apart from glowing) looked, talked and behaved like a human being like himself as if she were his pet or possession? I can understand why the filmmakers tweaked this plot point: in the movie Tristan tells Yvaine that he will use a magic candle to transport her back to the heavens once he has shown her to Victoria. (This doesn’t seem like a bad deal, making Yvaine’s initial resentment towards Tristan in the movie more difficult to understand.)

But Tristran’s enslavement of Yvaine in the book is probably necessary to making the story work. It’s a metaphor for Tristran’s immature attitude towards women. He idealizes and virtually worships Victoria, blind to the evidence that we readers see, that she is merely toying with his emotions. Obsessed with Victoria, Tristran ignores the good qualities of other women, and, through a kind of metaphorical hyperbole, even ignores the personhood of Yvaine. (As noted last time, Tristran is not cruel, and begins to develop a growing sympathy for Yvaine soon after making her his captive.) Tristran regards Victoria as if she were a goddess, whereas Yvaine, as a living star, is a true “goddess” whom he initially treats as if she were merely his prize.

In Stardust, Gaiman’s novel Anansi Boys (see “Comics in Context” #105, 106, 107 and 108) and his television series Neverwhere (see “Comics in Context” #18), the male protagonist starts out on the wrong part in life, having become involved with the wrong woman. A number of Gaiman’s protagonists find themselves confronting the choice of changing their life’s path or suffering death (like Morpheus in Sandman) or a kind of psychological stasis. Look at the contrast in Gaiman’s 1602 between Captain America, who remains set in his ways, and Nick Fury, who undergoes change and thus brings about redemption (see “Comics in Context” #35 and 36).

Stardust the novel isn’t about Tristran becoming a warrior (although he does so in its Epilogue). It is about Tristran becoming more mature emotionally and psychologically, outgrowing naive romantic fantasies and developing empathy for others. Before visiting Victoria on his return, Tristran realizes that “he could no longer reconcile his old idea of giving the star to Victoria Forester with his current notion that the star was not a thing to be passed from hand to hand, but a true person in all respects and no kind of a thing at all. And yet, Victoria Forester was the woman he loved” (p. 208). Tristan does not prove his heroism through physical combat but through his generous, mature response when Victoria confesses her love for Mr. Monday but nonetheless offers Tristran her hand in marriage. Rising above what was once his ruling obsession, Tristran releases her from her obligation to him and gives his “blessing” to her marriage to Mr. Monday (thereby, without realizing it, bringing about his mother’s release from her own enslavement).
Shortly thereafter, Tristran confesses to Yvaine that “Everything I ever thought about myself–who I was, what I am–was a lie, Or sort of. You have no idea how astonishingly liberating that feels” (p. 234).

I find it appealing that the realization that he is in love with Yvaine seems to take Tristan by surprise once he has been disillusioned about Victoria’s true feelings towards him. Similarly, Yvaine’s growing love for Tristran seems to sneak up on her: she once again calls him “a ninny, a lackwit, and a. . .a clodpoll” (p. 233) just before they agree that they will not part again and walk “hand in hand.” Again, the movie takes a more conventional approach, and Tristran and Yvaine seem well aware of their love for each other before the climactic battle. The movie shows Tristran fall in love with Yvaine, but does not communicate the sense that he undergoes a complete change of perspective about “everything I ever thought about myself.”

I also like that the book indicates that this is only the first major step in Tristran’s psychological development. The movie shows Tristan and Yvonne, crowned as rulers, before a vast audience that includes townspeople of Wall such as Victoria as well as Captain Shakespeare and his pirates. (So now it’s no big deal to cross the barrier separating Wall from the realm of Faerie? What happened?) Weren’t they acting like self-centered adolescents only a week earlier? But in the book’s Epilogue, Tristran postpones assuming the throne, and instead leaves his mother, Una, as ruler. He tells Yvaine, “there are still so many places we have not seen. So many people still to meet. Not to mention all the wrongs to right, villains to vanquish, sights to see, all that. You know” (p. 245). Not until five years later do Tristran and Yvaine ascend the thrones, whereupon he rules with wisdom and finally becomes more like the warrior hero of fantasy adventure, leading his people to victory over the Northern Goblins. The implication is that Tristran and Yvaine learned more about the world, and perhaps themselves, during those five years of travels, finally becoming worthy of ruling their land of Stormhold.

Numerous critics and director Matthew Vaughn himself, in the Times article, have compared Stardust the movie to The Princess Bride, the novel and film written by William Goldman. Perhaps this accounts for some of the blatant comedy elements in the film, like Captain Shakespeare and the treatment of the ghosts of the sons of the Lord of Stormhold, who are a more somber presence in the Stardust book. The novel Stardust can be witty but it isn’t a comedy, except in the sense that it has a happy (though ultimately bittersweet) ending. Gaiman said in a July 26, 2007 article in Time magazine that “It’s not like a comedy like Shrek that’s making fun of the thing,” meaning the fantasy and fairy tale genres. “It’s the thing itself.” This is my main problem with the film’s comedy elements, even the more diva-ish moments in Michelle Pfeiffer’s performance: they come too close for my taste to subverting “the thing itself.”

But that wouldn’t bother me if what should be the heart of the film–the character arcs and love story of Tristan and Yvaine–came across more powerfully in dramatic terms. The key to The Princess Bride lies in the movie’s metafictional framing sequence: the old man telling the storybook tale t his cynical young grandson, who stands in for all the adults in the audience who consider themselves too mature and sophisticated for such stuff. Goldman uses his postmodern satire of fairy tale tropes to disarm the contemporary viewer, and make it look as if he is mocking the genre. But beneath all these seemingly subversive trappings, the supposedly old-fashioned story of true love and true heroism comes through with palpable dramatic power, surprising and winning over the young boy just as it does the movie’s adult audience.

I didn’t find the love story in Stardust the movie personally moving, and it should be. Whether because of the acting or writing or direction, It seemed to me too predictable, too conventional, too superficial to be truly affecting. And the theme of Tristan’s and Yvaine’s awakening to their true selves never truly registered. The love story doesn’t come across in the book as powerfully as I might like, either, but it is there, and I can imagine passages in the book, such as those I have quoted, being staged much more dramatically than in the current movie. Maybe one day Stardust will be dramatized again, on stage, or radio, or television, or movies, and more of its potential will be successfully tapped.

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

Here’s an example of how fast the culture is changing. As regular readers know, I’ve given many talks at New York City’s Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (www.moccany.org). Two years ago I decided to hold a discussion of Stardust, the novel written by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by Charles Vess, both luminaries of the comics world. Nobody showed up. A month and a half ago, I was sitting in a local restaurant, gazing out the window, and saw a bus go by, bearing a advertisement for the Stardust movie on its side.

Last month I write about how the makers of the movie Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer so disastrously failed in their attempt to translate classic stories by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, notably their “Galactus trilogy,” to the screen. (See “Comics in Context” #184–185, and Quick Stop contributor Paul Dini makes his own incisive attack on the film in his podcast “Dini Double Feature” #3.) In contrast, the Stardust movie is considerably more faithful to its source material. Neil Gaiman sold the movie rights to a director he trusted with the material, Matthew Vaughn, and persuaded him to hire Jane Goldman, who collaborated with Vaughn on the screenplay (see “Comics in Context”#144). In numerous recent interviews Gaiman, who is one of the movie’s producers, has made clear he is happy with the finished film.

The movie still differs from the book in numerous respects. The changes range from the slight (the hero is named “Tristran Thorn” in the book, but “Tristan,” like the Wagnerian hero, in the movie) to major (a radically revamped final act, in which various characters meet different fates than they do in the book). A short episode in the book, in which Tristran is befriended by Johannes Alberic, captain of a flying “sky-ship,” becomes an extended sequence in the film which metamorphoses Captain Alberic into the pirate Captain Shakespeare, a considerably more flamboyant character.

Sometimes changes were made for budgetary reasons. In the book there is a battle between a lion and a unicorn, but to save on the CGI budget, only the unicorn appears in the film. Some changes were made due to the demands of dramatizing a prose story onscreen. Hence, Stardust the book devotes its opening chapter to the story of Dunstan Thorn, leading up to his son Tristran’s birth; the movie greatly condenses this section in order to introduce Tristan more quickly. And sometimes it seems that Gaiman was simply overruled by Vaughn and Goldman, who wanted to take their own approach to an aspect of the story. (Gaiman entertainingly describes the process of adapting Stardust into film in an August 8, 2007 National Public Radio interview.)

While I can understand the reasons why various changes were made in adapting the book, it is my role as a critic and independent scholar to show how even minor changes to a significant work of fiction can result in the loss of valuable nuances in the book. (And if you haven’t either read the book or seen the film, consider yourselves given spoiler warnings.)

Take the lion and the unicorn episode, for example, from Chapter Five. It serves many purposes. For one thing, as Tristran realizes, the battle between the two creatures is a reenactment of a famous nursery rhyme (“The Lion and the Unicorn were fighting for the crown. . . .”). The book has already established that Tristran is journeying through the enchanted realm of Faerie: this episode further suggests that this is the world of fairy tales, in which children’s fantasy stories take on reality. The lion and the unicorn appear on the royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom, so their presence in Stardust marks its version of Faerie as a specifically British fantasy world. Moreover, Stardust‘s lion and unicorn may serve as an allusion to Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, in which a battling lion and unicorn likewise appear. Alice and Tristran each recalls the nursery rhyme when he or she sees the battling lion and unicorn.

Although these subtexts are all worth notice, they are less important than what the episode conveys about the characters of Tristran and the book’s leading lady, Yvaine, the star in human form who has literally fallen to Earth. So far Yvaine has been utterly contemptuous towards Tristran, throwing mud at him and insulting him as soon as they first met in Chapter Four. Tristran doesn’t have Yvaine’s problem with anger management, but he is wrapped up in his quest to find a fallen star and bring it back to Victoria, the young woman whom he believes he loves. He is so obsessed with Victoria and his quest that he is rather lacking in empathy towards other people.

“”˜I broke my leg,” said the young lady [Yvaine].
“˜I’m sorry, of course,’ said Tristran. “˜But the star.’”
(Stardust, Harper Perennial edition, p. 103)

Tristran isn’t so “sorry” that he offers to do anything to relieve Yvaine’s pain or to comfort her. Moreover, once he realizes that Yvaine is the fallen star he seeks, he takes her prisoner, binding her to himself with a magical chain. He intends to give her to Victoria, as if she were not a person but an animal or object. Although the book never uses the word, this naive, innocent young man is nonetheless treating her as a slave.

But Tristran probably doesn’t realize the import of what he has done to Yvaine. Nor is he cruel: by the start of Chapter Five he makes a splint for her leg, offers to find her a doctor, and worries that she’ll starve. (Actually, according to the book, stars don’t eat.)

When they encounter the battling lion and unicorn, Yvaine demonstrates her own deep capacity for compassion, even for these fearsome beasts. “‘Stop them,’ whispered the star. “˜They will kill each other.’” (p. 114). When it becomes clear that the lion will kill the unicorn, Yvaine pleads with Tristran to try to stop the battle. Although Tristran knows that he cannot possibly stop the battling creatures by force, and that they would probably kill him as well, he nonetheless advances till he is only “an arm’s length from the beasts” (p. 115). Recalling the nursery rhyme, Tristran picks up a crown lying in the nearby grass and places it on the lion’s head; with that, the fight is over. Despite her own broken leg, Yvaine makes her way over to the unicorn and comforts it; she insists that they stay with the wounded animal, “and Tristran had not the heart to refuse her” (p. 116).

So through this episode the book first reveals Yvaine’s capacity for great empathy and kindness. It also depicts Tristran’s first important act of bravery in the story. Moreover, although at the end of Chapter Four, Tristran accepted Yvaine’s description of him as “a ninny, a numbskull, a lackwit and a coxcomb,” his solution for taming the lion is rather clever. (As with “The Tale of the Three Brothers” in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, children’s stories and rhymes prove to contain genuine wisdom.) He may be naive, often unthinking and self-deluded, but Tristran can rise above these failings and display true intelligence. Further, why did he risk his life to save the unicorn? Was it simply his emerging capacity to care about other beings than himself and his idealized vision of Victoria? Or was Tristran also acting out of a growing unconscious affection for Yvaine? Tristran embarked on a quest to find the fallen star in order to please Victoria; Yvaine effectively asked him to go on a quest to save the unicorn, and he obeyed, even though his conscious mind warned him against it. Stardust is principally the story of Tristran’s development from callow boy to mature adult, and this episode presents a striking step in that development.

The sequence concludes with Yvaine and Tristran lying on opposite sides of the unicorn, but still joined by the chain, on which Tristran focuses his attention just before falling asleep. Yvaine and Tristran are separate but linked, and his efforts to hear her quiet singing suggest he wishes he were figuratively closer to her. Even though Yvaine had earlier warned Tristran that she would do anything she could to obstruct her quest, in saving the unicorn’s life, they have acted in unison, foreshadowing the emotional bond that will grow between them.

The chain reminds me of the handcuffs in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 film The Thirty-Nine Steps, which serve a similar thematic purpose: its hero on a cross-country quest is handcuffed to a woman who resents him and intends to thwart him, but they end up as both allies and lovers.

But a CGI lion was judged to be too expensive for a single scene, and the scene really isn’t essential to the story. So in the film Tristan and Yvaine encounter the unicorn, who is needed for subsequent plot developments, under more peaceful circumstances. And yet look how much the lion-and-unicorn sequence in the book contributes to the careful reader’s understanding of the main characters, the setting in Faerie, and some of the book’s themes. I wonder if the lion’s fascination with the crown might even serve to parody the obsessions of other Stardust characters–the old witch (played by Michelle Pfeiffer in the film) and the murderous Septimus–with power.

In order to find the fallen star for Victoria, Tristan/Tristran had to cross over from normal reality into a world of the supernatural.

In Joseph Campbell’s The Hero of A Thousand Faces, he describes the various phases of the archetypal “hero’s journey” monomyth that underlies adventure stories. Among these is the protagonist’s “crossing of the threshold” which separates the normal, ordinary world from the realm of adventure, which is often enchanted. To get past the threshold, the protagonist must contend against a “threshold guardian.”

Stardust the novel makes its threshold wonderfully explicit. Tristran lives in the British town of Wall, which is named after an actual wall, which separates the town from a literally enchanted realm, that of Faerie. There is only a single gap in the wall, which is guarded by the townspeople of Wall, who are determined not to allow any of Wall’s children or any visitors to the town pass through into Faerie; apparently, the adult townspeople of Wall have no intention of going there. The only exception to the prohibition comes once every nine years on May Day, when the townspeople of Wall cross through the gap to attend a fair that is held in the meadow immediately on the other side.

The nature of the wall raises questions in my mind. Does the wall, which comes out of the woods and reenters them, have end points, enabling someone to walk around it? Is the wall presumably some kind of dimensional barrier, and Faerie actually located in another dimension? That would explain why Captain Alberic/Shakespeare couldn’t just sail his flying ship over the wall.) Probably wisely, Gaiman leaves the answers to these questions as mysteries: fairy tales do not conform to scientific principles. But his narrator does explain in the book that “Faerie is bigger than England, as it is bigger than the world (for, since the dawn of time, each land that has been forced off the map by explorers and the brave going out and proving it wasn’t there has taken refuge in Faerie. . . ) ” (p. 63). This suggests that while Faerie seems on the surface to be part of our world, just over that wall, it is actually an alternate reality, constructed over the ages by the imaginations of storytellers.

The movie avoids referring to the enchanted realm as Faerie. Why? Was the name considered confusing because Tristan does not encounter any actual fairies in the film? Was it thought that movie audiences nowadays cannot separate the word “fairy” from its alternate meaning as a slur against gays? By using the term “Faerie” for the realm beyond the wall, the book suggests that this is a truly magical world which perhaps predates human civilization in Britain. Moreover, Stardust is set in the 19th century, and its use of the term “Faerie” connects the book with the tradition of depicting fairies in Victorian literature and art.

Most importantly, Gaiman’s use of the name “Faerie” in the book makes it immediately clear to the reader that this is indeed an enchanted realm on the other side of the wall. One of my problems with the movie is that the world on the other side of the wall never seems like a truly magical land to me. It looks beautiful, certainly, but it looks and seems real. Referring to it as “Stormhold” makes it sound like another nation, not a supernatural domain.

This may be a difficult distinction to make clear. Certainly the movie’s “Stormhold” has witches and ghosts and even a unicorn. But Macbeth has witches and ghosts, too, yet no one contends that Scotland is a literally enchanted realm comparable to the land of Faerie. The witches in Macbeth seem like anomalies in an otherwise normal world, or they represent supernatural forces that are normally hidden from mortal view. The Stardust movie makes Stormhold look so realistic that its witches and unicorn likewise seem like anomalies to me. At one point in the book (p. 63), Gaiman’s narrator recounts a legend that as mountain range in Faerie is actually the body of a sleeping giant. The reader can then imagine a mountain range with a vaguely humanoid form, adding to his sense of a magical world, but how could a film visually convey that?

Other recent movies successfully make their distinctions between the normal and magical worlds. Take The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: as soon as the kids step through the wardrobe, they are surrounded by snow (at the wrong time of year) and sight a faun and talking beavers. The sheer number of unusual, supernatural phenomena plays a role. It’s always clear in the Harry Potter movies that Hogwarts is a magical place, what with ghosts and paintings with moving, talking figures, and staircases swinging about with minds of their own.

In Stardust the book Gaiman quickly establishes the supernatural feel of Faerie once Tristran crosses over there: he encounters a “hairy little man”–“if man he was,” notes the narrator-, as well as “tiny people” who emit a flickering light, who might be actual fairies. Later, memorably, there is a talking tree (acknowledged by Gaiman to be inspired by Tori Amos) and, much further on, a talking badger. None of them make it into the movie. As early as page 63, the book’s narrator assures us that “Here, truly, there be Dragons. Also gryphons, wyverns, hippogriffs, basilisks, and hydras.” But in the film’s Stormhold, the supernatural still seems to me to be the exception rather than the rule.

In the film, when Tristan and Yvaine first find Captain Shakespeare’s flying pirate ship soaring unto view, it initially seemed out of place to me: I hadn’t seen anything so massively, spectacularly supernatural in the film up to that point. In the book I accepted Captain Alberic’s flying ship right away. Having read about so many other impossible things by that point, I accepted the ship as a reasonable addition.

The most interesting aspect of the wall in the book for me is that the male townspeople of Wall take turns acting as guards–including Tristram himself and his father Dunstan, each of whom ends up violating his duty by crossing over into Faerie. In other words, this is the only case I can think of in which the protagonist is himself one of Campbell’s threshold guardians! In order to become a hero, he has to give up the role of threshold guardian and defy his former fellow threshold guardians.

In the book this also means freeing oneself from the townspeople’s own version of groupthink. The townspeople of Wall are devoted to not letting anyone cross the barrier either way between their world and Faerie. But why? Neither Dunstan nor Tristran seem to know, nor does anyone else in Wall say why.

The townspeople’s guardianship of the wall seems to me to be a metaphor for a mindset that fears and resents the unknown, that insists on conventional thinking and behavior, and that discourages all but the truly insistent on pursuing alternative paths through life. The only people whom the townspeople of Wall allow to pass through the gap have “a look in the eyes, and once seen it cannot be mistaken” (p. 4). Perhaps Tristran too developed this “look.” It’s as if Wall is a fairy tale version of an archetypal small town, whose citizens are crippled by provincial ways of thinking, and the land over the wall represents the archetypal big city, where those willing to embark on the quest can find “miracles and wonders” (p. 13).

In the movie there only seems to be one threshold guardian for the wall: an ancient man who is nevertheless amusingly formidable in preventing people from crossing the gap. (Does he never sleep?) I think that the movie misses something important here. The book has presented us with a powerful image of an entire community that devotes itself to preventing individuals from leaving and making a different kind of life. (Suddenly I find myself thinking of television’s The Prisoner.) In the movie it may well be that the community doesn’t even know that there is an enchanted world on the opposite side of the wall, and there is only this one aged, lone eccentric who shoos (or bears) people away from the threshold.

But what about that exception, on May Day every nine years, when the townspeople cross the threshold just far enough to attend the Faerie fair? This initially puzzled me, but I decided that these May Days are like Mardi Gras and Carnival, or Halloween or Saturnalia. There is a tradition of holidays when the normal rules of order and proper behavior are suspended. It is as if these holidays are outlets for emotions, for sides of our personalities, for activities, which are suppressed during the rest of the year in order that society may function in an orderly fashion. And so in Stardust the book, that outlet for the people of Wall comes once every nine years.

In the movie, though, the enchanted realm’s meadow and its fair are permanently off limits to the people of Wall. Perhaps the filmmakers didn’t want to puzzle the audience as to why there was an exception to the rule about not crossing the threshold.

As noted, Stardust‘s leading lady is Yvaine, a star in human form. who has fallen to Earth. The idea of a star in human form is not new. There is even a Marvel character, Cloud, a member of the Defenders in the 1980s, who was an entire nebula who took the form of a teenage girl (and sometimes a teenage boy) on Earth. I dealt with the concept in this column in my discussion of P.L. Travers’ first Mary Poppins book, in which one of the Pleiades appears as a young girl named Maia and even goes Christmas shopping in London (see “Comics in Context” #158).

What I found most intriguing about the Maia episode, and another one in which Mary Poppins hangs paper stars in the sky, is that they imply that in the world of Mary Poppins, science is wrong. Similarly, after meeting Yvaine, Tristran tells her “that he had always supposed stars to be, as Mrs. Cherry had taught them, flaming balls of burning gas many hundreds of miles across, just like the sun only further away” (p. 111). Mary Poppins and Stardust postulate that science is merely illusion, a notion that is appealing although not to be taken seriously. Science tells us that our planet is a miniscule part of a cosmos too vast for us to comprehend, to which we mean nothing. It is a bleak vision of reality. Wouldn’t the universe seem to be more benign if it had a more human scale, if the stars turned out to be people like ourselves, or to be tiny lights that we could reach out and touch just by climbing Mary Poppins’ ladder?

Still, one of the problems that I have with Stardust, both as a book and as a movie, is in accepting Yvaine as actually being a star. I don’t have trouble with Maia, because Mary Poppins is a more whimsical sort of book than Stardust, which takes a more dramatic tone. I feel that I should take Yvaine more seriously as a character than I do Maia. Are we to imagine that Yvaine and her fellow stars exist in humanoid form, albeit with the ability to shine, up in the heavens? Or do they exist in some other sort of form, and Yvaine took on human form when she fell into the realm of Faerie (just as the book and film tell us that she would transform into an unliving piece of rock–a meteorite–if she left Faerie and entered the “real” world)? Even if stars exist in the heavens in humanoid form, wouldn’t their native realm be very different from Earth’s? Yet Yvaine seems to have no trouble adjusting to Earth.

Certainly, Yvaine gives off light, but she does not seem to me to be a different kind of being in essence from Tristran/Tristan and the other humans. I find myself thinking back to Lee and Kirby’s “Galactus trilogy,” in which another celestial being literally falls to Earth–the Silver Surfer–and encounters a human being–Alicia Masters. Lee and Kirby depict the Surfer as initially not comprehending the ways and nature of humanity, until Alicia opens his eyes not just to the value of the human race, but to the potential for humanity–qualities such as nobility and compassion–within himself. The Silver Surfer is metaphorically an angel or god who has fallen into the world of mortals. That’s the metaphorical role that Yvaine too is intended to fill. Yet neither in the movie nor in the book do I get the sense that there is anything truly unearthly about Yvaine. She seems not like a fallen goddess, but like a dethroned princess, forced to put up with someone–Tristran/Tristan–whom she considers her social inferior.

I’ve thought of another parallel as well. In the book when Tristran and Yvaine first kiss, at last acknowledging their love for each other, the narration states, “He opened his eyes as he kissed the star. Her sky-blue eyes stared back into his, and in her eyes he could see no parting from her” (p. 234).

That last clause seems familiar. Charles Dickens wrote two endings for Great Expectations, and the final version of his second ending concludes thus: “I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so, the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.”

Is the similarity in phrasing only a coincidence? Tristran and Yvaine are like Dickens’ once naive Pip and the formerly disdainful Estella. In the Stardust book the narrator even points out to us in Chapter One that at the time of his story “Mr. Charles Dickens was serializing his novel Oliver Twist (p. 5), as if alerting the readers to be on the lookout for Dickensian parallels.

Dickens’ concluding lines for Great Expectations may suggest a happy ending, with Pip and Estella united in love. But they are actually ambiguous. Just before Dickens’ final paragraph, Estella, who admitted to have been changed by her experiences, told Pip that they “will continue friends apart,” which is hardly an expression of undying love. Just because Pip “saw no shadow of another parting from her” does not mean that they will not part. Indeed, Pip, as narrator recounting his past, may be phrasing it this way to suggest that there was such a “shadow” that he ignored at the time.

Moreover, in fine tuning this ending, Dickens had previously phrased the last line this way: “I saw the shadow of no parting from her but one.” It has been suggested that this “one” shadow would be that of the inevitable parting of lovers by death. (For more about Dickens’ ending, see here and here.)

This interpretation is relevant to Stardust the book, because, in retrospect, Tristran’s failure to see his “parting” from Yvaine is ironic. As we learn in the Epilogue, “Tristran and Yvaine were happy together.” But “Not foreverafter”–as fairy tales traditionally claim at their conclusions–“for Time, the thief, eventually takes all things into his dusty storehouse,” and Tristran inevitably dies.

Death is not such a bad thing in the world of Stardust. It’s instructive to be writing about Stardust so soon after doing a column about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (see “Comics in Context” #187). (Spoiler alert through the end of this paragraph!) J. K. Rowling was insistent on the mystery and finality of death in her Harry Potter series until Harry makes his (apparent) journey to the borderline between the world of the living and the realm of the dead, where he (apparently) encounters Dumbledore’s spirit towards the end of Hallows. In Stardust the sons of the Lord of Stormhold, once they have been killed, immediately reappear as ghosts; in the movie, this is even treated as a running gag. At least for those in the realm of Faerie, death is not oblivion, so Tristran’s death in the book is not the end for him.

But Yvaine is an immortal, and Gaiman ends the book on a bittersweet note, with the description of Yvaine, still alive and still young, but parted from her true love by his death, standing “for hour after hour” at the top of her palace: “She says nothing at all, but simply stares upward into the dark sky and watches, with sad eyes, the slow dance of the infinite stars.” (It’s an image something like the final, enigmatic shot of Rouben Mamoulian’s 1933 film Queen Christina, whose title character has also lost her lover and is staring out into the unknown.) She has been parted both from her true love and from the other stars. Possibly in death Tristan has become part of the infinite; Yvaine is condemned to be separate from it.

But at the end of the movie the narrator informs us that Tristan did not die, but after he and Yvaine jointly ruled Stormhold for many years, they used a magic candle to transport themselves into the heavens, where they lived as stars, presumably for eternity. So, I wonder, did Tristan achieved immortality, did he remain a very old man? Or was he somehow rejuvenated? More importantly, what does it really mean for Tristan to become a star? Did he retain his human appearance, or was he transformed into a different, sort of being?

Despite the transformation of the hero into a star, this is in essence the conventional ending of a fairy tale: the hero and heroine live happily ever after, in this case, literally forever. But the book has an unconventional ending for the genre. For one thing, the narrator cautiously implies that Tristran and Yvaine’s life together was not entirely blissful: “they were happy, as these things go, for a long while.” The narrator acknowledges that Tristran inevitably died, and that Yvaine faced a life (perhaps eternal?) of loneliness. All good things come to an end.

This is a more realistic and thought-provoking ending, befitting a fairy tale for an adult audience. Indeed, I would say that what makes Stardust the book interesting is its unconventional approach to familiar tropes of fantasy and fairy tales, while many of the changes that the movie makes push the story in a more conventional direction. This is a subject I will explore further in next week’s column.

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

One of the major event in cartoon art in 2007 is Warner Home Video’s release of Popeye the Sailor 1933-1938, a DVD set collecting the first sixty Popeye cartoons produced by the Max Fleischer Studios. This is everything that a DVD set of vintage animation should be.

First there is the handsome artwork on the case, depicting Popeye in the style of the Fleischers’ 1930s cartoons, adapted from the design by the character’s creator, comic strip artist E. C. Segar. The artwork, and even the simple orange color of the box, impart a wonderful vintage feel to the collection, as if this is what a DVD set would be like if it was produced seventy years ago. Picking my set up at a local Best Buy, I received an exclusive bonus: the chain sells its Popeye sets in a tin case bearing Popeye’s likeness, further reinforcing the appealing retro look.

Inside, the Popeye cartoons have been remastered, giving them sharp, clear image, enabling viewers to marvel at the beauty of their painted backgrounds, something to which I’d never paid attention when watching the shorts on television or even in theaters. Something I had noticed in the past was the Fleischers’ use of actual three-dimensional sets in some scenes, against which the animated characters would be filmed. Watching these DVDs I found myself thinking that these sets convey more of a sense of three-dimensional depth than even today’s computer animation can achieve (at least without making viewers wear 3-D glasses). After decades of seeing these cartoons start out with the logo of Associated Artists Productions (A.A.P.), which was their first television distributor, it is refreshing to see their original openings, with Paramount’s mountain logo, restored. Between the Paramount logos and the clarity of the restored prints, you can imagine that you are seeing these cartoons the way that they looked when they were first released during the Great Depression.

Then there are all the special features! The producers of this DVD cover Popeye’s history, in the comics, in animation, and even in Robert Altman’s 1980 live action film: its screenwriter, Jules Feiffer, and actor Paul Dooley, who played Wimpy, turn up in the set’s mini-documentaries.

What may be even more surprising is that the producers even feature material that has nothing to do with Popeye but which will be of interest to aficionados of early animation that led up to the Fleischers’ Popeye series. One of the documentary features on the set is “Forging the Frame: The Roots of Animation 1900-1920,” co-produced by Greg Ford, the curator of Lincoln Center’s retrospective of cartoon musicals, which I covered at such great length in this column starting with “Comics in Context” #100. This documentary goes all the way back to J. Stuart Blackton’s pioneering Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, made in 1906. (Hey, that means that last year was the hundredth anniversary of the animation medium. Shouldn’t there have been a major celebration in museums, revival film theaters, and comics conventions?) The documentary spotlights Winsor McCay, the first truly great creative figure in American comics and in animation, and offers excerpts from four of his landmark films, Little Nemo (1911); How a Mosquito Operates (1912), pointing out how it inaugurates animation that depicts a character’s personality; Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), in which McCay created the first great success in personality animation; and The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918), rightly characterizing it as a documentary in animated form. “Forging the Frame” provides excerpts from several other remarkable early cartoons, featuring such characters as Mutt and Jeff, Krazy Kat and Ignatz Mouse (adhering recognizably to George Herriman’s original versions), and the early Felix the Cat, and then you can watch the entire cartoons elsewhere in this amazing DVD set. My only complaint about these silent cartoons in the set is that, since silent films were originally shown with musical accompaniment, I wish that Warner Home Video had provided them with musical scores. Maybe there wasn’t enough money in the budget, but a simple piano accompaniment would do, and there are talented silent film pianists who regularly perform their own scores at New York’s Film Forum and Museum of Modern Art.

Two weeks ago I was disparaging special features on DVDs that provide no more than the most basic information that the animation buffs who buy the collection will already know, or will figure out for themselves on watching the cartoons. The “Popeye Popumentaries” and commentary tracks on this Popeye set do their job right. There is a wide array of experts on comics and animation history represented, including historians Jerry Beck (who played a major role in producing this set), Greg Ford, Michael Barrier and Leonard Maltin; animation professionals including Ren and Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi, former Disney director Eric Goldberg, omnipresent cartoon and comics authority Mark Evanier, and Quick Stop contributor Paul Dini; comic strip giants Mort Walker, Jules Feiffer and Mutts creator Patrick McDonnell, who get to speak about Segar; and the current voice of Popeye, Billy West, who provides an amazing on-screen demonstration of the difference between Popeye’s usual gravelly low voice and the higher voice that the great voice actor Jack Mercer used for improvising Popeye’s asides to the audience.

Throughout this four disc collection the commentators continually bring subjects to my attention that I hadn’t considered before: that the Fleischer Popeyes are mostly set in New York City, where their studio was located; the characters’ seedy apartments, reflecting Depression-era living conditions; the Fleischer studio’s skill at depicting the volume and solidity of their characters, and its prowess (which astonishes the present day animation pros) at animating characters in perspective, as in the great cartoon A Dream Walking (1934), in which Popeye, Olive and Bluto sleepwalk along the girders of a skyscraper under construction.

One major surprise in the commentaries is the reaction of Mexican-born animators Jorge Gutierrez and Sandra Equihua to the early Popeye cartoon Blow Me Down! (1933). Whereas a cautious, politically correct sort like myself would think that the Mexican stereotypes in this cartoon are offensive, Gutierrez and Equihua think they’re funny and happily reminisce about their delight as children in seeing Popeye visit their homeland.

Another big surprise comes in the featurette about “The Voices of Popeye,” which shows an excerpt from a wartime cartoon in which Mae Questel, the voice of Olive Oyl, substituted for Jack Mercer as Popeye. You have to hear it to believe it: it’s a good rendition of Popeye, yet it’s still believable that a woman managed to do it.

There are many cartoons in this set that I must have seen as a child but simply do not remember. Daniel Goldmark, an authority on the use of music in classic cartoons, provides the commentary on The Spinach Overture (1935), a cartoon I only vaguely recall seeing before. But I’m sure glad it’s here, since it features Popeye and Bluto as rival conductors, and fits a theme I’ve explored in several past columns: the use of the conductor as a figure of power, and symbol of the creative artist, in animated cartoons, as in Walt Disney’s The Band Concert (1935) (see “Comics in Context” #110) and Chuck Jones’s Long-Haired Hare (1949) (see “Comics in Context” #101).

I want to focus on two Popeye cartoons in this collection: the two-reel color featurettes Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor (1936) and Popeye the Sailor Meets Ali Baba’s Forty Thieves (1937). I’ve been wanting to write about them since I saw them on the big screen during the aforementioned Film Society of Lincoln Center retrospective on cartoon musicals. I’m used to seeing these two cartoons in faded prints, but the restoration on these two-reelers in this set seems miraculous. Again, the familiar A. A. P. logos have been banished: Warner Home Video has located and restored the gorgeous original opening credits for both featurettes. The colors in the cartoons are now vividly bright. What is most astonishing is the way the 3-D sets now look, such as the intricately detailed outside of a cave in Sindbad and the seemingly infinite desert sands in Ali Baba. The interior of the Forty Thieves’ cave now has an extraordinary sense of reality, as does the solid-looking treasure chest, filled with gems, at the cartoon’s end. And as a commentator points out, somehow the colorful 3-D sets and the animated backgrounds blend together rather than looking entirely different!

These two color two-reelers, each twice as long as a typical Popeye black and white short, are based on stories from The Book of One Thousand and One Nights, popularly known as The Arabian Nights. Later, the Fleischers did another color Popeye featurette based in an Arabian Nights tale: Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp (1939).

I wonder why the Fleischers decided on this Arabian theme. Did they decide to pit Popeye against another famous sailor, Sindbad, and since that was a success, continued with other famous Arabian Nights tales? Or were the Fleischers responding to the fact that Walt Disney was making an animated feature film of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs? (Disney’s Snow White was released in 1937, but had began production three years earlier.) Since Disney had chosen a well known story from the Brothers Grimm’s collected fairy tales, did the Fleischers think that that they should build their Popeye featurettes around similarly famous tales, and picked The Arabian Nights?

The Fleischers’ Popeye featurettes are comedic examples of Orientalism, in the sense of the Western perception of the cultures of the Near East to the Far East. Obviously, events such as the September 11 attacks have altered the popular American conception of the Muslim nations of the Near and Middle East, but American versions of Arabian Nights fantasies persisted long enough to serve as the basis for Disney’s own animated Aladdin (1992). The Woody Woodpecker and Friends DVD set contains two inventive Swing Symphonies cartoons set in this imaginary Arabian Nights world: director James Culhane’s Abu Ben Boogie and The Greatest Man in Siam (both 1944). (Siam is actually an old name for Thailand, yet The Greatest Man in Siam is clearly set in an Arab country. Perhaps this serves as an example of just how accurate Western fantasies about Arab culture can be.)

Differing sharply from its two predecessors, the Fleischers’ Aladdin has a metafictional framing device in which Olive Oyl is writing a screenplay about Aladdin, and imagines Popeye playing the role: the main part of the two reeler is therefore the movie that Olive envisions. (This reminds me of Chuck Jones’ 1950 animated short The Scarlet Pumpernickle, which similarly has a framing device in which Daffy Duck has written a screenplay, and the rest of the cartoon is Daffy’s imagined movie, with himself in the title role.)

In contrast, in the Fleischers’ Sindbad and Ali Baba’s Forty Thieves, Popeye actually meets these legendary characters. Then again, Sindbad has opening cast credits, as if Popeye, Olive and company were actors playing parts in a movie, and certainly we are expected to recognize Bluto as “playing” Sindbad and the leader of the Forty Thieves. There’s an ambiguity here, in keeping with the Fleischers’ characteristic reminders to the audience not to suspend disbelief entirely and that they are watching a cartoon.

The main point is that Aladdin casts Popeye as an Arabian Nights character, whereas in Sindbad and Ali Baba, Popeye is presented as himself. One of the DVD commentators suggests that in Sindbad and Ali Baba Popeye has been displaced back to the time of the stories. I think not. Popeye, Olive and Wimpy wear their standard 1930s costumes in the two featurettes, and Ali Baba clearly establishes that Popeye sails a Coast Guard ship to Arabia. Somehow Popeye and friends, representing modern times, co-exist with the legendary Arabia of The One Thousand and One Nights.

To my mind it is fitting that Popeye should meet Sindbad and the Forty Thieves, because, whether or not the Fleischers consciously realized it, by 1936 the super-strong Popeye had become a modern American counterpart of the mythic figures of The Arabian Nights. It’s become a commonplace that the superhero genre embodies a modern mythology, and that superheroes are modern pop culture counterparts to heroes like Hercules and Samson. Popeye isn’t technically a superhero, but he is an iconic hero with superhuman abilities who also qualifies as a contemporary mythic figure.

On the commentary track for Sindbad, when the climactic battle between Popeye and Sindbad is about to begin, John Kricfalusi jokes that these cartoons represent what America is all about. The Fleischers did appear to regard Popeye as an iconic American figure. In Sindbad, as in many Fleischer Popeye cartoons, Popeye’s triumphant climactic battle is accompanied by the patriotic music of John Philip Sousa’s The Stars and Stripes Forever. The Fleischers obviously saw something particularly American in Popeye’s heroic battles against the bad guys.

The Fleischers’ Sindbad and Ali Baba pit Popeye, as American iconic hero, against iconic figures from The Arabian Nights, who are cast as villains. (In The Arabian Nights, Sindbad, whose name is usually spelled “Sinbad,” is a hero.) These highly entertaining but decidedly chauvinistic featurettes assert that Popeye–the pop culture hero of a relatively new nation–is not only merely the equal of the mythic figures of older, alien cultures (as opposed to Europe), but their superior. Does this parallel a patriotic sentiment in America in its new role as a world power between the two World Wars: the idea that America is superior to foreign powers and can best them if need be? I leave it to you readers to judge what connection these two cartoons pitting Popeye against Arab foes may have to current American attitudes towards the Muslim nations of the Middle East.

Whereas in these Fleischer featurettes Popeye conquers figures from mythic Arabic culture, Abu Ben Boogie and The Greatest Man in Siam take a different approach. These two cartoons anachronistically set 1940s swing music into an Arabian Nights-style setting, thereby recasting the Arabian fantasy world into a then-contemporary American mode. In these cartoons American culture doesn’t conquer traditional Arabian mythology, but coopts it.

Walter Lantz’s Swing Symphonies series demonstrates how different pop culture was in the 1940s than it is now. Would any major cartoon studio today do a series of cartoons built around, say, hiphop music, for a general audience? And the Fleischer Popeye featurettes leave me with yet another question: why didn’t producer Max Fleischer and director Dave Fleischer adapt one of Segar’s own Popeye stories from the comics as a two-reeler?

INTO THE INKWELL

I am especially happy that this Popeye DVD set includes ten episodes of one of my favorite animated series, the Fleischers’ silent Out of the Inkwell, most of which I had never seen before.

Like the Fleischers’ Popeye and Superman cartoons, the Inkwell shorts usually present variations on a basic formula. A cartoonist, who is almost always played by Max Fleischer himself in live action footage, uses pen and ink to draw a clown–who was eventually given the name Koko–who comes to life within the cartoon “world” on the paper on the drawing board. Hence, Koko has emerged “out of the inkwell.” (That an animator is more likely to draw a character in pencil goes unmentioned. As for Koko’s name, which some cartoons spell “Ko-Ko,” I wonder if it is a reference to Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner and principal comedy character in Gilbert and Sullivan’s most celebrated operetta, The Mikado.) After going through various escapades in the cartoon world, Koko emerges from the drawing board into the real world, often to get even with Max, who is both his creator and his tormentor. In the typical ending to these shorts, Koko enters the ink bottle, which Max then seals with its cap.

Over the last few weeks I have referred to the traditional pairing of a “white clown,” who represents order and authority, with an “Auguste,” a clown who rebels against authority and rules. The Out of the Inkwell cartoons magnify to an extreme the gap in power between its counterparts to the white clown and Auguste. Koko is explicitly presented as a clown: he is the Auguste. Max takes the role of the white clown, or might better be compared to the ringmaster. Max is not only in charge, but he is literally the creator of Koko and his animated world. Koko, even when he escapes into the real world (with his animated figure juxtaposed atop live action film), ordinarily remains the same size as he is on the drawing board; hence, Max towers over him as if he were a giant–or as an adult does over a small child. Max is the artist who created Koko and who attempts to control his creation. Max is also like a father and Koko like his son, whom he attempts to dominate. Ultimately, Max is to Koko as God is to us. Max created both Koko and the world in the animated sections of the shorts. Max stands outside Koko’s “reality” and dominates both it and him.

The usual formula of the Inkwell films has Max creating Koko out of nothingness with pen and ink. The films work different variations on Koko’s creation: in Modeling (1921), for example, Max draws a mass of small circles which, before our eyes, merge and form into Koko. In Trapped (1923) Koko emerges from Max’s hand, in a perfect image of the animator as godlike creator. (All of the Koko shorts that I mention in this week’s column can be found in the Popeye DVD set.)

Normally at the end of an Inkwell short Koko seeks refuge within the ink bottle. This leads to the question of whether Koko continues to exist “alive” within the ink bottle or whether he returns to being merely ink. At the end of Modeling, when Koko hides in the ink bottle, the angry Max pours the ink out onto the table in a tiny puddle. This strikes me as a macabre image of Koko having entered oblivion. If human beings’ lives proverbially go from “ashes to ashes and dust to dust,” Koko’s life goes from ink in the ink bottle back to ink. Of course, since Inkwell is a series, the audience knows that Koko will return to life in the next short, so, whether or not the Fleischers realized it, the Inkwell series represents a repeating cycle of “death” and resurrection.

The ending of Modeling, with Max pouring Koko’s inky “remains” onto the table, demonstrates that if Max is Koko’s “god,” he can be a cruel deity. In Invisible Ink (1921) no sooner has Max created Koko than he imprisons him by drawing chains and cuffs to bind him, as if he were in a dungeon. Then Max, like a bully teasing a child, forces Koko to hunt for his hat. (Koko seems to have a particular attachment to his hat, perhaps because his clothes are really his sole possessions.) In Jumping Beans (1922) Max unleashes Mexican jumping beans on Koko, initially frightening him. In Bed Time (1923) Max strands Koko on top of a cartoon mountain in order to get him out of the animator’s way. In Trapped Max draws a man-sized spider with a human head who pursues Koko, imprisons him in his webbing, and even tries to serve him as dinner to his family of similar creatures. (So would they be the first “spider-men” in cartoon art?) And in A Trip to Mars (1924) Max forces the unwilling Koko to ride a cartoon rocket to a cartoon version of the Red Planet.

Not only does Max expose Koko to danger in Trapped, but he also sets a mousetrap to catch a live action mouse in the same short. Koko and the live action mouse are roughly the same size, and the short seems to be drawing a parallel between then: both are Max’s potential victims.

Even though the shorts portray Max Fleischer himself as the animator, they are designed so that the audience will side with Koko against him. The payoff in the Inkwell shorts comes when Koko turns the tables on his creator, like a son striking back at his father, or a mortal taking revenge on God for his suffering in life. When Koko invades the real world in Modeling to play pranks, it seems to be merely out of a sense of mischief. But in other cartoons, such as Jumping Beans, Koko explicitly vows vengeance on Max.

What I find especially interesting in the Inkwell shorts selected for this DVD is that Koko himself turns “artist” in order to fight back against Max. In Modeling Max shares a studio with a sculptor, who is making a bust of a rather ugly man with a big nose. Perhaps Koko, a creation of one form of art, cartooning, is jealous that Max and the other people in the studio are paying more attention to the bust, the creation in a more highly regarded form of art, sculpture. It’s a sort of sibling rivalry, with a subtext of popular art versus fine art, and the Fleischers stack the deck by making Koko far more appealing than the rather repellent sculpture of the equally repellent client. Or perhaps the real rivalry is between Koko and the real life artists.

Max had outfitted Koko with skates and drawn a frozen pond for him to skate on. First Koko creates his own portrait of the sculptor’s grotesque subject by skating in such a way as to carve the impression of his face into the ice. Then Koko makes a gigantic snowball and molds it into a bust of the sculptor’s client, imitating what the sculptor did with clay. Max, the sculptor and his client are unimpressed, so Koko emerges from of the animated world–that is to say, the sheet of paper on which Max drew him and the frozen pond–and into the real world. Unnoticed, Koko crawls into the statue, causing it to move as if it were alive. This startles the three humans. In actuality, the Fleischers were using stop motion animation to cause the bust to seem to move on film. But in terms of the story, it is Koko who is moving the statue from within: Koko has thus become an animator himself. No wonder Max gets angry when he discovers what is happening: his own creation has become a rival animator.

As noted earlier, Max chains up Koko in Invisible Ink and subsequently taunts him. This time Koko as clearly seeking revenge, and he more explicitly becomes an animator. Having escaped from the drawing board into reality, Koko imitates a trick that Max played on him earlier: he leaves a message that if Max wants to find him, he should follow this line. The line leads Max on a long trail inside and outside his studio. Meanwhile Koko creates duplicate images of himself in many different poses. The line finally leads Max into a room filled with Kokos, among which the real Koko hides. However, Max casts aside the alternate Kokos, which do not move.

Obviously, Koko needs to improve on his plan of multiplying himself, and does so in the later cartoon, Jumping Beans. Again vowing revenge for Max’s mistreatment of him, this time using a stamp to create duplicates of himself which move, and which line up in formation, as if they were Koko’s private army. So Koko as artist has created his own image over and over, and as animator has brought them to life. The legion of Kokos attack and overwhelm Max, binding and tying him to the floor, as the Lilliputians did to Gulliver. So, yes, this image anticipates the animated feature film of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels which the Fleischers made over a decade and a half later. Luckily for Max, he is carrying a small blade which he uses to cut himself free, and the Kokos flee into the ink bottle.

As noted, Max is a giant in comparison to Koko, so it may be significant that in two of the cartoons in the Popeye DVD set Koko encounters menacing cartoon giants. In Jumping Beans a giant beanstalk sprouts, and Koko climbs up the stalk far into outer space, past the moon and sun, until he arrives in the land of the giant of “Jack and the Beanstalk,” who turns out to be an immense head atop a comparatively tiny body. Upon escaping–and falling– back to Earth, Koko vows vengeance on Max for exposing him to such danger. In Bed Time Max traps Koko atop a mountain where he is pursued by another giant, this one with more normal bodily proportions. Yet again Koko vows revenge on Max. After all Max is the “giant” who is Koko’s true nemesis.

That revenge takes an appropriate form in Bed Time. Koko again invades the real world and enters Max’s bedroom. As Max watches in horror, Koko grows bigger, achieving human size, and then continuing to grow further. Max escapes the building, but Koko has become a true giant, and we watch him stalk through New York City, towering over buildings, hunting for Max.

And then Max wakes up. Perhaps, even in an animated/live action short in which one might assume that anything can happen, the Fleischers drew the line at Koko turning into a giant. Another possibility is that the Fleischers were insistent that Koko could not be allowed to overturn the order of the real world; that’s why the shorts usually end with Koko returning to the inkwell, ending his disruptions of order, like Superman’s foe Mr. Mxyzptlk saying his name backwards and returning to his home dimension. Koko as a giant would be unstoppable. Therefore the short establishes that Koko only became a giant in Max’s nightmare; Max awakes and sees Koko safely immobile on his drawing board. It’s as if Out of the Inkwell had suddenly turned into Winsor McCay’s Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, which may well have been a partial inspiration for Bed Time.

The strangest of the Inkwell cartoons in this DVD set is A Trip to Mars, in which Max forces Koko to be the unwilling passenger on a rocket heading to the fourth planet. Before blasting off, Koko plants dynamite underneath Max’s chair. The rocket takes off with Koko aboard, and the dynamite explodes, catapulting Max into outer space as well (as the short shows a live action Max against an animation background). The Mars on which Koko lands seems like an anticipation of Bob Clampett’s Warners cartoon Porky in Wackyland (1938): a mad, surreal world where any impossible gag could happen. Koko’s Mars also looks as if it might be an absurd version of New York: Koko spends part of the cartoon in Mars’s subway. Meanwhile Max continues to hurtle through space. The cartoon ends with both Max and Koko landing on the rings of Saturn and running along the rings as if they were a treadmill. Finally both Koko and Max are removed from Saturn and dropped into an ink bottle, and a hand comes from offscreen and places the lid on the ink bottle, sealing them in.

This raises an obvious question: just whose hand is that? The finale of A Trip to Mars presents both Koko and Max as the pawns of a more powerful manipulator. Perhaps the hand represents Max Fleischer the filmmaker, as opposed to Max the character in the film.

Now I wonder if director Chuck Jones and writer Michael Maltese were consciously reworking the Out of the Inkwell premise when they created their celebrated cartoon Duck Amuck (1953). The She-Hulk’s annoyed comments directed at her unseen cartoonist, John Byrne, likewise seem to echo Inkwell, intentionally or not.

The Out of the Inkwell series is founded on drawing a line between the real world and the world of animation and watching Koko cross it. Commentators on the Popeye DVD make the point that while Walt Disney kept striving for greater realism in his animated cartoons through the 1930s, the Fleischers simultaneously reveled in the blatant “cartooniness” of their animated films. Popeye and his castmates don’t look like real people, and even in a later Fleischer cartoon like Sindbad inanimate objects will still occasionally come to life.

Some of the early cartoons on the DVD also acknowledge their own artificiality. In Bobby Bumps Puts a Beaner on the Bum (1918) the title character sits on the animator’s hand as he draws. In the first Felix the Cat cartoon, Feline Follies (1919), Felix (here called Tom) plucks musical notes out of the air and turns them into parts for carts he and his girlfriend ride.

So we can see two traditions in animation history. The Disney tradition moved towards greater realism. But the rival tradition, celebrating the “cartooniness” of the medium, is even older, and continued through the Fleischers’ body of work until they attempted to move towards Disneyesque realism in Gulliver’s Travels (1939) and a more successful heightened realism in their Superman series. Tex Avery’s MGM cartoons further explored how cartoons can bend and break and twist the laws of reality. From the late 1940s into the 1960s, the UPA animation studio rebelled against Disney realism in its own way, through emphasizing stylized designs in characters and backgrounds. The result again was to emphasize the artificial nature of animation rather than use it to imitate reality.

Today the “cartooniness” tradition is carried on by The Simpsons and South Park and, yes, SpongeBob. However, the “realism” tradition has triumphed through the dominance of computer animated films, which have nearly entirely displaced hand drawn animated films in early 21st century movie theaters. (When I was watching Ratatouille I found myself thinking that the backgrounds looked just like photographs of the real Paris.) Anime seems to me to be a mix of the two traditions, with simplified, stylized figures often juxtaposed against realistic backgrounds, as in Hayao Miyazaki’s films. It’s rather like the Fleischers filming Popeye and Olive against those actual 3-D sets.

Should you want to learn more about the Popeye and Woody Woodpecker DVD sets, listen to one of the people behind both sets, animation historian Jerry Beck of the Cartoon Brew blog (www.cartoonbrew.com), on Stu’s Show on Shokus Internet Radio (http://www.shokusradio.com/), live from 4 to 6 PM Pacific time (7 to 9 PM EST) on Wednesday, August 22.

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

Universal Home Video’s Woody Woodpecker and Friends DVD set, which was released on July 24, provided me with a rare opportunity to get in touch with my early childhood memories. It was as a young boy that I first saw various Disney animated features, and many, many Warner Brothers and early Hanna-Barbera cartoons, as well as the Max Fleischer Popeyes. I also watched the syndicated half-hour Woody Woodpecker Show on television, hosted by his cartoons’ producer, Walter Lantz, which packaged Lantz cartoons from the 1940s.

Over the decades, I’ve rewatched many of these cartoons thanks to television, animation festivals at revival theaters, and, nowadays, DVDs. But I hadn’t reacquainted myself with the classic Lantz cartoons of the 1940s as an adult; I may have seen a few here and there, but I don’t remember. I recall seeing some of the later, uninspired Woody Woodpecker cartoons from the 1950s and early 1960s, in which the formerly dangerously madcap bird had turned cute and acquired nephew Knothead and niece Splinter. As the Wikipedia entry on Woody declares, “The domestication of Woody Woodpecker was complete,” and I was not impressed.

But though my memories of the 1940s Woody cartoons were dim, I retained warm feelings for them, and was eager to watch the new Woody DVD. It is amazing to be watching these cartoons and suddenly to encounter images that spark memories from my childhood, like Woody sticking a grease gun in nemesis Wally Walrus’s mouth and pumping grease out through his ears (in director Dick Lundy’s 1947 Well Oiled), or Andy Panda and his guardian angel (also a panda) dancing off towards the horizon at the end of Apple Andy (directed by Lundy in 1946). What’s even more amazing is to be watching one of these cartoons that I haven’t seen in decades and suddenly remember what the next gag is going to be. Obviously, the Lantz cartoons made a great impression on me way back when.

As soon as I got the Woody DVD home, I immediately watched the Woody cartoon that I most clearly recalled liking as a child: The Barber of Seville, from 1944. This appears to be the most celebrated of the Woody cartoons, having been selected in a survey of a thousand animation professionals and historians as one of “The 50 Greatest Cartoons” for Jerry Beck’s 1994 book of the same name. This cartoon also inaugurated what looks to me to be the prime period in Woody Woodpecker’s onscreen career. It was the first Woody cartoon directed by former Disney animator James “Shamus” Culhane, and was co-written by Ben “Bugs” Hardaway, who had created Woody (as well as a prototype for Bugs Bunny at Warners, hence Bugs’s name) and was now supplying his voice. Moreover, this cartoon debuted Woody’s new, sleeker character design, which was considerably more appealing than the grotesque appearance he bore in his first cartoon (1940’s Knock Knock), without devolving into the cuteness of the 1950s Woody.

Rewatching Barber was full of surprises: I didn’t remember most of the cartoon at all. For one thing, it opens with World War II references which would have sailed over my head when I was a child, assuming that they were not cut from the syndicated Woody show. Woody decides to get a haircut, and, alas, it was not until I started working on this week’s column that I realized that, wait a minute, this premise makes no sense: Woody’s famed topknot consists of feathers, not hair! But I expect this doesn’t occur to 99.99% of the people who have seen this cartoon over the last sixty-three years. Anyway, Woody decides to get a “Victory” haircut (which would separate the topknot into a “V” formation) but is thwarted when he strides into the Seville Barber Shop and finds it deserted: the barber, named Tony Figaro, has left a note, “Gone to take my physical. Back soon.”

One of the lessons of these 1940s Woody cartoons is not to do anything that attracts Woody’s attention, lest chaos ensue. Finding himself in a barber shop, with apparently nothing better to do, Woody decides to play barber himself, a decision that cannot end happily for any unwary customers. Soon the first victim walks in, and here was surprise number two. Beck’s book gently refers to him as a Native American, but this first customer is a stereotypical caricature of an Indian chief that would never be allowed in mainstream animation today: he can’t speak English correctly, for one thing. The chief initially does nothing to provoke mistreatment, but Woody, perhaps more through incompetence than malevolence, swaths his head in towels that are so hot that Woody uses the overheated chief’s mouth to toast bread, and his feathered headdress shrinks into a badminton shuttlecock. Understandably furious, the chief threatens Woody with a tomahawk, in more stereotypical behavior, and Woody finally bests him by turning him into a living “cigar store Indian.” I suspect that this sequence was not cut from The Woody Woodpecker Show, but I am glad I did not remember it.

Next comes the section that I did remember, in which a construction worker, who vaguely seems Italian, enters the barber shop, asks to get “the whole works,” and certainly does. Woody turns a blowtorch on the man’s hardhat, lathers his whole face and even his feet, and then slashes at the terrified man with a razor while singing Figaro’s famous aria “Largo al factotum” from Gioachino Rossini’s opera The Barber of Seville. This is intended to be sung at high speed, like the famous Gilbert and Sullivan patter songs, and Woody does so, moving rapidly in time to the music. This is the part of the cartoon which earns its high reputation, with Culhane utilizing shots of Woody that last as little as a fraction of a second, and even putting three, four and finally five Woodys onscreen simultaneously, to signify that he is moving so fast that he seemingly appears in different places at once.

Unfortunately I didn’t enjoy the spectacle as much as I’d hoped, because I felt that the sequence hadn’t been set up properly. What had the poor customer done to be so beset by this razor-wielding madman–or madbird? At the very end of the cartoon the customer takes revenge by trapping Woody inside the barber pole (a fate echoing that of the Indian chief: being turned into a living version of an inanimate object). But that didn’t make the shaving sequence funnier for me in retrospect.

Can we assume that director Chuck Jones and writer Michael Maltese were aware of Culhane’s Barber of Seville when, only a half decade later, they did their 1949 animated short Rabbit of Seville, in which Bugs Bunny plays barber to Elmer Fudd, in this case to the accompaniment of the overture to Rossini’s Barber (see “Comics in Context” #102)? If so, then Jones and Maltese recognized the problem and corrected it. In the opening of Rabbit of Seville, a particularly nasty-looking Elmer fires his gun repeatedly at Bugs, who looks unusually desperate. More than in most Bugs Bunny cartoons, Jones and Maltese are thus emphasizing that Elmer is out to kill Bugs. Hence, Elmer’s murderous intent dramatically justifies the lengths to which Bugs goes to retaliate, even including slashing at Elmer’s face with a razor.

Maybe Culhane and company recognized the problem, too, because they solve it in their very next Woody cartoon, The Beach Nut (1944). This introduces the character who becomes Woody’s leading foil, Wally Walrus. Last week I wrote about the traditional pairing of the White Clown, who upholds order, and the Auguste, the buffoon who creates chaos: Wally and Woody fit these respective roles. The cartoon makers are still dealing in ethnic humor, since Wally inexplicably speaks with a Swedish accent, but in his case it seems harmless. Wally is physically much bigger than Woody, placing the woodpecker in the role of the underdog. More importantly, Wally is pompous, bad-tempered and overbearing, and takes a dislike to Woody even, as in this cartoon, when Woody initially has no malicious intentions towards him. In another cartoon on the DVD Wally even admits to the audience that he should just ignore Woody, but nevertheless takes action against him anyway. The Beach Nut even makes clear that Wally is a potentially greater threat to order than the irreverent Woody: at the cartoon’s end Wally inadvertently destroys an entire pier in his war on Woody, thereby plunging himself and numerous people into the ocean. Furthermore, Wally’s personality seems to embody stifling conventionality: he is a square, whereas Woody is a free spirit. Audiences will naturally side with the uninhibited Woody, who, in The Beach Nut, just wants to have fun, against Wally, who fills the archetypal comic role of the “refuser of festivity.”

So, at least on this initial reviewing, I didn’t enjoy Culhane’s Barber of Seville as much as I’d expected. Still, I found much that was interesting in it. For one thing, the cartoon links Woody to Figaro, the trickster barber and servant who was created by the French playwright Pierre de Beaumarchais and who famously became a symbol of the spirit of revolution against the aristocracy; Rossini’s Barber is an operatic adaptation of one of Beaumarchais’ plays about Figaro, as was Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro. Figaro is probably the most famous example of the long tradition of the trickster servant that goes back to comedies in ancient Rome. I expect that Jones and Maltese, with their intellectual ambitions, meant to connect Bugs to Beaumarchais’ Figaro as fellow tricksters in Rabbit of Seville. I wonder if Lantz, Culhane, Hardaway and company likewise used Rossini’s music in their cartoon because they recognized that Woody fit the trickster tradition.

It’s also intriguing to me that Culhane’s Barber, like so many other cartoon shorts from Hollywood’s Golden Age, prominently uses classical music. Of course, one doesn’t have to be an opera buff to recognize the familiar “Largo al factotum,” although I wonder if many of us first heard it in animated cartoons. Still, how many cartoons have been made for television over the last fifty years that have been constructed around a piece of classical music? I can’t think of one. Culhane’s Barber was hardly an anomaly at the Lantz studio, either. Elsewhere in the DVD set is a 1946 cartoon featuring Woody and Andy Panda as musicians that bears the title Musical Moments from Chopin! In The Bandmaster (1947), a Lantz cartoon that appears to be inspired by Disney’s The Band Concert (1935), Andy Panda conducts the “Overture to Zampa,” a now obscure 19th century opera. Of course, Disney’s Fantasia (1940) is the most spectacular example of the use of classical music in classic Hollywood animation. All of this suggests to me that classical music played a larger role in American popular culture before the rock revolution of the 1950s and 1960s.

Woody’s singing in Barber turns out not to be unusual, either. He does it in numerous 1940s cartoons. For example, in Culhane’s The Dippy Diplomat (1945), Woody bamboozles Wally by masquerading as a Russian ambassador and singing a Russian-style melody. Another cartoon I partly remembered from childhood was Culhane’s Ski for Two (1944), which twice features a sequence in which Woody sings “merrily” (to quote the song) as he swiftly skis down a slope: once again Culhane combined speed and song as he did in Barber. (This cartoon featured a deja vu moment for me. In the second skiing sequence, Woody is escaping with a huge bag of what he thinks is food that he has stolen from Wally’s cabin. I found myself thinking: it’s really Wally in the bag, and he’s going to do Woody’s famous laugh at him. Yep. Some childhood memories are permanent.) I like Woody’s singing: it fits his character. The singing expresses his sheer pleasure in pulling off his tricks.

Ski for Two also gives Woody a new motive for his pranks: in this and later cartoons Woody is driven by hunger to pull his tricks on Wally Walrus or other adversaries. Thus, Woody is not just a trickster but he also fits another comedy character archetype: the parasite, forever hungry.

Yet another cartoon that I recalled from my childhood was Culhane’s Woody Dines Out (1945), whose title fits the parasite theme but does not hint at the short’s macabre content. I found this cartoon quite eerie when I was a child, both because of the dark settings and its sinister premise: a taxidermist is determined to make a fortune by capturing, killing, stuffing and mounting a “king-size woodpecker,” namely Woody. It’s well worth remembering that cartoons, and movies in general, can provoke different reactions in small children than they do in adults. Today I don’t find Woody Dines Out disturbing at all, although I still find its premise remarkable for a cartoon for family audiences.

A much bigger shock comes in Bathing Buddies, a 1946 short directed by Dick Lundy, in which Woody is Wally’s tenant and reads Wally’s list of regulations, which includes “No opium smoking.” I believe that if we are looking for proof that animated theatrical cartoons of the 1940s were aimed at adults, we have found it. Did Lantz and his coworkers assume that kids in the audience wouldn’t know what opium was?

What interests me more now about Woody Dines Out is a gag that is set up early in the cartoon, as the taxidermist imagines the fame and fortune to which he aspires. The cartoon shows us images in a thought balloon over his head, including one of the taxidermist surrounded by beautiful women. (The women are human, and the taxidermist is a cat, but we are apparently supposed to accept this.) At the cartoon’s end, after he has been soundly defeated by Woody, the taxidermist sadly reviews his previous fantasies of success. This time, when he gets to the thought balloon full of beautiful women, it is not the taxidermist sitting in their midst, but Woody, who triumphantly utters his trademark laugh. Here is the most startling example of Woody the trickster’s ability to defy the laws of reality: he has even invaded his enemy’s mind and commandeered his fantasy!

Now I find two other Culhane Woody cartoons far weirder than Woody Dines Out—Who’s Cookin’ Who? (1946) and Fair Weather Fiends (1946). The first is set amidst the snows of winter, and the second on a desert island; in each one a ravenous, anthropomorphic wolf is trying to eat Woody. That’s not a surprising premise for an animated cartoon. The surprise is that Woody, driven to desperation by lack of food, is trying just as hard to eat the wolf! It’s as of the Roadrunner suddenly started trying to hunt and eat Wile E. Coyote! This takes the theme of Woody as parasite, driven by appetite, to its extreme.

It also makes Woody stand out among his fellow animated trickster heroes. Woody, Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck all began as manic “screwball” characters. Bugs, however, evolved into a character who would not unleash his tricks against an opponent without provocation (“Of course you know this means war.”). In sharp contrast with the manic prankster versions of Bugs in his earliest cartoons, Bugs, beginning with Tex Avery’s A Wild Hare (1940), coolly manipulated his adversaries, who had less emotional control. Bugs resembles the eiron figure of ancient comedy, the self-deprecating trickster who maintains an ironic perspective on the world around him. Daffy started out as pure screwball but evolved into an exemplar of common human failings (including greed, egotism and cowardice).

In his own earliest cartoons, such as his first, Knock Knock (1940) and second, Woody Woodpecker (1941), which are both in the DVD set, Woody looks grotesquely goofy and acts insanely: in the second cartoon he even consults a psychiatrist. Appropriately, Woody was originally voiced by Mel Blanc, who famously did the voices of Woody’s fellow screwballs Bugs and Daffy. Even though Blanc’s voice was electronically speeded way up for Woody’s high-pitched voice, I find Blanc’s acting style still very identifiable at points in these early Woody performances, such as the scene in Knock Knock in which Woody mock threatens Andy Panda while swelling to gigantic size. Until recently I didn’t know that even after Ben Hardaway succeeded Blanc as the voice of Woody, the cartoons still recycled Blanc’s recording of Woody’s trademark laugh. (However, I’m rather fond of another laugh that Hardaway does as Woody, when he’s snickering at an adversary; you’ll hear it in all of the Culhane Woody cartoons.)

Even though Woody no longer seems insane in the Culhane cartoons, in the 1940s he remains an uninhibited prankster who freely follows his desires, whether they are for food or revenge or, as in Barber, simply to have fun, regardless of its effects on others. If Bugs and Daffy evolved into adults, one perfect and one imperfect, the Woody of the 1940s is still childlike. Many of the 1940s Woody cartoons end with Woody being punished for going too far: sometimes the retribution seems excessive and mean-spirited, as when Wally traps Woody in his “tit-for-tat” machine in 1947’s Smoked Hams, directed by Dick Lundy, but other times Woody seems to get the appropriate degree of comeuppance.

But it’s hard to get the better of Woody Woodpecker in these cartoons. The 1940s Woody can seem like a trickster as a force of nature, as when he whirls about giving that super-speed haircut and shave in Barber.

One of my favorite cartoons on the Woody set is Woody the Giant Killer, directed by Dick Lundy in 1947. After Culhane left the Lantz studio, Lundy took over the Woody cartoons, with Hardaway still co-writing them. The Lundy cartoons aren’t as sharp or inspired as the Culhane Woodys can be, but they’re still fun, and Giant Killer is remarkable. It starts disappointingly, with Woody being tricked into buying magic beans like those in the story of “Jack and the Beanstalk.” I’m aware that it’s part of the trickster tradition that the trickster can be tricked himself, but Woody normally seems too clever to fall for this con man’s spiel. As you expect, Woody ends up ascending a huge beanstalk into the realm of the giant, and here’s where the cartoon takes off. Despite his colossal size and strength, the giant never stands a chance against Woody for a moment, and with surprising ease, Woody not only bests the giant but makes him his servant. Perhaps I should object to the cartoon, because the giant didn’t provoke Woody, who, as in Barber, is once more the aggressor. But I was simply impressed by the sight of little guy Woody simply overwhelming this colossus. Once Woody sets his mind to go after someone, he is, as I said, like a force of nature, nearly unstoppable.

The Woody cartoons on the DVD set’s third disc, from late 1948 to 1952 are less entertaining and interesting than those on the first two discs, from earlier in the 1940s, and present Woody as a more conventional funny animal protagonist. Nonetheless, I was astonished by the ending of Disc 3’s Wild and Woody (which premiered on December 31, 1948), in which Woody kills another of his regular opponents, Buzz Buzzard, with exploding TNT, and then escorts Buzz’s ghost to two elevator doors. Woody waves aside the elevator operator heading “up” to heaven, and instead puts Buzz on the elevator operated by a devil, heading down to hell. Of course Buzz returns alive in subsequent cartoons, but nevertheless, Wild and Woody demonstrates that Woody Woodpecker is capable of inflicting damage on his adversaries that makes anything Bugs Bunny does to Elmer Fudd look tame.

After leaving MGM, the great cartoon director Tex Avery worked briefly at the Walter Lantz studio, and the Woody DVD set includes the four animated shorts he made there before leaving theatrical animation.

Chilly Willy, the little penguin who dislikes the cold, debuted a year before Avery used him in I’m Cold (1954), and this cutesy character seems like an anomaly in the world of an Avery cartoon. (For what Avery thinks of cute characters, witness the mayhem inflicted on one in his 1944 short Screwball Squirrel.) In I’m Cold Chilly Willy, seeking warmth, attempts to steal furs from the cartoon’s real star, a guard dog with a familiar Southern drawl, voiced by Daws Butler. This cartoon thus represents another step in the evolution of Butler’s laid-back Southern canine from the Wolf in Avery’s Three Little Pups (see last week’s column) to Hanna-Barbera’s late 1950s TV star, Huckleberry Hound. Whereas the Wolf was the villain in Three Little Pups, albeit a likable one, the dog in I’m Cold isn’t a bad guy at all, but is clearly just doing his job. Significantly, Avery doesn’t take sides and allows both the dog and Chilly Willy to win, each in his own way, at the cartoon’s end.

In Avery’s The Legend of Rockabye Point (1955), Chilly Willy keeps making loud noises in order to wake up a vicious bulldog and sic him on a polar bear, who is forced to keep rocking the bulldog back to sleep. Avery had already used the premise of one character trying to stop another from making loud noises in his MGM cartoons Rock-a-Bye Bear (1952) and Deputy Droopy (1955, the same year as Rockabye Point!). Deputy Droopy (which is on the new Droopy DVD set) is the superior cartoon, but I like the twenty-years-later ending of Rockabye Point, which suggests that a bond can evolve even between enemies over time.

In Crazy Mixed-Up Pup (1955) a dog gets a transfusion of human blood, and his owner gets a transfusion of canine blood, with the result that the dog acts human, and the human acts like a dog. Each time someone witnesses this unusual behavior, the top of his or head springs open, a cuckoo emerges, and flags sprout from his or her ears, all to signify that the witness has just gone nuts. Avery keeps repeating this device, but it grows no funnier: I prefer the wild takes that wolves and other characters did in 1940s Avery cartoons.

My favorite of the four Avery cartoons is the final one, Sh-h-h-h-h-h (1955), in which a man, driven to the brink of madness by noises (a recurring theme, it seems), follows his psychiatrist’s advice and checks into a very, very quiet hotel. The patient ends up in a room next to a man and woman who keep playing a horn and laughing raucously. Though the patient never sees the couple (until the cartoon’s surprise ending), they somehow manage to thwart his every attempt to silence them. But what I like most about the cartoon is its middle section, before the obnoxious couple are first heard. The total silence of the sequence in which the patient checks into the hotel is genuinely eerie. It’s also disconcerting to realize that Tex Avery stopped making theatrical cartoons over a half-century ago. I have friends who were born the year that he stopped making cartoons for movie theaters, and they’re now middle-aged!

There are many other cartoons in the Woody DVD set, including some of Lantz’s remarkable Swing Symphonies, but I don’t have the time or space to get to them this week. Perhaps another time.

The Woody Woodpecker and Friends DVD set doesn’t have any commentary tracks, but it does have plenty of bonus features, principally featuring the late Walter Lantz, head of the studio that created the animated shorts in the set. There’s a short documentary about Lantz’s career, made towards the end of his life, a complete episode of The Woody Woodpecker Show, and various “behind the scenes” segments from the show.

After all these decades I was particularly interested in watching these segments. Lantz hosted the half-hour Woody Woodpecker Show, obviously following the example of Walt Disney, who hosted his own hour-long show in the 1950s and 1960s, first on ABC and then on NBC.

Even as a child I realized that Disney was the king of animation and that Lantz was a lesser figure, operating in Disney’s shadow. Walt Disney’s public persona was warm and friendly–very much “Uncle Walt”–as he acted as the television viewers’ guide to his pop culture empire. He may have been Uncle Walt, but I, and I assume, most viewers, recognized that it was an empire that he was showing us, and that he was the Great Man who had built it.

Recently rewatching the “Behind the Scenes” segments from The Woody Woodpecker Show confirms the impression that I recall having as a child. Walter Lantz lacked Walt Disney’s impressively charismatic presence as host. Lantz projected a gentler, quieter image. Whereas Disney welcomed us from what appeared to be his large, resplendent office, Lantz’s surroundings were clearly humbler.

In his host segments Lantz interacted with an animated Woody Woodpecker, just as Disney sometimes shared the screen with one of his studio’s animated characters on his show. (Woody continually taunts his “boss,” and there’s a nice moment on the DVD set in which Lantz, who normally projected a pleasant demeanor, gives the offscreen Woody a look subtly suggesting that the woodpecker had gone a bit too far.) Disney would also do shows in which he showed how animated cartoons were made, continuing a tradition begun by his 1941 feature The Reluctant Dragon. Lantz did this all the time in his host segments.

Now this reminds me of early animated cartoons, like Max and Dave Fleischer’s Out of the Inkwell series, which emphasized that the animated characters on screen were artificial creations: in the Inkwell series we see Max Fleischer (in live action footage) draw the animated character Koko onto a drawing board and they interact with each other. The audience is not encouraged to suspend its disbelief entirely; it’s as if this was the Max Fleischer counterpart of Bertolt Brecht’s alienation effect in theater. The audience simultaneously treats Koko as “real,” a living character, and recognizes him as a drawing “out of the inkwell.” (I will have much more to say about the Inkwell series in the coming weeks.)

Can you imagine an episode of Sesame Street, or, to go back to my childhood, Captain Kangaroo, in which the puppeteers came out from hiding and showed their young audience that Bert and Ernie or Mr. Moose were really just puppets animated by their arms? Now imagine yourself as a child watching The Woody Woodpecker Show. Walter Lantz shows you his cartoons, but in the host segments he shows you that Woody Woodpecker is really a series of drawings. Lantz is like a magician who shows the audience how his tricks are done. And yet this doesn’t spoil the tricks. I don’t recall being bothered as a child by seeing and hearing Lantz explain how Woody was not real; I found it interesting, and I assume that the rest of the show’s audience did, too, since this show lasted for years in syndication. Lantz obviously had enough respect for the intelligence of his younger viewers to have faith that they would accept the paradox.

In fact, even as Lantz explains the process of creating an animated cartoon in the host segments and the documentary, he continues to interact with the animated Woody Woodpecker, as if Woody were real. In one of my favorite moments on the DVD, Lantz explains that at one point his wife Gracie took over performing the voice of Woody Woodpecker, whereupon Woody–voiced by Gracie–expresses disgust that a “girl” is doing his voice! Woody’s appeal is so strong that the audience will happily continue to pretend that he is real even as Lantz is showing us that he is not.

In one host segment Lantz shows us how to draw Woody Woodpecker, using simple geometrical shapes as his basis. (Whether that is actually Lantz’s hand we see drawing in the closeups, I have no idea.) The segment suggests that it’s not that hard to draw Woody, and that you, the viewer, could do it, too, by following the same steps. In the other “behind the scenes” segments Lantz similarly explains other aspects of the process of making a cartoon, such as coming up with story ideas, so simply that grade school children can understand. Again. Lantz suggests that you, the viewer, could do this, too.

Surely Lantz’s “behind the scenes” segments must have inspired many kids to try their hands at drawing cartoons, and maybe some of them eventually became animation professionals. In watching these segments recently I realized that Lantz was, by extension, demystifying the creative process for any kind of art or writing. Through these segments Lantz was effectively telling children that they were capable of creative activity of any sort.

Here the difference between Lantz’s onscreen persona and Disney’s proves important. Watching him now on the DVD, I see that Lantz projected a gentler, more approachable, more intimate presence. Whereas Walt Disney seemed to be addressing a vast audience from his office, Walter Lantz conveyed the impression that he was speaking to you, personally, was letting you in on his secrets, and was encouraging you to follow in his footsteps and become an artist or writer yourself.

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

In reviewing The Simpsons Movie for The New York Times (July 27, 2007), critic A. O. Scott wrote, “Ten or 15 years ago, The Simpsons Movie, which has been contemplated for almost as long as the show has been on the air, might have felt riskier and wilder. But The Simpsons, for all its mischief and iconoclasm, has become an institution, and that status has kept this film from taking too many chances”.

Online critic James Berardinelli wrote that “The primary satirical targets are religion (an easy mark), environmentalists (also easy), and government stupidity (even easier). The Simpsons Movie does not go after hot button issues nor does it tie itself to a time and place by addressing current events”. Early in the film Homer Simpson leafs through a Bible and exclaims this book has “no answers.” Is this merely Homer being stupid, or are the filmmakers attacking the Bible? If it’s the latter, isn’t that an unusual move for a family movie to take in a country in which religious believers make up the majority of the population? In the case of environmentalists, the movie comes down on the side of Lisa Simpson, who sincerely believes in the cause. As for “government stupidity,” the movie accuses the government of something worse than mere stupidity.

The more I think about The Simpsons Movie, the more I think it may be considerably more daring than the reviews I’ve read have noticed. And it is very much a satire about what is going on in America right now.

The Simpsons‘ creative freedom, on television and now on film, is particularly striking since it is part of Twentieth Century Fox, which is part of Rupert Murdoch’s vast News Corporation empire. So too is the Fox News Channel, with its leanings to the political right.

According to a July 30, 2007 article in The New York Times, “Activists are urging Home Depot, which recently unveiled an environmentally conscious marketing program, to withdraw advertising from Fox News, whose hosts and commentators dismiss global warming as liberal hysteria. . . .A short video by Robert Greenwald, Fox Attacks: The Environment, has been viewed more than 380,000 times since it was posted on YouTube on July 9.”

But The Simpsons Movie voices a strong environmental theme. Earnest, liberal Lisa tries to stop the people of Springfield from polluting their local lake, and, surprisingly, manages to overcome their apathy on the subject. According to Entertainment Weekly, Simpsons creator Matt Groening “mentioned an article he’d read about a community battling hog-waste pollution,” which became the springboard for the movie’s plot. When Homer dumps a silo full of his new pet pig’s manure into Lake Springfield, he triggers a chemical reaction out of a science fiction/horror movie. A squirrel that was exposed to the polluted water grows many more eyes. (This is surely an allusion to one of the earliest Simpsons episodes, 1990’s “Two Cars in Every Garage and Three Eyes on Every Fish,” in which radioactive wastes from Mr. Burns’ nuclear power plant result in a mutant fish with an extra eye.

In the film Arnold Schwarzenegger is President and gives a free hand to Russ Cargill, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), who takes drastic action in response to Lake Springfield’s mutagenic pollution. Rather than do anything to clean the lake up, he dispatches the military to encase the entire town within an enormous dome.

How seriously can we take the satirical treatment of the EPA? The writers’ point may simply be the absurdity of the idea that the EPA, of all government agencies, could possibly engage in this sort of rogue military action. Do any of you recall that in The X-Files movie (1998), FEMA was supposed to be a major player in the all-powerful alien conspiracy to take over the world? Anyone who watched the DVD after FEMA’s catastrophic performance after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans probably finds the idea of an omnicompetent FEMA grimly funny.

There are conservatives in the Republican Party who want to restrict the powers of the EPA or to abolish it altogether; they might like The Simpsons Movie‘s portrayal of the EPA as a menace to freedom. Then again, there are also liberals who believe that the EPA has not been effective enough in combatting environmental dangers; they would notice that the EPA doesn’t do anything to solve Springfield’s pollution problem, but just literally puts a lid on it.

I realized what the movie might be up to during the sequence in which we are shown endless rows of National Security Agency employees monitoring the phone calls of apparently ordinary Americans. The NSA man who thus located Marge Simpson is ecstatic, boasting that finally the government had located someone it was searching for. This is presumably a reference to the controversy over the real federal government’s recent venture into warrantless wiretapping in its surveillance of alleged suspects in the “war on terror.”

If the movie’s NSA gag has a serious subtext, then what other political commentary might lurk just under the surface? Are the film’s President Schwarzenegger and EPA head Cargill merely supposed to be a fool and a knave, respectively, with no connection to the real world? Or is this Schwarzenegger, who declares that he was elected “to lead not to read,” intended to remind us of our current President? Schwarzenegger irresponsibly allows Cargill, a man with a questionable agenda, to do whatever he wants. Are we meant to think of President Bush following the ideological agenda of his neoconservative associates in plunging the nation into what now appears to many as a hopeless war in Iraq? Is Cargill’s military assault on Springfield meant to remind us of the current administration’s reliance on massive military force to “solve” the situation in Iraq?

Were any of these allusions made consciously by the writers and producers of The Simpsons Movie? Or were they unconsciously acting to recent political developments in plotting their movie?

Over the years I’ve written a lot in this weekly column about “post-9/11″ stories, which reflect Americans’ new fears of being attacked by a foreign adversary. The Simpsons Movie seems to me to be an example of a post-“post-9/11″ story. The focus of this emerging genre is not the terrorist threat to the nation, but the dangerous measures that the government took in response to that perceived threat: the quagmire in Iraq, the assault on civil liberties.

Another target of this post-“post-9/11″ genre might be an attack on government incompetence, as demonstrated by the Katrina debacle.

Hurricane Katrina was certainly an environmental disaster, and there was nearly universal outrage at the delayed, inadequate efforts by FEMA and the federal government to aid the people of New Orleans following the catastrophe. During the hurricane and its immediate aftermath, over fourteen thousand people sought shelter in the Louisiana Superdome, there were inadequate supplies of food and water, dreadfully unsanitary conditions, and insufficient medical care.

Here’s another parallel that the filmmakers may or may have consciously intended. In The Simpsons Movie the people of Springfield are imprisoned within a dome, where the government leaves them to rot, and we watch as living conditions deteriorate over three months. Are we intended to see a connection to New Orleans after Katrina? My hunch is that this parallel is more than mere coincidence.

In other words, The Simpsons may indeed now be a pop culture institution, but The Simpsons Movie is much more biting politically than the television show usually is, or than film critics have given it credit for.

One of The Simpsons Movie‘s surprises for me was this political subtext. Another surprise was the strong mythic overtones to the plot. The early scene in which Grandpa Simpson collapses in church and begins uttering prophecies seems to me like nothing I’d ever seen on the TV show. Yes, on the surface the scene was played for laughs, and yet the prophecies came true. It was as if by ignoring Grandpa’s warnings (which he didn’t understand anyway), Homer was defying fate, thereby causing the disaster that befell Springfield. Perhaps the Simpsons Movie writers were intentionally parodying “end of the world” movies, and therefore were parodying the trope of the Cassandra-like warnings that go ignored. Still, the prophecies prepare us for the supernatural doings later in the movie.

The Joseph Campbell monomyth structure is especially evident in in the movie’s second act, set in Alaska. Less than a week before, I was reading the middle section of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in which Harry wanders in the wilderness, having escaped from his enemies, but having lost nearly everything and everybody. In The Simpsons Movie Homer and his family manage to escape from the dome (thus crossing a threshold) and flee to Alaska, where they live in an isolated cabin. But Marge and the kids head back, determined to try to help the people of Springfield. Homer refuses, but finds himself wandering through the wilderness, as if through a Campbellian labyrinth.

But Alaska also proves to be Campbell’s “enchanted realm,” and not just in the clever earlier sequence in which Disney-like animals help Homer and Marge prepare for a night of lovemaking. Homer encounters an Iniut woman who is a mystic and serves as his mentor figure. Through her guidance he has a vision in which he undergoes dismemberment: even in a cartoon, it’s somewhat shocking to see Homer’s body separated into component parts. This is the metaphorical descent into the underworld, Campbell’s “Supreme Ordeal,” and a symbolic death. Only when Homer has his epiphany, realizing he no longer cares about himself but knows he must help the people of Springfield, do the parts of his body rejoin. This is his symbolic resurrection, and his new determination to help the townspeople is the Campbellian “boon” that will enable Homer to save them in the third act.

Again, since this is The Simpsons, the filmmakers are parodying the Campbell pattern. But the surprise is that they are both kidding the Campbell monomyth and using it semi-seriously to structure Homer’s character arc.

The third big surprise in the film for me was the portrayal of Homer’s next door neighbor, Ned Flanders. You may recall a past Simpsons episode (“Home Sweet Home-Diddily-Dum-Doodily,” 1995) in which Flanders temporarily adopts Bart and Lisa, and his attempt at baptizing them is depicted as horrific, as if his trying to brainwash them into joining some strange cult. The show usually mocks Flanders for his religious devotion and naive benevolence; this episode was anomalous in casting him as a villain. The movie changes all this, mostly avoiding jokes at Ned’s expense.

In their joint appearance on The Charlie Rose Show (August 30, 2007), Matt Groening said that the secret of The Simpsons’ success was executive producer James Brooks’ insistence from the beginning that the show’s main characters had to have “real emotions.” The movie shows this, too, through Marge’s genuine anguish in separating from Homer, Bart’s unexpected pain at feeling betrayed by Homer, and his growing appreciation of Flanders’ fatherliness. In the movie Ned, who is so often a figure of fun on the TV show, finally becomes as real as characters in The Simpsons can get. He becomes a figure of genuine goodness, an ideal father.

At the climax of the movie, however, Homer surpasses Ned. As the movie’s first act showed, Homer is capable of extraordinary stupidity and irresponsibility. But that is matched by his capacity for extraordinary heroism, as well, as Homer shows when, reunited with Bart, he succeeds in saving Springfield from annihilation.

One reason that I’m glad to see that The Simpsons Movie did so well commercially in its first weekend is that it looks like two-dimensional drawings come to life, just like the TV show–and the way animated feature films used to look! However much computers were actually used on the film, it looks like hand-drawn animation. Therefore the film’s success should help make the case that audiences will still go see traditional-looking animated films, as long as the stories and characters merit their attention.

TRAILER TROUBLES

Like the rest of you, I enjoy seeing trailers for upcoming movies when they give me glimpses of what looks like something I’ll really enjoy. Ratatouille had a spectacular trailer, with Remy fleeing through the kitchen from pursuers, and finally just avoiding being pinned to the wall by flying knives, in an iconic shot used in the movie ads. I was disappointed that the sequence didn’t turn up in the actual movie! The new trailer for next year’s Get Smart movie perfectly captures the spirit of the original television series.

Then there are trailers that seem like cheats. For example, there’s that trailer for the sequel to Batman Begins, The Dark Knight. Those of you who saw it at the San Diego Con should be advised that you didn’t get an exclusive: I saw the same trailer before The Simpsons Movie. There’s a bat symbol on a black screen, and you hear voices–Alfred, the Joker–and that’s it. Well, if they had nothing to show, why even bother?

And then there are trailers that actively persuade me not to go see the movie in question. Before The Simpsons Movie started, I saw the trailer for the upcoming computer-animated film of Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who. It started beautifully, with a close-up of a CGI flower, but once Horton showed up, speaking in Jim Carrey’s voice, being self-consciously wacky, it became clear that this movie has nothing to do with the gentle humor of Dr. Seuss.

But worse followed: the trailer for a CGI Alvin and the Chipmunks (and really, who asked for this?), in which Alvin tries to prove that a piece of his brother’s excrement is actually a raisin by putting it in his mouth. No, I did not make this up. What were the publicity people for this movie thinking? It’s as if they are handing us critics the perfect image to describe a movie that I fear may look like a raisin but decidedly isn’t.

DOGGING HIS TRAIL

Back in May, when I bought the Warner Home Video’s DVD set Tex Avery’s Droopy: The Complete Theatrical Collection from a Best Buy store in midtown Manhattan, not only did the cashier break into a smile at seeing my purchase, but he even launched into a Droopy impression. Last month, I picked up the Woody Woodpecker and Friends DVD set at a different Best Buy, and the female cashier was already holding a copy of her own. Either this is coincidence, or Best Buy has a commendable policy of hiring animation buffs.

Usually I only buy DVD sets if they have special features I want to see. (Otherwise, I can just record the film off television.) The Droopy set includes a documentary about director Tex Avery that tells viewers such things as (1) that Avery’s cartoons move fast (yes), (2) that Avery had great comic timing (true), (3) that Avery’s cartoons frequently break the fourth wall (correct), and (4) that Droopy speaks with a “Southern drawl” (absolutely wrong). In other words, this documentary mostly offers only basic information about Avery’s work which will come as a surprise to those who are first learning about him, but that most animation collectors who purchase this set will already know. Moreover, even though Turner Broadcasting, which owns the MGM Droopy cartoons, also holds the rights to all the cartoons Avery directed at both Warners and MGM, the documentary only shows us clips from the Droopy shorts. So this is a disappointment.

But, of course, the set is worth getting because it has all twenty-eight Droopy cartoons that Avery directed, all of which are good, and one of which, Northwest Hounded Police (1946), is one of the greatest cartoons of his career. I’d always considered this to be a remake of the first Droopy cartoon, Dumb-Hounded (1943). But having this DVD set allowed me to watch them back to back, and now I consider them more as variations on a theme.

In each one a criminal wolf is hunted by Droopy, the slow-talking, slow-moving, melancholic dog who represents the law. But no matter where the Wolf goes, Droopy is there. If there’s one thing that the Wolf succeeds in leaving behind, it is any pretense of realism. In Dumb-Hounded the Wolf flees by car, plane, and boat, at velocities that might make the Flash’s head spin, yet Droopy, who seems barely to move, settles into his hideout, only to find Droopy patiently awaiting him. In Northwest Hounded Police the Wolf races to the Arctic wilderness, finds Droopy, known in this short as Sgt. McPoodle of the Mounties, flees again, and eventually ends up on a tiny Pacific island, where Droopy is concealed beneath a tiny rock. Many times when the Wolf comes face to face with Droopy, his surprise and horror are so great that he does a “take” that bursts the body’s normal limitations: his eyes bulge out like telescopes, or his entire body will fly into disconnected pieces.

Chuck Jones’s Wile E. Coyote has been likened to Sisyphus, in that both eternally strive at a task at which they will never succeed. In these two Avery cartoons, the Wolf is in a Sisyphean situation as well, unable to evade his mild-mannered pursuer. It’s like Les Miserables as surreal farce. Or it’s like a nightmare, in which the dreamer is unable to escape his doom, no matter what he does. It’s a funny-animal version of Kafka. Droopy is like the Greek god Nemesis reinterpreted as an inoffensive-seeming little dog.

Watching the two shorts back to back, I discovered that even though they have the same premise, they consist of nearly entirely different sets of gags. The prominent exception is that at one point in both cartoons, the Wolf is so desperately racing to escape Droopy that his momentum carries him past the sprocket holes at the edge of the film into a blank, white void whereupon he swerves and runs back into the film, his version of reality.

This is a perfect example of the one truly illuminating point that the DVD’s documentary makes: that whereas Disney animated films sought to create a credible reality, Avery broke the rules of reality and reveled in demonstrating that anything can happen in a cartoon. In effect, he was the anti-Disney.

Northwest Hounded Police is the better of the two cartoons because it pushes the comedic nightmarish aspect even further beyond the bounds of reality. At one point the Wolf undergoes plastic surgery, only to look in the mirror and find that his new face is Droopy’s! How can he outrun Nemesis when it is part of himself? (This might also suggest that Droopy represents the outlaw Wolf’s sense of guilt, which is indeed a part of himself he cannot escape.) At another point in Northwest, the Wolf hides in a movie theater and starts watching an MGM cartoon, which turns out to be, in effect, Northwest itself: Droopy looks out from this cartoon-within-a-cartoon and addresses the Wolf, who understandably panics.

In these two cartoons Droopy and the Wolf do indeed break the fourth wall and speak directly to the audience. Avery goes still further in indicating that these characters know that they are in an a film: not only does the Wolf run past those sprocket holes, but at one pint in Dumb-Hounded, Droopy tells the audience, “I surprise him”–the Wolf– “like this all through the picture.” It’s as if Droopy is an actor who has read the whole script, or an actor who has been in repeated performances of the film, like a performer in a play. Avery emphasizes the artificiality of the animated medium, and this is a subject to which I will return next week.

I’ve already described another cartoon in this DVD set, The Shooting of Dan McGoo (1945), in a previous installment (see “Comics in Context” #100). But before I move on to another subject, I want to mention another of my favorite Avery cartoons in this collection, The Three Little Pups (1953). As its title suggests, it’s a parody of the story of the Three Little Pigs, and in particular, the Disney version, which was then two decades old, with Droopy as Practical Pig. The Wolf of Three Little Pups, cast as a dogcatcher, starts out wearing an expression of melodramatic villainy and conducts a fast, frenzied assault on Droopy’s brick doghouse. But then, abruptly, he stops, shifts into what will be his usual manner for the rest of the cartoon and speaks to the audience in a laid-back Southern drawl (a real one). This Wolf is voiced by the great Daws Butler, using the same Southern drawl that will eventually become the voice of Huckleberry Hound. Unlike his frenetic counterpart in Northwest, this Wolf moves and speaks slowly and quietly, much like Droopy himself. Their ensuing battle reminds me of Laurel and Hardy comedy shorts like Them Thar Hills (1934) and Tit for Tat (1935), in which the comedy duo and their adversary move with a quiet, grave dignity in the course of unleashing slapstick violence on each other. I will also return to the evolution of Butler’s easygoing Southern canine in next week’s column.

OH YOU SQUID

I surrender. I can resist no longer. My Quick Stop colleague Fred Hembeck is right. SpongeBob SquarePants really is as good as he says it is.

Nickelodeon premiered five new SpongeBob episodes during the last full week of July. I caught some of them in the midst of watching a good number of animated cartoons from the Hollywood studio period for this week’s column and next week’s. SpongeBob may not have their high production values or masterful animation, but in terms of wit and invention and strong characters and voice acting, the new SpongeBob cartoons I saw were equally enjoyable as many of these classics, or even more so.

Among the new SpongeBob shorts I saw was “The Krusty Sponge,” which introduces a feared food critic who is nonetheless less imposing than Ratatouille‘s Anton Ego: Gene Scallop, based on–and voiced by–Today Show movie reviewer Gene Shalit. After Scallop’s review of the Krusty Krab restaurant singles out cook SpongeBob for praise, owner Mr. Krabs, the very personification of greed, converts this fast food establishment into a SpongeBob theme restaurant. It’s a subversive satire on the omnipresence of SpongeBob merchandising in real life, suggesting that it threatens to overwhelm the original character in the cartoons.

I’ve been thinking that SpongeBob is like a 21st century equivalent to Mickey Mouse. Each has a boyish persona, and each has an iconic appearance based on simple, appealing geometrical shapes: circles for Mickey, and a square–along with the curves of his mouth and eyes–for SpongeBob. The big difference between Mickey and SpongeBob is that SpongeBob is allowed to act downright weird at times.

Here’s an example. In another new short, “To Love a Patty,” SpongeBob encounters a “Krusty Patty” hamburger that he deems to be so perfect that he literally falls in love with it. Though SpongeBob is old enough to have a full time job, live on his own, drive and (in another new short, “Boat Smarts,” even shave), he is basically a big kid who doesn’t appear to have hit puberty yet. His creator, Stephen Hillenburg, has asserted that SpongeBob is “somewhat asexual”. Nonetheless, in “To Love a Patty,” it’s as if SpongeBob has enormous sexual urges that get misdirected onto his perfect hamburger, whom he names “Patty” (of course).

This allows the cartoon makers to satirize the blindness of love. As time wears on, “Patty” starts to rot and stink, but SpongeBob sees and smells only “her” imagined beauty, until the stench and decay finally becomes too great for even him to ignore.

Since SpongeBob, as a cook, creates hamburgers, then you could read “To Love a Patty” as a satire of the creative artist’s obsession with his own creation, and his blindness to its flaws.

Finally Mr. Krabs persuades SpongeBob that passion for a Krabby Patty is good, but it must be fulfilled by eating the Patty, which SpongeBob proceeds to do. Mr. Krabs has convinced SpongeBob to redirect his sexual drives into hunger, consuming and destroying the object of his desire. If you think about it, this suggests something a wee bit disturbing about Mr. Krabs. It’s just as well that he clearly sublimates his own sex drives into his ecstatic passion for money.

SpongeBob’s relationship with the female squirrel Sandy Cheeks seems to be a platonic friendship. Then again, those two express their friendship by having karate fights with each other. What’s being sublimated through all this mock aggression?

Well, Hillenburg was quoted in the same article as saying “The character SpongeBob is an oddball. He’s kind of weird, but he’s kind of special,” I can agree with this.

However, watching several new episodes reinforced my decision that my favorite character in the show is SpongeBob’s neighbor and co-worker Squidward, who is perennially annoyed by SpongeBob’s wacky behavior. If SpongeBob is childlike, then Squidward is an adult. Moreover, whereas the extroverted SpongeBob likes almost everybody, Squidward feels no obligation to put on a happy face to please other people when he doesn’t want to. Perhaps Squidward’s appeal is that he gets to voice the exasperation and irritation that we normally have to hold back.

Squidward also reminds me of a 1971 film by Federico Fellini, The Clowns. In it, Fellini concentrated on two types of clowns, which are often paired; the White Clown, who is the straight man, an actual or wannabe authority figure, and the Auguste, whom Fellini called a “rebel,” who engages in slapstick. The White Clown represents order; the Auguste is comedic chaos. Squidward is in the White Clown tradition, forever annoyed by SpongeBob, his personal Auguste. (I figured out that Squidward is analogous to the White Clown before starting this week’s column. And in the course of writing it, I discovered a Wikipedia article that also labels Squidward as White Clown and SpongeBob as Auguste.)

Next week Ill be reviewing the new Woody Woodpecker and Friends DVD, and Woody and his recurring antagonist Wally Walrus also fit the categories of Auguste and White Clown, respectively. But SpongeBob and Squidward aren’t actually antagonists: SpongeBob regards Squidward as his friend and is normally oblivious to Squidward’s disdain towards him.

Moreover, the SpongeBob series even grants Squidward some sympathy for putting up with SpongeBob’s manic efforts at friendship. In “The Thing,” a short that debuted in January, but which I saw last weekend, Squidward is accidentally covered in cement, rendering him unrecognizable and unable to talk. SpongeBob finds him, decides that he is some strange kind of animal, and adopts him as a pet. The short takes Squidward’s point of view, focusing on his horror at being caught in this nightmarishly absurd situation, and being unable to stop it.

It may be that Squidward secretly envies SpongeBob and wishes he were more like him. In the new short, “Good Ol’ Whatshisname,” Squidward discovers that the popular SpongeBob knows the names of all of the Krusty Krab’s regular customers. Squidward becomes so obsessed with learning the name of a customer before SpongeBob does that he steals the customer’s wallet and lands in prison.

In another new short, “Squid Wood,” SpongeBob creates a puppet version of Squidward. The puppet presumably represents Squidward as SpongeBob envisions him, and keep in mind that SpongeBob is generally oblivious to Squidward’s grumpiness. Everyone prefers SpongeBob’s kinder, gentler puppet version of Squidward to the real Squidward, to the latter’s horror.

And in another new short, “Breath of Fresh Squidward,” an electric shock temporarily gives Squidward an alternate personality. Squidward’s Mr. Hyde turns out to be even happier, nicer and more extroverted than SpongeBob. Thus SpongeBob and Squidward reverse roles, with Squidward unwittingly driving SpongeBob to distraction. Finally another electrical shock restores Squidward to his grumpy normalcy. The more benign side of Squidward is once more trapped within his subconscious, and it would take the equivalent of a bolt from the blue to free him once more.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF

This is the final weekend for “Stan Lee: A Retrospective,” the exhibition that I co-curated at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art in Manhattan (www.moccany.org). The show closes on August 6.

The ComicMix website recently ran Mike Gold’s very appreciative review of The Marvel Vault, the book I co-authored with legendary Marvel writer and editor Roy Thomas. You can see the review here, and ComicMix, a mix of news blogging, columns, and even podcasts about comics and related subjects, is well worth visiting on a regular basis.

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson