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There is a school of thought that any publicity is good publicity. I suppose that Marvel considers the furor over the recent demise of Captain America (see “Comics in Context” #168) to be good publicity if it boosted sales of the comics. But just what kind of lasting impression did that leave in the world beyond comics speculators? If people believe that Captain America really has been killed off, then it would seem to them that Marvel has destroyed an iconic figure representing the finest in the American spirit. If people believe that Captain America isn’t really dead, or will be resurrected, then it would seem to them that Marvel is exploiting and trampling upon said American icon as a publicity stunt to make big bucks. Why would a company that cares about its public image want to create either impression?

Last week Marvel got still more publicity of questionable value when the mainstream media discovered Sideshow Collectibles’ rather sexist statuette of Spider-Man’s leading lady Mary Jane Watson as a sexually submissive laundress. Not only was I interviewed about this figurine on MSNBC (see last week’s column), but former Spider-Man comics editor Danny Fingeroth showed up five times on the network to talk about the controversy (as you can see on YouTube here).

Comics artist Adam Hughes has posted his design for the statue on his website, and I find the original drawing considerably less objectionable, prettier, and even charming. Perhaps it was the people at Sideshow who pushed the design over the edge of taste. (And just who designed the rear of the statue?)

Even so, Hughes seems not to get why it was regarded as sexist and offensive, and this is part of the problem. “Mary Jane is a bit of a bimbo,” he explains, blaming the victim, adding that “Well, she’s bending over. Pin-up girls do that.” It’s as if male artists had nothing to do with creating the pin-up girl image. “But by that argument ““ if we take bending over to be a sign of sexual availability, every woman who bends over to pick up something should be chastised.” And just how many such women show off their thongs as they do so? Using some inappropriate hyperbole, Hughes asserts that “I think the whole “˜sexual availability’ claim comes from trying to back up the argument that this is the most awful thing to hit mankind since the Holocaust”. Here is a perfect example of someone who finds himself in a hole and unfortunately reacts by digging himself in even more deeply.

Hughes asks, “is it really a sexist or misogynistic act if it wasn’t intended that way on the part of the people doing it? . . .are you seeing something that’s either not there, or that the artist never intended to be there?” First, this demonstrates a lack of understanding of human psychology. Certainly, a person can be subconsciously sexist or misogynistic. Certainly people can consciously hold prejudiced opinions without being aware they are prejudiced: they consider their opinions to be correct. D. W. Griffith was reportedly surprised that his film Birth of a Nation (1915) was attacked as racist, though today that is the unanimous opinion of cinema scholars. There’s that song in the musical Avenue Q, “Everybody’s a Little Bit Racist.”

Moreover, even if Hughes did not consciously or unconsciously have sexist intentions, that does not mean that people who interpret the statue as sexist are wrong. Certainly artwork can be interpreted in ways of which the artist was not consciously aware. A Freudian interpretation of Oedipus Rex is not invalid simply because Sophocles died centuries before Freud devised the term “Oedipus complex.” If an interpretation fits the artwork, it is justified whether or not the creator agrees with it. This is a basic principle of criticism, long accepted in academia, and comics writers and artists had best wake up and take notice. (Not surprisingly, Neil Gaiman recognizes this principle, as can be seen from his introduction to The Sandman Papers, Fantagraphics’ 2006 anthology of academic essays about his work.)

But the Mary Jane maquette, as I suggested last week, is relatively tame compared to what just turned up in the comics shops. Years ago, back when I was first mulling over doing a column on the Internet, I considered doing a segment called “Atrocity of the Week.” Maybe I shouldn’t have dismissed the idea, since, lo and behold, less than a week after I wrote about the MJ statue, Quick Stop editor Ken Plume e-mailed me about this: the cover of Marvel’s new issue of Heroes for Hire, appropriately #13. It appears that the ladies in bondage, with necklines cut so low that in two cases they approach the navel, are the Black Cat and the detective team of Misty Knight and Colleen Wing, all formerly presented as empowered, independent heroines. Drawn in manga-influenced style, they’re virtually unrecognizable, and Misty looks less like the African-American she’s supposed to be than a well tanned Caucasian. But the biggest problem is those tentacles feeling them up.

Researching this week’s column has expanded my knowledge of Japanese cartoon culture, though not in a way I would have preferred. It seems that the Heroes for Hire cover evokes the style and content of hentai manga, a term used outside Japan for Japanese comics dealing in explicit sexual or pornographic content. It turns out that so many Japanese comics deal in “tentacle rape” that this subgenre merits its own Wikipedia entry, which informs us that “Tentacle rape is a concept found in some horror hentai titles, where various tentacled creatures (usually fictional monsters) rape or otherwise penetrate women (or, less commonly, men). Much of the genre also consists of humiliation and bondage fetishes, since the victim typically is restrained by the appendages.” That suggests that the point of this cover is to take three of Marvel’s empowered, independent heroines and humiliate them.

Even the great Japanese artist Hokusai did a “tentacle rape” woodcut, “The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife” (1820), as shown in the aforementioned Wikipedia entry, a considerably superior work of art, as well as further evidence that great artists are not necessarily beyind reproach (see Wagner, Richard).

And it turns out that the Heroes for Hire cover was done by a female Japanese artist, Sana Takeda, and that fact is a forceful reminder that being a member of a group that is the target of prejudice does not necessarily make one enlightened about prejudice.

But you don’t have to know this background in Japanese culture to be appalled by this cover. All you have to have is a sufficient grasp of Freudian psychology to recognize tentacles as phallic symbols. And can that milky white fluid splattered atop one of the Black Cat’s breasts be what I think it is?

Probably the mainstream media will take no notice of this cover, since people who don’t read Marvel comics are unaware of the three characters depicted. But what if superhero comics continue down this path, and sooner or later produce an equally, or even more offensive cover or a story about a character that the mainstream media knows–and that they notice?

I wonder if this is another sign that contemporary superhero comics are overreaching in their pursuit of the sensationalistic, to try to get a charge out of its shrunken, jaded niche audience. I worry that superhero comics are in a decadent phase, marked by the continual killing of longtime characters, and the distortion and demeaning of others, and that not even the reconstructionalist writers can pull the genre out of its descent. Is this Heroes for Hire cover the kind of work of which those of us who value the comics medium can be proud?

So let’s turn instead to a recent event that did do comics proud. On April 26, the night after my trip to Geppi’s Entertainment Museum (see “Comics in Context” #176–177), I attended the world premiere of a new documentary about one of the artform’s greatest creators, Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist, at New York City’s Tribeca Film Festival. Eisner was one of the founding fathers of modern American comic books, the creator of one of its masterpieces, The Spirit, and the pioneer of the contemporary American graphic novel (see “Comics in Context” #6, 25, 64, 68, 69).

Tribeca, which is short for a “triangle below Canal Street,” is a section of lower Manhattan near the site of the World Trade Center. Robert De Niro and his business partner, producer Jane Rosenthal, founded the festival in 2002, in part to help revitalize lower Manhattan following the September 11, 2001 attacks.

In May, 2003, shortly before I started “Comics in Context,” the second Tribeca Film Festival included a panel, which I attended, called “The Return of the Superhero,” dealing with the new wave of superhero movies. The panelists were Mark Steven Johnson, the writer/director of the Daredevil movie, and since then, this year’s Ghost Rider flick; Alan Cumming, who played Nightcrawler in X2: X-Men United, which premiered that month; and Kevin Misher, a producer who was developing a Sub-Mariner movie (which seems to have sunk from sight).

It occurs to me that I haven’t written about the Ghost Rider movie yet. Even if Nicolas Cage doesn’t look like the young, blond Johnny Blaze, I think the idea of Cage as a middle-aged Blaze with an Elvis Presley vibe. The visual concept of this demonic motorcyclist with a flaming skull for a head is undeniably powerful, and, as an updated version of Faust, Ghost Rider has great story potential. But it has gone untapped: I agree with Peter B. Gillis’s observation that Ghost Rider was never a great comics series, even despite Mike Ploog’s memorable art in the early stories. Although I can tell from the Tribeca panel that Mark Steven Johnson’s heart is in the right place in his respect for Marvel series, the execution of his movies doesn’t match his good intentions. The Ghost Rider movie is just an empty series of action sequences, devoid of wit or true human interest, not really worth writing about for more than a paragraph. Casting Easy Rider‘s Peter Fonda as Mephisto was clever, but I couldn’t care about Ghost Rider battling another devil, Blackheart, on behalf of Fonda’s not-quite-as-bad devil. As an update of Faust, Ghost Rider the comic and the movie both should be better than they ever have been. At the end, Blaze defiantly declares that Mephisto may possess Blaze’s soul but not his spirit. But if you don’t understand that they’re the same thing, you don’t get what Faust is about. I exited the Ghost Rider screening, wondering how low the reputation of Marvel movies would be were it not for Sam Raimi’s great Spider-Man trilogy.

But back to the “Return of the Superhero” panel. Of course, there are more comics writers, artists and editors in the New York City area than anywhere else in the nation. Constantine Valhouli, the indie filmmaker with whom I collaborated on the documentary Sex, Lies and Superheroes, offered to put the Tribeca Festival’s panel programmers in touch with comics professionals we had interviewed for the movie. But the Festival wasn’t interested. Presumably they felt that people who wrote and drew the superhero comics on which the movies were based had no relevance to a panel about said movies. Considering that one of the people on Constantine’s list of contacts was Frank Miller, soon to become a formidable filmmaker himself, this seems even more ironic.

A great deal has changed in only four years. Now the Tribeca Film Festival was showing a movie about the life of a comics professional, filled with interviews with other comics pros. This was the glorious end of a long, long road for the filmmakers, director/producer Andrew D. Cooke, and its writer/producer, his brother Jon B. Cooke, the editor of Comic Book Artist, an invaluable magazine that serves as a continuing oral history of American comics. They had been working on this movie made for five years, showing a twenty minute sample of their work-in-progress at comics conventions, as they searched for the additional financing they needed to complete it. It is their and our good fortune that they were able to conduct extensive interviews with Will Eisner before he passed away in early January of last year. You may recall that Jon B. Cooke showed the sample of his documentary at Eisner’s memorial (see “Comics in Context” #80). Finally, teamed with the film’s editor and executive producer Kris Schackman and Montilla Pictures, they had completed the film, roughly a year after the memorial.

The Tribeca Film Festival scheduled four showings of the Eisner film, and initially, I tried to get a ticket for the second one, on Saturday evening April 28, after learning that Eisner’s widow Ann would attend. A number of comics professionals who appear in the documentary–Jules Feiffer, Jerry Robinson, and Art Spiegelman–also attended the Saturday screening. But that one was sold out, so I went with my second choice, the world premiere, on the evening of April 26.

The Tribeca Film Festival has grown so large in five years that this premiere wasn’t in Tribeca, but further north, at the AMC Village VII multiplex on Third Avenue and 11th Street, in the East Village. The showing was in one of the multiplex’s smaller screening rooms, and though it was well attended, and I was surprised to see that there were still plenty of empty seats. I assumed that since thousands of people attend the New York Comic-Con, surely all of the Eisner documentary showings would be sold out, but no.

Moreover, I got the sense that the people at this initial screening weren’t a crowd of comics buffs, either. During the opening credits, the audience broke into applause when they saw the credit for “Schackman Films,” executive producer Kris Schackman’s company, so his friends must have attended en masse. I expected there might be applause for at least some of the notable figures of the world of comics when they first appeared on screen, but no. There was, however, a gasp from one member of the audience when an unexpected interviewee first turned up in the film: novelist Kurt Vonnegut, who had died on April 11. Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist presumably is his final public appearance.

Nor did I spot any comics professionals in the audience, aside from Jon Cooke, who greeted me before the movie started, and Randolph Hoppe of the Jack Kirby Museum (http://www.jackkirbymuseum.org/), with whom I chatted after the film had ended. Not even the legendarily ubiquitous Beat had come!
There still seems to be far too little serious interest in the study of comics, whether it takes the form of classes in critical appreciation of the medium, museum exhibitions, or documentaries such as this one.

So, then, I told myself, that meant I was part of a small group who can say in years to come that they were fortunate enough to attend the world premiere of a film whose reputation will surely grow as the serious appreciation of the comics artform continues to rise.

The program began with an introduction by a man named Aaron (I didn’t catch his last name), one of the people who selects the films to be shown at the Tribeca festival, who told us how much this film had surprised him. He was not a comics aficionado, but as amazed to learn from the movie about Eisner, “someone I never knew was so important,” who had participated in “creating a whole new artform.”

This is an indication of how effective the Cookes’ documentary is. It’s not just for people in the comics subculture who are already familiar with Will Eisner’s life and achievements. It caught the interest of someone who know nothing about them, and who, indeed, would have had to wade through many other documentaries in the course of helping to select the films for the festival. This one stood out.

In the question and answer session after the screening, Jon Cooke told us that “Previously Kris”–the executive producer–“didn’t know who Will Eisner is.” Kris Schackman then explained that he had “always liked comics,” but that working on this documentary was an “eye-opening experience.” He said that he “spent a year working on it,” during which time he “fell in love with his [Eisner’s] work” and “the whole artform.”

And if I’m correct that the audience on Thursday evening was more of a film buff crowd than a comics crowd, it worked for them too: they were quietly attentive through the entire film. This is a movie that can make converts to comics as an artform.

Let’s shift back to Aaron’s opening remarks: he then introduced Andrew Cooke, who was greeted with cheers and applause. Cooke explained that the “process” of making the movie had taken “five years.” Not only was tonight’s showing the “world premiere,” he told us, but “no one has seen the film in this form except Kris Schackman and myself.” (Not even Jon?) In fact, in the question and answer session, we were told that the Cookes had only done the interview with Jules Feiffer–who started his extraordinary career as Eisner’s assistant on The Spirit–“four or five weeks ago”! So I really was present at a special occasion.

Then the film began, and after the opening credits, there was vintage black and white footage of Manhattan–Fifth Avenue, Times Square–and then of a newsstand with comic books. An offscreen narrator, who turned out to be Art Spiegelman, explains that comic books were originally intended to entertain kids. There was a “notion,” he continued, that “kids are. . .stupid adults,” so “most comics were junk.” But it as Eisner, he went on, who pioneered comics as a “bona fide means of self-expression.”

we first hear the film’s score, jazz music played by a group that Kris Schackman’s father had assembled; it sounded appropriate playing under images from The Spirit and footage of early 20th century New York.

Next came a surprise: the voice of Jack Kirby, who passed away over a decade ago. The movie makes use of the interviews that Eisner taped in the 1980s with various peers in comics, including Kirby, Milton Caniff, and Harvey Kurtzman, all now deceased, as well as the still active Neal Adams. I read the interviews when they first appeared decades ago in The Will Eisner Quarterly and The Spirit Magazine, and Dark Horse has since published them in the book Shop Talk, but it is an unexpected pleasure to hear the voices of these giants in this movie.

Many other major figures in comics appear on-camera, including Eisner contemporaries such as Jules Feiffer, Joe Kubert, Jerry Robinson, and the late Gil Kane; leading creators of contemporary comics including Frank Miller and Art Spiegelman; Eisner’s friend and longtime publisher and agent Denis Kitchen; Michael Chabon, author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, his novel about comics’ Golden Age; and comics historian Gerard Jones.

The film’s most important interviewee, however, is Eisner himself, who appears throughout, as the movie progresses chronologically through the story of his life. Eisner comes across as open, articulate, intelligent, good-humored, warm and friendly. If he had a dark side, it never appears in this film. I expect that audiences for the movie, even those who don’t know his comics work, will find him immediately likable. He is the perfect ambassador for the comics medium.

Eisner’s story starts with his birth in 1917, and here was another surprise; a nude baby photograph of the Great Man. That certainly set a tone of intimacy, and indeed, the film is about Eisner’s personal life as well as his career in comics. It’s an appealing strategy to follow, humanizing its portrait of its subject.

It was also a surprise to see silent film footage of Eisner’s father and mother. But much of the story of Eisner’s youth and early career in comics is illustrated onscreen by selections from two of his autobiographical graphic novels, To the Heart of the Storm (1991) and The Dreamer (1986), in which Will, his parents, and other real life figures appear in thinly fictionalized form. I’ve lectured on both books at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (www.moccany.org), so it was like seeing old friends appear on the big screen. For example, Eisner, on the soundtrack, recounts the tale of how bullies taunted his brother for his Jewish-sounding first name, and how Eisner slugged one of them only to be beaten up. Meanwhile, the screen shows a succession of images from Eisner’s fictionalized depiction of the incident in To the Heart of the Storm. When Eisner, on camera, delivers the punch line, telling his brother, “From now on your name is Pete,” not only does he laugh himself, but so did the audience. He had already won them over, this early in the film.

The Cookes have good eyes for selecting artwork. Eisner’s characters can sometimes seem over the top in their broad, emotional gestures and expressions, but throughout the film the Cookes chose more subtly effectve work which can stand being blown up to the size of a movie screen. At one point they even employ some animation to a Dreamer sequence, which works well.

The documentary simply and accurately describes the arc of Eisner’s career, so that even filmgoers who are unfamiliar with comics history should be able not only to follow his life story but to understand the significance of his innovations in the medium.

But a movie like this should ideally work on two levels: stating the basics for newcomers, while providing illuminating nuggets of information and insight for people like myself who are already familiar with Eisner’s work and career. This documentary succeeds on both levels.

For example, it was interesting to me to hear Eisner say that he considered going into the theater as a career, until his mother stopped him. People compare the “cinematic” style of The Spirit to film noir, but what about examining its theatricality, through the lighting, the staging, and the “performances” of its cast of characters? When Eisner talks about the artists who influenced him, he names illustrators Dean Cornwall and J. C. Leyendecker (see “Comics in Context” #132). This is followed by a segment that follows Eisner in the International Museum of Cartoon Art in Boca Raton in 1997, before it closed, in which he points to an original Krazy Kat by George Herriman, declaring that the strip was “influential on me.” I wonder how, or was it simply the fact that Herriman constantly experimented with the conventions of the artform? Among other strips he singles out are Richard Outcault’s Yellow Kid; the early, now nearly forgotten adventure strip, Lyman Young’s Tim Tyler’s Luck; Bud Fisher’s Mutt and Jeff, and E. C. Segar’s Popeye. (Did Commissioner Dolan get his enormous chin from Popeye?)

Joe Kubert then appears to assert that Milton Caniff (Terry and the Pirates), Alex Raymond (Flash Gordon), and Hal Foster (Prince Valiant) were “saints in our business” who were “admired by every guy in comics.” That sets me wondering how many contemporary comic book artists know their work at all.

The movie then shifts back to Eisner, who declares Caniff to have been a “tremendous influence” on him, with his “ability to stage his stories so you could follow it.” (Note that “stage” is a theatrical term.) Eisner praises Caniff’s “high degree of drama” and how Caniff utilized “shadows [to] increase a sense of threat.” The “film noir“ look of The Spirit would thus actually be Eisner’s evolution of Caniff’s use of chiaroscuro. Later on in the film, Eisner is quoted as saying that his goal with The Spirit was to be “as good as Caniff.”

A little later Denis Kitchen incisively exposes the hypocrisy of newspaper people who looked down on comics. He points out that the Sunday newspapers were actually wrapped in the comics section. This is true: I remember this from my childhood. When my family and I left church on Sunday morning, we’d pick up the Sunday newspaper from a dealer on the sidewalk outside, and each one on sale had the comics section on the outside. When you looked at the Sunday Boston Herald Traveler, the first thing you saw was not the headlines, but Peanuts. “Comics sold the papers,” Kitchen triumphantly declares. Now those were the days, and a testament to the powerful role that newspaper comics then played in American popular culture.

Yes, I was having a good time watching this film, and to think that I was there, and the allegedly omnipresent chronicler of comics culture, the Beat, was not! Wait, what’s this? It was a clip onscreen from the 2004 San Diego Con, with Eisner recounting a story from his early days in comics. And there, to his right, is the Beat, gazing worshipfully at the Great Man, with her name clearly visible on a placard in front. She’s not at the movie; she’s IN the movie! How does she do it?

Within the documentary there are sequences that might be considered sidebars: short investigations of subjects relating to Eisner’s career. Art Spiegelman introduces the topic of the important role of Jewish creators in the early comic book industry (a subject on which Danny Fingeroth is even now writing a book). Kubert points out that comic books were considered a “gutter profession” in the 1930s and 1940s; today’s graphic novel enthusiasts may find that hard to believe. Chabon quotes Eisner saying that Jews would “gravitate” to comics, because they could get work there. (The implication is that bigotry barred them from other professions.) Feiffer comments that the comic book heroes these Jewish creators concocted had WASPy names: they “assimilated themselves on the comics page.” Gerard Jones widens the scope of the topic, observing that Jewish creators played important roles in movies and popular songs, as well as comics, in this period: that they contributed to American pop culture as a whole.

A little while later, Jones notes that many of the early creators in comic books “were just storytellers,” who were not adept in business, and were exploited by the publishers. In contrast, Eisner proved to be a master of both fields. Onscreen, Spiegelman phrases it cleverly: Eisner, he says, made a “great cocktail” out of his parents’ disparate ambitions: his father’s dream to be an artist, and his mother’s emphasis on making money.

Once the documentary gets to The Spirit, another sidebar emerges: Ebony, the Spirit’s African-American sidekick, who was drawn and dialogued in a stereotypically caricatured manner. The movie goes to considerable lengths to put this character in the context of the times. We are shown onscreen that Eisner’s hero Caniff also used racial caricatures. exemplified by Connie, the Chinese sidekick in Terry and the Pirates. The movie includes an excerpt from the truly dreadful movie Check and Double Check (1930), featuring the popular radio characters Amos and Andy, played in blackface by their white creators. Eisner explains that the “whole culture accepted Amos and Andy” back in the 1940s and that it “never occurred to me I was violating black sensibilities.” And you should be able to see here what relevance this passage of the film has on the controversy over the Mary Jane statuette. Here is an example of the sort of unconscious prejudice that I mentioned earlier.

The film returns to the subject of Ebony a little later, when it gets to the point that Feiffer began working with Eisner. Spiegelman comments that Ebony made Feiffer “irritable.” Feiffer explains that he was of a “different generation” than Eisner and was “more interested in civil rights” and more liberal politically than Eisner. Acknowledging that he “had great affection for Will,” Feiffer does not condemn Eisner’s use of Ebony. Feiffer says he didn’t think the treatment of Ebony was “racist”; he thought the treatment of Ebony was “dumb.”

Maybe that’s the lesson we should apply to the MJ statuette and the Heroes for Hire cover: their creators weren’t necessarily being consciously sexist, they were just being too “dumb” to understand the implications of their work.

Come back next week for the rest of my review of Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist and my report on my adventures at another Tribeca Film Festival event: the American premiere of Spider-Man 3.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR OTHER PEOPLE
Heidi MacDonald, the Beat herself, has been writing a thoughtful series of essays on the Mary Jane and Heroes for Hire controversies and the larger subject of sexism in comics. You can find them over at the following addresses:
http://pwbeat.publishersweekly.com/blog/2007/05/17/night-of-the-feminazis-pt-1/
http://pwbeat.publishersweekly.com/blog/2007/05/18/but-the-little-girls-understand/#comments
http://pwbeat.publishersweekly.com/blog/2007/05/21/2563/#comments
http://pwbeat.publishersweekly.com/blog/2007/05/22/and-the-tits-just-keep-coming/

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

A little over four hours before I began writing this week’s column on Thursday afternoon, May 18, I was on television. Yesterday afternoon I got a phone call from a member of the staff at MSNBC asking if I would we willing to be interviewed about the notorious new Comiquette statue of Mary Jane Watson, Spider-Man’s leading lady. So, early this afternoon I was picked up by a car service that MSNBC sent, and taken to a midtown Manhattan studio.

This is a different sort of experience than you might expect. MSNBC is actually located in Secaucus, New Jersey. A young woman ushered me into a tiny room where I sat on a chair in front of a background photo of New York City. An earpiece was affixed to my right ear, so I could hear both the live MSNBC news telecast and the producers, who were presumably out in Secaucus. A woman came in and quickly applied makeup, mostly under my eyes. (I was impressed, since I didn’t get any makeup when I was interviewed by CBS! See “Comics in Context” #73.) I was facing a small TV monitor, and was asked if I wanted in turned on, so I could see Alex, the anchorwoman who would be interviewing me (whom you can see here). But I decided against it, which was probably a good choice, since I was not supposed to look at the monitor, but into the camera. There was no cameraman in the room, but I knew that the red light meant that it was on.

This wasn’t the first time I had been gone to a studio to be interviewed by remote control. I once spent an hour in a soundproof room in Manhattan being interviewed over a headset by a man from the BBC who was across the ocean in Britain. At least time I got to see several real people, the helpful young women who got me seated, applied my makeup and brought me a soft drink!

Readers of this column may be amazed that I can speak about comics in sound bites when it is required of me. Actually, I’m rather surprised by this myself.

In case you haven’t seen this statuette of Mary Jane, take a look on this website, and you’ll better understand why it raised such controversy (such as here). It was produced by Sideshow Collectibles, whose products I generally admire, on license from Marvel, and designed by comics artist Adam Hughes, who is well known in comics circles for his skill at portraying beautiful women.

Since the panel in which she was introduced over forty (!) years ago, Mary Jane has long been depicted in the comics as a sexy knockout. BUt this maquette pushes the sexuality just far enough to fall over the line separating tastefulness from tawdriness. She’s bent over, wearing a low cut top revealing a veritable canyon of cleavage. Her jeans ride so low that her thong underwear is visible, and there’s a hole in the seat of her jeans, as well. Her smile can be interpreted as a come hither look. The overall effect is to create the appearance of sexual submissiveness. She’s shown washing Peter Parker’s Spider-Man costume, and I can see that Hughes and Sideshow might have considered this a clever gag. I can also see the argument that the maquette implies that Mary Jane’s proper place is washing her husband’s dirty laundry, whereas in both the comics and the movies MJ has always been independent, pursuing a career in modeling and acting.

My interviewer observed that Marvel claims that the MJ maquette is being sold only to adult collectors, and not to children. The price alone demonstrates that: Sideshow is charging $124.99 each, and the entire limited edition of nine hundred has already sold out, and it hasn’t even started shipping yet. I pointed out that the comics market has primarily consisted of adults for quite some time now.

At the end of my segment, the interviewer asserted that comics sales were in decline, and asked me if I thought that Marvel had “sexed up” Mary Jane in order to push the sales up. I detected an edge in her voice when she asked me this, which I interpreted as anger at Marvel for exploiting the character this way for profit. I responded that I didn’t think that the MJ maquette would have any effect on the comics sales, and that this statuette would primarily be sold to people who had already been reading Spider-Man comics for twenty years. (I could have said “horny aging fanboys,” but I restrained myself.) I sensed that my interviewer may have been disappointed in this answer.

Earlier, she had asked me whether I thought that Marvel had anticipated the adverse reaction the maquette has received. I replied that I thought that Marvel would have been surprised. I didn’t have the time or opportunity to go into this, but comics aficionados should realize that this Mary Jane statuette is not all that different from business as usual in the male-dominated world of superhero comics. Collectors have long prized what they euphemistically call “Good Girl Art” in the comics. Female outfits bordering on the lurid go back as far as Phantom Lady’s costume back in the Golden Age of the 1940s. Wikipedia correctly defines the “Good Girl Art” of the 1940s and 1950s as “a style of comic art depicting voluptuous female characters in provocative situations and pin-up poses that contributed to widespread criticism of the medium’s effect on children” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_Lady). In the 1980s and 1990s, as Wikipedia chronicles, there was the trend in comics featuring “Bad Girl Art,” whose heroines, such as Lady Death and Witchblade, wore even less than their “Good Girl Art” predecessors. This Wikipedia entry pretentiously likens “the original “˜Image Comics’ house style” to Mannerism, a 16th century style of painting that featured elongated anatomy. I find little or no aesthetic appeal in the distorted human figures perpetrated by so many artists working in “The original “˜Image Comics’ house style.” In particular, the basketball-sized breasts with which so many male comics artists have been endowing women since the late 1980s have more to do with immature male fantasies than with serious portraiture.

In other words, the Mary Jane maquette is arguably rather tame in comparison with many lurid illustrations of women in comics history. So why did this statuette inspire such a furor?

I suggested in the MSNBC interview that one reason is that comics in the early 21st century attract a larger female readership than they had even ten years ago. I can tell just by looking at the audience at an event at the Museum of Comic or Cartoon Art (www.moccany.org), or at its roster of volunteers, or scanning the crowd at the New York and San Diego Comic-Cons. It’s the growth of alternative comics and graphic novels and the manga explosion that has brought many of them in. Of course many of them will perceive and object to the sexist implications of that MJ maquette.

Moreover, this is the age of the Internet, and, as I’ve said before, you never know who or how many people may read what you post there. I was a little surprised that some of the people at MSNBC I spoke with had read some of the same comments about the MJ statue on the Net that I had.

And here we come to another factor behind the furor: the mainstream media is paying attention. Ten years ago MSNBC probably wouldn’t have done a story like this, and most of the American public probably wouldn’t have recognized the name “Mary Jane Watson” (and this, despite her presence in the Spider-Man newspaper strip). But the mainstream media’s interest in comics has rapidly grown, even in the short time since I began writing this column in 2004, so much so that it is no longer much of a surprise to see, say, the profile of cartoonist Tony Millionaire in the Arts and Leisure section of last Sunday’s New York Times (May 13, 2007).

And then there are the enormously popular Spider-Man movies. Whatever you may think of the 1960s Batman TV show, one thing that it accomplished was to familiarize the American public with so many of the primary elements of the Batman mythos: Alfred, Commissioner Gordon, the Batcave, the Batmobile, the Joker, the Penguin, the Riddler, the Catwoman. Before his movies, the American public beyond comic book fans had heard of Spider-Man, but now they know about Aunt May, the Green Goblin, J. Jonah Jameson, and yes, about Mary Jane Watson. By now, after three movies, she had become an iconic figure to the worldwide moviegoing public. Consider how importance the romance between Peter Parker and Mary Jane is in the three movies, and how prominently she is featured in much of the movie advertising (and, for example, the cover of the Spider-Man 2 DVD).

In interviewing me, the MSNBC anchorwoman referred to Mary Jane as the “girl next door” that Marvel had “sexed up” in the maquette. The interviewer noted that Mary Jane had been portrayed as a character with strong sex appeal since her debut in the comics, and asked if I thought the statue updated that quality for our time. I replied that I thought the statue went beyond that, crossing the line of taste (for the reasons I’ve noted above).

But her phrase “girl next door” is significant. John Romita, Sr., who first drew Mary Jane’s face (in Amazing Spider-Man #42, November, 1966–Steve Ditko had earlier given readers a look at her figure) has stated on many occasions that he was inspired by the young Ann-Margret in drawing her. Watch the movies Bye Bye Birdie (1963) and Viva Las Vegas (1964) and you’ll see what he must have been aiming for: a young woman who can be vividly, openly sexy without coming off as tacky or promiscuous. Stan Lee gave her an enchanting, captivating party girl persona, and it was later writers who drew out the more serious side of her personality. Just last week former Spider-Man editor Jim Salicrup and I were discussing Gerry Conway’s underrated graphic novel Spider-Man: Parallel Lives (1989), in which he persuasively demonstrated that MJ’s sexily extroverted public persona was a facade for her serious side, her means of escaping the emotional pain of her family life, just as Peter Parker escaped his own unhappiness through the assumed identity of the wisecracking Spider-Man.

Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies not only dispense with Spider-Man’s ability as a comedian, but also with Mary Jane as life of the party, thus eliminating important parts of their characterizations from the comics. I will return to this subject when I review Spider-Man 3 in the near future. I feel that I’m only seeing half of Mary Jane–that serious side, capable of sorrow–when I see her in the movies. Referring to Kirsten Dunst’s performance as Mary Jane in his review of Spider-Man 3 (May 4, 2007), New York Times critic Manohla Dargis wrote, “this wispy, sad-eyed beauty turns into Melancholy Girl, able to melt hearts in a single glance.”

In thus simplifying Mary Jane’s personality for the movies, Raimi has turned her into a more conventional leading lady, but one which he and Dunst make affectingly real. She is the “girl next door,” both literally and figuratively. I see that Wikipedia also has an entry on this phrase, stating that “The prototype of the girl next door is often invoked in American contexts to indicate wholesome, unassuming, or “average” femininity. . . .To fall in love with the “girl next door” is an archetype of romantic fiction and a key plot element. . . .She is the sweet girl he [the male protagonist] sees every day, a really great friend, or the perfect girl to bring home to his parents. She is often a virgin.” The entry even lists Kirsten Dunst’s Mary Jane as its first example of this archetype. (In Stan Lee’s 1960s Spider-Man stories, it was Gwen Stacy who conformed to the “girl next door” image, not Mary Jane.)

At this point much more of the public at large, not just in America but around the world, knows Raimi and Dunst’s version of Mary Jane, rather than Lee and Romita’s from the 1960s. Doubtlessly many moviegoers, male and female, project their idealized image of what a heroine should be onto the films’ Mary Jane. So it’s no wonder that the folks at MSNBC felt a sharp disconnect between their image of MJ from the movies and the fanboy fantasy version presented by the Sideshow statuette. As the Wikipedia entry puts it, the “girl next door” is “contrasted with other stereotypes such as tomboy, valley girl, and slut.”

Marvel contends that the MJ maquette is intended only for adult collectors, and children won’t even see it. Ah, but this is the age of the Internet, and not only will children find a picture of the statue, but so did MSNBC and other members of the news media. With Spider-Man 3 so much in the news lately, the mainstream media would be more on the lookout for news like this than they might be normally.

And that makes me wonder what might have happened if the notorious Spider-Man: The Other comics saga, in which Spidey’s eye is gouged out (and subsequently grows back), had seen print closer to the release of one of the Spider-Man movies (see “Comics in Context” #118). What would the mainstream media have thought of this, had it come to their attention? Or what about the more recent Spider-Man: Reign miniseries, which my colleague Fred Hembeck found particularly appalling? In this tale of an alternate future, Mary Jane has died of cancer, her body grotesquely ravaged, induced by Peter Parker’s radioactive semen!

I believe that both storylines grossly violate the spirit of the Lee/Ditko/Romita Spider-Man concept, but within the subculture of the comic book audience, these storylines were commercial successes. But just how could Marvel have explained them to the mainstream news media, which think of Spider-Man in terms of Stan’s own stories and the Raimi movies? I suspect that such a media spotlight would expose the way that the Grim and Gritty movement has so severely distorted the superhero genre over the last two decades.

Now we should be wondering what is the next time bomb that will go off in comics about superheroes that the mainstream media know about?

How about this: writer Frank Miller and artist Jim Lee’s All Star Batman and Robin #5, which just hit the comic book shops? It seems like such a long time since I last wrote about this series, way back in “Comics in Context” #119 (which I had titled “Bats and Spats,” since it also covered Carl Barks’s Uncle Scrooge, but IGN changed it), and indeed, it’s been over a year (!) since the last issue.

But the issue 5 starts off with a bang, as a severely pissed off Wonder Woman marches down a Metropolis street, mentally fulminating that “It stinks of men,” and she means literally, and ordering a harmless-looking male passerby, “Out of my way, sperm bank.” So, you know that meretricious stereotype about man-hating feminists? This first page seems to agree with it.

It gets worse. Several pages later, Wonder Woman is castigating the Man of Steel: “You call yourself a Superman? Kow-towing to these ants? Dropping to your knees before these earthbound, ephemeral humans?”

Now Miller has Superman remind us that this is a Wonder Woman who has newly arrived in “man’s world” from the Amazons’ island: “Settle down, Diana. You’re new to this world.” The All Star Batman series is set in the past, back when Batman first recruited Dick Grayson to be the original Robin.

But many of you will recall Miller’s The Dark Knight Strikes Again (see “Comics in Context” #30, 31, 34), set in the future, in which Superman declares, “Ma. Pa. You were wrong. . . . I am not one of them. I am not human.” He continues, “And I am no man’s servant. I am no man’s slave. I will not be ruled by the laws of men.” We last see Superman in Dark Knight Strikes Again hovering above the Earth with Lara, his daughter by Wonder Woman, as he ominously asks, “What exactly shall we do with our planet, Lara?” In Miller’s continuity, the Superman of All Star Batman will end up agreeing with Wonder Woman: he will become Miller’s superpowered version of Friedrich Nietzche’s ubermensch, unrestrained by conventional human morality.

Continuing her harangue in All Star Batman and Robin #5, Wonder Woman tells Superman that the “rules” he follows instruct him to “mince about.” Oh, look, she’s invoking an insulting gay stereotype, just like Leonidas in Miller’s 300 dismissing the Athenians as “boy-lovers” (see “Comics in Context” #175).

Wonder Woman also tells Superman he will “prostrate yourself before whatever vermin their stupid elections prop up as the “˜authorities.’” So Wonder Woman is contemptuous of democracy and, by extension, of the law. But disdain for the law doesn’t seem to be a sin in All Star Batman. A page before, Green Lantern was arguing that the Batman isn’t all that bad: “He’s got no respect for the law. And, yeah, maybe he’s a little unhinged. But that’s no reason to run off half-cocked” after him. What harm could there be in a somewhat insane vigilante defying the law?

Wonder Woman has a different approach to the matter of Batman: “We kill him, we chop off his head and plant it on a stake and present it to your “˜authorities’ as their first gift from the Justice League.” You see, as far as Wonder Woman is concerned, the Justice League shouldn’t serve humanity, but as their superiors, may deign to present them with gifts. (Hey, it’s Wonder Woman as Salome!)

I concede that there has always been a seeming contradiction in the Wonder Woman concept: she is the princess of a warrior race, and she engages in physical combat against evildoers, and yet she has traditionally been depicted as the enemy of warmongers and an advocate of peace. Yet this latter side of Wonder Woman is essential to the character. Rather than despising men, Wonder Woman traditionally journeyed to “man’s world” because she loved the series’ original leading man, Steve Trevor. The bloodthirsty Wonder Woman whom Jim Lee draws in this issue of All Star Batman and Robin may look like Wonder Woman, but I doubt that her creator William Moulton Marston would recognize her from the script.

Do you recall that notorious sequence in Civil War: Frontline #11 in which a reporter named Sally Floyd tells off Captain America for defending the cause of individual freedom in Marvel’s Civil War, and he just sits there and takes it, rather than acting in character and mounting a stirring defense of freedom (see “Comics in Context” #168)? That suggests that the writer was on Sally’s side. Similarly here in All Star Batman, though Superman roars his outrage at Wonder Woman, Miller does not allow him to make a reasoned defense of his position. Indeed, Superman’s declaration that “This is my world. These are my people. These are my rules.” may suggest that he is already subconsciously embracing the ubermensch outlook of superiority to humanity. Superman also thunders that if “you commit murder on my land,” perhaps implying that Earth is his personal possession, “you’ll pay for it with your own precious Amazon blood.” Remember Superman’s traditional oath against killing? He certainly doesn’t remember it here.

Turn to the next page, and you’ll see that all this rage and bloodthirstiness on Superman and Wonder Woman’s parts covers over their intense sexual passion for each other, which suddenly bursts forth. (Lois who?) When George Lucas had Han Solo and Princess Leia continually quarreling, oblivious to their love for each other, I suspect he intended the viewers to think they were behaving immaturely. On the other hand, in this scene between Superman and Wonder Woman, we can see the shadows of two other characters Miller portrayed as both antagonists and lovers, Daredevil and Elektra.

As for Wonder Woman’s intention of beheading Batman, who is it that still beheads their alleged enemies in real life here in the early 21st century? Isn’t it some of the so-called “Islamo-fascists”? Wonder Woman advocates decapitation, rants against democracy, and insists that Superman act like as an ubermensch, above human law. MIller’s Wonder Woman is heading down a dangerous path, and, in Dark Knight Strikes Again, takes Superman with her. Dr. Marston created Wonder Woman to be the adversary of Nazism, not as a sympathizer.

Then Batman himself, or “the goddamn Batman,” as he calls himself yet again, shows up in this fifth issue, laughing to frighten criminals, as if he were Steve Ditko’s Creeper. There’s a reason why, even back in the 1940s when Dick Sprang regularly drew a happily grinning Batman, that he didn’t launch into maniacal jags of laughter. That’s what his enemy and opposite, the Joker does.

And the Joker has the sadistic sort of personality that gets off on inflicting harm on people. Well, the All Star version of Batman not only has the Joker’s laugh, but he has a streak of sadism, too. Miller’s original The Dark Knight Returns had already suggested that Batman takes pleasure in hurting criminals, but in All Star Miller makes this much more explicit and ups the ante considerably.

Batman comes across two man who are apparently about to rape, mutilate, and possibly kill a woman. Batman injures one assailant’s arm so badly he can no longer feel his hand. Then Batman grimly informs him, “It’s called a compound fracture, rapist. It’ll never heal. Not right it won’t. You’ll remember me every time the air goes wet and cold. Arthritis, punk. It’ll hurt like hell.” Batman seems to take satisfaction in this.

Next Batman turns his attention back to the other assailant, striking him seven times, each with a “Krunch” sound that suggests shattering bones. The woman watches, and then breaks into a smile, as if she is sexually turned on by the sight of such brutality. It wasn’t many pages before that the thought of violence impelled Superman and Wonder Woman into each other’s arms. There’s a pattern here. The first assailant, whose injured arm is bent backwards (!), asks the woman he had tried to victimize for help. She does something we can’t quite see to him with her foot, probably kicking him in the balls. (It’s the return of the genital injury motif from Sin City!) “Good girl,” Batman tells this adult woman, simultaneously commending her initiation into sadism and engaging in sexist condescension.

Batman also instructs her not to call an ambulance for these guys. “These creeps will survive,” he tells her, “but I want them to suffer pain that’ll last a lifetime.” You see, even if these guys reform, they’ll still be in pain for the rest of their lives. “I love you,” responds the woman, enthralled.

By coincidence, on the same day that I picked up All Star Batman and Robin #5 at my favorite Manhattan comics shop, Cosmic Comics at 10 East 23rd Street, I also purchased Astro City: The Dark Age, Book Two #3, by writer Kurt Busiek and artist Brent Anderson. Busiek is one of the principal writers of what he calls the “reconstructionist” school in superhero comics, and which I have dubbed the “Neo-Silver” movement. The Dark Age is Busiek’s critique of the comics of the 1970s and the origins of the “Grim and Gritty” aesthetic that ate away at the idealism of the comics of the Silver Age of the 1960s.

It makes Kurt uncomfortable when I point out similarities between his Astro City characters and other established superheroes, but they are inevitable, since he is devising his own variations on the character archetypes of the superhero genre.

In this latest issue Busiek includes a team of costumed urban vigilantes, Street Angel and the female Black Velvet, who remind me in part (but only in part, Kurt), of Daredevil and Elektra. Black Velvet turns out to be a killer, and Street Angel intends to turn her into the police. She then asks him how the two of them are different.

“I don’t kill,” he replies.

“Oh?” she asks. “How many have you left lying in alleyways these past two years, skull fractured, lung punctured? How many internal injuries? Did they all get medical attention? Did they all live? Did they?“

Street Angel is horrified by this, having never considered it before. His first reaction is to think that somehow she corrupted him, but Street Angel pointedly asks, “Did you ever think maybe–you just liked it?” And I thought of that scene with Batman and the would-be rapists.

Batman’s brutality fits into an aspect of the zeitgeist of early 21st century America: the concept that any cruelty directed against the Bad Guys is justified. In popular culture that leads to the frequent use of torture by the supposed Good Guys in the television series 24: usually they don’t have any moral qualms or hesitation about it. In real life, of course, this mindset led to the Abu Ghraib scandals.

Am I wrong in sensing that the majority of American public opinion is against the use of torture? As entertaining as I have found 24 in the past (This season it’s clearly running out of steam!) , I wonder if the national sensibility is shifting, whether the time will come that the series is regarded as something of a dated embarrassment, specifically because it condones torture.

Towards the end of the issue there is a vignette in which MIller and Lee show a bare-chested, surprisingly muscular Alfred the butler working out. (Is no one in contemporary superhero comics allowed to have an average build?) Alfred describes how, after she and her husband were fatally shot by the mugger, the last thing that Martha Wayne saw before she died was the look in her young son Bruce’s eyes: she metaphorically “saw him become a demon.”

Unless Miller means for us to think that Alfred witnessed this double murder (and if he did, why wasn’t he shot, too?), then Alfred must be imagining what happened. It seems as if Mrs. Wayne’s murder was horrifying enough without her witnessing her formerly innocent son’s dreadful psychological transformation, as well.

On balance, though, I approve of this reminiscence, and I wonder if Miller intended it as a response to the movie Batman Begins (see “Comics in Context” #89). In that film Bruce Wayne grows up lacking any vocation beyond shooting his parents’ killer, Joe Chill; it is Bruce’s friend Rachel, and later Henri Ducard, who direct his energies into becoming a crimefighter. However, I think that the idea that Bruce Wayne, from childhood on, was determined to avenge his parents’ death by warring on all criminals, is an important component of the Batman myth. Here Miller captures that transformation of innocent child to dedicated avenger in words, just as Alex Ross did it in a single picture in JLA: Secret Origins (see “Comics in Context” #29).

Miller has Alfred worry that Bruce Wayne suffers from “hubris” and may have gone “mad.” Readers may wonder if Miller intends us to regard Batman as going overboard, and if Miller intends that Batman will moderate his behavior over the course of the All Star series. Maybe. But is the All Star Batman really that different from the Batman of Miller’s Dark Knight books? The All Star version seems more explicit about his attitude towards violence against criminals. On the other hand, the Dark Knight Batman seems more caring towards his own new Robin, Carrie Kelly. We shall see.

In this All Star issue Alfred regards young Dick Grayson as an “innocent young boy” and thinks, “I pray this child will survive this,” namely his tutelage by Batman. But the issue concludes with Grayson picking up a broadaxe and saying, “Cool.” Just how innocent is he? And we know from The Dark Knight Strikes Again that he will end up as a serial killer.

All Star Batman and Robin is not part of DC’s canonical mainstream continuity. Miller has stated that he considers it to be part of an alternative continuity that leads to his two Dark Knight series. (It seems that Miller’s Batman: Year One belongs to both continuities.) Still, All Star Batman and Robin is putting forth rather disturbing portrayals of Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman. The mainstream media probably will not take any notice.

But now I’m worried about what will happen when Miller finishes his Holy Terror, Batman series, pitting his version of Batman against Al Qaeda. This is the kind of story hook that will guarantee attention from the mainstream media. What will the mainstream media–and the general public–think? There have already been reviews of the 300 movie that accuse it of homophobia and even fascist tendencies (here, for example).

I’m not saying I fear there’ll be censorship or bookburnings of comics, as in the 1950s: I think the mainstream media have by now gotten the message that comic books now have an adult audience.

The lesson of the brouhaha or the Mary Jane figurine is that comics is no longer a niche artform, the interest of a small subculture, off the radar screen of mainstream culture. The press, the literary world, academia, and the general public are all paying much more attention to comics now. Through the reports on the Mary Jane maquette, the news media exposed a sexism which much of the comics industry and readership tolerated, if they were even aware of it. The bloggers’ panel at the New York Comic-Con (see “Comics in Context” #167) pointed out that comics industry representatives now have to be more careful in their public statements, because the mainstream press may pick them up. (This is one reason why I am so appalled by the nonsensical statements made by certain comics industry executives.)

The bright spotlight of the mainstream media will bring flaws to light that may have remained concealed in the darkness of comics’ niche subculture. It’s like your mom telling you to wear clean underwear when you go out: you never know what will happen, and what may be revealed.

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–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

When I left off last week, I was being dazzled by the vast array of vintage comic books on display at Geppi’s Entertainment Museum (http://www.geppismuseum.com/), which opened last fall at the former Camden Station building in Baltimore, Maryland. Hundreds and hundreds of comic books from the Golden Age of the 1930s and 1940s to nearly the present day lined the walls of the gallery titled “A Story in Four Colors,” as you can see in this photo of just a sampling. There were also an enormous array of Big Little Books and a selection of pulp magazines, including The Shadow and The Spider.

But there was even more than just the actual comics and pulps on display beneath glass. For example, on a video monitor a documentary about the history of EC Comics was playing, presumably the same one that was a subject of a panel at the 2005 San Diego Con (see “Comics in Context” #95). Nearby were original copies of the legendary ECs themselves, and beyond them, high on a wall, the original artwork for various EC covers, including a stunning comics cover by Harvey Kurtzman.

At one end of the hall were a series of screens on which the very first Superman story from Action Comics #1 (1938) was projected, a few pages at a time. In front of the screens were two kiosks with touch screens, which enable the visitor to electronically page through this story, or Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s Fantastic Four #1 (1961), or Lee and Ditko’s first Spider-Man story from Amazing Fantasy #15 (1962), or Carl Barks’s “Donald Duck Finds Pirate Gold,” from Four Color #9 (1942). First one touches the screen to select one of the comics, and then, through additional touching, cause the onscreen book to open and its pages to turn, through simple, appealing animation. This was entertaining, and I found myself wishing that there were a lot more selections in the kiosks, and, probably impracticably, that the museum people had scanned the backup stories for these comics as well. (Fantastic Four #1, which had no backups, was the only complete issue, but, of course, most visitors would probably not care about, say, the other features in Action #1.) While I was playing with the kiosks, the first Batman story, “The Case of the Chemical Syndicate” from Detective Comics #27 (1939) and the first Spider-Man story appeared on the big screens behind them.

As much fun as I had with these electronic toys, afterwards I wondered how much the museum visitor with little knowledge of comics history would get out of them. He or she might figure out that the stories on the screens are the debuts of Superman, Batman, the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man, and the latter two have credits for Lee, Kirby and Ditko. But no information is supplied about who these men are, or what made these stories so revolutionary in their time. Nor is there any information about Superman’s co-creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster and their struggle to get their innovative strip published, or about Bob Kane and his long unacknowledged co-creator of Batman, Bill Finger (see “Comics in Context” #94).

In the case of Barks’s “Pirate Gold,” I recalled that this was one of his earliest comics stories, but it wasn’t until after returning home and researching it on the Net, that I discovered that (1) this was the first Donald Duck comics story produced by American publication, (2) it was Barks’s first work in Disney comics, following his stint as a story man for Disney animation, (3) the story was not written by Barks, but adapted by a writer named Bob Karp from a script for an animated cartoon that was never made, and (4) Barks only drew half the story, while his former Disney writing partner Jack Hannah drew the rest. Now, I’m pretty knowledgeable about comics, but all this came as news to me.

But of course I already knew who Carl Barks was, and his importance to Donald Duck’s history, and, indeed, to the comics medium (see “Comics in Context” #114). How many typical visitors to this museum have even heard of Carl Barks, whose comics work went uncredited for decades?

Furthermore, although the “Four Colors” room’s introductory wall text asserts the significance of comics as an artform, what the visitor principally sees in this gallery are the outside of comic books: their covers. Each cover is a single image, however iconic it may be, whereas the essence of comics is a succession of images that tell a story. Apart from some original artwork near the room’s entrance, only the screens and kiosks provide examples of comics storytelling in operation.

But all one need do is to step out into the main hall of the museum to find some brilliant examples of classic newspaper comic strips. To enter this splendid hallway with its high ceiling is like stepping back in time to the Victorian period when Camden Station was built. Artworks have been hung from waist level right up almost to the ceiling, in the fashion of art galleries and museums in the 19th century. But here the objects d’art range from an Alex Ross color print of the Justice League, with his trademark combination of realism and idealization, to a huge Joe Shuster drawing of Superman signed by Siegel and Shuster. There are an enormous 1933 RKO King Kong poster (in German, I think) and an original 1956 “half-sheet” for the movie Forbidden Planet, as well as lobby cards going all the way back to one featuring Mary Pickford from the silent movie era. Here is a page of Bob Kane’s 1930s funny animal series Peter Pupp, as well as a Joe Kubert page from the Viking Prince tale “Curse of the Dragon’s Moon” (from Brave and the Bold #24, 1959). There’s a genuinely amazing piece by Wally Wood entitled “Comic Strip Christmas Party,” with a multitude of interacting famous comic strip characters, drawn of the styles of their creators (apparently from MAD #68 in 1962). And down at one end of the hallway, instead of the Greek or Roman heroic statue one might expect in a Victorian museum, stands instead a statue of a modern hero, Superman.

Then there’s animation art from the Golden Age of the Hollywood Cartoon. Amazingly, there’s a whole series of cels over backgrounds from the Max Fleischer Popeye cartoon Let’s You and Him Fight (1934): Popeye gets kicked in the chin by a mule, Popeye eats spinach, and the setting of his latest boxing match, “Yank’Em Stadium“. Here is the Wicked Queen from Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), holding the box in which Snow White’s heart is to be placed, and her alter ego, the Old Witch, holding her own trademark, the poisoned apple. Nearby an underwater Jiminy Cricket tips his hat to a passing fish in a cel and background from Disney’s Pinocchio (1940), while another pairs the evil puppeteer Stromboli with Foulfellow, the con artist fox. Two other cel-and-background combinations aren’t properly identified, but this Mickey Mouse in bandleader’s uniform and long-billed Donald with a flute are obviously from the classic 1935 cartoon The Band Concert (see “Comics in Context” #110).

As for the original art for comic strips on view, here we see museum founder Steve Geppi’s collector’s eye at its best. My favorites in this main hall are two extraordinary Sunday pages by Hal Foster that persuaded me to rate this master even higher in my estimation. I usually think of Foster as creating formal, stately, handsomely drawn tableaus. But this 1933 Tarzan page, titled “The Woman and the Ape,” is a masterpiece of kinetic power, as Tarzan plunges and swoops among the tree trips, wresting a princess from the clutches of a great ape (probably it is no coincidence that this appeared the same year as the premiere of King Kong), only to confront a roaring lion in a climactic close-up.

Elsewhere along the hallway is a Prince Valiant page from August 2, 1953, in which Foster demonstrates his prowess at visual characterization. Here Valiant confronts Rory McColm, the king of Ireland. Foster communicates the king’s arrogance through a subtly imperious, condescending look. Then, with equal skill, Foster uses a different, more openly expressive approach to convey Valiant’s reaction: he bares his gritted teeth in anger, a surprising sight from this archetypically noble prince, alerting the reader as to just how evil Valiant considers his foe.

There are examples of Walt Kelly’s Pogo in different spots in the museum. I was especially pleased to find a 1960s Sunday page I remembered from my childhood: Albert the alligator, wearing a scoutmaster’s hat, and his troop of scouts, consisting of a single bug, are lost in the woods until in the final panel they see what Albert calls “Civilization!”: Beauregard Houn’Dog, moving to what seems to be a rock beat, with his transistor radio to one ear (the mid-20th century version of an iPod), as a commercial blares forth: “No ifs, no ands, no butts, no, no!/No cigarettes, no tobacco!” (This, children, is not just an example of Kelly as a master of nonsense poetry, but a cutting parody of contemporary cigarette commercials that attempted to delude the unwary into believing that some cigarettes were actually safe to smoke.)

There’s an unusual Peanuts strip from May 18, 1953, back in the early days before Charles Schulz had fully molded Charlie Brown’s personality into its now familiar form (see “Comics in Context” #66): after Charlie Brown typically blunders in a baseball game, Schroeder pointedly asks him if he’d mind going home, and Charlie Brown angrily roars back, “Yes, I would!”

A late example of Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie from the late 1960s features an intriguing character about whom I’d like to find out more; in one panel he seems to be a giant, but he has a philosophical bent, and calls himself Mr. Alpha Omega, after the Greek letters denoting the beginning and end: he tells Annie, “It’s what happens between these two terminals that’s important.” Considering that Gray died in 1968, Alpha Omega seems to be his response to facing mortality.

Examples of Al Capp’s Li’l Abner in display provide looks at two fabulous animal species he created. A 1948 strip showcases the Shmoo, the all-purpose animal that satisfies virtually all human needs (especially if it is killed and eaten): “There’s good Shmoos tonight,” the strip declares, burlesquing a 1940s catchphrase. A strip from the following year features the Kigmy, who relieves human tensions and aggressions by allowing itself to be kicked: in another parody of cigarettte commercials, the strip refers to “the kick that refreshes.” I wonder what contemporary animal rights activists would think about these two races of critters that exist to be humanity’s slaves.

And there are many more strips here of note. There’s one of Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy Sunday pages from 1943, in which a grotesquely disfigured woman shows the captive Tracy a locket bearing the visage of her deceased husband, one of his archfoes, and introduces herself as “Mrs. Pruneface.” (More original art from this storyline appeared in the “Masters of American Comics” show, as described in “Comics in Context” #153. And yes, I know, Max Allan Collins resurrected Pruneface decades later.) In a George Herriman’s Krazy Kat from Sunday, March 25, 1934, a solar eclipse seems to thwart Ignatz Mouse’s umpteenth effort to clobber Krazy with a brick, until the darkness is unexpectedly–and prettily–illuminated by a swarm of fireflies. In an E. C. Segar daily Thimble Theatre from 1936, Olive Oyl tests Eugene the Jeep’s oracular powers by repeatedly asking him if she is beautiful, to no response. Finally, exasperated, she demands, “Am I ugly?” and Eugene’s tail shoots straight up, his gesture denoting “yes,” as Popeye reacts with his barking laugh. And there is a gorgeous Sunday March 15, 1936 page by the great Alex Raymond, pairing his Jungle Jim strip, featuring a character called Bat-Woman (!), with a classic Flash Gordon featuring Flash, the archvillain Ming the Merciless, and leading lady Dale using MIng’s “paralyzo ray” against his underlings.

There are examples of Winsor McCay’s work in both the main hallway and the “Extra! Extra!” exhibit room. A 1906 Little Sammy Sneeze finds the little menace in the water at the seashore, as a nearby pair of adult swimmers dread his inevitable nasal assault. But the sneeze proves anticlimactic and disappointing; what’s remarkable here is McCay’s depiction of a wave which cascades over the swimmers yet is sufficiently transparent that we can still see them. Elsewhere, in a Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, another beachgoer wears a life preserver so large that he looks like an immense balloon; unsurprisingly, then, when a wave dashes him against the shore, it explodes. At the start of an astonishing 1909 Little Nemo, Doctor Pill already feels somewhat disoriented, having lost his hat. Matters quickly grow worse, as the characters find themselves standing on an immense face, with giant eyes. Then they are standing upon some enormous creature’s feet. Was McCay anticipating or commenting upon the movie close-up, which was developed around this period? Finally, McCay’s “camera” pulls back to a long shot, and we see that the eyes and feet belong to a creature resembling a flying dragon, which the various characters try to identify. (One calls it a “pusillanimous,” perhaps projecting his own reaction to the beast.)

However, my favorite McCay in the Geppi Museum is one of his editorial cartoons, hanging in the main hallway. A tremendous storm with billowing thunderclouds, lightning, and towering, crashing waves, rages about the Statue of Liberty. Yet the Statue stands firm, its torch alight, as if untouched by the storm, and looking somehow both melancholy and determined. McCay labeled the storm clouds “Futile Attacks,” and the Statue “Liberty of the Press”.

From this grand corridor you can enter any of a series of rooms which trace the history of American pop culture collectibles, dividing it into a different set of “ages” than the history of comic books.

The first of these rooms, “Pioneer Spirit 1776-1894,” actually starts even earlier with the only privately owned copy of the May 9, 1754 Pennsylvania Gazette with Benjamin Franklin’s famous editorial cartoon “Join, or Die” (see “Comics in Context” #159). The room includes conventional playthings such as dolls and marbles. However, the stars of this gallery are the Brownies, created in illustrated children’s books by artist Palmer Cox (1840-1924). As a lengthy wall text satisfactorily explains to people like myself who knew nothing about them, the Brownies were the first cartoon characters to spin off commercially successful licensed products, such as these bowling pins.

The title of the next gallery, “Extra! Extra! 1895-1927″ refers to the competition between turn of the last century newspaper moguls Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearts which led to the first flowering of the American newspaper comic strip. The McCay strips are here, as is an autographed photograph of comics pioneer Richard Outcault and an array of merchandise based on his comics characters the Yellow Kid and Buster Brown. There’s even a cartoon in which Buster Brown tells off Theodore Roosevelt (circa 1904).

But what particularly enchanted me was the merchandise on display that was based on a character most of you have never heard of: Uncle Wiggily, a rabbit who was a gentleman, but still a trickster (like the later Bugs Bunny), who starred in illustrated children’s books written by Howard Roger Garis (1873-1962) in the 1910s and 1920s. No, no, I’m not that old: when I was a child and I visited my grandmother, I used to read Uncle Wiggily books at her home. (It’s like how members of my generation show Bugs Bunny DVDs to their offspring.) And here in the museum were an Uncle Wiggily crayon box from 1923, an Uncle Wiggily mug from 1924, and all sorts of Wiggily memorabilia I had never known existed. My sole disappointment was that I was hoping for a look after all these years at his archvillain, the dreaded Skillery-Skallery Alligator, who, if memory serves, was determined to “nibble Uncle Wiggily’s ears!”

The title of the next gallery, “When Heroes Unite 1928-1945,” surely alludes both to American soldiers in World War II and to the birth of the superhero genre. To look around this room is to recognize that the period of the Great Depression and World War II gave rise to some of the most important and enduring iconic characters in American popular culture.

The centerpiece of this room is a display of Mickey Mouse merchandise from the 1930s, including plush dolls, a toy circus train, a radio, and even underwear. There are also charming Walt Disney studio Christmas cards featuring Mickey from 1930 (in which Mickey merrily plays the piano out in the snow, oblivious to a huge snowball looming above him) and 1931 (with Mickey caroling). Other characters are represented by toy figures as well, ranging from Horace Horsecollar and Clarabelle Cow to the “Dance of the Hours” cast from Fantasia (1940). My favorite was the matador from Ferdinand the Bull (1938), a caricature of the young Walt Disney himself.

To look at all the early Superman merchandise on display is to realize how rapidly after his 1938 debut that the Man of Steel became an American icon; here are Superman buttons from 1939 through 1945, a Superman belt from 1940, a Superman hair brush from the 40s, and more. Popeye was no slouch in licensing, either: the museum has Popeye soap, a Jeep doll, and even Popeye Sunshine biscuits (but not spinach!).

Collectibles featuring other pop icons of the period turn up as well, some that you definitely know, such as coloring books based on the 1939 films of The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind, and Little Orphan Annie decoder badges, and some that have been fading into obscurity, like statuettes of the radio characters Amos and Andy. There’s a toy of ventriloquist Edgar Bergen’s dummy Charlie McCarthy sitting in his car, and a doll of Bergen’s other famed dummy, Mortimer Snerd. And again I wondered how many visitors would know who they were.

The next gallery, “America Tunes In 1946-1960,” brings us to the start of television and the childhood of most of the Baby Boomers. As soon as you enter the room, you’ll see Howdy Doody puppets atop a series of TV screens showing not only Howdy’s show, but also The Honeymooners‘ “Chef of the Future” episode (“Better Living through TV,” 1955), Lucille Ball’s drunken encounter with “vitameatavegemin” on I Love Lucy (“Lucy Does a TV Commercial,” 1952), Hopalong Cassidy, and comedian Milton Berle interacting with, of all people, Ronald Reagan.

The Sixties get their own room, “Revolution 1961-1970,” but it’s not politics, rock music or fashion that dominates this gallery. Instead, on entering, you will face an imposing statue of the Batman, flanked on one side by the bright red Batphone from the 1960s TV series, and on the other by the bust of Shakespeare that concealed the device for opening the study wall to the Batpoles.

It was “A New Heroic Age,” according to a wall text, the time of comics Silver Age, and there is Merry Marvel Marching Society memorabilia on exhibit, as well as the March 11, 1966 issue of Life magazine with Adam West as Batman on the cover. (Hey, I owned a copy of that myself! And remind me to tell you sometime how Jim Salicrup introduced me to Adam West last year.)

It was also the decade of the superspy, who was being marketed to both adults and kids: among the exhibits are a Get Smart lunch box from 1966 and Milton Bradley’s John Drake Secret Agent game featuring a good likeness of Patrick McGoohan. In contrast the rather repellent Honey West doll from 1965 on display comes nowhere close to the luminous looks of Anne Francis in the title role of this early feminist detective TV series.

Elsewhere in this gallery is another issue of Life, from August 28, 1964, featuring the Beatles on the cover. A copy of their Magical Mystery Tour album hangs on a wall above a toy version of the Yellow Submarine from the 1968 animated film of that same name. There are copies of The Monkees comics (and little did I know this was a prophetic sight, as you shall learn next week), along with a Woodstock festival poster from 1969.

The name of the next section, “Expanding Universe 1971-1990,” suggests to me how science fiction and fantasy grew from niche cults to genres with mass audiences over these years. My favorite piece in this room was an original “3-sheet” poster for Star Wars (1977), which was both memorably iconic and blatantly deceptive. There’s Luke baring part of his chest, while Princess Leia stands seductively, hand on hip, displaying both cleavage and long, bare legs: the poster was way sexier than the movie! I also wonder about the horizontal ray of light that intersects Luke’s raised lightsaber, creating a luminescent cross, suggesting Christian imagery.

The chronological survey ends with a section called “Going Global & Special Edition.” Here in a room at the end of the hallway was a small exhibit on African-Americans in comics, ranging from the usual suspects (Jack Kirby’s Black Panther, Will Eisner’s Ebony) to the unexpected (a Gasoline Alley Big Little Book called Skeezix in Africa, about which I’d like to know more).

I should think that the main problem with providing more information about the exhibits at the Geppi Museum is that there are so many of them. There is only room for the brief descriptions in the labels.

This reminds me of the newly opened Roman galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which I mentioned in critiquing the 300 movie (see “Comics in Context” #175). On a mezzanine level above the sculpture court is a long gallery containing “The Greek and Roman Study Collection,” an enormous assemblage of roughly 3500 numbered but otherwise unlabeled artworks. But the Metropolitan has installed several touch screen kiosks in the gallery that enable the visitor to access information about each item on display. This is the sort of system that the Geppi Museum could use, but it may be prohibitively expensive. Why pay for something that, at this point, not many people would use?

If you get the impression that I pretty much had the museum all to myself during my visit, well, I pretty much did. There were as many staff members present as visitors when I was there. Of course it was a Wednesday afternoon in April, when most potential visitors are at work or school, although Baltimore’s magnificent National Aquarium (www.aqua.org), which I visited later that afternoon, was far from deserted.

Reportedly, attendance levels for the Geppi Museum have been well below initial estimates. My initial reaction to this was that there isn’t sufficiently widespread interest in the museum’s niche subjects, the histories of comics and pop culture collectibles. But the Sports Legends museum on the first floor likewise suffers from low attendance.

The problem is blamed on the two museums’ location in Camden Station, next to the Baltimore Orioles’ stadium at Camden Yards. It is said that the Orioles’ attendance has been declining recently, and that few people pass through the stadium are outside the baseball season. Moreover, Camden Station is across the street from the Baltimore Convention Center, a number of hotels are being built nearby, and pedestrians allegedly avoid walking by the construction sites.

On my visit, however, there was no construction blocking my path. More importantly, my overwhelming impression was how close so many of Baltimore’s major attractions were to each other. One might think that museums that were directly across the street from a major convention center, and within short walking distance from the nearby major hotels, would attract plenty of tourists. When I left the Geppi Museum, it took me only ten to fifteen minutes to walk roughly six blocks from Camden Station to Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, the center of the city’s tourist activity. Walking from the Geppi Museum to the Inner Harbor’s National Aquarium was no different from going from one museum to another on the Mall in Washington, D. C.. And there’s a light rail stop directly across the street from Camden Station!

I just don’t understand why the Geppi Museum is so allegedly inaccessible. Is it that New York is a walking city, and I’m simply more used to foot travel?

The more knowledge about pop culture history that you bring to the Geppi Museum, the more you will get out of it. But even if you don’t know who, say, Uncle Wiggily is, the Geppi Museum covers so many subjects–superheroes, dolls, Disney cartoons, Star Wars, the Beatles, classic television shows–that you are bound to find something here that will not only interest but fascinate you. For anyone who grew up in the 20th century, no matter what your age, it is a treasure trove of memories. As for the subjects the museum covers that you are unfamiliar with, perhaps the toys and memorabilia on display will whet your interest so you’ll want to go home, get online, and look up their background. And then you can go back to the Geppi Museum and take another look.

I traversed parts of five different states over two and a half hours to get to Geppi’s Entertainment Museum, and not only did I have no trouble finding it, but I felt my visit was well worth the time and expense. I advise any of you with a serious interest in the history of American comics, who can get down to Baltimore and back within a day, to make the trip to Geppi’s; you won’t regret it. In fact, you should make it an overnight trip and see much more of this historic city while you’re at it.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR OTHER PEOPLE
After it had been dropped by Diamond, writer/artist Richard Howell has resurrected his vampire series Deadbeats at Claypool Comics’ recently revamped website (www.claypoolcomics.com). By going here, you can start with the first online installment. New segments are posted each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

Longtime readers know that I typically celebrate my birthday by going to see a Broadway show, including Monty Python’s Spamalot in 2005 (see “Comics in Context” #82) and Disney’s Tarzan in 2006. They may also recall that I spent the Friday after Thanksgiving last year making a day trip to see the “Cartoon America” at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. (see “Comics in Context” #157 and 159).

That went so well that instead of seeing a play, this year I decided to go down to Baltimore on my birthday, a city I’d visited once before, in 1996. (The round trip train fare costs less than a pair of Broadway orchestra seats these days.) The principal reason for making the trip was to see Geppi’s Entertainment Museum, a showcase for pop culture collectibles, including comics, founded by Steve Geppi, the owner of Diamond Comics Distributors, the last significant English language comics distribution company standing. I hadn’t been one of the lucky people who were invited to the grand opening last fall, but I’d been waiting for the right opportunity to go ever since. And here it was, on a pleasantly warm and sunny day in the Northeast, following a few days in the 80s (highly unusual for April), and, before that, weeks of lingering winter cold.

I find train travel relaxing, and it spares me the hassles of dealing with taxi drivers and airport security. It proved remarkably easy to get from New York City down to Geppi’s Museum. After a two and a half hour journey from New York’s Penn Station, Amtrak train pulled into Baltimore’s own Penn Station, whose waiting room, with its beautiful stained glass skylights, was the first of many striking examples of local architecture I would see on this whirlwind trip. At this Penn Station I got aboard a light rail shuttle to a transfer point, where I chatted with a fellow passenger. (This, by the way, was a reminder of Baltimore’s friendly atmosphere. On my previous trip there, I was startled that total strangers would say hello to me on the street. This never happens in New York City, or Boston or Washington or even San Diego, for that matter.) Then I boarded the main light rail train and got off at the Convention Center stop, which is directly across the street from the Geppi Museum. I keep reading that the Geppi Museum is out of the way, but quite clearly it isn’t.

The Geppi Museum is housed in Camden Station, a magnificent Italianate brick building with a soaring tower, which stands next to Baltimore’s famous baseball stadium, Oriole Park at Camden Yards. The central section of Camden Station was opened in 1852, and Abraham Lincoln visited the building on four occasions; the rest of the original building, including the tower, was completed in 1867. This was the terminal for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, which continued to use Camden Station until 1971, by which time it was the oldest train terminal still in operation in a major American city. In the 1990s the building was restored to look as it had in 1867. In 2005 Sports Legends, a museum about the history of sports in Baltimore (the birthplace of Babe Ruth), opened on the first floor; Geppi’s Entertainment Museum opened the following year.

Entering through what I took to be the front of the building, I asked the folks at the Sports Legends admission desk where the Geppi Museum was, and was informed that its entrance is actually on the opposite side of the building. (Well, that seems appropriate: jocks and comics fans have separate entrances.) So I crossed to the other side of the lobby and ascended a staircase, past a handsome collection of vintage posters.

Then I found myself in the entrance hall for the Museum proper, whose walls were covered with even more impressive posters, my favorite being an enormous one for a Charlie Chaplin silent feature. Alongside one wall is a flatscreen TV monitor continuously running an introductory video narrated by Mr. Geppi himself, welcoming guests.

Here I was greeted by the museum’s curator, Dr. Arnold Blumberg. We had talked by phone in the past, but had never actually met until this year’s New york Comic Con. Knowing exactly what I most wanted to see, Dr. Blumberg escorted me into the museum’s largest gallery, the room titled “A Story in Four Colors.” He can doubtless attest to my reaction on entering this room, which must have involved bulging eyes and a dropping jaw.

Right in front of the room’s entrance stood a vitrine, a case with a glass top, holding beautifully preserved copies of Action Comics #1 (1938), the debut of Superman, complete with co-creator Joe Shuster’s iconic cover drawing of the Man of Steel lifting an automobile; Action Comics #2, which, though it now seems odd, does not have Superman on the cover; Adventure Comics #40 (1938), with the first appearance of DC’s original version of the Sandman, drawn on the cover by Creig Flessel; Adventure Comics #48 (1940), with the debut of the original Hourman; All-American Comics #16 (1940), in which the original Green Lantern first appeared; All-Star Comics #3 (1940), the initial saga of the Justice Society of America, the leading superhero team of the Golden Age of Comics of the 1940s; and two first issues that need no further description, Batman #1 (1940) and Captain America Comics #1 (1941).

I have seen Golden Age comic books before, and even own a few, and I have even seen copies of some of these particular landmark issues before. But to see them all together, all at once, is astonishing. And beyond the vitrine, there was a long wall lined with shelves, each filled with still more landmark issues of vintage comics. It was a treasure house! I was peering into the comics collector’s equivalent of Scrooge McDuck’s money bin, at the mother lode of this artform’s history, preserved within a single room!

Dr. Blumberg and I conversed for a while, comparing notes on our experiences teaching courses in comic books as literature, and discussing the obstacles and opportunities in persuading the culture at large that they should study comics just as people do with novels, plays and films. Eventually Dr. Blumberg had to leave for a scheduled meting, and as I faced the door to bid him goodbye, my eye was caught by a comic exhibited along another wall: Detective Comics #1 (1937), whose cover, drawn by Vin Sullivan, featured the face of the villainous Chin Lung, a ripoff of Dr. Fu Manchu! I ended up spending probably an entire hour in this room.

A wall text begins by quoting one of the Founding Fathers of modern comics, Will Eisner: “In the beginning, God made comics. . . .” Eisner was joking, but the quotation wittily sets the stage for the wall text’s version of the argument, familiar to comics scholars, that the comics artform has forebears going back to the prehistoric paintings on cave walls.

My friend and former comics editor Meloney Crawford Chadwick once pointed out to me a major reason why the mainstream culture still regarded comics with disdain. (This may seem a long time ago, but it was only in the 1990s that she told me this.) She observed that small children are considered to have grown more mature when they turn from reading illustrated storybooks to reading books with no pictures. Hence, comics enthusiasts are suspected of suffering from arrested intellectual development. The Geppi Museum wall text makes a similar point–“Although many people believe that reading words alone–prose lit–is a sign of intellectual maturity, the fact is that humans are a visual species. . . .”–and cites such early examples of sequential art (communication through a series of pictures) as the medieval Bayeux Tapestry.

The wall texts also explain Dr. Blumberg’s and the Overstreet Price Guide‘s division of comics history into nine different “ages,” expanding upon comics fandom’s traditional concepts of the “Golden Age” of the late 1930s and 1940s, in which the superhero genre was created, and the “Silver Age” of the late 1950s and 1960s, in which superhero comics were resurrected (see “Comics in Context” #58). First there is the “Pioneer Age” (1500-1828), during which many of the elements of comics–word balloons, stories told in sequential panels–were being developed. It was during the “Victorian Age” (1828-1883) that Switzerland’s Rodophe Topffer created the earliest graphic novels. Next comes the “Platinum Age” (1883-1938) when the history of the American newspaper comic strip begins with such pioneers as Richard Outcault (The Yellow Kid, Buster Brown), many strips are reprinted in comic book format, and by the end of the period American comic books begin to feature original material. The “Golden Age” begins with the debut of Superman in 1938, leading to the explosive creation of scores of classic superheroes over the next several years. Superheroes faded from popularity in the second half of the 1940s and the Overstreet Guide characterizes 1946-1955 as the “Atom Age”: this appropriately gives the heyday of EC’s horror, science fiction, war and humor comics their own “age” in between the first and second superhero-dominated “ages.” The superhero genre was reborn in the “Silver Age” (1956-1970) starting with the introduction of a reconceived Flash in Showcase #4 (1956), followed by Stan Lee’s Marvel revolution of the 1960s. This is followed by the “Bronze Age” (1970-1984), the “Copper Age” (1984-1992, my own period of activity at the Big Two comics companies of DC and Marvel), and the current “Modern Age,” specified as beginning in 1992.

In our conversation Dr. Blumberg and I agreed that these divisions into “ages” are subject to critical reevaluation, and that it is difficult to perceive which “age” is currently going on around us. Thinking further about the subject, I suspect that Overstreet’s “Modern Age” should be broken in two, and that various factors, such as the ascension of Bill Jemas and Joe Quesada at Marvel, the great expansion of the graphic novel and comics trade paperback market, accelerated mainstream acceptance, the manga revolution, and the increasing importance of alternative comics make the early 21st century landscape of American comics very different from that of the 1990s.

Overstreet’s division of “ages” applies to American comic books, not to comics worldwide, or even to American comic strips, and the “Golden,” “Silver,” “Bronze” and “Copper” Age titles traditionally apply to superhero comic books. (It is an appealing idea that the “Silver Age” was also the first age of underground comix.) The dominance of manga in the American comics market, and the high profile that alternative graphic novels now have in the culture surely show that superhero comics can no longer be the primary standard for defining American comics history.

So the Geppi Museum’s system of Nine Ages of comics may require modification, but it is still quite useful. Moreover, it is striking that this division into nine ages has moved from the pages of a collector’s price guide into the context of a museum. Just as Dr. Peter Coogan’s book Superhero: The Secret History of a Genre, serves as a first major attempt at defining the superhero genre, the Nine Ages provide a helpful tool for academic analysis of the history of American comics.

It’s also striking to see that nearly a hundred percent of the objets d’art in this room are actual comic books. There is original comic book art, too: the cover artwork for various EC comics, as well as the original art for covers of the Overstreet Price Guides, by such notables as Alex Ross and Joe Kubert. In the case of the latter, the covers portray comics characters, but the guides, of course, are not actual comics. The vast majority of what is displayed in this room are actual printed copies of comic books. I was surprised that last year’s “Masters of American Comics” show at the Jewish and Newark Museums, which mostly displayed original artwork, included so many printed copies of comic books and newspaper comics pages. But of course this was a means of exhibiting work for which the originals are unavailable, such as Lyonel Feininger’s comic strips and Jack Kirby’s “Galactus trilogy.” When Ken Wong and I co-curated “Stan Lee: A Retrospective” at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art, we similarly used photocopies of original artwork and even pages from reprint editions of 1960s comics when we could not obtain an actual original art page we would have liked to include. But in the case of both these museum shows, the main drawing card is the original art. At the Geppi, the printed comic book, the collectible, is the center of attention.

This reminds me of the question that New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman asked about “Masters of American Comics”: “The show includes one of Mr. [Will] Eisner’s drawings for a “˜splash,’ or title, page of his Spirit strip, and the printed version of it, each of which has its own aura, and raises the issue central to comic art: What is an original?”. After all, it was the printed version that Eisner meant for his audience to see; the original drawing was arguably just a tool in the creation of that printed page.

Back during the infamous comics speculator “boom” of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the conventional “wisdom,” and I use that term ironically, was that various collectible comics would be worth big money someday. Now we begin to see that vintage comic books are potential museum pieces. Once I got to the Silver Age section of the “Story in Four Colors” gallery, I saw comic books on display that I have copies of in my own collection. It is now conceivable that I could exhibit forty-year-old comics that I own in a gallery at some point. Art museums court fine art collectors in the hope they will bequeath their paintings to them. I foresee the day when museum curators and librarians court comics aficionados with massive collections, like, say, Fred Hembeck, to donate them to their institutions. Imagine: the Fred Hembeck Collection at the New York Public Library. You may think I’m kidding. The New York Public Library holds an enormous collection of Charles Addams’ original cartoons (see “Comics in Context” #72) and has recently begun collecting comic books. Isn’t it possible that in decades to come they would be happy to acquire a major collection of comic books from the last half of the twentieth century?

Around the corner from the introductory wall text for the “Four Colors” room are examples of comics from the 19th and early 20th centuries, including Buster Brown, leading up to the aforementioned Detective Comics #1 from the close of the Platinum Age.

The vitrine with Action Comics #1 which I saw when I first entered the room marks the beginning of the Golden Age. Walking to the opposite side of the vitrine, I found even more landmark issues of that period: Captain Marvel Adventures #1 (1941); Detective Comics #27 (1939), with the first appearance of the Batman; Detective Comics #28 (1939), which, like Action #2, fails to feature its new star on the cover; Detective Comics #38 (1940), with the debut of Robin the Boy Wonder; Famous Funnies #1 (1934), said to be the first “true” comic book, published in the format that became standard for the industry; Flash Comics #1 (1940), and (if I remember correctly) Dell Comics’ Four Color (second series) #9 (1942) featuring “Donald Duck Finds Pirate Gold,” with artwork by Carl Barks, launching his long career in Disney comics, and his writing partner at the Disney studio, Jack Hannah.

To my right was a walk with shelves packed with Big Little Books, tiny (3″ by 4 1/2″) but thick illustrated books, published starting in 1932, many of which featured popular comic strip and animated cartoon characters of their time.

There were still more Golden Age comics in a case, including Marvel Comics #1 (1939), introducing the original Human Torch and featuring the Sub-Mariner, the first comic book from the company, Timely Comics, that would evolve into modern day Marvel; More Fun Comics #53 (1940) with the debut of the Spectre; and New York World’s Fair Comics #2 (1940), featuring Superman, Batman and Robin on its cover (the first time Superman and Batman were shown together) standing in front of the architectural symbols of the 1939-1940 World’s Fair, the Trylon and Perisphere.

The Golden Age collection continued in a bank of shelves along the wall, including Four Color (first series) #16 (1941), in which “Mickey Mouse Outwits the Phantom Blot,” his supervillain nemesis, as drawn by Floyd Gottfredson; Patsy Walker #1 (1945) with its delightful cover portrait of its heroine, seated with her legs in the air, and Daredevil Battles Hitler (1941), starring the first costumed superhero to bear that name (DD, not Adolf!). I was especially pleased to see Superman #14 (1942), with its artist Fred Ray’s iconic patriotic cover image of Superman standing with an American bald eagle on his arm: I had seen the original art for this cover at “Superheroes: Good and Evil in American Comics,” an exhibit curated by Jerry Robinson at the Jewish Museum last fall.

In the case of long rows of shelves such as these, I can only mention a handful of the comics I saw on display. There were many, many more, each bearing significance in the history of comics.

Next came an enormous set of shelves showcasing comics from the Silver Age, including Showcase #4 (1956) which inaugurated that period by successfully introducing a reconceived version of the Flash, one of DC’s leading Golden Age superheroes.

Mort Weisinger’s editorial reign over the Silver Age Superman family of comics was represented by such examples as Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane #1 (1958) with its pre-feminist title; Adventure Comics #247 (1958), which introduced the Legion of Super-Heroes; and Action Comics #252 (1959), featuring the debut of Supergirl.

Here too were the Superman comics in which President John F. Kennedy played a significant role: Action Comics #309, which was cover-dated 1964, but, by an ominous coincidence, went on sale the month of his assassination, and Superman #170 (1964), with the tribute story “Superman’s Mission for President Kennedy,” written by Batman co-creator Bill Finger and E. Nelson Bridwell. But the reason I remember issue #170 is its cover story, one of the weirdest of the Weisinger era, “If Lex Luthor Were Superman’s Father,” written by the Man of Steel’s co-creator Jerry Siegel, in which Luthor travels back in time to Krypton and nearly marries Superman’s future mother Lara!

DC’s most important and innovative Silver Age editor was the late Julius Schwartz (see “Comics in Context” #32), the man who started the Silver Age going with the new Flash. Among the comics on exhibit that represent his contributions are Brave and the Bold #28 (1960), the first appearance of the Justice League., memorably pitting them against the gargantuan alien starfish Starro the Conqueror, and Justice League of America #1 (1960). Here too was one of the first comics in the exhibit that I also own a copy of: Justice League of America #21 (1963), titled “Crisis on Earth-One,” inaugurating the celebrated team-ups of the Justice League with their forebears, the Justice Society. Similarly, the collection included Green Lantern #1 (1960), starring Schwartz’s Silver Age version of the character, and Green Lantern #40 (1965) in which the Golden Age and Silver Age Green Lanterns first teamed up. There too was Detective Comics #359 (1966), in which Schwartz introduced the new version of Batgirl, Barbara Gordon, who would go on to co-star in the 1960s TV series. Also on display were two comics in which Schwartz revived two Golden Age Batman villains: the Riddler in Batman #171 (1965) and the Scarecrow in issue 189 (1967). I was pleased to find Hawkman #1 (1964) and one of the 1966 Showcase issues in which Schwartz resurrected the Spectre, all with extraordinary cover art by Murphy Anderson.

Speaking of Showcase, it was fun to find here unexpectedly Showcase #43 (1963), DC Comics’ adaptation of the first James Bond movie, Doctor No. It now seems strange that DC never did another Bond adaptation or an ongoing James Bond comics series, though certainly back then they would have had to clean it up considerably for young readers.

There were plenty of landmark Silver Age Marvel comics on exhibit as well. Among them was Amazing Fantasy #15 (1962) the first appearance and origin of Spider-Man, by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko; Lee and Jack Kirby’s The Incredible Hulk #1 (1962), with old Greenskin in his original gray color; Lee and Kirby’s X-Men #1 (1963), the initial appearance of Thor in Journey into Mystery #83 (1962), Iron Man’s debut in his clunky gray armor in Tales of Suspense #39 (1963) and his sleek red and gold battle armor in Iron Man #1 (1968), testifying to how rapidly Marvel’s look evolved in the 1960s; plus Jim Steranko’s Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD #1 (1968). Here too was the return of Golden Age great Captain America in Lee and Kirby’s Avengers #4 (1964).

The great comics of the 1960s inspired a new wave of young comics writers and artists who sought to build on the Silver Age’s foundation and push the creative envelope in new directions. Thus began the Bronze Age, and among the scores of comics on display in this section is Green Lantern #76 (1970), in which writer Denny O’Neil and artist Neal Adams, under Julius Schwartz’s editorial aegis, shook up the superhero genre by introducing realistic social and issues. In another comic on exhibit from the same year, Conan the Barbarian #1, writer Roy Thomas and artist Barry Windsor-Smith expand mainstream comics’ reach into the realm of sword and sorcery, a genre that is decidedly not for the small children who were once comic books’ principal audience. Another sign that the audience was becoming older was the debut of that ruthless vigilante, the Punisher in Amazing Spider-Man #129 (1974), also on display.

With a relaxation of the Comics Code, DC and Marvel ventured into the horror genre, as the museum shows with Marvel’s Ghost Rider #1 (1973) and DC’s The Demon #1 (1972), one of the 1970s projects with which Golden and Silver Age veteran Jack Kirby became an innovator in yet a third age of comics. Nearby is DC’s House of Secrets #92 (1971), in which Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson introduced Swamp Thing, and Wrightson immortalized the young Louise Simonson by portraying her on the cover as the story’s heroine.

Here too is the cult classic from Charlton Comics, E-Man #1 (1973), blending humor and superheroics. Elsewhere in this section, you can see the following classic issues. Artist Mike Kaluta unveiled his definitive visual take on the title character of The Shadow #1 (1973). Julius Schwartz turned his prowess at updating classic superheroes to Superman himself with the famous “Kryptonite No More!” story in Superman #233 (1971). Schwartz turned to co-creator C. C. Beck to help revive the long dormant original Captain Marvel in Shazam #1 (1973), with the right touch of whimsy that no one has recaptured until Jeff Smith’s current series. Stan Lee briefly returned to comic books with the origin story in The Savage She-Hulk #1 (1980).

Through several Bronze Age comics on exhibit, you can follow the radical shift turn in fortune for the X-Men series, which had been canceled at the close of the Silver Age. First, you’ll see Wolverine’s debut as a guest star in The Incredible Hulk #181 (1974). The following year, Wolverine joined Storm, Nightcrawler and other new mutant heroes in Len Wein and Dave Cockrum’s relaunch of the series in Giant-Size X-Men #1. Keep looking through the Bronze Age section and you’ll find Chris Claremont and John Byrne’s classic Uncanny X-Men #137 (1980), with the death of Phoenix.

You’ll also find Daredevil #168 (1981), in which Frank Miller not only began writing the series as well as drawing it, but also introduced Elektra to the world. The Bronze Age concluded as Walter Simonson launched his run on Thor, the best since Lee and Kirby, with the creation of Beta Ray Bill in Thor #337 (1983), also on display.

When I look over my notes on particular issues I singled out from the Bronze Age displays, I am struck by how many of them contain the seeds of the major changes we are currently witnessing in the comics artform, and business. There are few graphic novels on exhibit at the Geppi Museum, but the Bronze Age section holds three of major historical importance. There’s Will Eisner’s A Contract with God (1978), the first modern graphic novel, the forebear of all that followed. Here too is the pioneering independent comics company Eclipse’s first graphic novel, Sabre (also in 1978!), by Don McGregor and Paul Gulacy, and Marvel’s first venture into the new format, Jim Starlin’s memorable and gratifyingly adult 1982 Death of Captain Marvel (about Marvel’s version of the character, not to be confused with the Golden Age original in Shazam). The Big Two were clearly watching and adopting innovations from the new alternative comics companies that were popping up. Also on exhibit are Dave Sim’s pioneering indie comic Cerebus the Aardvark #1 (1977), Howard Chaykin’s political and sexual satire American Flagg #1 (1983) from First Comics, and the first issue of DC’s first limited series produced specifically for the new, growing direct sales comics market, Mike W. Barr and Brian Bolland’s Arthurian science fiction epic Camelot 3000 (1982).

At the far right end of the long wall with the Golden, Silver, and Bronze Age displays are the issues in exhibit from the Copper Age. Among them are Jim Shooter’s Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars #1 (1984), which launched the reign of the company-wide crossover blockbuster limited series, which still plagues us today with the likes of Infinite Crisis and Civil War. In retrospect Marvel’s flagship series may have jumped the shark with Amazing Spider-Man Annual #21 (1987), also on display. (Good heavens, Peter Parker and Mary Jane have been married for twenty years!) The Copper Age is also the age of the Grim and the Gritty, as evidenced by the exhibited copies of Batman #428 (1988), with the brutal murder of the second Robin, Jason Todd, and the even more ghastly demise of Supergirl in Crisis on Infinite Earths #7 (1985). (Both deaths have recently been undone, but they were real enough for nearly two decades.) But among the Copper Age comics on the shelves are enduring classics, including Alan Moore’s Miracleman (1985), Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns #1 (1986), John Byrne’s The Man of Steel #1 (1986), Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen #1 (1986), Moore and Bolland’s Batman: The Killing Joke (1988). From the vantage point of 2007, the mid-1980s now look to me like the high point of the evolution of the superhero genre in comics, which has subsequently slid into a dead end of Grim and Gritty shock effects and shark jumping.

There ae two doors leading from the museum’s main hallway. I entered through one, near the copy of Detective Comics #1, and I exited through the other, near the wall display of representative first issues of the Modern Age. I am surprised that the museum devotes little attention to graphic novels, underground comix and alternative comics, but Dan Clowes’ Ghost World #1 (2002) was on display in this section. I also found first issues of some recent favorites of mine: Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross’s Marvels #1 (1994), Mark Waid and Ross’s Kingdom Come #1 (1996), Buffy the Vampire Slayer #1 (1998), and Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen #1 (1999).

So, to modify one of British comedienne Catherine Tate’s catchphrases: “Was I dazzled?” Oh, yes, indeed. It was as if the whole history of American mainstream comics had taken concrete form around me, flooding me with memories.

But, of course, I’m already an authority on comics history: I could put all these comics in context. Beneath each of the comics in these immense cases there is a line on the shelf explaining its significance, such as the first appearance of the Legion of Super Heroes. But what if you are like that young comics fan I encountered in San Diego last summer who had never heard of the Legion, whose most classic period, after all, was forty years ago? What if you are a casual visitor to the Geppi Museum, who may have seen some of the recent superhero movies, but knows little about comic books themselves? What would you then make of these hundreds upon hundreds of comics exhibited in this comprehensive gallery? These are questions I will explore further in my next installment.

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You can read Dr. Arnold Blumberg’s erudite report on our recent encounter and conversation in his column at the Geppi’s Entertainment Museum website.

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In the course of the new documentary Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist, Mr. Eisner discusses what he calls his “favorite story” from The Spirit, “The Story of Gerhard Shnobble” (see “Comics in Context” #68), about a little man who had the talent to fly, although he died without anyone ever seeing him doing it. Eisner observes that this is about “people who go through life, do great things, have moments of glory no one knows about.”

Watching the documentary I realized, of course, “Gerhard Shnobble” is a parable about the creative artist whose talents go unrecognized by the world at large. Surely Eisner must have identified with Shnobble, back in the days not so long ago when comics were still regarded as a “gutter” medium.

Lately I’ve been writing about comics artists who made a great impact on the medium in the 1970s, but who had unjustly fallen from popularity by the time of their recent deaths. What is even sadder is the case of a creative artist of remarkable talent who, for one reason or another, never received the career or the level of recognition that he deserved. Such a man is Tom Artis, a comics artist whom I only met once, but whose work I admired, and who passed away this week. I recommend that you read his friend and collaborator Peter Gillis’s tribute to him, and then take a look at Artis’s work for yourself by doing a search on the Internet. Not enough people paid attention, but Tom Artis flew.

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

At the beginning of director Zack Snyder’s film adaptation of Frank Miller’s graphic novel 300, we are told that that if the Spartans of ancient Greece decided that a newborn infant was physically unfit to grow up to be a warrior, they would throw him to his death. The baby we see onscreen doesn’t meet such a fate, but we do get to see a mound of infant skulls.

This sight leads me to contemplate my own beginnings. I was born prematurely, spent some time in an incubator, and suffered from eczema as an infant. While no one would ever mistake me for a warrior, I’ve led a healthy life and have never spent a night in a hospital since my infancy. But watching this scene in 300 makes me realize: if I had been born in Sparta in the 5th century B. C., I would have been killed like all the other “unfit” newborns.

I don’t find this to be a propitious opening for a movie.

Both the 300 graphic novel and the movie recount the story of the Battle of Thermopylae (translated as the “Hot Gates”) in 480 B. C., wherein King Leonidas of Sparta and three hundred soldiers sacrificed their lives in combat against the massively larger army of the Persian emperor Xerxes. But although Leonidas’s forces lost the battle, they inflicted surprisingly large losses on the Persian army.

Moreover, the Three Hundred’s brave resistance at Thermopylae became an inspirational story, as Miller shows in 300 through his emphasis on the role of Dilios, the soldier turned storyteller. Before the climactic battle, Miller’s Leonidas observes that Dilios has “a talent unlike any other Spartan.” Though Leonidas and Miller do not spell it out, it is that Dilios is a storyteller, a creative artist, in effect. Leonidas commands Dilios to “make every Greek know what happened here. You’ll have a grand tale to tell. A tale of victory.” Dilios appears in 300‘s framing sequence in his role as storyteller, and most of Miller’s 300 is thus presented as the “grand tale” that Dilios tells to all of Greece, and to generations yet unborn.

This reminds me of the end of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in which the dying title character prevents his friend Horatio from committing suicide, and instructs him to live on and to tell Hamlet’s story; immediately after Hamlet’s death, we see Horatio begin his task, telling what happened to the newly arrived prince Fortinbras. There’s a similar idea at work in the end of the Lerner and Loewe musical Camelot, in which King Arthur, just prior to his final battle, knights a young boy and imposers a different sort of quest upon him: to leave the battlefield and devote his life to spreading the legend of Camelot.

The saga of Thermopylae was not only conveyed through succeeding centuries by historians but also through references by poets including Lord Byron, Emily Dickinson, and T. S. Eliot. Miller surely identifies with the warrior king Leonidas. Though he looks considerably younger in the movie, the 300 graphic novel establishes that Leonidas is in his fifties. Hence, he is yet another of Miller’s middle-aged heroes facing his last battle, like the Batman of The Dark Knight Returns and Hartigan in Sin City: That Yellow Bastard. But surely Miller also identifies with Dilios, since they are both artists telling the “grand tale” of the Three Hundred.

My question is just how well 300 succeeds in communicating the heroic spirit of the Thermopylae saga. Through the way in which they present their story, do Miller and Snyder distort the inspirational message they seek to convey? How justifiable is their idealization of the Spartans of 300, who, among other things, practice infanticide? I admired the graphic novel, though I never felt the affinity for it that I have to Miller’s 1980s work. The movie, however, through dramatizing and amplifying them, made me more aware of the troubling aspects of the book.

For example, take the infanticide business. In the graphic novel, this is dealt with in two tiny panels in Chapter Three. “We are born. We are inspected,” reads Dilios’s narration for a small panel showing a newborn who is mostly concealed from our sight by two enormous adult hands. Just what are those hands doing to the infant’s eyes? Is that blood? And why use the word “inspected,” as if human babies were livestock? Then, in the next panel, the narrator tells us, “If we are small or puny or sickly or misshapen, we are discarded.” We see the silhouetted figure of a man, standing on a silhouetted cliff, dropping a silhouetted baby from it. The small size of the panel deemphasizes the scene’s dramatic importance; the silhouettes prevent us from seeing clearly what is happening; and the word “discarded,” as George Orwell would point out, suggests that nothing more is happening than tossing out the trash. But what is really going on is the murder of a baby.

In the movie Zack Snyder can’t vary the size of the “panels,” and so the image of the adult “inspecting” the baby atop the precipice fills the screen. Not surprisingly, Snyder did not show the baby being dropped, but we see the remains of those who were killed before him.

I am reminded of 24, a television series which I otherwise enjoy, but which has reversed what I had thought was an immutable principle of entertainment. In stories it is the Bad Guys who torture. Indeed, in the most recent episode (April 21) of the commendable new Robin Hood series on BBC America, Robin’s servant Much is horrified that Robin intends to torture his foe, the traitor Sir Guy of Gisborne, and Robin does not go through with it. I presume that the series’ writers and producers had the Abu Ghraib torture scandal in mind, but I wonder if they were also thinking of 24, in which hero Jack Bauer tortures people without hesitation. In 300 the Good Guys kill babies, and there is no hint in either the movie or the graphic novel that this sullies the Spartans’ heroic reputation.

Actually, Wikipedia states that the babies “were abandoned on the slopes of Mt. Taygetos to die”. The 300 book actually makes matters worse by showing an adult actively killing a baby by dropping him off the cliff!

Miller has stated in numerous interviews that he was inspired to create 300 by seeing a movie about the Battle of Thermopylae called The 300 Spartans (1962) when he was a boy. That was the last movie version of the “grand tale” until 300, nearly a half century later. Obviously, the “grand tale” had faded from American consciousness in the interim.

Indeed, my understanding is that in the later decades of the last century, interest in ancient Greece and Rome declined in American schools, but it was still going strong when I was growing up. There were casts of the Elgin Marbles, the frieze from the Parthenon, on the interior walls of the prep school I attended; I wish I had appreciated them more at the time. What I did love since childhood were John Singer Sargent’s murals of gods, heroes and even monsters from Greek mythology above the grand staircase at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts: they fired my childhood interest in mythology, which would lead to my lifelong fascination with deciphering the mythic archetypes in comics. And it was in grade school that I first learned about the two great rival city-states of ancient Greece: Sparta and Athens. Right from the start, I felt an affinity for the intellectual Athenians and didn’t much care for the warlike Spartans.

As I’ve been observing for the last few weeks in this column, fashions shift over time, and perhaps now in the early 21st century American interest in
classical culture is resurging. There was HBO and the BBC’s recent Rome television series, for one thing. (The 300 movie, I suspect, is less a sign of renewed interest in Greek history than of the growing cultural influence of the graphic novel.)

Back in 1949, a director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art decided to convert its Roman court into a restaurant, thereby halving the space available for displaying the museum’s collection of ancient Greek and Roman art. This month the Metropolitan reopened the newly renovated Roman Court, transformed into a spacious sunlit showcase for Roman statuary. Turn immediately to the left as you enter, and you will find a bust of Herodotus, the “Father of History” (3480-430/420 B. C.), the Greek author who is the original source for 300‘s saga of the Battle of Thermopylae.

In 2001 the Onassis Cultural Center, which presents temporary exhibitions of ancient Greek art, opened in midtown Manhattan. Its current show, running though May 12, is, appropriately for this column, “Athens-Sparta,” which compares and contrasts the two city-states through artwork from both city-states. There is a large marble statue of a hoplite, or Greek soldier, who is said to be Leonidas himself, and the exhibit includes arrowheads and spearheads that were found in the battleground of Thermopylae.

But the opening wall text in the exhibit reminded me just why, even as a child, I preferred Athens to Sparta. Noting Sparta’s “strict training of its citizens,” the text states that Sparta’s “primary concern” was “the creation and maintenance of a mighty military force.” In contrast, Athens, was “imbued with a progressive worldview that promoted the individual” and “took a totally different direction that led to major intellectual and artistic achievements as well as to the unique phenomenon of the Athenian democracy, making the city the most important cultural center in the Hellenic world until the Roman Age.”

The wall texts in the Metropolitan’s new Greek galleries trace the cultural history of Athens, depicting the reign of Pericles in the 5th century B.C. as a Golden Age that produced extraordinary achievements in philosophy, democratic government, architecture, sculpture, science, philosophy, and literature. These wall texts ignore Sparta.

The Onassis Cultural Center’s show seeks to correct the imbalance by presenting works of art from Sparta. But, according to one of the show’s wall texts, “”From the mid-sixth century B.C. this burgeoning of the arts began to wane. . .The adverse domestic situation that had begun to take shape, with the gradual decline in the economy and trade, led to Sparta’s alienation from the rest of the world and to the dwindling of interest in the arts.” That “dwindling” strikes me as less ominous than Sparta’s “alienation from the rest of the world,” which seems an unhealthy attitude to have.

It also occurs to me that choosing between Sparta and Athens may be something like the red state/blue state split in contemporary American politics. The Onassis show does characterize the militaristic Sparta as “conservative and restrained” in a wall text, whereas Athens, presumably liberal by contrast, was the birthplace of democracy.

Considering my childhood affinity for ancient Athens, the leading cultural center of its time, it makes sense that I ended up spending most of my life in New York City, the cultural capital of the United States, and perhaps the world, filled with museums, theaters, publishers and educational institutions.

Athens was also the birthplace of drama, home in the fifth century B.C. to the first great authors of tragedy, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, and the first great comic playwright, Aristophanes. With my own lifelong passion for storytelling in a variety of forms–novels, plays, movies, and, yes, comics–it’s no wonder that I regard Athens as a cultural Camelot of the ancient world. Why, wouldn’t anyone who loves storytelling feel the same way?

On the basis of 300, apparently not. Here’s Leonidas talking to the Persian messenger early in the 300 graphic novel: “Rumor has it that the Athenians have already turned you down, and if those boy-lovers found that kind of nerve. . . .” So here’s the Athenian civilization dismissed with a homophobic jibe.

It also turns out to be hypocritical on the part of the fictionalized Leonidas, although you wouldn’t know this from either the graphic novel or the movie.
Referring to 300‘s seeming characterization of Xerxes as gay, academic Ephraim Lytle of the University of Toronto comments, “This is ironic given that pederasty was an obligatory part of a Spartan’s education. This was a frequent target of Athenian comedy, wherein the verb “˜to Spartanize’ meant “˜to bugger.’”. Not only that, but according to Wikipedia, “In antiquity it was thought that a youth was expected to find himself an older lover, and that pederasty, a social practice common throughout most of Greece, was especially so in Sparta, where the ephors fined any eligible man who did not have chaste relationships with youths”.

As for heterosexuality in Sparta, by law each Spartan man had to marry a woman when he was twenty. According to the aforementioned Wikipedia entry, the wedding ceremony “consisted of the intended bride being abducted with simulated violence.” Doesn’t seem very loving, does it? But wait, there’s more. Wikipedia continues, “After the wedding night the husband remained living in his barracks and would have no further contact with his wife except for the purpose of procreation.” (Actually, as a lapsed Catholic, I’d have to say this isn’t that different from the Church’s traditional position on marital sex.) And what effect might that have on the psychological well-being of any straight young Spartan? No wonder they sublimated their libidos into the violence of warfare.

By the way, while the Onassis show acknowledges the “Spartan supremacy on land,” the Athenians were no slouches, despite their lack of a militaristic culture. The main villain in 300 is the Persian ruler Xerxes, whose father, Darius, did indeed intend “to create a worldwide empire,” according to the Onassis wall texts, which further state that Darius’s army “marched onto Marathon, where, despite being outnumbered four to one, Greek troops led by the Athenian general Miltiades achieved a remarkable victory over the Persians” in 490 B. C.. Lytle points out that while the Spartans were facing Xerxes’ troops at Thermopylae ten years later, “a vastly outnumbered fleet led by Athenians was holding off the Persians in the straits adjacent to Thermopylae, “ In the 300 graphic novel Miller has Dilios acknowledge that “In the waters of Salamis, Athenian seafaring mastery led the united Greek navy to shatter the Persian armada.”

But look how Dilios describes the Athenians’ triumph at Marathon in the 300 book. “Armored men, Athenians, with their leather skirts and lovingly sculpted breastplates. What a pretty pack they must have been! Athenians. Amateurs. Foppish, frilly citizen soldiers. . . . and still they drove the Persians back to the sea and away!. . .How can we fail–against foes so fearful of combat they’d show their backside to Athenians?”

How many things are wrong with this? Rather than commend the Athenians for their courage and battle prowess in defeating the Persians, Dilios disparages them by “feminizing” their image, as if he were some bigoted adolescent saying, “They are SO gay!” (Of course, in contrast to the Athenians in “skirts,” the Spartan soldiers of 300 walk around virtually naked, but we’ll get to that later.)

Of course, if the Persians are supposedly such cowards that even the allegedly incompetent and girly Athenians could put them to flight, then the Battle of Thermopylae is really not such a big deal, right?

There’s something more subtle that I find disturbing, as well. In 300 Dilios and Leonidas speak condescendingly about the “citizen soldiers” from other Greek city-states, whom Dilios calls “amateurs.” When Leonidas encounters the Arcadian army in 300, he asks various Arcadians what their professions are. There is a sculptor, a blacksmith, and as baker, all creative artists of one sort or another. Leonidas and Dilios, however, prefer the Spartans’ full time professional army: “You see, old friend,” Leonidas says, “I brought more soldiers than you did.”

My father fought in World War II. He was an engineer, not a professional soldier. The vast majority of American soldiers in World War II were ordinary people who were drafted or who enlisted out of patriotism, not career soldiers, and yet they won the war. Amazing, eh? In fact, movies about World War II, those made during the war and right up through Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998), celebrate the courage and endurance and skill of these “citizen soldiers”; you may recall that Tom Hanks’ character in Ryan was a schoolteacher in civilian life. In fact, this celebration of the “citizen soldier” seemed to be a celebration of the democratic spirit of America.

But 300 turns this ideal upside down. “Citizen soldiers” may be “brave,” as Dilios acknowledges, but 300 argues that they should leave the real fighting to the pros.

So, thus far 300 has badmouthed my dad’s wartime service and thrown me over a cliff. This is not looking good.

Well, what if I had been born in ancient Sparta and I hadn’t immediately been thrown over the cliff? According to the graphic novel, in Dilius’s words, “we are starved, driven to steal, and fight and kill. We are tested, tossed into the wild, left to pit our wits and will against nature’s fury. By rod and lash, we are punished, trained to show no pain.”

It seems that this is more or less true. According to Wikipedia Spartan boys started their compulsory military training, called agoge, at the age of seven (!), which “consisted for the most part in physical exercises, such as dancing, gymnastics, and ball-games.” That doesn’t seem so bad, but consider this. The kids also had to run what was called the gauntlet: “They would have to run around a group of older children, who would flog them continually with whips, sometimes to death.” And I thought the bullying I endured in grade school was bad. So had I not been thrown over the cliff, this is where I’d get killed.

Following the agoge “a select few young men were arranged into groups, and were sent off into the countryside with nothing, and were expected to survive on wits and cunning” and, yes, were expected to steal. Professor Lytle states that Spartan boys “were indeed toughened by beatings and dispatched into the countryside, forced to walk shoeless in winter and sleep uncovered on the ground.”

So, from the age of seven, all Spartan boys are set on the same mandatory career path, and they remained full time soldiers until they were thirty. There doesn’t seem to have been the opportunity for someone like myself to become a scholar or a writer. If Frank Miller had been born in ancient Sparta, presumably he wouldn’t have been able to become an artist.

But wait! If all the men are soldiers, then who performs all the other jobs in Sparta? It’s not the women, who, even though they had more freedom than the women of other Greek city-states, were still confined to managing the home. Citizens made their money from their land, which was farmed by the helots, a class that Wikipedia compares to medieval serfs, who made up ninety percent of the Spartan population. Not only did helots have no civil rights, but according to Professor Lytle, the initiation rite for young Spartan soldiers consisted of “murdering unarmed helots.” Lytle dryly observes that “By living off estates worked by helots, the Spartans could afford to be professional soldiers, although really they had no choice: securing a brutal apartheid state is a full-time job. . . .” Before the Fifth Century B.C. Sparta pursued what the Onassis show calls an “expansionist foreign policy”: the helots were descendants of the other Greeks they conquered.

So, in the graphic novel Leonidas says on the eve of the Battle of Thermopylae that “Come tomorrow, we light a fire that will burn in the hearts of free men for all the centuries yet to be.” Miller’s Leonidas is well aware that he is the impelling force behind the “grand tale.” But just how free are the people of Sparta? They may not be under foreign domination, but ninety percent of the people living in Sparta are effectively slaves. Spartan male citizens are forced to become part of the military machine. And how much freedom did those abandoned infants experience?

Wikipedia states, ” From the earliest days of the Spartan citizen, the claim on his life by the state was absolute and strictly enforced.” Isn’t this the kind of overbearing government, restricting individual freedom, that Miller presents as the enemy in Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, The Dark Knight Strikes Again (see “Comics in Context” #30-31, 34), Elektra: Assassin, Sin City, and the Martha Washington books?

Notice that right after Leonidas makes that speech about “the hearts of free men,” one of his subjects says, “We’re with you, sir, to the death,” and Leonidas replies, “I didn’t ask. Leave democracy to the Athenians, boy.” So much for liberty.

I shouldn’t go further without dealing with some unfinished business. I never did complete my discussion of the neo-noir movie Frank Miller’s Sin City and the graphic novels on which it is based (see “Comics in Context” #78-79, 83), and I should at least wrap up the storyline about Marv, The Hard Goodbye. Perhaps it’s just as well that I waited, because some things I’ve written about in subsequent columns have added to my understanding of Sin City, and that in turn helps illuminate the meanings of 300.

In The Hard Goodbye the brutish Marv is trying to find out who is responsible for the murder of Goldie, the one woman he says ever showed him kindness, and to avenge her. (Actually, Marv’s mother, his female parole officer, and his fried Nancy the stripper all like him, too; what Marv, who is grotesquely ugly, means is that Goldie is the only one who would have sex with him.) I left off just before Goldie seemingly returns from the dead to try to kill Marv, repeatedly hitting him with her car.

This isn’t Goldie resurrected, but her twin sister Wendy, who soon finds out that Marv didn’t kill Goldie and becomes his ally. It was clever of Miller to introduce Wendy, because she serves several important purposes. First, when she first appears, and is trying to kill Marv, she represents Marv’s own sense of guilt over Goldie’s death. When he discovered she was dead, he blamed himself for having lain there obliviously drunk and asleep next to her when the murderer struck. The male protagonists of the Sin City movie are driven by a kind of chivalry: they regard it as their duty to protect women, even though the women in some cases are quite capable of defending themselves. It’s possible that in beating up, torturing and killing various antagonists in his quest to avenge Goldie’s murder, Marv is displacing his own sense of guilt onto the various members of this conspiracy. In punishing them, he feels less guilty. Then again, perhaps his sense of guilt is on reason why it’s appropriate that Marv ends up in the electric chair: he subconsciously may feel that he must be punished, too.

Second, Wendy’s role in the story underlines the extent to which Marv’s Goldie is not so much the real person as a figment of his imagination. At first Marv thinks that Wendy is Goldie, and even after he learns the truth, he continues to confuse one for the other. In a sense Wendy is no more Marv’s Goldie than the real Goldie was. The Goldie he is in love with, whom he seeks to avenge, is his image of the ideal woman, which he projects onto the real Goldie. Even as he learns Goldie’s true motivations, and that she wasn’t in love with him, he keeps saying that it doesn’t matter: he is still loyal to the death to his idealized conception of Goldie, and he won’t let facts get in the way.

When Wendy visits Marv on death row just before his execution, he thinks again that she is Goldie. And at this point, symbolically she is: Wendy is expressing the gratitude to Marv that presumably Goldie would have felt had she lived.

Recently watching the Sin City movie again on television, I connected it with my long commentary on Dr. Peter Coogan’s book Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre (see “Comics in Context” #162-166). (See, I warned you that this book would keep popping up in my column.) Coogan pointed out that superhero stories fit into the literary mode that the late Northrop Frye designated in his book, Anatomy of Criticism, as “romance.” By that term Frye meant a story of extraordinary adventure in which the protagonist is “superior in degree to other men and to his environment,” but is still a human being, who “moves in a world in which the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended.”

This explains some of the improbable things in Miller’s Sin City comics, which seem even more improbable on the movie screen. Wendy repeatedly hits Marv with her car, yet he suffers no serious injury, and is barely slowed down. Ultimately Marv is sentenced to the electric chair, but not only survives the first electrocution, but is able to mock his captors: it takes two to kill him.

But if you perceive Marv as a hero of “romance” who is somehow “superior in degree to other men” and the world around him, and who exists in a world “in which the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended,” it makes sense. Sin City sends mixed signals, since the setting, the urban underworld, is what Frye would consider a “low mimetic” milieu, in which we would not expect blatant elements of fantasy. Nor do we expect the characters of film noir to be stronger or more resistant to injury than normal people. But although Marv is not a character in the superhero genre, he is to some degree superhuman, and in my earlier review I compared him to the Hulk, both physically and temperamentally.

Since Sin City is a Frye-style romance, that also explains the odd science-fiction element: in That Yellow Bastard Hartigan shoots off Roark, Junior’s hand and genitals, but unusual treatments somehow enable him to grow them back! This may also explain certain characters’ resistance to bullets. Hartigan can sever Roark Junior’s hand and genitals with a single gunshot apiece, yet in the same scene Hartigan is shot repeatedly, without losing any body parts, and, despite his heart trouble, manages to survive. This is why the serial killer in The Hard Goodbye, who looks like an ordinary preppie, displays strength, agility and speed on the verge of impossibility.

There are also elements of Frye-style romance in 300, especially the movie. As I reported in this column, at last year’s San Diego Con, Miller “pointed out that sometimes Snyder changed the speed of the cameras to make the Spartans look “˜superhuman’ during the fighting” (see “Comics in Context” #146). In the movie one of the principal Spartans is impaled by a spear and nonetheless manages to keep on slaying enemies until he finally dies: he too is “superhuman.”

In that Robin Hood episode I mentioned, Much does not want his master, Robin, to lower himself to the moral level of the bad guys by torturing Gisborne. In The Hard Goodbye Marv not only kills people but tortures antagonists in the course of his quest for vengeance. Marv even cuts off the arms and legs of the cannibalistic serial killer in Hard Goodbye and lets a dog eat him. Hartigan tears off the Yellow Bastard’s new genitals with his bare hand and then kills the Bastard by beating his head to a literal pulp. However awful their antagonists’ actions, surely Marv and Hartigan have gone beyond the bounds of moral justification in taking their revenge.

Marv ends up being killed in the electric chair, and Hartigan commits suicide. I wondered whether Miller gave them these fates as an acknowledgment that Marv and Hartigan had each gone too far, and had to suffer punishment themselves. They were both like the classic hero whose violence ensures the safety of society, but for that very reason cannot be a part of it: that’s why Alan Moore’s V effectively commits suicide, leaving Evey to guide a new, freer British society.

Is this the subtext of Miller’s 300? Are we meant to be horrified by the Spartans’ militaristic society? Are they sacrificing themselves, like V, in order to assure the rise of a better world, of which they could never be part? Does Miller mean us to deconstruct 300 in this way? Or does he mean for us to accept his heroic portrait of the Spartans at face value, warts and all, offering no moral condemnation of those warts? Are we meant to excuse Marv’s and Hartigan’s violent excesses, as well? We shall look into this further in the near future.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF
This spring Art Spiegelman has been an artist-in-residence at my alma mater, Columbia University. For the latest edition of Publishers Weekly’s Comics Week, I wrote a report on a lecture that Spiegelman recently delivered on campus.

And congratulations to fellow Quick Stop columnist Fred Hembeck, whose column will celebrate its hundredth anniversary within the coming week!

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

Over the last few weeks I’ve been writing about the fate of the creative artist, in both real life and in animated films, who takes a new, innovative path only to suffer rejection and failure. Last week I also referred tp essayist Paul Graham’s characterization of the innovator’s new ideas as “heresies,” as far as the conventional wisdom of the time is concerned. But with the passage of time, the truly talented creative artist receives the recognition he deserves, and his “heresy” is accepted as truth.

DIsney’s latest computer-animated film, director Stephen Robinson’s Meet the Robinsons, provides new variations on these theme. Along the way, the film propounds a “heretical” notion of its own: that failure is good.

The protagonist of the film is a twelve-year-old orphan named Lewis who has a talent for technology, but whose inventions keep malfunctioning. Transported into the future, Lewis meets the title characters, the Robinson family. When another of his inventions goes awry, Lewis believes he has failed again. But the Robinsons celebrate his failure, acting as if it were his birthday. They explain to the bewildered boy that failure is good, because it enables us to learn from our mistakes.

The Walt Disney Company recently purchased Pixar, the studio that has created so many successful computer-animated features over the last twenty years (See “Comics in Context” #120), and made Pixar’s John Lasseter the chief creative officer of Walt Disney Animation. So this sequence made me think of another Pixar animated film, writer-director Brad Bird’s The Incredibles (See “Comics in Context” #62), which takes a very different point of view.

As you may recall, Bob Parr, alias the superhero Mr. Incredible, complains that “They keep finding new ways to celebrate mediocrity” in contemporary society. When public opinion forces the government to prevent super-powered individuals from using their powers as superheroes, The Incredibles presents this as an indictment of society for allegedly refusing to allow talented individuals to excel. Bob and Helen Parr’s son Dash says to his mother, “Dad says our powers make us special.” Falling back on society’s conventional wisdom in the film, she replies, “Everyone’s special, Dash,” whereupon he retorts, “Which is another way of saying that nobody is.” Indeed, the ultimate scheme of the movie’s villain, Syndrome, is to make it possible for everyone to gain super-powers, because, he says, if everybody is super, then nobody is.

In an article titled, “Take a Bow, Loser, the Spotlight’s Yours,” in the April 8, 2007 issue of The New York Times, drama critic Charles Isherwood contends that there is a “new mood abroad in America. A country renowned–for good or ill–as the land that enshrined success as a prize to be cherished above all others has lately evinced a sneaky fascination with failure. “ Among other examples in current popular culture, Isherwood points to last year’s indie film success Little Miss Sunshine, stating that “the ethos of the movie argues that winning isn’t really anything. Better to be a happy misfit, like the rest of the family, than a soulless success. . . .”

That, in fact, sounds like the philosophy of Pixar’s 2006 release, Lasseter’s own Cars (see “Comics in Context” #137-138). Its protagonist, Lightning McQueen, is no “loser,” but ultimately chooses the virtues of empathy that he has discovered over his ambitions for “soulless” success. He sacrifices his chance of winning the big race in order to aid an older, injured competitor. McQueen becomes part of a community of outsiders, just as the misfit Lewis finds happiness when he is accepted by the Robinsons, who are a clan of outright eccentrics who are also a warmly loving family.

I see from Googling that I’m not the only person who saw a similarity between the Robinsons and the similarly happy, caring family of nonconformists in the 1936 stage comedy You Can’t Take It with You by George S Kaufman and Moss Hart, which was adapted into a 1938 film directed by Frank Capra. According to an interview with director Stephen Anderson published in The Los Angeles Times on March 26, 2007, the analogy is intentional. Anderson said that William Joyce, who wrote the book A Day with Wilbur Robinson, on which the new animated film is based, told him “You have to watch this movie. It was a huge influence on me in creating the family in the book.” As a result, Anderson told the interviewer, “Several times throughout the process, as we were trying to crack this family and come up with moments for them and how Lewis would interact with them, I would pop in the movie and use it as an inspiration.” He continued, “I love how accepting and free they [the family in the Capra film] are. “˜Freedom’ is the word to describe that family and [the Robinsons]. There is no normal. There is no abnormal. It’s whatever makes you happy.”

According to the play and film of You Can’t Take It with You, Grandpa Sycamore, the head of this extended family, one day decided to quit his job. Except for the heroine Alice, no one among the Sycamore family and their live-in friends has a conventional career, and they obviously don’t have much money, though they somehow have enough for leading a simple lifestyle. The play and film thus clearly define two alternatives: the pursuit of “soulless” success and the decision to achieve happiness by “failing” to seek such success. (Presumably Alice and her boyfriend follow a path between the two extremes.)

Cars and Meet the Robinsons don’t make the dividing line so sharp. They contend that one need not singlemindedly pursue “success as a prize to be cherished above all” in order to achieve a more profound and emotionally rewarding sort of success. Lasseter said in an interview that in Cars “the message is not that life in the fast lane is bad, it just needs to be in balance. . . . If you don’t have friends and family for the sake of a career, when you’re a success you have no one to share it with. It’s much more satisfying to have people around you to share in your successes, and to help you through your difficult times. That’s what life’s about.”

McQueen’s act of charity during the climactic race actually makes him more popular with the onscreen audience than the actual, amoral winner. His new friends in the community of Radiator Springs are examples of talented individuals who have fallen from current fashion, like certain real life creative individuals whom I have mentioned over the last few weeks. Once McQueen, a current racing star, directs public attention to Radiator Springs, the enduring values of that community are again recognized, and the little town prospers once again.

Meet the Robinsons deals not with the talented individual whom the world has forgotten, but with the brilliant innovator whom the world has not yet recognized. Let’s go through the screening I saw step by step, and along the way I will show you how Meet the Robinsons develops this theme.

I saw a screening of the version of Meet the Robinsons in “Disney Digital 3-D,” which struck me as looking far more impressive than it had with Disney’s previous computer-animated release Chicken Little (see “Comics in Context” #110). Following the inevitable irritating series of onscreen commercials and trailers, we were alerted onscreen to don our 3-D glasses. Then there was a short, amusing sequence in which Carl, the Robinsons’ robot, welcomes the audience and demonstrates 3-D effects, as he abruptly seemingly moves from the flat screen right towards our faces, justly earning delighted vocal reactions from the kids in the audience.

But before the feature began, we got to see Working for Peanuts, a 3-D Donald Duck cartoon that was released in 1953 during the original fad for 3-D movies. The 3-D effect here is interesting, but hardly convincing. Everything still looks flat, but it’s as if the characters and the backgrounds are on separate planes, one in front of the other. In contrast, in the computer-animated main feature, everyone and everything possesses a convincing sense of three-dimensional volume. The 3-D version of hand-drawn animation emphasizes the flatness of the drawings and hence underlines the unreality of the cartoon. The 3-D version of computer animation gives the figures and objects and backgrounds onscreen a heightened sense of reality, so that it’s easier to suspend one’s disbelief.

My favorite 3-D effect in Meet the Robinsons came at the very beginning, in a scene set during a driving rainstorm: it was as if the rain was falling not just in the world of the film but around me, as well.

Working for Peanuts is nominally a Donald Duck cartoon, but he’s really only the fourth most important character in it. It’s really about chipmunks Chip “˜n’ Dale trying to steal peanuts from a elephant in the care of zookeeper Donald. In this cartoon Donald must be on Prozac or something, since though he gets characteristically annoyed, he never launches into one of his famous all-out temper tantrums, which are highlights of his earlier vehicles. (John Byrne has described Donald as Disney’s Hulk.)

Maybe Donald seems so tame because this is one of the Disney studio’s animated shorts from the 1950s, when they usually seemed low key in comparison to the Warners and MGM cartoons of the period. Donald, who at his animated best embodies this irrepressible splenetic force, has been relegated to a supporting role in his own cartoon. This cartoon represents the Disney studio of Walt’s time in a more easygoing, less ambitious middle age. There are good gags here and there, but the cartoon is more charming than funny, and it comes to a stop rather than building to a proper ending.

On the other hand, I was impressed by how good even such a mediocre cartoon from Walt Disney’s lifetime looked. The character designs were appealing, the animation was pleasing, the colors were bright and cheerful, and I found myself thinking that this minor Disney product looked so much better than most recent animation I see. The standards of Disney animation were so high that even a disappointing cartoon like this one now seems like a minor gem from a lost Golden Age.

Those audiences who attended the non-3-D screenings of Meet the Robinsons got to see a different introductory cartoon instead, Boat Builders (1938), a genuine classic from the true Golden Age of the DIsney animated shorts, teaming Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy.

According to a December 3, 2006 article in The New York Times by animation historian Charles Solomon, Pixar’s John Lasseter, now that he is in charge of Disney animation, was the driving force in instituting a new series of animated shorts at Disney as a training ground for rising talents, just as CGI shorts have served at Pixar. So the shorts accompanying Meet the Robinsons presumably are to accustom audiences to looking forward to the new animated short subjects yet to come.

It seems to me that the shorts accompanying Robinsons serve other purposes as well. For one thing, they’re fighting back against the new conventional wisdom that contemporary audiences only want to see computer-animation on the big screen, not traditional hand-drawn animation.
Now here’s a prime example of important works of art–the great hand-drawn animated films from Disney and other studios–that have currently, unjustifiably, fallen from fashion!

Further, the shorts shown before Meet the Robinsons serve to introduce a new generation of kids to classic Disney characters. Meet the Robinsons began with a new logo for Disney animation, which incorporated a clip from the first Mickey Mouse cartoon, Steamboat Willie (1928). My pleasure in seeing this tribute was suddenly interrupted by a kid’s voice from the audience yelling, “Who’s that?” Luckily, another child responded almost immediately, and nearly as loudly, “Mickey Mouse.” I know that the Disney Channel has the new Mickey Mouse Clubhouse for preschoolers and that its sister network Toon Disney features Mickey in the clever and entertaining House of Mouse animated series. Still, this little incident served as a reminder that even iconic cartoon characters have to be exposed to new audiences. Let’s not let them fall from fashion just because the new generation doesn’t know about them!

It’s also important to keep the classic Disney cartoon shorts in public view. Certainly I’m grateful that so many of them are available on DVD for aficionados. But when the Disney Channel started, these shorts were prominently featured, notably through the Mouseterpiece Theater series, wherein George Plimpton introduced them. That was an intriguing gimmick, since it was simultaneously parodying Alistair Cooke’s introductions for PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre, while simultaneously making the point that these cartoons are indeed classics that are worthy of formal showcases. I continue to be amazed that nowadays neither the Disney Channel nor Toon Disney finds time to show the classics, not even as a late night show. So I’m grateful that Mr. Lasseter and company have released two of the classic shorts from the vaults to be shown with a new animated feature.

I’m even more surprised that at present Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies made from 1948 on aren’t being shown anywhere on television. This is something that I never thought would happen. Turner Broadcasting owns most of the pre-1948 shorts, while Warner Brothers retains ownership of the later shorts, including most of the best work of directors Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng, and Robert McKimson. After Time Warner bought Turner Broadcasting, Turner’s Cartoon Network would show Warners theatrical animated shorts from both sides of the dividing line, but, after the commercial disappointment of Looney Tunes: Back in Action, the Warners theatrical cartoons were all banished to the less widely seen Boomerang digital network. And now, even though Boomerang is owned by Time Warner, it still had to license use of the post-1947 cartoons and let the license lapse (see here for explanation) . And yes, I have all the Looney Tunes Golden Collection DVDs, I appreciate that Warner Home Video includes cartoons as special features on DVDs of films made during Hollywood’s Golden Age, and I know about the new Looney Tunes website, but I still find it astounding that, after so many decades, so many Warners cartoons are no longer on television. Maybe Warner Brothers should follow Disney’s lead and pair classic shorts with new animated releases. Warners’ Happy Feet could have been accompanied by 8 Ball Bunny, a 1950 Chuck Jones cartoon with its own show biz penguin (which turns out to be the cleverly chosen bonus feature on the March of the Penguins DVD).

Now, as for Meet the Robinsons itself, in the dark, moody opening scene in the rain, an unidentified woman leaves the infant Lewis on the steps of an orphanage.

Sometimes I will see a critic figuratively throw up his hands in the course of a review of a story, exasperated that the supposed cliche of the hero as orphan is being used yet again. It’s not a cliche; it’s an archetypal situation, and there are good reasons why we see it used everywhere from the works of Charles Dickens to the Harry Potter novels to the origin of Batman.

For one thing, the orphan’s situation symbolizes that of all of us once we emerge from the protection of our parents in our childhood and have to strike out into the world on our own. There is a longing for lost security and a sense of aloneness, coupled with an awareness of the necessity for taking responsibility for our own lives.

Second, orphanhood connects to the individual’s quest for his identity, whether in Oedipus Rex or H. M. S. Pinafore or the origin of Superman. The protagonist searches for his past, in the hope that learning who his parents are and where he came from will define his role in life.

It turns out that in the case of Meet the Robinsons, orphanhood is a literally autobiographical element; director Stephen Anderson is himself an orphan.

When Lewis has grown to the age of twelve, he has proved to be brilliant in science, and is continually inventing new devices, most or all of which, it seems, do not work. Moreover, the film makes the point that he is long overdue for being adopted, and that, since he is on the verge of turning into a teenager, if he isn’t adopted soon, he probably never will be. (Since he’s on the verge of adolescence, Lewis is about to leave childhood behind, and start on the path to self-reliant adulthood; this, therefore, is the proper place for this contemporary fable to begin.)

But it seems that Lewis keeps being rejected by potential foster parents. We are shown how one interview with prospective parents goes awry. This couple is put off by the intense fervor with which Lewis describes his latest invention, and then the machine spectacularly malfunctions, creating a mess that infuriates the would-be adoptive parents.

In this sequence the film teeters on the brink of labeling Lewis as an obsessive nerd or geek, but it never crosses that line. Lewis remains a sympathetic figure, and the prospective parents come off as narrow-minded, unpleasant, and even anti-intellectual.

Though he is an inventor, Lewis can be regarded as a creative artist, following his muse, attempting to turn his imagination into reality. Computer animation involves both art and technology, so Lewis’s vocation is appropriate to the film. He’s also the artist as lonely, struggling innovative, who so far meets with only rejection and incomprehension. The world rejects his work, just as sets of potential parents keep rejecting him as a person.

One of his few friends is a fellow orphan nicknamed Goob, who likewise has never been adopted. Goob’s interests lie in baseball rather than science, but he seems rather sullen, joyless, and unimaginative. But the fact that Lewis and Goob are presented as roommates should alert the perceptive viewer that they may metaphorically represent two sides of the same person.

Focused on his past, Lewis invents a “memory scanner” device in the hope that he can use it to learn his mother’s identity. Lewis exhibits his invention at a science fair, where it is sabotaged by a mysterious villain known as the Bowler Hat Guy, whose hat is a sentient, sinister robot known as DOR-15 (alias “Doris”). Thus another of Lewis’s inventions causes a disaster, and the Bowler Hat Guy makes off with the memory scanner.

Another enigmatic stranger, a boy named Wilbur Robinson, shows up with a time machine. Lewis, still focused on the past, wants to use the time vehicle to go into the past to learn who his mother is, but instead they crash land in Wilbur’s own time period, decades into the future. There Lewis meets Wilbur’s large, eccentric family, the futuristic counterparts of Kaufman and Hart’s Depression-era Sycamores.

I found the first third of the film more expository than entertaining, and found my attention wandering during the start of the second third, set in this future three decades hence. On a second viewing I may find myself more interested in this section, which introduces us to the idiosyncratic members of the Robinson family.

But on this viewing I did like the bright, sunny, retro-futuristic look of this future world, whose buildings are designed in the “Streamline Moderne” style of the 1930s. According to Wikipedia, this is “a late branch of the Art Deco style. Its architectural style emphasized curving forms, long horizontal lines, and sometimes nautical elements (such as railings and porthole windows).” (That makes me wonder if that the giant porthole-like windows at the San Diego Convention center, home of Comic-Con International, may be references to the Streamline Moderne style.) According to my research, Streamline Moderne was a style used for the fantasy architecture in MGM’s The Wizard of Oz (1939) and, coincidentally or not, another Frank Capra movie, Lost Horizon (1937).

It doesn’t really make sense that the architecture of the Robinsons’ world would have so completely changed in merely three decades. Look around any American city and you’ll see buildings from many different decades coexisting. My own neighborhood is a historic district, with apartment buildings designed in imitation of the Tudor style, and even an Art Deco building. Similarly, the Robinsons wear clothes that are wildly different in style from those of the present day. Radical shifts in fashion can take place–compare women’s clothing in the 1890s to what they wore in the 1920s–but the extreme change in style posited by Robinsons seems unlikely.
Recently visiting my alma mater, Columbia University, I again observed that, apart from the cell phones and laptops, the students there look and dress just like they did in the 1970s.

But the thorough changes in clothing and architectural styles is actually essential to the theme of the film, as you shall see.

My attention revived when the Bowler Hat Guy and his nasty hat turned up in this future world to send a ferocious tyrannosaur from the Cretaceous Period after Lewis. Just as the BHG proves to be more of a pathetic incompetent than the master villain he seeks to be, the tyrannosaur turns out to be more charming than dangerous, and quickly turns into the Robinsons’ tail-wagging pet. Thus the family succeeds in incorporating another outsider into their charmed circle.

The head of the family is strangely absent, but the family takes to Lewis, and Mrs. Robinson offers to adopt him. When it is revealed that Lewis is from the past, however, she withdraws the offer, presumably because she now sees the big plot twist coming. (And if you don’t want to know about it, this is your spoiler warning, and come back after you’ve seen the movie.) Distraught and angry by yet another rejection, Lewis joins forces with the Bowler Hat Guy, who, as I suggested earlier, represents his dark side.

It is in the film’s final third when the movie finally comes to life for me. The long set-ups in the earlier part of the film finally pay off handsomely. I could see the Big Plot Twist coming: Lewis is actually the missing Mr. Robinson as a child, and the Robinsons are his future family. But I was caught off guard by the second Big Twist: the Bowler Hat Guy is Lewis’s sullen roommate Goob as an adult.

It turns out that by falling asleep at the wrong moment during a baseball game, Goob failed to catch a ball, dooming his team to defeat. Goob was paralyzed by his sense of failure, was never adopted, and led an empty life, putting the blame on Lewis for keeping him awake the night before the big game. So as an adult, he became the Bowler Hat Guy and went back in time to get revenge on his former roommate. The bowler hat itself, DOR-15, turns out to be one of Lewis’s inventions, which the adult Goob stole.

Like Lewis, Goob is fixated on the past, but Goob has taken this to obsessional extremes. Goob is tormented by his sense of failure, but is unwilling to take responsibility for it, and instead displaces the guilt onto his former roommate. You could easily interpret Lewis’s own fixation with learning about his mother as rooted in his own sense of failure and inadequacy: surely he wonders why he was abandoned. Was it somehow his fault? The fact that Goob’s primary weapon, the robotic bowler hat, is Lewis’s invention is a further symbolic link between them.

The BHG imprisons Lewis in the future; the side of Lewis’s personality, which the BHG represents, is now dominant. That side may not be so much the dark side as the weak side. The true villain is the robotic hat. The BHG goes back in time to the present day, Lewis’s own time, in order to forge a deal to mass produce the robot hats. As a result, in the future, the Robinson family’s time, the hats, following the familiar Frankenstein scenario, are taking over the world. Everyone who wears one of the robotic bowlers is mentally controlled by it. (This seems to be an archetypal science fiction scenario, like the Mad Hatter with his mind-control devices in Batman: The Animated Series, and the mind-control variations on iPods in the new Doctor Who series’ revamped origin of the Cybermen.) The mind control exerted by the hats seems to me symbolic of the way that Goob’s obsession with the past and with revenge dominated his own psyche. It’s as if the hat is usurping the role of the well-balanced human mind.

In this altered future, the bright, beautiful world of the Robinsons is altered into a dark, nightmarish dystopia. Reviewers have likened the plot to the Back to the Future film trilogy, but if we pursue the Frank Capra analogy, it’s like the metamorphosis of Bedford Falls into Pottersville in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946).

Lewis escapes captivity (his good side symbolically reemerging from domination by his anger and self-pity), and uses the time machine to travel back to the present. In a clever bit, Lewis alters history simply by declaring that he will never invent DOR-15, whereupon the evil bowler hat simply dematerializes from existence. Lewis takes the BHG (now hatless and symbolically free from DOR-15’s influence) back to the future, where they witness the dark dystopia’s transformation back into the Robinsons’ sunny utopia. The BHG repents, and later in the movie, Lewis changes the BHG’s own history by waking Goob up during the fateful baseball game, enabling him to catch the ball. The treatment of Goob/BHG shows the generosity of this movie, which ultimately has no human villains: Goob is granted redemption.

In the future Lewis meets his older self, a successful scientist and inventor. Young Lewis may be an orphan, but the adult Lewis, who is actually named Cornelius, is the central figure in his large family. Rather than seek our a lost parent, he has created a family of his own. Moreover, through his inventions, he has greatly changed the world in which he lives. That’s why it’s symbolically important that the world of the Robinsons looks so different from the present day. Cornelius has not only made a family for himself, but he has also reshaped his world. (Young Lewis has done so too, by banishing the dystopian alternate timeline and reinstating the Robinsons’ future.)

This is a metaphor for how every individual creates his own life through his actions. Lewis/Cornelius did so productively, benefiting the whole world. Goob/BHG took a different route, first turning his life empty through inaction and obsession with the past, and then having a destructive influence on the world through seeking vengeance.

But also the world of the adult Cornelius represents the ultimate triumph of the creative visionary. Whereas Lewis as a boy was not taken seriously as an inventor, three decades later, the adult Cornelius has won recognition and success, and, indeed, he has remade the world according to his vision. That is a metaphor for how innovative “heretical”: thinking can eventually overcome opposition and become recognized as truth.

Wilbur (who is now revealed to be the adult Cornelius’s son) takes Lewis back in the time machine to that rainy scene from the opening of the film, and Lewis is tempted to tap his mother on the shoulder, learn who she really is, and perhaps even somehow change his own history. But Lewis resists the temptation, and history proceeds as before.

This is an intriguing decision by the filmmakers. In other works of fiction it is both important and right that the orphaned protagonist discover his heritage. Harry Potter learns the truth about his parents, and thus goes from being an abused orphan to becoming a heroic magician. The revelation of the identity of Oliver Twist’s parents gives him a new identity as the wealthy Mr. Brownlow’s adopted son.

It reminds me of the end of John Byrne’s 1986 The Man of Steel miniseries, which rebooted and reinterpreted the Superman mythos. Whereas the Silver Age Superman could recall his childhood on Krypton through his “super-memory,” Byrne’s revised version could not. In the final issue of The Man of Steel Superman was confronted by an image of his father, Jor-El, which downloaded information about his Kryptonian origins into his mind. Yet on the final page, Superman, though grateful to have solved the mystery of his origin, asserts that it has changed nothing. He has lived his life on Earth, his foster parents were Earthlings, and he considers himself not an alien but an Earthman. Many have stated that the Superman myth is in part about the immigrant experience. In this regard Byrne’s version was sharply different from the Silver Age Superman, who longed nostalgically for his native world.

Byrne’s Superman is very much like Lewis in Meet the Robinsons. Both of them have made the decision that their past doesn’t matter; what matters is their present and future, which they are creating for themselves.

Just as Lewis revisited the scene of Goob’s failure and made it turn out right, he then returns to the science fair, and this time his memory scanner works. That’s because there’s no Bowler Hat Guy to sabotage it this time around. Perhaps it’s also symbolically because Lewis himself is no longer fixated on his past; maybe the destruction his inventions caused reflected the psychologically destructive impact of his own fixation. Now that Lewis is looking ahead to the future that he visited, his invention works.

Moreover, his triumph at the science fair sets dominoes falling that he and we know will lead to that future. Lewis is adopted by the science fair judge and her husband, who he realizes are the grandparents in the future Robinson family. (Actually, everyone in the audience should have recognized the raucous white-haired grandmother as the science fair judge long before.) And a girl at the science fair turns out to be the future Mrs. Robinson.

Just as Robinsons opened with a clip from Walt Disney’s Steamboat Willie, it closes with a quotation from Walt himself, “Around here, however, we don’t look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things”¦ and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.” This connects the philosophy of Robinsons to that of Walt Disney himself. Goob remained stuck in a rut, obsessed with past failure; once he overcame his own fixation with the past, Lewis moved ahead as an inventor of “new things.” Possibly it is also a signal from Lasseter as to his hopes for the future of Disney Animation. The quotation also underlines once more that Meet the Robinsons is about the life and goals of the creative artist, whether he is a child prodigy inventor or the founder of a great animation studio.

And isn’t Walt Disney a prime example of a creative visionary who, despite early setbacks, literally transformed the world? Steamboat Willie premiered within the memories of people who are still alive, and yet I think it is difficult for those of us who belong to younger generations to imagine what American popular culture would be like had there been no Walt Disney.

The next Pixar animated feature, arriving this summer, is director Brad Bird’s Ratatouille. In the same interview that I quoted from earlier, John Lasseter describes the new film thus: “It is about a rat that wants to be a fine chef in a top French restaurant in Paris. It is a wonderful story about following your passions when all the world is against you. A rat to a kitchen is death; a kitchen to a rat is death.” In other words, Ratatouille follows Happy Feet and Meet The Robinsons in exploring the theme of the creative artist who pursues his muse in the face of universal opposition. When I review Ratatouille this summer, I’ll be returning to this theme as well.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR SOMEONE ELSE
Since upgrading my Internet connection to broadband, I’ve found the explosion of online video more frustrating than pleasurable. Sometimes I get only the sound, other times the sound and picture are out of synch, and in many cases I can’t get the video link to work, period.

But meanwhile I’ve found videos that work perfectly right here at Quick Stop: comics and animation writer Paul Dini’s Monkey Talk, chronicling his interspecies Oedipal conflicts with his anthropoid son Rashy, a classic trickster. After an absence of several months, he’s posted new ones here at Quick Stop, and they just keep getting funnier. I recommend that you take a look.

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

Last week I wrote about Dave Cockrum and Marshall Rogers, both of whom recently passed away, and whose innovative work as comics artists in the 1970s had considerable impact on the superhero genre. But tastes shifted, and neither artist was considered “hot” in the last few decades. Will their reputations continue to fade? Are the people paying tribute to their work doing so merely out of nostalgia? Or, as time passes, bringing new perspectives, will their work prove to be enduring classics, that survive the shifting tides of fashion?

Recently I read online a 2004 piece by the essayist Paul Graham titled “What You Can’t Say“. He starts out by asking, “Have you ever seen an old photo of yourself and been embarrassed at the way you looked? Did we actually dress like that? We did. And we had no idea how silly we looked.” That’s because fashions change, and what seems stylish in one decade may well look ridiculous in the next. Graham moves from this example of fashion in clothing to the subject of “moral fashions” and fashions in ideas, which both can prove just as ephemeral and wrong. I find that I can apply much of what he says about shifting fashion to the world of the creative arts as well.

Graham contends that “In every period, people believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you would have gotten in terrible trouble for saying otherwise.”

I saw a couple of comics pros at this year’s New York Comic-Con who were superstars a little over a decade ago. They would have been mobbed at a con in the 1990s, but at this 2007 con they attracted relatively little notice. They had proved to be no more than creatures of the popular fashions in comics of that time, and their work lacked the true artistry that would make it vital and relevant to a new century. Why, collecting multiple copies of their work back in the 1990s now seems ridiculous.

But, Graham warns, we must not assume that the present day is more enlightened than the past. “It would be a remarkable coincidence if ours were the first era to get everything just right.” Graham finds that “It’s tantalizing we believe things that people in the future will find ridiculous.” Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns are still popular twenty years after they were published, and it looks likely that they are becoming true classics. Which of the “hot” comics of 2007 will still matter in 2027?

Graham asserts that it is difficult to see beyond the conventional thinking of one’s own time, and identify which notions will prove in time to be transient fashions. “Indeed, the arrival of new fashions makes old fashions easy to see, because they seem so ridiculous by contrast.”

Graham is trying to identify ideas that may be unfashionable now, but which will eventually be accepted as truth. His first question, then, is “Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?” He acknowledges, “OK, it may be heretical (or whatever modern equivalent), but might it also be true?”

I’ve got a splendid example, with which other Baby Boomers can identify. I kept on reading comic books after the age at which one was supposed to give them up. Not only did I like them, but by college I believed that in the hands of the better writers and artists they were vehicles for serious artistic expression. But the world at large did not agree, and I felt uncomfortable about reading comics in public places, or letting people know I read them.

Graham would sympathize, since he writes that “The most important thing is to be able to think what you want, not to say what you want. . . . . Inside your head, anything is allowed. . . .But, as in a secret society, nothing that happens within the building should be told to outsiders.” So I kept believing in the creative worth of comics, even if I felt I had to keep it to myself. While attending university in New York, I finally got to make friends who were comics pros or comics fans, and they became my “secret society.”

Once my classmates in graduate school and I were attending an end-of-term party at a professor’s house, and my friends decided to embarrass me by revealing my fascination with comics to the professor. Their prank backfired, because the professor turned out to have been a passionate comics fan when he was growing up, started reminiscing about the Sub-Mariner, and told me that as a boy he once owned a copy of Action Comics #1!

In retrospect I see this incident as a sign of things to come. It turned out that the “secret society” was far vaster than I imagined. The result is that now, in the 21st century, suddenly we’ve passed the tipping point, and people stopped keeping their appreciation of comics to themselves. For most of my life the conventional wisdom was that comics were junk for kids, and it was a “heresy” that comics could be taken seriously as art. Time is proving the “heresy” right.

Moreover, comics and their creators are following a path that other artforms and their creators have trod in the past. In the April, 2007 issue of Harper’s Magazine, British Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate writes an essay “The Mirror of Life.” He begins by relating that “. . .in the spring of 1616, [Francis] Beaumont and Shakespeare died within a few weeks of each other. Beaumont became the first dramatist to be honored with burial in the national shrine of Westminster Abbey. . . .Shakespeare was laid to rest in the provincial obscurity of his native Stratford-on-Avon. That same year , Ben Jonson became the first English dramatist to publish a collected edition of his own plays written for the public stage. He was much mocked for his presumption in doing so, especially under the title of Works, suggestive of an edition of a classical author such as Virgil or Horace” (Harper’s, April 2007, p. 37).

Here Bate reinforces two of the points I’ve been making here. First, he shows that at the time of their deaths, Beaumont, who often collaborated with John Fletcher, was considered a superior playwright to Shakespeare. But, of course, there is no Royal Beaumont and Fletcher Company nowadays; indeed, today only people who studied English Renaissance drama at university, like Mr. Bate and myself, have any idea who Beaumont and Fletcher were. “We now think of Shakespeare as a unique genius, the embodiment of the very idea of artistic genius,” Bate continues, “but in his own time, though widely admired, he was but one of as constellation of theatrical stars. How is it, then, that when we reach the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Shakespeare’s fame has outstripped that of all his peers?” (p. 37). Bate’s essay shows that as the centuries passed, Shakespeare’s work proved to transcend passing fashions. Although Shakespeare addressed the issues of his own time, his plays dealt with themes and personalities which remain vital and relevant to each succeeding generation. Once again, time proves to be the test of artistic merit.

Second, it continues to astonish me that in the early 17th century Ben Jonson was “much mocked for his presumption” in publishing a collection of his plays, thus treating them as works of literature like the ancient classics. Plays were popular culture, and it was a “heresy” at that time to think of them as high art. Hence it would have been as much a “heresy” in the early 1600s to consider Shakespeare’s plays to be art as it was in the late 1900s to declare that comics were an artform.

Here’s yet another example: recently I went to New York’s City Center to see the “Encores!” revival of Face the Music, a 1932 musical with songs by Irving Berlin and a book by Moss Hart. But Face the Music had not been performed for nearly seventy-five years, in part because neither a full copy of the score nor a definitive version of the book existed. Playwright David Ives explains in the program book that this show “bespeaks an era when there were 90 Broadway theaters, all hopping, and shows went up and down like billboards in Paramus. . . .When shows closed, books got tossed and musicians left their scores in the pit.” In other words, the pop culture of the time was taken for granted, and, Ives continues, “What this means is that nobody thought about preserving Face the Music for posterity.” But time has proved Hart and Berlin to be major figures of the history of the American theater, and so “Encores!” undertook a major research to reconstruct a performing edition of this “lost” show.

Bate asserts that it was the passionate advocacy of Shakespeare’s works by subsequent writers and actors, like John Milton and David Garrick, that caused his reputation to climb with the succeeding centuries. Bate also points out that the publication of the “folio” editions of Shakespeare’s plays further extended his influence by making his work more accessible.

How does this relate to the world of comics? For one thing, the 21st century has brought explosive growth in reprint editions of classic works of the past. Now, rather than poring through back issue bins and sending a fortune, a newcomer to comics can easily, inexpensively acquire copies of the classic work of the past, including Marshall Rogers’ Batman and Dave Cockrum’s X-Men. It would have been “heretical” to carry comic books in public libraries only a decade ago, but now you can even read these classics for free in a well-stocked graphic novel section of a neighborhood library. This will bring about a major change in the comics readership. Older work and its creators will be less likely to fall into obscurity; readers will be able to judge contemporary comics in the context of the medium’s classics.

Further, I believe it is the duty of a critic to separate the wheat from the ephemeral chaff, to identify work of lasting artistic value and praise its creators, whether it–and they–are popular today or not. Graham declares that, “To see fashion in your own time, though, requires a conscious effort. Without time to give you distance, you have to create distance yourself. Instead of being part of the mob, stand as far away from it as you can and watch what it’s doing. And pay especially close attention whenever an idea is being suppressed.” Or when a major creator is undeservedly ignored.

So what if much of today’s audience–and today’s comics editors and publishers–don’t sufficiently appreciate the work of Dave Cockrum and Marshall Rogers? My considered opinion is that Cockrum’s and Rogers’ work will be rediscovered by the comics scholars and connoisseurs of the future, and that they will be remembered and their work appreciated long after the taste of many of today’s “flavors of the month” have faded away. Time will tell.

Another way to examine the careers of Cockrum and Rogers is to consider how much they changed the field in which they chose to work. As I wrote last week, according to inker Terry Austin, the powers at DC Comics originally castigated Rogers’ artwork until he made his enormous impact with fandom on his mid-1970s Batman stories with Englehart. Around that same time, according to DC president Paul Levitz on a panel at the New York Comic-Con, Cockrum, serving his muse, was putting far more creative effort into his artwork than various veteran artists. On the same panel Cockrum’s X-Men collaborator Chris Claremont pointed out that before Cockrum, superhero artists did not pay attention to costuming characters in such a way as to express their individual personalities. To use Graham’s term, Rogers and Cockrum were innovators whose “heresies” eventually won recognition and acclaim from both the critics and the audience of the superhero genre.

In fact, their impact has extended beyond comics onto television and film: Cockrum’s co-creations Colossus, Nightcrawler, Storm, and Mystique have all appeared in the X-Men movies and animated TV series, and Rogers’ 1970s collaboration with Steve Englehart on Batman paved the way for the serious treatment of the character in the 1990s animated TV series and the live action Batman films from 1980 onward. I was amazed and gratified to see that Time magazine not only gave Rogers an obituary, but ran a considerable sampling of his Batman artwork.

Cockrum and Rogers thus each had visible impact on American popular culture. I was thinking of them recently while watching three animated films, which share a common theme: how a creative figure, whose efforts at first meet with disdain and rejection, can ultimately change the world.

Warner Home Video has just released on DVD director George Miller’s computer-animated Happy Feet, which won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature earlier this year. Someone at Warner Home Video had the inspired idea of including a classic Warner Brothers cartoon on a similar theme as a special feature on the DVD. This is the 1936 hand-drawn animated short I Love to Singa, directed by the great Tex Avery (see “Comics in Context” #100-101), with Chuck Jones credited as one of its animators.

Long, long ago in the dim, dark days before home video, film reviewer and animation historian Leonard Maltin, aided and abetted by future “Cartoon Brew”-master Jerry Beck, used to teach a course on animation at the New School in Greenwich Village. Though nominally a course, there were no examinations or term papers. Basically, people such as myself and a number of my friends would pay a reasonable fee to attend eight weekly sessions in which Maltin would show us classic Hollywood cartoons, many of which we could not otherwise see, or at least not until Greg Ford’s “Cartoonal Knowledge” festival came around again in the summer at the Thalia (the legendary revival theater on the Upper West Side). Actually, Maltin’s most popular session each semester was “Sex, Violence and Racism” night, in which he’d show cartoons that still don’t make it onto official home videos (such as Bob Clampett’s infamous 1943 Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs). Maltin served less as an academic than as a well-informed master of ceremonies, introducing and giving the background for each of the well-chosen animated gems on the evening’s program. (Then one semester the course was abruptly canceled at the last minute; Maltin had abandoned us for the siren song of Hollywood to appear regularly on Entertainment Tonight.)

Anyway, I recall that Maltin was bewildered by his audience’s–uh, I mean, students’–fervent love for I Love to Singa, a cartoon that he didn’t consider to be particularly special. But I believe I understand the reasons for it, and it’s interesting that this cartoon still produces such a strong response, since it is so heavily indebted to the fashions of its own time.

First, I Love to Singa is a parody of Warner Brothers’ first “talkie,” the groundbreaking 1927 film The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson. The young owl who is the cartoon’s protagonist is even named “Owl Jolson.” Made nine years before, The Jazz Singer would still be remembered by adult audiences of 1936; this is even evidence that Warners–or at least Avery–was aiming cartoons at adult viewers as well as children. Jolson was still popular at the time, and it turns out that the song “I Love to Singa,” around which the cartoon was created, was written by Harold Arlen and E. Y. “Yip” Harburg (the composer and lyricist for MGM’s The Wizard of Oz!), for Jolson and others to perform in a live action movie of that same year, The Singing Kid.

In The Jazz Singer the protagonist Jakie is the son of a cantor at a Manhattan synagogue. When thirteen-year-old Jakie starts singing jazz songs in public, his father is enraged, saying, “I’ll teach him better than to debase the voice God gave him!” Jakie’s mother protests, “But Papa–our boy, he does not think like we do.” Papa is not convinced and actually beats Jakie, who leaves home, and grows up to become a professional jazz singer, now known as Jack, played by Jolson.

Avery’s I Love to Singa omits explicit references to The Jazz Singer‘s central characters’ ethnicity, although the European accent that voice actor Billy Bletcher gave Papa Owl may be a hint. But notice how that quotation from the father in Jazz Singer relates to Graham’s reference to new ideas as “heresies.” The father in Jazz Singer fairly clearly condemns Jakie’s enthusiasm for this newfangled jazz music as sinful, in defiance of God’s will. The mother, on the other hand, seems to realize that Jakie’s “heretical” thinking is merely a result of his belonging to a different generation, that “does not think like we do.”

I Love to Singa doesn’t use the religious analogy, and doesn’t emphasize the generation gap either. In the opening of the cartoon Papa and Mama Owl’s eggs hatch, and the first three young owls emerge singing or playing classical music, of which Papa, a music teacher, approves. The fourth egg hatches to produce our hero, Owl Jolson, who launches into the title song. Infuriated, denouncing his son as a “jazz singer” (just as the father does in the Jolson movie), Papa Owl throws young Owl out of his home.

Since the other three young owls all share Papa’s taste in music, the cartoon isn’t necessarily pointing to a generational difference as the problem. Instead, Owl is presented as the advocate and practitioner of a kind of music that is new, untraditional, and even innovative in this time period. And at the start of the cartoon this makes him a solitary outcast.

Then Owl enters an amateur talent competition on a radio show presided over by host and judge “Jack Bunny,” a rabbit. Here again Avery is satirizing popular culture of that particular time. “Jack Bunny’s” name is an obvious reference to radio comedian Jack Benny, whom the Warners animation seemed to love (as most clearly demonstrated by the real Benny’s appearance in Robert McKimson’s 1959 cartoon The Mouse That Jack Built). But the amateur competition, this rabbit’s sour demeanor, and his rapid dismissal of blatantly incompetent contestants all suggest Avery is really parodying Major Bowes’ Amateur Hour, which is referenced in the title song’s lyrics, and was a Depression-era counterpart to today’s American Idol.

Young Owl performs on the show and is an instant sensation. Hence, this cartoon is also about the difference between high culture, represented by Papa Owl and his classical music-playing offspring, and popular culture, represented by the jazz singing Owl. Young Owl is the creative artist whose new style of work is considered “heretical” by the cultural establishment, and who seems isolated at first, but who eventually finds a wide audience among the general public.

Walt Disney addressed the same topic in his “Silly Symphony” cartoon Music Land (see “Comics in Context” #136), which had come out the year before Avery’s cartoon. But Music Land , I Love to Singa, and The Jazz Singer each resolve the conflict between the old and the new differently.

At the climax of The Jazz Singer, Jack has to decide between starring in a Broadway musical on opening night, or substituting as cantor for his dying father. Despite being warned that if he skips opening night, his career in show business will be ruined, Jack becomes the substitute cantor. The film’s coda reveals that Jack became a successful “jazz singer” anyway. But The Jazz Singer ultimately is a variation on the tale of the Prodigal Son, and in the moment of crisis he chooses the old over the new.

Music Land takes Romeo and Juliet as its basis, instead, and gives it a happy ending. The literal war between the rival kingdoms of music is resolved through the marriage of the prince of jazz to the princess of classical music. High culture and pop culture thus coexist peaceably as equals.

In I Love to Singa Papa Owl and the rest of the family hear young Owl singing on the radio and rush to Jack Bunny’s studio. Upon seeing them, Owl unhappily shifts into a dreary rendition of “Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes,” but Papa Owl and the family encourage him to continue singing his jazz tune instead. Now it seems that Papa’s change of heart came about not because he suddenly learned to appreciate jazz, but because his son is on the verge of winning a trophy, presumably representing fame and fortune. Owl goes back to singing “I Love to Singa,” Mr. Bunny presents him with the winner’s trophy, and the cartoon ends with the entire Owl family singing and even dancing along with the prize-winning son.

In other words, I Love To Singa concludes with complete victory for Owl Jolson, the lone, pioneering creative artist who has remade his world: he was once an outcast, but by the cartoon’s end, everyone is literally dancing to his tune.

The topical references in the cartoon–to Al Jolson, The Jazz Singer, Jack Benny, and Major Bowes, and Papa’s mention of violinist Jascha Heifitz–have all dated, and it is questionable how much they mean, if anything, to contemporary audiences. But the thematic heart of this cartoon enables it to transcend its own time, and to appeal to audiences who were born long after it was made.

Happy Feet likewise centers on a clash between two schools of art, with a lone innovator who is initially shunned by the cultural establishment. I’m lucky that I saw the 2005 documentary March of the Penguins first, since Happy Feet based its fantastical story on actual facts about the habits of Emperor penguins. For example, in real life penguins recognize each other by each bird’s distinctively individual cry. Happy Feet turns this into the notion that each penguin, chick or adult, has his or her own “heartsong,” which expresses his or her personality. So each penguin is effectively a creative artist, devising a song which is his or her means of self-expression.

The movie’s protagonist Mumble, however, is a dreadful singer, and expresses himself instead through tap dancing. Mumble has invented dancing (as far as his community is concerned), and the rest of the Emperor penguins, including his own father, Memphis, are horrified and repulsed by it. Their religious leader, a penguin called Noah, condemns Mumble’s dancing as sinful. This may well be a reference to the 1984 movie Footloose, with its minister villain who condemned dancing, but it also echoes The Jazz Singer and ties in to Graham’s comparison of the unpopular, innovative idea to heresy. (I find it interesting that the reviews I’ve read of Happy Feet all miss the fact that every religious opinion expressed by the penguins in the film is obviously false: a penguin enclosure at a zoo is nor “penguin heaven,” the oracle Lovelace is an impostor, and so forth. Is this the first animated family film that presets religion as a delusion?)

Perhaps even worse, Mumble’s father and the penguin community attribute Mumble’s dancing to the fact that Memphis dropped Mumble’s egg before it hatched. Hence, the penguin community regard Mumble’s new art form, dancing, as the result of alleged brain damage! Creative artists with new ideas may be called crazy, but the penguins go further, thinking of Mumble as effectively retarded!

And so Mumble becomes the artist as outcast. But over the course of the movie he gains more acceptance, first from a band of Adelie penguins, a different species, who speak with Latino accents. This put me in mind of Disney’s Dumbo (1941), about another shunned misfit, who is considered a freak, the title character, a baby elephant with enormous ears: his talent for flying is encouraged by a group of crows with African-American voices. In both cases, members of a different ethnic community are portrayed as more open to new ideas than the establishment of the protagonist’s own community. In Dumbo‘s case the crows clearly respond through sympathy with a fellow outcast. On the other hand, Happy Feet never makes clear why the Adelie penguins, “The Amigos,” whose species has its own community, don’t share the Emperor’s apparently innate revulsion towards Mumble’s dancing. Later in the film younger penguins, of Mumble’s own generation, start admiring his dancing, while Noah and the elders still condemn it. So why did the younger penguins, who hadn’t liked the dancing earlier in the film, change their minds?

By the end of the film (and at this point I issue a spoiler warning for those who haven’t seen it), dancing has become necessary for the penguins’ survival. The movie establishes that the penguins are suffering from a shortage of food, caused by fishing by humans. Investigating, Mumble is captured and placed on exhibit at a zoo, where he won the interest and hearts of humans through his tap dancing. Released back into the Antarctic wild, Mumble induces the whole Emperor penguin community to dance in front of what they consider the “alien” invaders–human scientists. The world of humans is so impressed by the penguins’ dancing, which presumably indicates they aren’t just dumb birds, that the United Nations takes steps to ensure their survival.

The internal logic of Happy Feet‘s story has sizable holes. In any animated film with talking animals, we have to accept the notion that animals have human-level intelligence and their own language, which we moviegoers hear as English even if the humans in the film can’t understand it. (A scene in the zoo makes clear that humans can’t understand the penguin language, and hear it only as squawking.) Until the end of Happy Feet most of the penguins have never seen human beings; there are a few who have encountered them and consider humans to be aliens from another world. So if the penguins are supposed to be ignorant of human society, why do the moviemakers give them such famous songs to sing, even “Heartbreak Hotel” and “My Way”? Not only is Mumble’s father voiced by Hugh Jackman as an Elvis Presley soundalike, but he’s named Memphis, as if the penguins, isolated in Antarctica, would have known about either Memphis, Tennessee or Memphis, Egypt! All of this is asking for a lot more suspension of disbelief than I’m used to giving.

As for the movie’s climax, why is dancing necessary to save the penguins? Even if the humans can’t understand penguin language, if they heard them singing, couldn’t the humans tell that they were making music? And wouldn’t the humans recognize the melodies of, say, the songs by Prince that the filmmakers give the penguins?

But, once again, the main thrust of the movie’s story is the innovative creative artist’s journey from lone outcast to widely recognized success, remaking the culture in the process. Owl Jolson set his entire family dancing to his tune at the end of I Love to Singa and became a success on local radio. Mumble goes much further, getting his entire community to dance along with him, playing to a worldwide audience, and altering the history of his community for the better. Mumble is the artist as savior, literally bringing a new lease on life to his culture. His “heretical” art supplants his culture’s old religion.

Happy Feet encountered considerable controversy since it employed “motion capture” technology, comparable to that used in The Polar Express (see “Comics in Context” #66) and the new King Kong (See “Comics in Context” #121) with live human dancers in creating the penguins’ dance movements. I don’t have the expertise to judge how much of the characters’ movements in Happy Feet may have been taken directly from motion capture and how much were the result of conventional computer animation. But penguins aren’t built like people, so I should think that animators had to do considerable modification of the motion capture data to make it look right for penguins.

Now that I’ve finally seen Happy Feet, it’s not surprising to me that it won the Academy Award, considering the joyousness of its musical sequences, the sheer visual spectacle of its Antarctic landscapes, and a theme that Hollywood, filled with creative artists who went there seeking success, would identify with. By the same logic, they would be less likely to identify with Pixar’s Cars (see “Comics in Context” #137-138), which was about getting out of the rat race (or auto race) to success, and learning to value life’s other virtues. But I still think that Cars was a more profound and affecting movie, and should have won.

The latest Disney animated feature, Meet the Robinsons, has a young protagonist whose talents lies in science and invention, not in singing or dancing. Yet it too follows the same basic theme as I Love to Singa and Happy Feet, as we shall see next week.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR SOMEONE ELSE

Instead of plugging myself this week, I wish to turn readers’ attention to one of my fellow Quick Stop columnists’ latest episode of The Fred Hembeck Show. Discover how Fred, the herald of SpongeBob SquarePants was finally rewarded for his faith by a phone call from Tom Kenny, the mortal incarnation–and voice–of the Absorbent One!

Here’s a real life equivalent of the same pattern followed by Owl Jolson and Mumble. Fred was far ahead of many of us in preaching the virtues of SpongeBob, and now, as he points out in his column, the rest of the world has caught up with him!

I also want to compliment Fred on the brand new cartoons he has been doing lately for his Quick Stop column. And there are only two weeks to go until The Fred Hembeck Show hits its hundredth anniversary!

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson