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On January 10, 2007 The New York Sun ran an article titled “Bonding with a Superhero,” which turned out to be a review of Simon Binder’s book The Man Who Saved Britain, a study of James Bond. Is James Bond a superhero? The Sun copy editor who wrote that headline isn’t the only one who thinks so. The introduction to The Rough Guide to James Bond calls Bond “a superhero without superpowers,” a description that would place him in the same category as Batman and Captain America.

Well, you might think, the people who labeled Bond a superhero haven’t thought seriously about what the word means. Nor has New York Post writer Brian Niemietz, who recently began a fashion article (Jan. 25, 2007) thus: “Joe Namath. Bruce Lee. Superman. Cher. All superheroes. All men in tights.” (Cher?)

But then there’s the case of scholar John Shelton Lawrence, who, with Robert Jewett, wrote the book The Myth of the American Superhero (2002). In an interview for his publisher, Lawrence states that “Many of the great American superstars and superhero characters have built their franchises on roles that, like Spider-Man’s, show them circumventing laws and the leaders so that they can be saviors. Our book discusses Clint Eastwood, Mel Gibson, Sylvester Stallone, Charles Bronson, John Wayne, and many others.” (What, no Arnold Schwarzenegger?) Superman is on the cover of the book, but so is Eastwood in his Western guise as the Man with No Name. Lawrence even goes on to say, “We also discuss the more overtly religious program Touched by [an] Angel, which highlights psychological manipulation rather than violence. We don’t find Touched healthy either, because it is just one more way of dramatizing failed institutions and calling for intervention by disguised superheroes who will leave after they exercise their special powers.” If Lawrence has extended the definition of “superhero” to include not only Rambo and Western heroes, but the angels in the television series Touched by an Angel, then the term has become so broad as to lose any practical meaning. Is Harry Potter a superhero? Or Luke Skywalker? Or Aragorn? Or Jack Bauer? Or Dirty Harry? Or Yojimbo? Or Austin Powers?

The new Mary Poppins stage musical is playing in Manhattan at the New Amsterdam Theatre, the former home of the legendary Ziegfeld Follies. The interior of the theater, beautifully restored by the Walt Disney Company, is a miracle of Art Nouveau splendor: my only regret when I saw Mary Poppins there was that I didn’t have the opportunity to explore the theater itself as I did when I saw The Lion King musical there a decade ago. In the theater’s lobby and elsewhere, Disney has placed photographs of various performers who appeared at the New Amsterdam in the Ziegfeld days, from W. C. Fields to Louise Brooks. But what most impresses me about the lobby are the relief sculptures along the walls, illustrating scenes from Shakespeare’s plays and Wagner’s cycle of operas, The Ring of the Nibelung. In short, at the New Amsterdam one finds the juxtaposition of high art and popular art, which is the theme of this week’s column.

Every year the Beat conducts a year-end survey at her blog and asks what the biggest story of that year was: I responded that for 2006 it was the considerable number of museum and gallery exhibitions devoted to comic and cartoon art. I’ve written extensively about the shows at the Jewish and Newark Museums and the Library of Congress. Here’s yet another one that I just learned about: “Il etait une fois,” translated as “Once upon a Time–Walt Disney: The Sources of Inspiration for the Disney Studios” which opened at the Grand Palais in Paris on September 16 of last year and just closed on January 15. The show reopens at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (or, if you prefer, the Musee des Beaux-Arts, Montreal) on March 8 and runs there until June 24.

I doubt that I’ll be able to get up to Montreal to see it, and, as yet, there has been no announcement that the exhibition will travel to the United States. But an English language version of the show’s catalogue will be published by Prestel Publishing on February 28, and there are articles on the Internet that provide glimpses of the exhibit, such as the one at “Mice Age”.

The fact that this Disney exhibition appeared at one of Paris’s leading museums but not in the United States seems to underline the old maxim that comics and cartoon art are taken more seriously in France than in America. But maybe France isn’t quite the enlightened paradise it may seem to comics aficionados from afar. I see that in the “Animated Views” interview with the show’s curator, Bruno Girveau, writer Ben Simon points out that “Bruno has fought long and hard to stage the show, coming up against the highbrow French art critics who were initially horrified to hear that, in the place which usually hangs works by Poussin and Chardin on the walls, he planned to excerpt Mickey Mouse clips!” Girveau contends that most of the critics liked the show once they saw it, but that those who didn’t like it could not get past their loathing of the contemporary Walt Disney Company to recognize the achievements of its founder: “So it’s difficult for them to forget all that ideology and see Disney as an artist.”

In an article inspired by his viewing of the Grand Palais exhibition, Jonathan Jones, a writer for the British newspaper The Guardian, maintained that “to many people, buying a toy Pinocchio is as bad as feeding your child burgers” (Hey, wait a minute: I love hamburgers) and that “Hating Disney has become a cliche.” Jones asserts that “beneath the all-American facade, Walt Disney had a terrible secret: he was a true artist.”

Moreover, Jones points out, as with any significant creative artist, one can find and follow personal themes that run through the body of his or her work. “You only have to watch a few Disney films, widely separated across the decades of his career, to recognize the consistent obsessions that can only have been the product of one man’s mind.”

In his extraordinary new biography, Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American imagination (which I wrote about in last week’s column), Neal Gabler contends that Walt Disney had relatively little to do with the films, animated or not, that his studio made after Bambi (1942) until Mary Poppins (1964). It does appear that Disney did not devote anywhere near the degree of hands-on attention to those films that he did to the classics of the 1930s and early 1940s. But isn’t the real test of his involvement the degree to which the postwar films reflect his personal themes and concerns? When I heard Gabler speak about his book at the Barnes and Noble near Lincoln Center last December 5, he cautioned the audience that “as much as you might love” Disney’s 1950s animated films Alice in Wonderland (1951), Peter Pan (1953), Lady and the Tramp (1955), and Sleeping Beauty (1959), Disney himself has little to do with them. Has anyone done a serious critical analysis comparing the thematic content of the 1950s animated features to Disney’s earlier animated features? This is something that’s missing from Gabler’s book. Don’t most Disney aficionados sense, as I do, that the 1950s animated films reflect the same consistent artistic sensibility as the features from Snow White (1937) through Bambi, and that Walt Disney, even if he did not actually direct or write any of them, was the auteur of them all (to use the term from film criticism)? (I will concede that the 1960s animated features produced during the last years of Walt Disney’s life demonstrate increasingly less of his own sensibility.)

Jones also argues that people do not look beyond the conventional stereotypical view of Disney’s work to give him credit for its true complexity of mood and vision. Jones points to the first “Silly Symphony” cartoon, Skeleton Dance (1929) “is American, deeply so, in the vein of Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe–a jazz-age honk of American gothic that brilliantly uses black and white silhouettes to create an archetypal midnight churchyard where the skeletons get out of their graves and dance.” Jones insightfully observes that “When Tim Burton does this sort of thing [as in The Nightmare before Christmas (1993) for the Disney studio, I presume], it’s hailed as a gothic subversion of the homeliness of Disney, but Disney subverted himself first.” And, illustrating his thesis that Disney’s personal obsessions, themes, and imagery persist through his oeuvre, Jones then notes that “When later he came to make Fantasia, the skeleton dance was echoed in the march of the mops carrying their buckets of water until Mickey chops, chops, chops them up.”

The thesis of the “Once upon a Time” show is that in creating his great animated films, Walt Disney and his collaborators drew upon artistic influences from outside the animation medium. The Grand Palais’ website states that “Popular culture and highbrow culture typically ignore one another and the links between them have seldom been explored. Walt Disney’s feature-length animated films, from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937, until The Jungle Book in 1967, are striking examples of reciprocal influence of these two cultures.” Note that the “Once upon a Time” show treats all the animated features the Disney studio produced during Walt Disney’s lifetimes as works of Walt Disney the auteur.

According to the Grand Palais’ website “In 1935, Disney spent several weeks in Europe. . . . and took back to California as many illustrated books as he could, to build up a stock of images meant to inspire the Studios’ productions. . . .Original editions of the works of the illustrator J.J. Granville figured prominently, along with drawings by Gustave Doré and German artists such as Ludwig Richter Moritz von Schwind and Heinrich Kley. The English were represented by editions of Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll and Peter Pan and Wendy by James M. Barrie, illustrated by Arthur Rackham or John Tenniel.”

Likewise the exhibit finds links between live action films of the 1920s and 1930s and Walt Disney’s animated features. The website states that “German expressionist cinema had a more profound impact on Disney’s first long features: the influence of Friedrich Murnau’s Faust (1926) is omnipresent in several sequences of Fantasia,” notably the Night on Bald Mountain sequence. It seems that the Faust film too has a sequence in which a devil figure towers over a city while demons rise towards him. Over the last several years each time I’ve gone to see a rare screening of F. W. Murnau’s Faust at a New York revival theater, it’s been sold out. When Tower Records held its going out of business sale last year, the DVD of Murnau’s Faust was on my want list, but other bargain hunters had already snapped it up. Now that I know Murnau’s Faust was an influence on Fantasia (1940), I am even more intent on finally seeing it.

Neither illustration nor film were widely considered to be serious art back in the 1930s and 1940s. But film is certainly considered an artform today, and illustration has increasing been gaining cultural respectability (see “Comics in Context” #132), and it does Walt Disney and his collaborators credit that they recognized their artistic importance well over a half century ago.

Disney and his artists were also studying works that were then unquestionably in the realm of fine art. Like Gabler, “Once upon a Time” devotes considerable attention to Destino, Walt Disney’s 1940s collaboration with Surrealist artist Salvador Dali, which was finally completed in 2003 and will be released on DVD this year. According to the Grand Palais website, “Sleeping Beauty‘s castle was a cross between the illuminations of the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, drawings by Viollet-le-Duc and the extravagant castles of Louis II of Bavaria. Forests took their inspiration from 15th-century Chinese painting, Japanese prints or American or English forests. Bird’s-eye views drew on the work of the American regionalist painters Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton. The influence of Gaspard Friedrich and Arnold Böcklin’s landscapes can be seen in Fantasia, and that of the Flemish and Italian primitives in the décors for Sleeping Beauty.” The exhibition even proposes that the “general silhouette” of the Wicked Queen from Snow White “seems to be derived from the column statue at the entrance to Naumberg Cathedral in Germany.” Not having visited the exhibit or read the catalogue, I cannot judge whether some of these resemblances between Disney’s animated films and works of fine art may be coincidental, but where there is this much artistic smoke, there must be fire.

“Once upon a Time” appears to be arguing that if Disney and his artists studied so much artwork in other mediums, then their animated films must also be works of art. That doesn’t necessarily follow, but it does demonstrate that Disney and his collaborators had a more sophisticated appreciation of art than they have generally been given credit for, and that they had genuine artistic ambitions of their own.

Reviewers of Gabler’s book have been amazed at his reminders of the high cultural esteem in which Walt Disney was held in his most creative period, the 1930s and early 1940s. Gabler recounts that Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein “wrote that he was sometimes frightened watching Disney’s films–‘frightened because of some absolute perfection in what he does’ and because Disney seemed to know “˜all the most secret strands of human thought, images, ideas, feelings.’ Later, among other notables, architect Frank Lloyd Wright, novelist Aldous Huxley, and composer Igor Stravinsky would also visit [Disney and his studio]” (Gabler p. 204). Gabler notes that critic Gilbert Seldes, the champion of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, wrote in Esquire in 1937 about that year’s Mickey Mouse cartoon The Band Concert “that none of “˜dozens of works produced in America at the same time in all the other arts can stand comparison with this one’” (p. 195). Gabler also quotes New York Times film critic Frank Nugent writing in 1937 that Snow White “is a classic, as important cinematically as The Birth of a Nation or the birth of Mickey Mouse” (p. 273). In 1943 Disney was even made a trustee of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. (MoMA did a wonderful Pixar retrospective recently, so why don’t they host “Once upon a Time” in New York?)

This is indeed astounding: it seems that in the 1930s much of the cultural establishment was perfectly willing to recognize animation as art. In this chorus of praise for Disney, there is no sign of the prejudice that cartoon art is junk for kids that has been prevalent throughout my lifetime. Gabler chronicles how critics turned against Disney in the 1940s, and argues that Disney’s films had indeed suffered in quality. On the television program Theater Talk, shown in New York early January 13, Gabler theorized that the critics condescendingly considered Disney a latter-day “folk artist” and turned against him when he showed he had conscious artistic ambitions, as in Fantasia. I don’t know that either of these explanations is sufficient. Just why the cultural establishment turned so radically against Disney’s animated films in the 1940s and 1950s, and even animation in general (with exceptions such as the early UPA shorts, which were perceived as having what we might now call an indie sensibility) puzzles me. It also makes me wonder about the current new artistic respectability of the comics medium. Is this new attitude here to stay, or will a backlash eventually set in here, too?

The greatest lesson I took from Gabler’s book is that Walt Disney, from the late 1920s into the early 1940s, thought and acted as a genuine artist, even if he did not use the term. “‘I can’t get into a rut or let my boys get into ruts,’ he would tell a reporter. “˜If we quit growing mentally and artistically, we will begin to die’. . . .Asked by one storyman if Walt felt they were taking full advantage of the cartoon medium, he riposted, “˜This is not the cartoon medium. It should not be limited to cartoons. We have worlds to conquer here. . . .We’ve got more in this medium than making people laugh” (p 300).
With Fantasia (which was originally called The Concert Feature at the studio), Gabler declares, “This time he was explicitly bidding to join forces with high art and pry the cartoon from its origins in popular culture, where he felt it was doomed to be crude and juvenile. Walt would never have called himself an artist–he was too skeptical of culture and too plainspoken for that–but he did want to make art, if only because that was the natural evolution for him, and The Concert Feature was, he thought, certifiably art” (pgs. 300-301).

This reminds me of Jules Feiffer’s contention that in the 1940s cartoonists working in comics, even Will Eisner, did not think of themselves as artists or of their work as art. At “The Golden Age of Comics,” a panel discussion held at the Jewish Museum last November 2, Feiffer explained that comics artists back then considered it pretentious and somehow unmanly to think of themselves as creating art. But the best of these cartoonists did indeed create art of enduring aesthetic worth, and examples of Golden Age artwork were hanging in the Museum as part of the exhibition “Superheroes: Good and Evil in American Comics.” Similarly, in the 1930s and 1940s Walt Disney may not have used the word “art” but that was what he was intent on creating through his animated films.

As Gabler repeatedly shows, Walt Disney could be dictatorial, even tyrannical, and actually frightened his employees. In my experiences in the comics industry I’ve witnessed examples of how authoritarian bosses can wreck the morale of the creative end of a company. But another major point that Gabler makes about Walt Disney is how, in the 1930s and early 1940s, the studio’s most imaginative and innovative period, Disney more than compensated for his flawed people skills through impressing his co-workers as a visionary leader, even a “muse” according to Gabler (p. 242). “Despite the occasional griping and resentment that Walt was overbearing, mercurial, ungrateful, and impossible to please, all of which he was, no one at the studio doubted the overriding importance of his contribution” (p. 207). For one thing, “he was a superb storyteller, and Walt himself seemed to think it was his primary attribute” (p. 207). He was a master of gags and plot structure, and moreover, he had “the uncanny ability to inhabit the character and enter the situation” (p. 209). At story meetings Walt Disney would spontaneously perform the characters, and “everyone at the studio marveled ar his acting” (p. 209). Co-workers “cited Walt as an inspiration, setting standards, expecting perfection, drumming up enthusiasm, buoying spirits” (p. 210). “Finally, and perhaps most important,” Gabler concludes, “there was Walt’s ability not just to supervise but to coordinate the entire studio apparatus” to create a work of art along the lines he envisioned (p. 210-211). “Almost everyone at the studio admired how Walt, in either conducting then or flitting among them, forged them into a unit. . . .Among his employees, the sum total of all these attributes evoked unbounded admiration for the young man who possessed them” (p. 211).

Gabler asserts that “By the mid-1930s the Disney studio operated like a cult, with a messianic figure inspiring a group of devoted, sometimes frenzied acolytes” (p. 212). This strikes me as too harsh an appraisal. I’m more kindly disposed, having glimpsed–and felt–in my own experience some of this sort of creative fervor that a community of young artists and writers can generate.

What Gabler reveals about Walt Disney persuades me that Disney was a genuine creative genius. Yes, the word “genius” is too often applied to people who do not truly measure up in the strict definition of that term. But after reading Gabler’s book, I now believe that Disney was the real thing: a true genius, and most of his co-workers of the 1930s, consciously or unconsciously, seem to have recognized it.

The Guardian‘s Jonathan Jones refers to the Mary Poppins movie as “this magical, and totally unAmerican child’s-eye vision of London as one of the films on which he lavished most attention, a film he was obsessed with making for 20 years, and turned into his final testament. If you want to know the real Walt Disney, watch Mary Poppins.” Gabler believes that Disney saw himself in the character of George Banks, the workaholic executive who rediscovers the child within himself. In last week’s column I delved further into this idea. Gabler recounts how as he grew older and his studio grew larger, Walt Disney increasingly became a corporate executive rather than a creative visionary. But towards the end of his life, Disney found renewed energy and inspiration in working on Mary Poppins. Gabler quotes Karen Dotrice, who played one of the children, as describing Disney as being “like a big kid” (p. 598). The parody court martial of Mr. Banks by the bank executives turns out to be an exorcism of the repressed, stodgy, corporate side of his personality. Banks’s old self dies, and a new self is born, who, appropriately, initially acts like a giddy “big kid” and returns home to “go fly a kite” with his family. Last week I wrote that this reminded me of the section of Gabler’s biography in which he describes Disney’s own midlife crisis: his disillusionment with animation and filmmaking following the studio strike and the financial failures of ambitious films like Fantasia. Disney discovered a new enthusiasm for trains big and small, and Gabler significantly refers to “the kind of delayed childhood he was now enjoying” (p. 475).

Mr. Banks seizes the day and finds his own “delayed childhood.” But despite what New York Times critic Edward Rothstein says (Nov. 20, 2006), he doesn’t remain in emotional childhood, though the movie does not underscore this point. While flying the kite with his family, Mr. Banks encounters other bank executives who are also flying kites. (Mr. Banks’ psychological regeneration appears to have spread to his whole community.) They inform him that Mr. Dawes, Sr.. the ancient personification of the heartless world of the bank, has died, but though Mr. Banks immediately expresses regret, the other executives, including Mr. Dawes Sr.’s own son, aren’t at all unhappy about it. Mr. Dawes, Sr. died happy, as a result of laughing convulsively (and levitating, like Mary Poppins’ Uncle Albert) over the bad joke Mr. Banks told him (also from the Uncle Albert scene). Unlikely as it seems, the bank executives seem to think that Mr. Dawes, Sr.’s cheerful demise outweighs Mr. Banks’ alleged responsibility for the panic, and so they offer Mr. Banks a new, higher position at the bank, which he gratefully accepts.

So Mr. Banks hasn’t ditched the responsibilities of adulthood, making a living and supporting his family, after all. Following the Joseph Campbell monomyth, Mr. Banks has undergone symbolic death (of his old workaholic, emotionally inhibited self) and rebirth (as a man more in touch with his emotions, a better husband and father, and even a more successful banker). It makes a certain sense that psychological rebirth would entail a brief return to symbolic childhood (flying the kite) before resuming the role of adult.

Watching the movie again in December, I had not remembered the death of Mr. Dawes, Sr. and was amazed by the insertion of this dark note (even if the executives make light of it) into the film’s concluding festive mood. (A more noticeable disturbance of the general festivity comes with Mary Poppins’ acknowledgment that she has been utterly forgotten by their children in their joy at reconnecting with their redeemed father and mother. If Mr. Banks has regained his job and family, Mary Poppins has lost hers, for the moment, anyway. Suddenly I see Mary Poppins flying off at the end of the movie as an image similar to that of the door closing upon John Wayne at the end of The Searchers [1956]: each is a protagonist whose success in reuniting a family results in his or her own exclusion from it.) In effect Mr. Banks has inadvertently murdered Mr. Dawes, Sr. by telling him that killer joke. (Comedians do talk about “killing” the audience by making them laugh, an idiom that presumably helped inspire Monty Python’s “killer joke” sketch.) Here’s the mythic motif of the new ruler rising to power by slaying the old, only flimsily disguised. The new generation (well, middle-aged), represented by Mr. Banks, has seized power from the declining older generation, represented by Mr. Dawes, Sr.. But it’s significant that Mr. Banks did not intentionally seize power: he was not motivated by greed or ambition, but merited success by discovering his true self. Moreover, whether or not Disney and his collaborators intended it, Mr. Banks “slays” the old tyrant, thereby symbolically overcoming death, not by brute force but by a work of popular art, however humble, that embodies the spirit of comedy: a simple joke.

On one level, the death of Mr. Dawes, Sr. could have represented for Disney his triumph over the bankers who for so long had controlled his fate and prevented him from doing the work he wanted. On another level, the death of Mr. Dawes, Sr. could represent the “death” of the side of Walt Disney that accepted corporate thinking but was also cruel and insensitive to his subordinates. Whether any of this was conscious on Disney’s part is a mystery.

The Mary Poppins stage musical handles the Banks/bank subplot very differently: there is no Mr. Dawes, Sr. and therefore no implication that Mr. Banks is an unwitting murderer. The revision suggests that Julian Fellowes, who write the stage version’s book, may also be aware of the parallels between Walt Disney and Mr. Banks. Rothstein describes Fellowes’ version thus: Mr. Banks “ends up learning. . . that it is far better to approve loans for a kind factory builder who boasts of having no collateral other than his workers, than for a selfish oaf who simply plans to make money. Eventually everyone is convinced by Mary Poppins that anything is possible if you let it, nothing is ever set in stone, and that everyone should have fun and do good works. They join forces in a paean to this narcissistic cartoon of liberalism.” How about that last line? Rothstein succeeds in sounding like Stephen Colbert on one of his rants, except that Rothstein means it. What happens in the stage version is that Mr. Banks turns down a loan to a financial manipulator who has no goal greater than increasing his own wealth, and instead approves a loan to a visionary entrepreneur who intends to build a business that will benefit his workers as well as himself. In other words, the man who gets the loan is like the young Walt Disney himself, a man of vision who values and rewards his workers. In approving this loan, Mr. Banks demonstrates to the audience that he has a heart and thus the potential for redemption. But Mr. Banks is taking a gamble with this entrepreneur, and In the stage version, it is because the bank’s hierarchy disapproves of this decision that Mr. Banks’ job is in jeopardy. But at the show’s end it is revealed that the gamble paid off, and the visionary entrepreneur proved to be wildly successful. Now the bank’s promotion of Mr. Banks makes more sense. Doesn’t the entrepreneur’s success mirror the ultimate financial success of Walt Disney himself? Isn’t the attitude that Mr. Banks takes towards the loan in the stage musical just the sort of attitude that Walt Disney would have wished the banks would have taken towards him in the 1940s?

Walt Disney did not remain stuck in his “delayed childhood” either. His passion for trains unexpectedly led him in a new creative direction. He wanted to build train tracks at his studio, then he wanted to build a small village that the train could travel around, and, ultimately, he conceived of Disneyland, a creation that rivals his animated features in importance. So that’s why that old-fashioned train chugs around Disneyland’s perimeter; this explains the monorail as well.

In Disney’s Mary Poppins, both the movie and the stage version, flight becomes a symbol of transcendence, of rising above the rut in which one finds himself and achieving a new freedom. When Mr. Dawes, Sr. learns to laugh, he levitates. Liberated from the self-imposed structures of his old self, Mr. Banks flies a kite. As for Bert and Mary Poppins, they don;t have to achieve liberation; they already have it. Bert and his fellow chimney sweeps in the movie are propelled out of the chimneys like rockets. In one of the high points of the stage musical, Bert, played by Gavin Lee from the original London production, dances up the side of the proscenium, and then upside down along the top. (It’s true! And without the trickery employed by Fred Astaire when he danced on the ceiling in the 1951 movie Royal Wedding. This is really happening!)

Now there’s one of the advantages of sitting up in the balcony of the New Amsterdam. Broadway prices have skyrocketed over the last several years: and now a normally priced orchestra seat can cost $110 and “premium” seats can cost twice or even four times as much! Thankfully, the New Amsterdam holds a very large number of seats, and so the balcony seats can be had for reasonable, and even surprisingly inexpensive, prices. So, sitting up towards the top of the theater, I had a really good view of Bert’s dance up, across, and back down the proscenium. But there was an even bigger surprise in store.

At the end of the first act of the Mary Poppins musical at the New Amsterdam, she rises above the stage in flight, holding onto her umbrella, in the iconic image from Mary Shepard’s original illustrations from P. L. Travers’ book and from the end of the movie. Well, I wondered, why did they choose to use what I would have thought would be the climactic special effect of the show only halfway through? They must have something more spectacular in mind for the finale.

And so they did. At the very end Mary Poppins again rises into the air, holding her umbrella. But this time she ascends outward over the audience, and to everyone’s amazement, rises higher and higher, and passed directly in front of the balcony, virtually right in front on my own seat, and little more than arm’s length away from me, and continued to ascend until she made her exit, somewhere at the very top of the theater! Now that is an unforgettable coup de theatre! (And I am almost as amazed by the fact that Ashley Brown, the actress playing Mary Poppins, somehow managed to get back on stage mere moments later for the curtain calls!)

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF
“1986: The Year That Changed Comics,” my yearlong lecture series at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art in Manhattan, finally comes to an end on Monday evening, January 22, with Neil Gaiman’s first work in comics, Violent Cases, illustrated by Dave McKean. (It was actually published in 1987, but I figure they must have been working on it in 1986.) MoCCA and I are discussing possibilities for other lectures–either one-shots or series–that I could do there in the future. But for now, this is the last of my monthly MoCCA talks, so if you’re in the area, please stop by. (It’s free!)

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

The triumph of Neal Gabler’s voluminous, thorough and fascinating new biography, Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), is that it so fully humanizes a figure whom many of us previously knew either from his public image, as the benign, fatherly host of his weekly television series, or as the enigmatic and sometimes dictatorial executive of later books on animation.

In fact, there is one anecdote in Gabler’s vast tome that should allow any of us in the comics business to identify with DIsney. “Walt would recall an incident that happened on the back platform of the train when he first headed west to Los Angeles. He was making conversation with a man there who asked what Walt did. . . . “˜I make animated cartoons,” Walt told him, which was met with a steely disdain that Walt never forgot and that had led him to resolve that someday his cartoons would be afforded the same respect as live features” (p. 271).

As regular readers know, I’m associated on a volunteer basis with the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art in New York City, and one of the perks of being a museum staffer, albeit unpaid, is that I receive free admission to other museums. So last month I visited a Manhattan art museum, which shall be nameless, and presented by MoCCA ID card at the admissions desk. The man behind the counter read the name of the museum and scrunched up his face into an expression of, yes, steely disdain for the idea of a museum dedicated to, of all things, cartoons. Thanks to Gabler’s book, I can now console myself with the knowledge that even Walt Disney had to experience this prejudice against the artform. (And to be fair, last year I showed my MoCCA ID card to a woman at the admissions counter for the Whitney Museum of American Art, and she not only burst into enthusiasm, but asked if she could bring her art students to visit the museum. So, yes, the cultural climate is changing, if not as widely as I might hope.)

Back in 2005 I wrote a number of columns about Lincoln Center’s retrospective of musical animated cartoons, and commented on how various people in animation were interested in the figure of the conductor (see “Comics in Context” #109 and 110). Mickey Mouse plays that role in The Band Concert (1935), among other cartoons, and as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice in Fantasia (1940), “conducts” the seas and the heavens as if they were orchestra members. Of course, at the end of that section of Fantasia, Mickey famously shakes hands with Leopold Stokowski, two conductors united. I suggested that Walt Disney, among others, regarded the conductor as a symbol of the filmmaker, directing the creation of a work of art.

How rewarding to learn from Gabler’s book that I was right on target with Disney! “Walt himself compared the cartoons to a symphony, with him as the conductor who took all the employees–the storymen, the animators, the composers and musicians, the voice artists, the ink and paint girls–and got them to “˜produce one whole thing which is beautiful’” (p. 210).

There is a great deal to say about Gabler’s biography of Disney, but this week I want to concentrate on the light it casts on a subject I wrote about a few weeks ago: Mary Poppins, in its incarnations as P. L. Travers’ original book, Walt Disney’s 1964 film adaptation, and the new stage musical on Broadway, based on both (see “Comics in Context” #158). Last time I concentrated on Ms. Poppins herself, but this time I’m turning to a character who is barely present in the original book, but who has the principal character arc in the movie and stage musical: Mr. George Banks, the father of Mary Poppins’ charges, Jane and Michael. As Variety theater critic David Rooney referred to Mr. Banks in his review of the Broadway version (Nov. 16, 2006) as “George whose sensitization is the story’s central journey.” In the course of the movie and play he changes from what writer Caitlan Flanagan called “a martinet banker” in her Dec. 19, 2005 New Yorker article about Travers, whose signature song in the stage version is “Precision and Order,” to an emotionally open and loving husband and father.

The Mr. Banks arc is the Disney studio’s invention. Travers’ original book is episodic: Mary Poppins takes the children on one adventure after another, until finally we reach the end of the book and she leaves. The redemption of Mr. Banks gives the story of the movie and stage musical an overall structure. Moreover, through developing the character of Mr. Banks, Walt Disney and his collaborators on this family movie gave the adults in the audience someone with whose problems they could identify.

It also solved another problem. As Flanagan explains, “The story of Mary Poppins depended on the premise that it was normal for a middle-class family to employ. . .a servant to raise the children. But to a large segment of Disney’s intended audience this idea would be bewildering or, at least, cold and unpalatable.”

Travers expressed surprise at the movie’s notion that Mr. Banks was a bad father. Flanagan quotes her as writing, “What wand was waved to turn Mr. Banks . . . . from an anxious, ever-loving father into a man who could cheerfully tear into pieces a poem that his children had written?” But Flanagan earlier related that Travers’ father died when she was ten, that her mother was irresponsible, and that as a girl Travers turned instead to her unmarried Aunt Ellie, who “bossed everyone around, but her fierceness disguised a kindness she would have been embarrassed to admit” and who was the obvious model for Mary Poppins. Moreover, Flanagan asserts that “the fate of children whose parents can’t take care of them – haunted her [Travers] for the rest of her life.”

Of Travers’ Mary Poppins books, I’ve only read the first, and it gives me the impression that Mr. and Mrs. Banks pay little attention to their children and are perfectly content to let Mary Poppins take the lion’s share of raising them. The children’s adventures with Mary Poppins thus become ventures into a secret world to which their parents are oblivious. So Walt Disney’s interpretation of Mr. Banks as a rather distant father seems reasonable to me. Richard Sherman, who with his brother Robert wrote the songs for the Mary Poppins movie, worked on its story with Walt Disney, and told Flanagan they realized, “You could make the father emotionally absent.” Hence, he told her, “We made it a story about a dysfunctional family,” Sherman said. “And in comes Mary Poppins – this necessary person – to heal them”

Gabler points out that Walt Disney had been considering doing a Mary Poppins movie since the 1940s, and when the movie finally was being made, “Walt was energized. . . .It had been years since Walt was so personally invested in a film. . . he obviously connected with the film in ways that he had not connected with the studio’s recent releases” (pgs. 598-599).

How did he connect? Gabler explains that Disney’s great early feature films, like Pinocchio (1940) and Dumbo (1941) are about children achieving maturity, taking on the “hallmarks of adulthood.” In contrast, he says, “Mary Poppins was a kind of reversion to childhood before responsibility, or, rather, a reaction to it. In a household that encouraged them to suppress their antic spirits and behave like adults, Poppins taught the children joy. . . If his earlier films had spoken to young Walt Disney’s need for empowerment, Poppins spoke to the older Walt Disney’s predicament as a corporate captain burdened with duties. . . ” (p. 599).

It makes sense that as he grew older, the films that Walt Disney considered personal projects would change. I observed a similar phenomenon with George Lucas’s Star Wars movies (see “Comics in Context” #86). The original Star Wars trilogy, made by a young man, who, when he started them in 1977, was still striving for success, were about empowerment; they also embodied a young man’s optimism. The later trilogy, made by an older, successful man, who has become “a corporate captain” like Disney, reflects disillusionment, shows a new concern with mortality, and even approaches tragedy; the “New Hope” is left to the next generation, represented by the births of Luke and Leia at the end of Revenge of the Sith (2005). In contrast, Disney holds on to his optimism in Mary Poppins: the true central character, Mr. Banks, emerges from disillusionment into spiritual regeneration.

Gabler asserts that Walt Disney “could certainly identify with Mr. Banks, the stodgy banker who has a child lurking inside him, and with Mary Poppins, the magical nanny who manages to emancipate that child” (p. 599). This is certainly true, and Gabler is particularly perceptive in recognizing that Disney could identify aspects of himself with more than one character in the story.

If Walt Disney, consciously or unconsciously, molded Travers’ Mary Poppins into his own spiritual autobiography of sorts, then there are further depths to be plumbed.

As many reviewers of Gabler’s book have remarked upon, Walt Disney was unconcerned with money except as a means for financing his future projects. But he was forced to become concerned about it. Astounding as it may seem to us today, when they are all nearly universally regarded as classics of America popular culture, Pinocchio, Fantasia (1940), and Bambi (1942) were all failures in their initial releases, and the Disney studio would have gone bankrupt if not for the film projects it undertook for the government during World War II. Moreover, as the Disney studio grew, it inevitably lost the sense of community it had in its earlier days, especially after the animators’ strike of 1941. Gabler describes Disney’s “transformation from a heedless entertainer to a cautious corporate leader” (p. 442) who “even looked different. The boyish young Walt Disney had dressed casually and flamboyantly,” but now “his suits were more likely to be solid blue or gray and conservatively cut. . .” (pgs. 441-2). One reason for all this, Gabler explains, was “the need to make films without also making mistakes. The studio couldn’t afford the risk.” Gabler maintains that Disney was growing more conservative anyway, in part “possibly” due to the fact that “he was in his mid-forties and no longer a reckless young visionary” (p. 442).

Mr. Banks, of course, by Travers’ own admission, is dedicated to making money: “Now, the City was a place where Mr. Banks went every day–except Sundays, of course, and Bank Holidays–and while he was there he sat on a large chair in front of a large desk and made money” (p. 4).

As his name suggests, the movie’s Mr. Banks’s ties his sense of identity to his job. In his book Gabler shows how bankers thwarted Disney’s dreams ands ambitions in the first decades of his studio. For example, after the strike, an executive of the studio’s creditor, the Bank of America, “concerned about what he saw as Walt’s profligacy,’ “ordered the studio to restrict itself to the production of shorts,” and moreover demanded “the creation of an “˜executive committee,’ including a bank representative” to govern the studio. “In effect, the studio was no longer Walt Disney’s fiefdom, He was now under the control of the businessmen” (p. 376). Did Disney the artist feel that by increasingly conforming to the demands of the corporate world, and indeed by making himself over into a conservative corporate executive, that he had joined the enemy’s side?

Whether motivated by the need to make money or by his artistic ambitions, Disney was quite a workaholic who had trouble tearing himself away from his own figurative desk. Gabler quotes animator Ward Kimball about a train trip he took with Disney: “No matter what you were talking about, he’d get back to this goddamn studio. . . .He wanted to talk about it. This was HIM. This was his SEX! This was EVERYTHING. . .The orgasms were all here” (p. 473).

It appears that Disney was indeed sublimating his libido into his work, at the expense of his family life. Gabler makes clear that Disney was emotionally distant from his wife, though he was quite close with his daughters. “But as much as he cherished his girls, and enjoyed spending time with them, there was something solitary about him when he wasn’t at the studio–something self-absorbed and distant” (p. 462). Gabler states that “Walt seemed to realize that he was hopelessly addicted to work at the expense of family and friends” (p. 282).

There, too, is a link between Walt Disney and the movie’s Mr. Banks, who, as Sherman observed, is “emotionally absent” from his family. The stage musical goes even further. As Ben Brantley put it in his Nov. 17, 2006 review of the stage version for The New York Times, “Mr. Banks. . .learns to stop recoiling when his wife tries to kiss him and to value quality time with the kids over making money.”

I also wonder if Disney, consciously or not, saw himself in Mr. Banks, not only in Disney’s relationship with his children, but in Disney’s relationship with his employees. Gabler perceives a paternal quality in Disney’s attitude towards the people who worked at the studio. At its best, in the 1930s, “if this was paternalism, it was paternalism in service of a higher principle. . . .He wanted an organization in which everyone would be selfless and happy” (p. 241). But Gabler also shows, especially as time went on, that Disney could be a martinet who terrified his employees. In Mr. Banks, before and after his transformation, perhaps we see Disney the distant, tyrannical “parent,” and Disney the benign, caring “father” to his staff.

Gabler also tell us that Disney “always loved to forge people into a happy unit” (p. 240). That’s what Mr. Banks does at the end of the movie, when he reconciles with his family and invites them to join him in his new pastime of flying a kite. Here too is one of the links between Walt Disney and the character of Mary Poppins. Even if he didn’t do it enough, Disney loved spending time with his daughters, and Mary Poppins takes the children on one magical adventure after another. At the movie’s end, Mr. Banks, the character who more clearly represents Disney himself, takes on Mary Poppins’ role of companion to his children, and so there is no more need for her, and she departs.

As a worker of magic, which often amazes and entertains the children, Mary Poppins can also be regarded as metaphorically representing the creative artist, making yet another connection between her and Disney himself. Bert is specifically identified in both Travers’ book and in the Disney movie as an artist, and one who creates a world within his painting with characters that come to life. So Bert effectively deals in animation, like Walt Disney himself.

I also wonder if Disney, consciously or not, saw himself reflected in Mary Poppins’ characteristic sternness. Gabler shows repeatedly that Walt Disney was a difficult man to know, had few friends, did not show emotional warmth towards his employees, and, indeed, intimidated his staff, and could be cruel to people. Yet Gabler also makes clear that Disney had this “paternal” side and, at least before the strike, took unusual steps to promote his employees’ welfare and happiness. So could Disney have identified with his version of Mary Poppins, who masks her genuine caring for the children behind her forbidding facade? (Even Travers notes, when Maia, the star that took human form, parts from Mary Poppins, that Jane and Michael “could see in Mary Poppins’ eyes something that, if she were anybody else but Mary Poppins, might have been described as tears. . . “ [p. 194].) Mary Poppins’ severe demeanor could be used to rationalize always treating children sternly and never betraying emotion. So it is a relief that Disney’s Mary Poppins film ultimately depicts the transformed Mr. Banks’s open affection for his wife and children as its ideal. Mary Poppins, hiding her true feelings beneath a stern manner, was a necessary transitional figure in the family’s evolution, and is sent on her way once their “dysfunction” is cured.

There is yet a fourth figure in the movie who may resemble a side of Disney and who is missing from the stage musical: the head of the bank, Mr. Dawes, Sr., an extraordinarily ancient man who can barely stand upright. (The closing credits reveal that Dick Van Dyke, who plays the young, spry Bart, doubles in the role of Mr. Dawes, Sr.. Van Dyke is unrecognizable beneath the banker’s old age makeup, and proved far better at altering his voice in this role than he was at adopting a Cockney accent for Bert. Surely I am far from the only person who, on first seeing the movie, did not realize that Van Dyke played the elder Dawes until the closing credits.) This is a man on the brink of death, who maintains his hold on the reins of power well past the time he should have passed them on to a new generation, namely Mr. Banks’s. Death thus symbolically rules the bank, whose vast emptiness might resemble a mausoleum.

Despite Mr. Banks’s loyalty to the bank, the elder Mr. Dawes and his hierarchy show no loyalty in turn to him. In the movie Mr. Banks falls from his masters’ favor through sheer accident. When Mr. Banks brings his children to the bank and encourages Michael to open an account, Michael, understandably cowed by his surroundings, vehemently refuses. A customer overhears, leaps to the conclusion that something must be wrong with the bank, and her panic spreads, causing a run on the bank. For adults in the early 1960s who remembered the 1920s and 1930s, this sequence would conjure up the fears they felt during the Great Depression. Significantly, Frank Capra made two films that dramatized a similar situation: in American Madness (1932), a rumor foments panic and a run on the protagonist’s bank, and in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), there is another fear-driven run on George Bailey’s savings and loan. In each of these Capra movies, the hero’s friends loyally rally to his support and prevent him from going under. In the Mary Poppins movie Mr. Dawes, Sr. and the rest of the bank’s hierarchy blames Mr. Banks for the panic and decide to fire him, or, to continue the death analogy, to terminate his employment. (Mr. Banks accepts responsibility for his children’s actions, but of course, the children were not really to blame. It’s the nameless customers who really started the panic, but they cannot be identified, and Mr. Dawes, Sr. and company apparently need a scapegoat.)

In the movie, before returning to the bank to face the judgment of his superiors, Mr. Banks morosely ponders his imminent fate: to have his career cut short while he is in his “prime.” Again, this evokes memories of the Depression for Disney’s generation. For Disney himself it may have alluded to the times when his studio nearly went bankrupt, a fate that might have put an end to his career and artistic dreams. Pointedly, on his way to the bank, Mr. Banks passes by the Bird Woman who feeds the pigeons on the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral (which is near the “City,” London’s banking district). Gabler reports that towards the end of his life, Disney would repeatedly summon the Sherman Brothers to play the song about the Bird Woman, “Feed the Birds,” for him. “Whether Walt related to the song because he related to the old woman’s loneliness, or whether in a life of grand gestures he appreciated her small one, or whether he recognized in her his own mortality, or whether the woman simply reminded him of his own mother, he never said. . . .But hearing the song, he would always cry” (p. 618). These all seem good explanations, and Gabler’s mention of mortality fits in with the idea of the bank as the realm of death.

The Bird Woman is also a rather pathetic figure of destitution, and therefore may represent to Mr. Banks the specter of what he fears lies in wait for him once he has been terminated. Moreover, she is an icon of charity, feeding the birds despite her own poverty. Now that Mr. Banks is on the brink of financial ruin, he is himself in need of charity, but seems to realize he will find none from his judges at the bank.

Despite Disney’s reputation for sugar-coating reality, it should be no surprise that his great films include moments of disturbing darkness, from the notorious death of Bambi’s mother to Mr. Banks’s descent into despair. Gabler quotes Disney as stating that “Life is composed of lights and shadows, and we would be untruthful, insincere, and saccharine if we tried to pretend there were no shadows” (p. 398).

Clearly Disney could identify with Mr. Banks as the potential victim of a bank, just as he had been in real life. But if Mary Poppins was in part a psychodrama for Disney, then Disney may well have been the oppressor as well as the victim. Consciously or not, perhaps Disney saw part of himself in Mr. Dawes, Sr. According to Gabler, even before the studio strike, but as pressures from the Bank of America grew on him, Disney “displayed no hint of sentiment when it came to newer employees, especially as his dream of utopia faded under the glare of economic realities. . . .Walt thought nothing of firing someone who had outlived his usefulness, calling it “˜weeding out marginal people,’ or getting rid of “˜deadwood’” (p. 353). After the strike, Gabler reports, “Beyond the fear he inspired, Walt now displayed a vindictiveness occasionally even bordering on cruelty. . .” (p. 379). How bad did it get? This bad: Gabler quotes the recently deceased Richard Fleischer (who was not only a director who worked for Disney but was the son of his former rival Max) as recalling Disney telling him, “every once in a while I just fire everybody, then I hire them back in a couple of weeks. That way they don’t get too complacent. It keeps them on their toes” (p. 540). Mr. Banks identified himself with the bank until the bank turned against him. Through the elder Mr. Dawes, did Disney consciously or subconsciously recognize that his insensitivity towards employees mirrored the Bank of America’s coldness towards him?

In the movie when Mr. Banks arrives at the bank to face his reckoning, he is subjected to a parody of the expulsion of a disgraced military officer: parts of his businessman’s “uniform,” such as his bowler hat and umbrella, are ritualistically ruined. It’s funny, but there is a dark edge to the scene; the man is being humiliated and symbolically reduced to nothing.

Thus expelled from a harsh adult world, the movie’s Mr. Banks abruptly, giddily reverts to a kind of childhood, babbling “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” telling a bad joke, and otherwise recapping motifs from earlier scenes involving Mary Poppins. It reminds me of Scrooge’s happy hysteria on awakening on Christmas Day, or George Bailey’s own delirious euphoria, following their respective visions. Soon Mr. Banks is rushing back home to go flying a kite with his children.

Now that I have read Gabler’s book, Mr. Banks’s new enthusiasm for flying kites makes me think of Disney’s own passion for trains. Gabler tells how in the 1940s Disney’s artistic dreams were thwarted by a combination of factors, including the commercial failures of Pinocchio, Fantasia and Bambi; the strike that wrecked the studio’s sense of community; the financial constraints imposed on the studio by the bank; and even his sense that due to high costs and lack of sufficiently talented people, he could no longer make animated films that could equal his great work of the 1930s and early 1940s. Gabler reports that Disney’s wife Lillian “once claimed that after the war Walt had come close to another breakdown like the one he suffered in 1931, because he was working too hard, she said, though the better explanation was that he was depressed from his work showing so little result. . . ” (p. 465). Gabler aptly titles this chapter of his biography “Adrift.”

But then Disney became fascinated, even obsessed, with trains: models, miniatures, and full size versions. “The train, like the animation, was to be all-consuming,” Gabler writes, “his escape from the animations, as the animations had been intended as an escape from reality” (p. 467). The trains became a substitute for animation as the object of his creative energies: “He had an object on which to lavish his affection. He had the pleasure of doing work exactly as he wanted and an opportunity to exercise the control that he had lost” (p. 467). This in turn led to Disney’s building a new house for himself, “where he could lay track for the railroad that consumed him” (p. 474). “The new house was partly a project, something to hold Walt’s attention, partly a haven to replace the studio as the trains had replaced the animation, and partly a way to secure himself against the assaults of the world by retreating to his family” (p. 474). That’s what Mr. Banks does when he is expelled from the bank: he returns to his family, who, he now recognizes, will still accept him even when the business world does not. Mr. Banks’s kite parallels Disney’s train.

In his piece about Mary Poppins for The New York Times (Nov. 20, 2006), critic Edward Rothstein contends that the Mary Poppins movie “treated adulthood as if it should be another form of childhood. . . Life would be better if parents allowed themselves to dance like chimney sweeps and fly kites in the park. They shouldn’t just pay more attention to their children; they should become more like them.”

And here is Rothstein’s key observation: “The movie’s liberatory spirit is, of course, out of the heart of the 1960s.” Now that is startling. What we think of the free-spirited Sixties is really the late Sixties. The Mary Poppins movie was released in 1964, and conventional wisdom, then and now, regarded Disney as conservative in outlook. But Rothstein’s observation fits with Gabler’s argument that “though Walt Disney was made to seem conservative–had made himself seem conservative because it fit the cultural ethos of the time–in his films, at least, he may not have been so very conservative after all, nor the barrier against the new America that he was often purported to be” (p. 615). Gabler contends that Disney’s movies “were surprisingly modern in outlook and not quite as innocuous as even Walt had declared them to be. The rock-ribbed Republican. . .also suspected authority and often questioned it, hated money and its acquisition, was wary of materialism, detested affectation. . . and all of those values had found their way into his movies and quite possibly into the mind-set of the generation who had been weaned on them” (p. 614). In the late 1960s the idea of turning one’s back on the establishment, rejecting the pursuit of materialism, and “dropping out” of the 9-to-5 life had become familiar and trendy; the movie version of Mr. Banks had already done all of this in 1964.

Back on Dec. 5 in his blog, Neil Gaiman wrote, “And of course Mary Poppins is not — in the books — actually “˜practically perfect,’ although that’s her own opinion of herself. She’s conceited, dangerous, implacable and a force of nature. She teaches the Banks children nothing as banal as moral lessons, and I don’t believe that anybody is really emotionally transformed in the books, except for a handful of lucky people in the stories who are given the ability to run away from their lives or are set free from some kind of physical imprisonment (and that occurs more in the stories that Mary Poppins tells the children than in the stories themselves).” But those stories-within-stories supply thematic justification for Mr. Banks’s emotional transformation.

Reading the first Mary Poppins book, I was taken with Mary Poppins’ tale of “The Dancing Cow” (in Chapter 5), concerning a Red Cow who “was very respectable” and who “always behaved like a perfect lady” (Odyssey paperback edition pgs. 66-67) and devotes herself to raising a succession of children. In other words it appears that she exactly lives up to society’s conventional standards of behavior for women back when P. L. Travers wrote the book: be ladylike and a good mother, and aspire to nothing else. Travers informs us further about the Red Cow that “All her days were exactly the same” and that “she felt that she could ask for nothing better than for all her days to be alike until she came to the end of them” (p. 67). It seems like a living death by boredom.

However, Travers continues, “adventure. . .was stalking” the Red Cow (p. 67). One night, to the Red Cow’s own surprise, she “stood up suddenly and began to dance. She danced wildly and beautifully and in perfect time. . . .” The abruptness strikes me as being much like the movie’s Mr. Banks’ sudden shift from despair into childlike merriment. In each case pent-up emotions that they were not even aware of burst forth. Mr. Banks had previously thought that kite flying and words like “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”: were silly, and the Red Cow tells herself, “I always thought dancing improper, but it can’t be since I myself am dancing. For I am a model cow.” And Mr. Banks, the proper businessman, similarly finds himself flying a kite.

Moreover, just as Mr. Banks’ new euphoria verges on a hysterical lack of self-control, the Red Cow discovers that she is now unable to stop dancing. That’s the result of having repressed their inner drives for so long. I suppose that P. L. Travers made her cow red in homage to Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of “The Red Shoes,” whose wearer likewise cannot stop dancing. (So this is The Red Hooves?) It might seem as if the Red Cow will meet as tragic an end as Andersen’s heroine: in continual motion, the Red Cow cannot sleep and can barely eat. Nevertheless, she confesses, “it’s rather a pleasant feeling. . .as if laughter were running up and down inside me” (p. 73). The source of the Cow’s problem is a bright fallen star that has gotten caught on one of her horns. (Once again, the laws of science prove to be hogwash in Mary Poppins’ world.) The local King advises the Red Cow to try dislodging the star by jumping over the moon, as in the nursery rhyme. The Red Cow protests, “I am a decent, respectable animal and have been taught from my infancy that jumping was no occupation for a lady” (p. 75). Nonetheless, she overcomes her inhibitions, makes the jump, and it works: the star falls off, her dancing ceases, and she returns to her responsibility, the Red Calf, and “soon began to live her life just exactly as she had lived it before” (p. 78).

And this doesn’t work. The Red Cow “began to feel uncomfortable and dissatisfied” and realizes that she misses dancing and “the happy feeling the star had given her” (p. 78). It gets worse: she loses her appetite, “her temper was atrocious. And she frequently burst into tears for no reason at all” (p. 78). (Reminds me of Disney’s own anger and depression.) Finally, the Red Cow embarks on a quest to find another fallen star. (If Victoria Page in the 1948 The Red Shoes movie begged, “Take off the Red Shoes,” the Red Cow wants their equivalent put back on.) But this happened “long ago” according to Mary Poppins (p. 66), and the Red Cow hasn’t found another fallen star yet.

This fable may reflect Travers’ own ambiguous feelings about discipline, responsibility and propriety on one hand, and emotional release and self-expression on the other. As in “The Red Shoes,” the pursuit of pleasure to excess is destructive, but one lesson one might take from the Red Cow’s story is that once you free yourself from inhibition to follow your inner voice, it’s a mistake to go back to repression. The Red Cow’s story also suggests that you cannot count on more than one such opportunity for emotional freedom.

Mr. Banks follows this principle by seizing the day at the movie’s and the musical’s endings, and I will have more to write about both Poppins and Disney next time.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF
There will be another Big Apple Con (http://www.bigapplecon.com/) at the Penn Plaza Pavilion (401 Seventh Ave. at 33rd St.) in Manhattan on Friday, January 19 and Saturday, January 20. I’ll be there on Saturday, when I’m scheduled to help interview Doom Patrol co-creator Arnold Drake and She-Hulk writer Dan Slott.

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

Since I last wrote about the Library of Congress’s “Cartoon America” exhibition (in “Comics in Context” #157), the show has been extended until February 24, 2007, and I’ve also discovered the Library’s online version of the exhibit. The Library does not have the rights to display online all of the artwork in the show, but you can find a number of the pieces I previously described, including the Bambi concept drawing, the Betty Boop model sheet, the New York cartoons by Peter Arno and James Thurber, the Winsor McCay Gertie the Dinosaur drawing and Dream of the Rarebit Fiend strip, and the Charlie Brown soliloquy in Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts.

“Cartoon America” poses a very basic question to the viewer, which is made explicit in the interview with editorial cartoonist Pat Oliphant in the accompanying book Cartoon America: Comic Art in the Library of Congress (edited by Harry Katz and published by Harry N. Abrams). In an interview (p. 244) Oliphant says, “it’s a wretched word, cartooning, Without being precious, when you talk about cartooning, you don’t know what sort of cartooning you’re talking about. Are you talking about Disney? Are you talking about gags? Are you talking about illustrations? It’s an all-encompassing word, which drives me crazy.” What, then, is cartoon art?

Originally, as Wikipedia states, the term “cartoon” meant “a full-size drawing made on paper as a study for a further drawings, such as a painting or tapestry. “ During the Renaissance, an artist who was going to paint a fresco would first do a full-scale drawing–the “cartoon”–as a guide. Hence, you may see preserved “cartoons” of this sort by Leonardo or Raphael exhibited in museums.

Claypool Comics editor/writer/artist Richard Howell recently told me that cartooning involves “economy and exaggeration.” As we use the term nowadays, “cartoon” usually means a drawing that entails a degree of caricature, usually for humorous purpose, or an animated film. An editorial cartoon can be entirely serious, but it usually is drawn using caricature, exaggerating human features. Although an animated film need not necessarily be funny, it is popularly called a cartoon, just as comic books are called “comic,” even though most of them nowadays deal in genres other than comedy. As for “economy,” this word suggests that cartooning, even if it does not involve caricature, involves drawing figures and objects in a simplified manner rather than with detailed realism.

So, is caricature a determining factor in whether or not something is cartoon art? This is something I wondered while exploring a new show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s,” which is dominated by expressionist works by Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, and George Grosz, and runs till February 19, 2007 (You can find an online version of this exhibition here). Most of these portraits are heavily caricatured, reflecting the artists’ opinions of German society in the years preceding the Nazis’ rise to power. These are all paintings and drawings, which the Metropolitan displays as works of fine art, but are they also arguably cartoons?

But can you have cartoons without caricature? In the Cartoon America book (p. 248) the veteran editorial cartoonist Oliphant laments that “The great ones [cartoonists] could really draw, going back to [James] Gillray and [William] Hogarth… I grew up believing that cartooning was a noble profession. Unfortunately, these days nobody seems to care much about drawing. It’s a great loss to the profession. We have a whole state of cartoons that pay no attention at all to drawing. Like these people have never seen Charles Dana Gibson.” Gibson was best known for his “Gibson Girls,” drawings of beautiful “modern” women of the first years of the twentieth century; although Gibson’s work isn’t in the “Cartoon America” show, it does turn up in the book (see pages 14, 22 and 246). But there’s no trace of caricature in these drawings, which are done in a very naturalistic style, even if the women are idealized figures. Isn’t Gibson an illustrator rather than a cartoonist? Yet Gibson was included in the cartoonists’ “Hall of Fame” on Mort Walker’s Museum of Cartoon Art, and the “Cartoon America” show has an entire section devoted to illustration.

This section has illustrations that involve a considerable degree of “cartooniness,” such as a “Raggedy Ann and Andy in the River“ by their creator, Johnny Gruelle (1880-1938). But other illustrations on display are wholly realistic, including a drawing (circa 1937) of Davy Crockett and settlers by Dean Cornwell (1892-1960), who was included in the Dahesh Museum’s “Stories to Tell” show on the Golden Age of American illustration (see “Comics in Context” #132).

Then there are illustrations in the show that fall somewhere between these two poles. In “Alcohol, Death and the Devil“ (circa 1830-1840) by George Cruikshank (1792-1878), the illustrator of many of Charles Dickens’ novels, the fantastic figure personifying Alcohol–a scrawny man whose head is a skull, topped by serpents like Medusa’s–is nonetheless portrayed realistically enough to seem an ominous menace. The Devil, hovering behind Alcohol, has a simple, caricatured face that makes him seem more humorous than dangerous, and their potential victims, in the background, are drawn as simple cartoon figures, most of whom have only blank ovals for heads. (After visiting the Library of Congress, I went over to the National Gallery of Art, and there, in an exhibition titled “The Artist’s Vision: Romantic Traditions in Britain,” I found another Cruikshank piece. So here is an artist who has been claimed as both a practitioner of cartoon art and a creator of fine art!)

In her 1918 work “Uncle Sam’s Girl-Shower” (Cartoon America p. 144 and here), pioneering female cartoonist/illustrator Nell Brinkley (1888-1944) comments on young women coming to work in Washington D. C. during World War I by depicting them floating down from the sky on the left of the picture. In a large panel to the right of center, one of Brinkley’s young women converses with Uncle Sam, a tall, elderly man who here is dressed in a conventional suit rather than his familiar stars-and-stripes costume. The women’s round, youthful faces with their simplified features are not only endearingly cute but are arguably cartoonish, but their figures and clothing are drawn quite realistically, in what the show’s website calls “a distinctive, fine-lined drawing style.” Moreover, Brinkley naturally portrays Uncle Sam as an old man that one could meet on the street in real life..

The handsomest piece in this section is a 1922 story illustration (“The phone rang, and Hugh leapt to answer it.”) (Cartoon America p. 23 and here) by James Montgomery Flagg (1877-1960), another artist who was included in the Dahesh show. Husband Hugh’s smug sense of triumph is so broadly portrayed in his face and body language that it crosses the dividing line into caricature. But the emotions of his wife Polly, who seems vulnerable and beleaguered, are portrayed more subtly, and her face looks more naturalistic than her husband’s. Indeed, apart from Hugh’s broad facial expression and stance, the couple and their surroundings are drawn quite realistically. Flagg’s nuanced delineation of shadings and textures through fine linework seems to belong more to the world of fine art than to cartoons, which we tend to associate with broader strokes of the pen.

The Cartoon America book includes two pieces by the Punch caricaturist Sir John Tenniel (1820-1914), who is best known today for his classic illustrations for the original editions of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. Though neither of the Library’s pieces come from those books, Tenniel follows a similar strategy in them, juxtaposing the real and the unreal, the naturalistic and the caricatured. In “A Contented Maid” (1894) (p. 53), a rather dowdy, but relatively realistically drawn woman, is led past a naturalistic background by a pompous man who incongruously wears what seems like a jester’s costume. Through his exaggeratedly proud facial expression, gesture and stance, Tenniel “cartoons” this unlikely suitor. In the other example, “The Old Story” (1884) (p. 51), the division between the real and the caricatured is even stronger: here Red Riding Hood, realistically drawn, encounters the wolf, who stands upright and wears a full suit of clothes, including a top hat, and, like a good British gentleman, carries an umbrella. As he did with the White Rabbit and other talking animals in the Alice books, Tenniel pulls off the feat of turning the wolf into a caricature of a man while still making him look realistic enough to fit into the same naturalistic world as the human being in the picture.

Since we’re investigating the connection between caricature and cartoon art, it’s appropriate that one of the six segments into which the “Cartoon America” show is divided is entitled “Caricature,” including works by theatrical caricaturist Al Hirschfeld and political caricaturist David Levene.

In this section is a striking 1954 “Self-Portrait” (Cartoon America p. 229) by New Yorker artist Saul Steinberg (1914-1999), who depicts himself holding a bottle of ink in his right hand and a pen in his left, drawing an elaborate, calligraphic series of curlicues where his head should be. Steinberg is presenting his artwork, his creations, as his identity. He is suggesting that his head is full of artistic imagery. A possible implication is that the Steinberg of the picture has drawn his body as well, suggesting that he is his own creation: he has devised his own persona as artist: Max Fleischer’s Koko the Clown comes “Out of the Inkwell,” and in this picture, so does the artist. Perhaps Steinberg is suggesting that he has no identity apart from his work, an idea with dark implications. Since the calligraphy is more beautiful than the seemingly crudely drawn body, perhaps he is suggesting that art is superior to nature. This is a simple picture, which on the surface seems intended only to amuse, and yet it inspires so many interpretations.

Here too can be found a 1743 etching by the British artist William Hogarth (1697-1764), whom the website calls “the father of English caricature,” entitled “Characters & Caricaturas” [sic] (Cartoon America p. 29 and here), in which he depicts over a hundred faces. The website explains that “Hogarth distinguished between characters (faces drawn from nature) and “˜caricaturas” (faces with exaggerated and grotesque features).” To demonstrate his point, along the bottom of the etching Hogarth drew copies of handsome faces by Raphael; alongside copies Hogarth drew of grotesquely caricatured faces by Leonardo da Vinci and another Italian Renaissance artist, Annibale Carracci. In his preface to the Cartoon America book, its editor Harry Katz asserts that “American cartoon art evolved from varied historical sources” including “Renaissance grotesques drawn by Leonardo da Vinci and Pier Leone Ghezzi [and] the English and French print satirists of the eighteenth century,” a category that includes Hogarth and James Gillray. (I reviewed the New York Public Library’s Gillray retrospective back in “Comics in Context” #72.)

Hogarth is a key figure in the history of comic and cartoon art in another way, which Katz misses but which Scott McCloud pointed out in his landmark book Understanding Comics. Hogarth was renowned for creating series of pictures which told a continuous story, such as his Marriage a la Mode, six paintings which today hang in the National Gallery, London, from which Hogarth made engravings. Such sequences of pictures by Hogarth were pioneering examples of what Will Eisner termed “sequential art,” the form more popularly called comics. According to the website Hogarth did “Characters and Caricaturas” in 1743 for the “subscription ticket” for the Marriage a la Mode engravings.

Katz credits “the first political cartoon published in America” to one of the nation’s Founding Fathers: Benjamin Franklin, whose celebrated cartoon “Join, or Die” was published in The Pennsylvania Gazette on May 9, 1754 (shown in Cartoon America, p. 24). It pictures a snake broken into segments representing the pre-revolutionary American colonies. The cartoon doesn’t display any great drawing ability; what makes it powerful is its metaphorical concept. Franklin’s point is that the colonies must join forces to combat their adversaries in the French and indian War; otherwise the “snake” will perish.

Though the snake has represented evil since the Book of Genesis, Franklin’s serpent was widely adopted by American patriots as a symbol of their country, including Paul Revere, whom Katz credits as another significant figure in the history of American cartooning. But the example of one of Revere’s cartoons (which he actually copied from a sketch by his brother) that Katz reprints in the Cartoon America book (p. 9) once again raises the question of what a cartoon is. “The Bloody Massacre,” first published on March 28, 1770, is a depiction of the infamous Boston Massacre of American patriots by British redcoats. The composition is fine, but the architecture in the background is drawn far more skillfully than the humans in the foreground. Revere isn’t practicing caricature here, but merely demonstrating the limitations of his primitive skill at drawing the human face and form.

A friend of mine suggested to me that there is a difference between cartooning as a style and the cartoon as a format. But just what makes this a cartoon? Isn’t it rather a 1770 equivalent of today’s courtroom sketches, an effort to record an actual event through realistic illustration, a skill in which Revere was severely lacking?

Making the connection between 18th century British cartooning and American cartooning clear, Katz points out that Gillray himself adopted Franklin’s image of the snake as a symbol of America for his 1782 cartoon about the British defeat at Yorktown, the final battle of the American Revolutionary War (p. 28).

Another important figure in fine art whom Katz credits as a significant influence on the history of cartoon art is France’s Honore Daumier (1808-1879), who is renowned for utilizing caricature for social and political satire.

A clear example of Daumier’s mastery of cartoon art is “Le ventre legislatif,” translated as “The Legislative Paunch” (Cartoon America, p. 118), created in 1834 as a print for subscribers to a journal called (appropriately) La Caricature. In it Daumier caricatures members of the French legislature as a collection of grotesques: smug, self-satisfied, bad-tempered, and obese. One of the legislators in the front row has an enormous, beak-like nose, making him look like a vulture wearing human clothing. That’s an image that later political cartoonists will use.

But another print for La Caricature which Katz includes in the Cartoon America book (p.119) involves no caricature whatsoever. This is “Rue Transnonain, le 15 Avril 1834″ (which you can also find here), which depicts the aftermath of an incident in which French troops invaded a building suspected of housing an assassin and slaughtered the inhabitants. In this picture, all naturalistically portrayed, are several of the victims, notably the corpse of a man in a nightshirt lying on the floor, atop a small, dead child, with blood streaming from its head onto the floor. Daumier isn’t joking here: the power and the horror of this lithograph lie in its utter realism.

It’s not “cartoony” in the least, but I suppose one might call it an editorial cartoon, in that it is a drawing that comments on a political issue of its time.
But is every drawing–or print or painting–that makes a political point a cartoon? Is Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937), which criticizes the Nazi bombing of the town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, a cartoon? I’ve always thought so, since it involves caricature-like distortions of form. But what about Eugene Delacroix’s painting, Liberty Leading the People (1830)? I’d say no, and there’s no caricature involved, yet it uses a symbolic figure at its center, the woman representing Liberty, the same device traditionally employed by editorial cartoonists.

Katz contends that Daumier was an influence on another major figure of the fine art world, the American artist Winslow Homer (1836-1910), and reprints his 1856 print, “Arguments of the Chivalry,” which records the notorious incident in which a Senator from South Carolina, Preston Brooks, beat his fellow Senator, Massachusetts’ Charles Sumner, with a cane in an argument over slavery (Cartoon America p. 37). This, too, seems to me to fit into the same area as courtroom sketches; Homer draws the people naturalistically, without any satiric exaggerations, and I cannot count this piece as a cartoon. If this is a cartoon, then any drawing on a political subject is a cartoon, and the term “cartoon” loses its distinctive meaning.

Nonetheless, the Cartoon America book makes the point that there have been important figures in the fine art world who have also created cartoon art. Katz reprints pieces that are clearly cartoons by the Ashcan School painters George Luks (p. 50), who also worked on The Yellow Kid, and John Sloan (p. 60), as well as a drawing by Stuart Davis which straddles the border between cartoon art and illustration (p. 63). One could describe Davis’s simplified, stylized graphic approach towards elements in this drawing as moving towards abstraction and moving towards cartooning with equal justice. Remember that in the “Masters of American Comics” show, co-curator John Carlin often described aspects of its cartoons as abstract.

In his essay about Lyonel Feininger’s comics work in the Cartoon America book, Art Spiegelman writes that “Only a handful of American painters of the period dabbled in cartooning–George Luks’ work on The Yellow Kid comes to mind–but lots of esteemed European modernists–Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec, Gris, Kirchner, Kupka, and Grosz, to name just a few–drew cartoons for publication either at the beginnings of or throughout their careers” (p. 134). There are Picasso’s and George Grosz’s names again.

The full title of the last of the six divisions of the “Cartoon America” exhibit is “The Ungentlemanly Art: Political Illustration,” and the brochure explains that Art Wood, the editorial cartoonist who compiled the collection from which the show is drawn, used the term “illustration” “to describe the enormous talent and craft that went into a work of art produced to capture a moment in time.” This just further muddies the waters as far as drawing a distinction between cartoon art and illustration, as well as possibly suggesting that these “political illustrations” are somehow superior works of art to gag cartoons or comic strips. the pieces on display in this segment of the show all engage in either the “exaggeration” or “economy” that marks them clearly as editorial cartoons.

Among them is a piece by the great 19th century editorial cartoonist Thomas Nast (1840-1902), who not only popularized the elephant and donkey as symbols of the Republican and Democratic parties, but even defined the visual image of Santa Claus; all of these are examples of the power of cartoon art to affect the culture.

The Nast cartoon in the show, “The Crown Covers a Multitude of Shortcomings“ (1888), mocks former Senator and Republican Presidential candidate James G. Blaine for his “crowning folly”. Nast cruelly undercuts Blaine’s considerable political stature by portraying him as a fat, ungainly figure with unkempt hair who seems to have a misshapen leg and walks with a cane. A sign behind him ironically refers to “a step in the direction of free trade”: Nast’s Blaine looks as if he might topple over if he took another step. To the left of Blaine, Nast has drawn a crown atop the derriere of some unidentified animal, as if Blaine had created a Bizarro World in which crowns no longer rest atop the heads of regal leaders.

There is a more celebrated and powerful Nast cartoon in the Cartoon America book (p. 45), “Let Us Prey” (September 23, 1871), in which he caricatures his most notorious target, the corrupt New York political leader William M. “Boss” Tweed and his cronies as vultures with human heads, as if they were 19th century versions of the Harpies of Greek mythology.

Contemporary political cartoonist Patrick Oliphant paid homage to Nast with his cartoon in the show, “Waiting for Reagan” (1982), in which he portrays various right wing critics of President Reagan as human-headed vultures. Oliphant’s version is arguably eerier, since he gives them eyes without pupils, surrounded by heavily shadowed sockets, rendering even their human faces inhuman. The Cartoon America book includes a 1965 cartoon, for which Oliphant won a Pulitzer Prize, showing Ho Chi Minh holding the corpse of a North Vietnamese civilian, in what may be an allusion to Michelangelo’s Pieta (p. 260).

Most contemporary editorial cartoons that I see today are gag cartoons, but when I was growing up, my favorite editorial cartoonist was Herbert L. Block, alias Herblock (1919-2001), who worked in the Nast tradition of visual metaphor. Starting his career in 1929, he moved to The Washington Post in 1946 and continued drawing cartoons for that paper until his death at the start of the 21st century. Growing up, I would borrow Herblock’s books of collected cartoons from my local library to teach myself about history since World War II, and I looked forward to the publication of a new collection every presidential election year.

There is a Herblock cartoon in the “Cartoon America” show and more in the book. But I was pleasantly surprised to discover on arriving at the Library of Congress that it was running a show of his work, “Enduring Outrage: Editorial Cartoons by Herblock,” which runs through January 20, 2007 in its aptly titled “American Treasures” gallery (and which has an online version). After his death, the Herb Block Foundation donated 14,000 of Block’s finished cartoons and over 50,000 of his preparatory sketches to the Library of Congress; “Enduring Outrage” presents only a select handful of this massive collection.

Herblock’s symbolic figures can be familiar ones. In “The Gray Plague“ (January 29, 1967) he uses the traditional image of the Grim Reaper, a skeletal, robed figure carrying a scythe, to critique the potentially lethal effects of air pollution. What makes this cartoon powerful is the unusual way he uses the Reaper, who becomes a gigantic figure amid modern skyscrapers, towering above gridlocked traffic. Smoke pours from chimneys, and Herblock’s shading all through the cartoon suggests an atmosphere thick with smog and smoke. A cloud hovering above the street is labeled “Air Pollution,” and the Grim Reaper, likewise rising from the street, himself seems like an ominous cloud that has taken a macabre form. With his scythe, the Grim Reaper represents Death come to harvest the victims of pollution; he is a medieval figure within a contemporary setting.

Another cartoon about pollution, “The Drums” (March 21, 1979), demonstrates the darkly ironic side of Herblock’s sense of humor. Here the Grim Reaper beats the tops of metal canisters marked “Radioactive Wastes” and “Toxic Chemicals,” as if he were playing bongo drums, as the contents of other dangerous canisters leak out into a lethal stream. The medieval image of the “Dance of Death” links Death with rhythmical movement, as if to music; here Herblock updates the musical metaphor.

The most famous symbolic figure that Herblock created is a modern version of the Reaper: Mr. Atom, an anthropomorphic atomic bomb with a sinister brow, a five o’clock shadow, and hairy hands, making him look like a brutal, potentially violent thug. The image may seem obvious, but again, Herblock’s greatness lies in his inspired uses of this imagery. In a May 14, 1963 cartoon, Mr. Atom looms over the globe, placing his left hand upon it, as if it were his possession. With his right hand he snuffs out a candle, labeled “Test Ban Hopes.” In clever touches, the candle has already virtually melted into a pool of wax, and the puff of smoke from its extinguished flame takes the form of a mushroom cloud from an H-bomb explosion. The cartoon’s title, spoken by Mr. Atom, is a quotation from Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “. . .Out, out brief candle! LIfe’s but a walking shadow. . . .” The line is a chilling description of mortality. The epic scale of Herblock’s cartoon, picturing the Earth, shifts Shakespeare’s line from referring to Macbeth alone to involving all of humanity; simultaneously Shakespeare’s words lend Herblock’s darkly humorous cartoon a sense of profound drama.

Herblock could not only chill his readers but also shock them. His January 13, 1993 cartoon “Bosnia“ echoes Daumier’s “Rue Transnonain, le 15 Avril 1834.” Block’s cartoon shows the corpses of a woman and a baby, with a pool of black blood linking their heads. The woman has been impaled by two enormous weapons: a knife marked “Milosevic Serbs” and an umbrella (such as British gentlemen traditionally carried) labeled “World Leaders.” In other words, Herblock blames not only the brutality of the Serbs but also the inaction by the proper, respectable diplomats and politicians of the rest of the world. Surprisingly, the woman’s body is half-naked. Perhaps Herblock was trying to emphasize her vulnerability (as Daumier did with the man in his nightshirt) or was alluding to the sexual assaults on women during the Bosnian war. Or perhaps Herblock was alluding to the fine art tradition of painting mythical or symbolic figures as partly or wholly nude, as with the topless figure of Liberty in Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People. Block’s woman, after all, represents all the Serbs’ victims in the war in Bosnia.

Herblock’s work is not just “enduring outrage” but “enduring art”: though he was responding to topical events, his work continues to be relevant to the present.

Take, for example, his January 28, 1968 cartoon which shows Uncle Sam, literally up to his neck in water, holding a rifle above his head as he makes his way through a swamp labeled “Asia.” Herblock’s subject at the time was the Vietnam War, but the cartoon could equally serve as a comment on America’s current involvement in Iraq.

Consider, too, another cartoon, from May 29, 1987, that involves no fantastic figures or settings, and nowadays takes on new relevance. Lying on a floor is a newspaper with the headline, “‘I think it’s better if the Iranians go to bed every night wondering what we might do.’–Reagan.” Herblock instead shows us a man , wearing a button labeled “U. S.” lying in bed in a darkened room lit only by his eyes, staring out in sleepless worry and dismay.

So there are certainly many rewards to be found in the Library of Congress’s two current shows on cartoon art. There are many pieces I haven’t described, including fine examples in the comic strips section of Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates (from 1942), Al Capp’s Li’l Abner (1943), Roy Crane’s Wash Tubbs (1935), Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie (1962), Johnny Hart’s B. C. (1969), Lynn Johnston’s For Better or for Worse (1983), Richard Outcault’s Buster Brown (a 1907 Sunday strip in which he meets Outcault’s Yellow Kid!), Alex Raymond’s Secret Agent X-9 (1934), and Cliff Sterrett’s Polly and Her Pals (1933).

Yet although James H, Billington, the Librarian of Congress himself, bids us to “prepare to laugh, wince, and wonder at the best of the best of American cartoon art” in his foreword to the Cartoon America book (p. 10), there is a canyon-sized gap in both the show and the book. Where is the original artwork from comic books?

DC Comics president Paul Levitz contributed a brief essay about comic books to the catalogue, but discusses them principally as objects of nostalgia. The book’s editor, Harry Katz, concedes in his afterword that “More work needs to be done toward acquiring drawings for Underground Comix, comic books, and graphic novels.” (p. 307). No kidding. How can a national collection of cartoon art lack any original artwork by Jack Kirby, to name just one of the missing? Since the American comic book as we know it began in 1935, the Library has seventy-two years worth of the history of this artform to catch up with. Aside from animation, comic books and graphic novels have arguably become the most significant form of cartoon art in the last few decades. Yet neither the “Cartoon America” show nor the book betray a real sense that they have missed out on something important. Katz’s “A Brief History of American Cartooning” concentrates almost entirely on editorial cartoons and comic strips. How strange that the show and the book keep trying to incorporate illustration under the heading of cartoon art while nearly ignoring the comic book medium. Art Spiegelman, Trina Robbins, and Chris Ware turn up as essay writers in the Cartoon America book, but it contains none of their own artwork.

A seeming exception to this exclusion of comic book work is a chapter on the “Cartoons of 9/11.” Here are striking works by comic book artists Kieron Dwyer, Peter Kuper, and Sue Coe. There is a powerful piece by Will Eisner, “Reality 9/11″ from 9-11: Emergency Relief (2002), showing a man watching the devastation at Ground Zero on television: blood drips from the TV set, smoke billows out from the picture tube, and the man seems covered in ash (p. 303). There is even Alex Ross’s cover for DC Comics’ 9/11 Vol. 2 (2002), showing Superman and Krypto looking up in admiration at a poster of police, firemen, and medical workers (p. 306).

But except for a Doonesbury 9/11 strip, all of the comics art reprinted in this chapter are single panel works, not sequential art at all! Indeed, these single panels are really editorial cartoons that were published in comic books rather than newspapers.

The Alex Ross cover poses a final quandary regarding the definition of cartooning. Ross usually works in a style of heightened photorealism, influenced by illustration, and devoid of the “exaggeration and economy” associated with cartooning. In works like Marvels, Kingdom Come and the current Justice, Ross demonstrates that it is entirely possible to do comics that are not cartoon art.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF
To my surprise Marvel has just published yet another Essentials volume of The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, this one reprinting the 1989 Update limited series, on which I was the principal writer. An even bigger surprise was that, just in time for Christmas, I received a reprint royalty check for an Essentials volume of the Handbook! And I had resigned myself to never getting anything more out of any of these reprint books than a complimentary copy! Well, I was going to recommend that you buy the new reprint volume anyway, and now I have even more motivation to do so!

I also recommend that you visit the blog of my friend and fellow former Marvel writer Peter B. Gillis, who just posted some characteristically insightful reflections on the current state of superhero comics, inspired by our encounter on Christmas.

-Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson