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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TRAILER TROUBLES

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

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

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

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

DOGGING HIS TRAIL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OH YOU SQUID

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF

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

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

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

Always looking for material for this column, I thought, why not go to one of the big bookstore events on Friday, July 20 for the midnight release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the final book in J. K. Rowling’s series? The biggest bash in New York City was the one at the Barnes & Noble at Union Square, where Jim Dale, who performs the audio book versions of the Harry Potter series, would start doing readings at 10:30 PM. There would even be live owls in the store!

When the previous book in the series was released, I was in San Diego for the 2005 Comic-Con International. Despite the fact that I was at a Borders bookstore within easy walking distance of the Convention Center, I had no trouble getting into the store, and only a reasonable wait in line to pick up a copy of the book (see “Comics in Context” #97). This wasn’t bad, considering that among the hundred thousand people attending the Con, there was surely a huge number of Potter fans.

So I got to Union Square’s Barnes & Noble at 10:30 on Friday night and saw a long line stretching out the doors, which I followed to the end of the block, around the corner, down the block, around another corner, and midway down that side of the block, reaching the bookstore’s delivery entrance. It was obvious that these people weren’t being let in because the store was filled to legal capacity. That meant that none of these people would probably get in until the pre-release festivities were over at midnight, and a woman in line told me that everyone in line had already reserved a copy of the book. (I dfon’t recall seeing any small children in line. The people in line were mostly twentysomethings, who had presumably grown up reading the series and remained loyal to these “children’s books” which appeal to all ages.)

I had decided not to go to this year’s San Diego Con and had felt relieved that I would not be braving the lines to the dreaded Hall H, site of the con’s movie panels. Now, I realized, the Hall H experience had come to New York. Would I wait outside for at last 90 minutes, probably longer, not to get in until the show was over? Not this time. I headed home.

Besides, I had already had an experience appropriate for the release of Deathly Hallows. On the website of the book’s British publisher, Bloomsbury, there had been a webcast from the Natural History Museum in London, which is my favorite building in the city and whose Romanesque architecture makes it a good substitute for Harry’s school Hogwarts.
The audience counted down to midnight (London time), and then Rowling read the first chapter of the new book aloud. She did it rather well, too, much better than the reading I heard her do at Radio City Music Hall last year (see “Comics in Context” #148). You can hear her Natural History Museum reading, too. She did it in the Museum’s Great Hall; I wonder what it would’ve been like seeing the Museum’s famous Diplodocus statue looming in the background, as if playing the role of one of the Potter series’ mythical beasts.

The first chapter made for a suspenseful set piece, and made me thankful that I had refused to read any spoilers or reviews that had come out before the book’s official release. I realized that I was glad I hadn’t even known what the first chapter was about before hearing Rowling read it aloud. I wanted to be completely surprised about the direction the book would take from each chapter to the next. (And those of you who have not yet read Deathly Hallows and want to be similarly surprised should stop reading this week’s column now. In another paragraph I’m going to start discussing the plot, including the ending.)

The New York Times, including its Public Editor, has been defending its decision to run Michiko Kakutani’s review of Hallows on Thursday, two days before the official release. The Times claims that the review did not give anything important away; I read the review after finishing the book, and it’s true that Kakutani concentrates on Rowling’s style rather than the specific contents. But, as film critic Nathan Lee observed in a Times Op-Ed about the controversy, every review by necessity gives away something, and Kakutani did state in her review that “at least half a dozen characters we have come to know die in these pages, and many others are wounded or tortured.” (Rowling had publicly stated that two major characters would die, but I immediately realized that that quota would be filled and exceeded just by killing off the principal villains, including Voldemort. In fact, I’m rather surprised that Lucius Malfoy survives in the book. Perhaps since he had fallen from Voldemort’s favor, Rowling didn’t want to kick him when he was down.)

Moreover, it seems to me that by printing its review two days early, the Times was effectively giving its approval to the booksellers and Internet posters who had violated the official release date. The Times‘ tin ear as to the repercussions of its decision is demonstrated by the responses to the Public Editor’s defense, as you can read online.

Journeying into Manhattan on Saturday, I sighted a fellow subway passenger holding a copy of Deathly Hallows. At a midtown Barnes & Noble, I simply walked up to the sales counter, where the cashier handed me a copy of Hallows from what must have been a considerable stack. It was a beautifully sunny day, so I headed over to Central Park, where I found two appropriate locations to start reading the book: first by the statue of Hans Christian Andersen, and then by the statue of Alice in Wonderland. Yes, this was far better than waiting outside Barnes & Noble past midnight and then taking the subway home around 1 or 2 A.M Saturday morning.

Why should I write about Deathly Hallows in a column titled “Comics in Context”? First, I suspect that many, perhaps most of you are Potter readers and don’t mind. Second, one of my primary subjects in “Comics in Context” is the superhero genre, which is a form of the larger genre which the literary critic Northrop Frye called “romance,” meaning an adventure story involving heroes and villains who are larger than life. Rowling’s Harry Potter saga appears to have succeeded Star Wars as the dominant, most influential “romance” in popular culture.

Where should I start in tackling a critique of Deathly Hallows? I decided to focus on the declaration by Time Magazine’s Lev Grossman (Thurs., July 12, 2007) that “If you want to know who dies in Harry Potter, the answer is easy: God.” He continued, “Harry Potter lives in a world free of any religion or spirituality of any kind. He lives surrounded by ghosts but has no one to pray to, even if he were so inclined, which he isn’t. Rowling has more in common with celebrity atheists like Christopher Hitchens than she has with [J.R.R.] Tolkien and [C.S.] Lewis”.

I couldn’t recall any examples of prayer or religious services in the Harry Potter books, but I didn’t find Grossman’s pronouncement entirely convincing. Does the absence of references to religion on the printed page necessarily mean that the author and her hero don’t believe in God? What if Rowling thought that religious faith was too private a matter to insert openly into a children’s adventure saga? What if she thought it unwise to enunciate specific religious beliefs in her books when her audience consists of children and adults of many faiths, as well as agnostics and atheists? Besides, to be vulgar about it, although Rowling establishes the existence of lavatories in her fictional world (notably Moaning Myrtle’s hangout, the entrance to the Chamber of Secrets), she doesn’t depict her characters relieving themselves, though we may assume that they do. The Beat points out “the pervasiveness of Christian holidays” like Christmas and Easter in the Potter books; so maybe many of Rowling’s characters are praying and attending church when we’re not looking.

In this same piece, the Beat includes a quotation from Rowling, who was asked by the Vancouver Sun (Oct. 26, 2000) whether she was a Christian. “‘Yes, I am,’ she says. “˜. . .Every time I’ve been asked if I believe in God, I’ve said yes, because I do, but no one ever really has gone any more deeply into it than that, and I have to say that does suit me, because if I talk too freely about that I think the intelligent reader, whether 10 or 60, will be able to guess what’s coming in the books.'” Rowling told another interviewer (CBCNewsWorld: Hot Type, July 13, 2000), “I do believe in God.” but “Magic in the sense in which it happens in my books. . . .I don’t believe in that. . .. This is so frustrating. Again, there is so much I would like to say, and come back when I’ve written book seven. But then maybe you won’t need to even say it ’cause you’ll have found it out anyway. You’ll have read it.” Grossman even reported in a previous article, “Interestingly, although Rowling is a member of the Church of Scotland, the books are free of references to God. On this point, Rowling is cagey. “˜Um. I don’t think they’re that secular,’ she says, choosing her words slowly” (Time, July 17, 2005). (For all three quotations, see here.)

Intrigued, I did further research and discovered that there has been considerable analysis of Christian imagery and themes in the Harry Potter books, notably the work of scholar John Granger, the author of several books on the series. (Granger maintains his own website, and is interviewed here.)

In her aforementioned blog entry, the Beat, who describes herself as “some kind of Zen Buddhist agnostic,” raises the question as to whether she would be “clubbed over the head” with Christianity in Deathly Hallows, but predicts that Rowling will take a more subtle approach.

That proved to be correct. In the previous books the subtext of Christian imagery and themes that Granger has found completely escaped Grossman’s notice, and, it seems, that of most reviewers. Why would Rowling change her approach in the final book?

Furthermore, the Beat makes a fine point in asserting that Rowling “understands that what many take as Christian symbols – blood, chalices, trees, etc etc – are actually universal symbols, many of them adopted from pagan faiths by the early Christian missionaries. “ I don’t know if Rowling has actually said so. But the Beat is right that many of these symbols are not restricted to Christianity.

For example, one of the Christian symbols that Granger finds is Fawkes, Dumbledore’s phoenix. Due to its ability to die and resurrect itself, early Christian writers used the phoenix as a symbol of Christ. But the phoenix dates back to ancient Egyptian mythology, and also appears in ancient Greek mythology, Chinese mythology, and Russian folklore. The idea of a bird, a creature of the air, that can thus transcend death, appears to be an archetype that turns up in various cultures.

(And is Jean Grey, the Phoenix of the superhero genre, a Christ figure? Well, she is well known for returning from the dead. And she did give her life to save the universe in Uncanny X-Men #137, although, significantly, that was not the ending that Chris Claremont and John Byrne intended for the “Dark Phoenix Saga.” I should ask them if their Phoenix was a Christ figure, but I expect they will look at me as if I have three heads and say no. But that doesn’t mean that she can’t be interpreted as such.)

C. S. Lewis intended his book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (see “Comics in Context” #99) to embody Christian themes. In it, Aslan the lion is the Christ figure who undergoes literal death and resurrection. So if the Harry Potter series has Christian themes, then one might expect Harry to die and return to life in the final, climactic book. And indeed he does, although Rowling carefully leaves it up to the reader to decide whether Harry’s death and resurrection are literal or figurative, as we shall see.

But death and resurrection is not uniquely a Christian motif. Osiris died and returned to life So did Dionysus. It is part of Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s journey” monomyth. Symbolic deaths and resurrections are everywhere in the romance (adventure) genre. Batman is left to die in an inescapable death trap; Batman escapes and triumphs over the villain. Virtually every two-part episode of the 1960s Batman TV show thus included symbolic death and resurrection.

So if we are to detect Rowling’s Christianity in Deathly Hallows, we must look carefully. Is there a particular interpretation that she puts on archetypal symbols and the phases of Campbell’s monomyth that may specifically reflect her religious views?

In Deathly Hallows we meet Xenophilius Lovegood, the father of Harry’s friend Luna. Both Lovegoods believe in all manner of things that are unlikely to be real. But on important matters, they tend to be correct.

Xenophilius inevitably clashes with Hermione, who takes a wholly rational approach to the world, even to magic, and, it would seem, to literature as well.

In his will Professor Dumbledore left Hermione his copy of The Tales of Beedle the Bard, a collection of children’s stories–the counterpart of Grimm’s fairy tales for the wizards’ community, it seems–for young wizards and witches, “in the hope that she will find it entertaining and instructive” (p. 126). Significantly, rationalist Hermione had never heard of these fantasy tales (pp. 134-135).

Later, Xenophilius instructs Hermione to read one of the book’s stories, “The Tale of the Three Brothers,” aloud. Xenophilius then informs Hermione, Harry and Ron that the three magical objects in the story–the Elder Wand, the Resurrection Stone, and the Invisibility Cloak–are real, and that they are known as the Deathly Hallows.

“”˜But there’s no mention of the words “Deathly Hallows” in the story,’ said Hermione.

“”˜Well, of course not,’ said Xenophilius. . . . “˜That is a children’s tale, told to amuse rather than to instruct. Those of us who understand these matters, however, recognize that the ancient story refers to three objects, or Hallows, which, if united, will make the possessor master of Death'” (pp. 409-410).

I suspect that here Rowling may be stating that though her Harry Potter books are “children’s tales,” primarily “told to amuse rather than to instruct,” that “those of us who understand these matters” recognize that they have deeper meanings, beneath the surface. Remember that Dumbledore wanted Hermione to regard Beedle’s book as simultaneously “entertaining” and “instructive.” Dumbledore wanted Hermione to discover those deeper meanings, and Rowling is thus encouraging those of her readers who are capable of literary analysis to do the same. And “The Tale of the Three Brothers” is about how to become “vanquisher” of death.

Notice that Xenophilius is also saying that “The Tale of the Three Brothers” is about the Deathly Hallows even though it never uses that name. Grossman contends that the Potter books are atheistic works because Rowling never mentions God in them. Through Xenophilius, Rowling indicates that her books can deal with subjects without explicitly mentioning them by name.

Hermione objects to the idea that there can be any truth within this children’s fable, whereupon Xenophilius scolds her, “You are, I gather, not unintelligent, but painfully limited. Narrow. Close-minded” (p. 410). That is because Hermione only believes in what can be proved by scientific methods.

Soon afterwards, Hermione and Xenophilius get into an argument about the existence of the Resurrection Stone. She refuses to believe that any magic object exists that can raise the dead. “Well, how can that be real?” she demands.

Xenophilius replies, “Prove that it is not.”

This infuriates Hermione, who explodes, “you could claim that anything’s real if the only basis for believing in it is that nobody’s proved it doesn’t exist!”

“”˜Yes, you could,’ said Xenophilius. “˜I am glad to see that you are opening your mind a little'” (pgs. 411-412). And as it turns out, the Resurrection Stone–and resurrection–do exist in the world of Deathly Hallows.

However comedic this quarrel between Hermione and Xenophilius may be, it also makes a serious point. The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard acknowledged that there was no proof that there is a God, but took a “leap of faith” to believe that God exists. I am also reminded of the philosopher Blaise Pascal’s “wager”: not knowing whether or not God exists, Pascal chose to act as if God does exist, since if he’s right, he’d go to heaven.

At least in his or her work, the fantasy writer is open to the idea that there may be a reality that cannot be detected by scientific means. The religious person believes in beings and things whose existence science cannot prove, such as God, heaven, and an afterlife. Xenophilius’s position–if you can’t prove something doesn’t exist, then it’s real–is a comic justification of faith.

Is there a hereafter in the Potter books? There are ghosts, such as Nearly Headless Nick. Though ghosts in fiction traditionally frighten the living, the notion of ghosts is actually reassuring, since their existence indicates there is a life after death. So it makes sense that the ghosts at Hogwarts are friendly spirits.

Just because an author uses ghosts in her stories doesn’t mean that she believes that ghosts exist or that there is an afterlife: the author may simply be working within a long literary tradition of the ghost story.

Rowling has an unusual take on ghosts in the Potter books: their existence (and that of souls) proves nothing about whether or not there is a hereafter. In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (the book, but not the movie), following the death of his godfather Sirius Black, Harry seeks out Nearly Headless Nick to find out if it’s possible for Sirius to return from the grave. Nick informs Harry that only wizards can return as ghosts, but that Sirius will not, because he “will have. . . gone on.” Nick does not explain what that means because he does not know. “I was afraid of death,” he tells Harry; “I chose to remain behind. . . .I know nothing of the secrets of death” (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, p. 861). Rowling has said, significantly, that “there are some people who would not come back as ghosts because they are unafraid, or less afraid, of death”. This may suggest that Rowling considers it important to overcome a fear of death. Voldemort is driven by a fear of death, leading to his vain attempt at immortality by concealing portions of his soul in the various “horcruxes” which figure so prominently in Deathly Hallows‘ plot. (So would this make suicide bombers even more cold-blooded than the Harry Potter saga’s master villain?)

In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, what appear to be the souls of Voldemort’s victims, including Harry’s parents James and Lily, emerge from Voldemort’s wand. But the book informs us that these are “spirit echoes,” not the actual spirits of the deceased.

The deceased headmasters of Hogwarts, including Dumbledore following his demise, appear in portraits in the headmaster’s office and can converse with the living. But Rowling has stated that “they are not as fully realized as ghosts. . . .the idea is that the previous headmasters and headmistresses leave behind a faint imprint of themselves. They leave their aura, almost, in the office and they can give some counsel to the present occupant, but it is not like being a ghost”. In a flashback via the Pensieve, the portrait of the deceased Dumbledore seems to me very much like the real Dumbledore as he discusses strategy with Snape, and not like a “faint imprint,” but I will bow to the author’s interpretation.

Thus through most of the saga, Rowling emphasizes the finality of death. Even so, there are hints in the books before Hallows that there is indeed a hereafter.

In Phoenix, Luna Lovegood tells Harry that she is confident she will “see” her deceased mother again (Phoenix p. 863). When Harry voices doubt, Luna reminds him that they heard voices behind a mysterious veil in an archway in the Ministry of Magic, a veil that seemingly separates the world of the living from the realm of the dead. The implication is that they heard the voices of the dead. At the time (Phoenix, p. 774) Hermione declared vehemently that she didn’t hear any voices from behind the veil. Here may be another case of a Lovegood, as a visionary, being aware of a reality that the rational Hermione denies.

Moreover, as early as the first book in the series, Dumbledore, that font of wisdom, declared, “After all, to the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure” (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, p. 297).

In “The Tale of the Three Brothers,” one of the brothers used the Resurrection Stone to resurrect the woman he loved. According to the tale, “Yet she was sad and cold, separated from him as by a veil” (Hallows p. 409); Rowling may well have chosen that last word as an allusion to the mysterious veil in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

The tale continues, “Though she had returned to the material world, she did not truly belong there and suffered” (Hallows, p. 409). Shortly afterwards, Harry speculates about using the Resurrection Stone to resurrect his parents and others, but then realizes, “But according to Beedle the Bard, they wouldn’t want to come back, would they?” (Hallows, p. 416).

This reminds me of another hero of the “romance” genre, who has undergone literal death and resurrection not once but twice: Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer. At the end of the fifth season, Buffy heroically sacrificed her life to save her sister and the world, and in the sixth season Buffy’s friends performed a spell that brought her back to life. But it turned out that initially Buffy did not want to be back in “the material world”: by resurrecting her, her friends had forcibly torn her soul out of a spiritual realm that Buffy called “heaven,” where she had achieved a transcendent bliss; it was actually painful for her to readjust to life on Earth. Whedon is known to be a Harry Potter fan (see “Comics in Context” #97-98); in this instance we find him and Rowling thinking alike, although Whedon is an atheist who only uses the afterlife as a fictional device.

Not only does the Resurrection Stone prove to be real, but it causes Harry’s parents, his godfather Sirius Black, and his ally Remus Lupin, all deceased, to appear and accompany him as he goes to what Joseph Campbell would call Harry’s “supreme ordeal”: his death at the hands of Voldemort. The omniscient narrator observes, “he was about to join them. He was not really fetching them: They were fetching him” (p. 698). The narrator says that these figures “resembled most closely” the Tom Riddle (the young Voldemort) who manifested in the second book, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, and who “had been memory made nearly solid” (p. 699). But the books have established that that version of Riddle was actually a portion of the real Voldemort’s soul, placed into his younger self’s diary. The narrator states that these figures were “Less substantial than living bodies, but much more than ghosts” (p. 699): I read this as indicating that these are the actual spirits of James and Lily Potter, Sirius and Lupin, though they have not taken on new physical bodies.

Here I am reminded of how the spirits of Obi-Wan Kenobi, Yoda and the redeemed Anakin Skywalker appear to the triumphant Luke at the close of Return of the Jedi. In Luke’s case the danger has passed. It’s a comforting idea that one’s parental figures would appear to him to ease his passage into death.

Though Rowling’s narrator treats these four spirits as real, I wonder if Rowling is providing an alternate way of reading this sequence for the agnostics in her audience. Sirius’s spirit informs Harry, “We are part of you. . .Invisible to anyone else” (p. 700). That could suggest that the four spirits are actually figments of Harry’s imagination, or “memories made nearly solid.” Or Sirius could just be speaking metaphorically of the spirits’ personal connection to Harry as being “part of you,” and assuring him that his enemies will not see them. The passage can be read either way.

Shortly thereafter Voldemort unleashes a Killing Curse at Harry, seemingly murdering him. Then, in chapter 35, Harry awakens within “unformed nothingness” (p. 706) that takes the form of an idealized version of King’s Cross, the real life London train station from which Harry travels to Hogwarts. If Rowling is intentionally putting Christian symbols into her work, then the name “King’s Cross” is blatantly one of them. As a train station, it is a place of transition; Joseph Campbell would call it one of the thresholds of his monomyth.

In this seemingly astral version of King’s Cross, Harry encounters Dumbledore, who readily admits to being dead, but who repeatedly states that Harry is not dead. Dumbledore also explains why, by the rules of magic, Voldemort’s attempt to murder Harry failed.

So Harry is not literally dead, but he is figuratively dead. Perhaps it is more precise to say that he is in a state between life and death, and that may be literally true, since Dumbledore says that Harry has the choice of whether to “go back” or to go “on.” (Again, Rowling is not defining what the hereafter is like.) Harry is in a place in which the living (himself) may interact with the dead (Dumbledore).

It is part of the pattern of the Harry Potter novels that Harry has an conversation with Dumbledore, reflecting on that book’s adventure, at the end of each (except for the sixth, in which Dumbledore dies). In Chapter 35 of Hallows this part of the pattern reasserts itself, even though this time Dumbledore is dead. In Hallows this encounter is what Campbell called “atonement with the father,” a reconciliation between the protagonist and a father figure. This may be especially necessary in Hallows since in this book Harry has learned disturbing things about Dumbledore’s past and even come to have doubts about Dumbledore’s true intentions towards him; in Chapter 35 Dumbledore confesses to his failings but reassures Harry about his good intentions towards him.

According to the Maricopa Center for Learning and Instruction’s description of Campbell’s monomyth, for the hero to undergo a transformation in this phase, “the person as he or she has been must be “˜killed’ so that the new self can come into being. Sometime this killing is literal. . . “. Scholar Lynne Milum, in describing Campbell’s Atonement, notes that “While he assists the hero through his journey, the father figure is mindful that the budding hero is destined to replace him.”. In their encounter in Chapter 35, Dumbledore acknowledges to Harry that “I have known, for some time now, that you are the better man” (p. 713) and that Harry has succeeded where Dumbledore failed, in becoming the “true master of death” (p. 720).

The next step in Campbell’s monomyth is the hero’s “Apotheosis.” The Maricopa Center website explains that “When someone dies a physical death, or dies to the self to live in spirit, he or she moves beyond the pairs of opposites to a state of divine knowledge, love, compassion and bliss. . . .the person is in heaven and beyond all strife. A more mundane way of looking at this step is that it is a period of rest, peace and fulfillment before the hero begins the return.” This fits Chapter 35, in which Harry receives considerable knowledge from the now rather godlike Dumbledore about what has been happening.

At this point in the monomyth, the hero receives the “Ultimate Boon.” With regard to this, Milum states that “Most prevalent is the recurring theme of Immortality. The hero achieves illumination that there is an indestructible life beyond the physical body. This Immortality is timeless and experienced in the here and now.” Well, certainly Harry has learned by meeting Dumbledore’s spirit that there is life beyond physical death.

Moreover, the “Ultimate Boon” is that, in Dumbledore’s words, Harry has become “the true master of death, because the true master does not seek to run away from Death. He accepts that he must die,” which Voldemort does not (pp. 720-721).

In Chapter 35 Rowling returns to the theme of the deeper meanings of children’s stories, or, perhaps, of fiction in general. Dumbledore exclaims that Voldemort’s “knowledge remained woefully incomplete, Harry!. . .Of house-elves and children’s tales, of love, loyalty and innocence, Voldemort knows and understands nothing!” (p. 709).

In some cases, the next phase of the monomyth is the “Refusal of the Return.” Dumbledore tells Harry that the latter has a “choice” whether to “go back” or not. Since Harry has pictured this transitional realm as King’s Cross, he could “board a train” to go to the true hereafter. This is a nice parallel: Harry crossed a threshold in the first book by taking the train from King’s cross to Hogwarts, starting a new phase of his life, and he can make the transition to the next world by taking another train from this other King’s Cross. Harry is tempted: “it was warm and light and peaceful here, and he knew that he was heading back to pain and the fear of more loss” (p. 722). But, as Dumbledore puts it, it is “a worthy goal” to save others from Voldemort, and Harry decides to cross the threshold back to the land of the living.

The chapter concludes with my favorite passage in the entire book. Harry asks Dumbledore, “Is this real? Or has this been happening in my head?” Dumbledore replies, “Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?” (p. 723).

Here Rowling offers different ways of interpreting chapter 35. It may be that Harry has imagined this conversation with Dumbledore. This reminds me of Ratatouille (see last week’s column), in which the protagonist, Remy, imagines that the ghost of Auguste Gusteau, the deceased master chef whom he idolizes, appears to him and gives him advice. Thus the archetypal mentor figure of Campbell’s monomyth is presented as an aspect of the protagonist’s own psyche. Gusteau’s “ghost” is actually Remy’s own wisdom, emerging from his subconscious to provide him with counsel. It may be that in Chapter 35 that Harry is dreaming, and that he imagines Dumbledore providing him with answers that Harry’s subconscious mind has worked out on its own. Dumbledore’s final words therefore mean that even though Harry is imagining all this, the information that he has gained in this “dream” is still true.

On the other hand, one could also read this final exchange in Chapter 35 quite differently. Dumbledore is pointing out that of course Harry is having this vision inside his head, but that Dumbledore’s spirit, and their conversation, and the knowledge Dumbledore imparts in their talk, are all real. (Of course, you could say that we all experience reality “in our heads” since we rely on our senses conveying information to our brains.)

So Rowling gives us the option of thinking that Harry actually did communicate with the spirit of Dumbledore, and that there is life after death, or that Harry hallucinated it all, and that there might not be. In either case, the information that Harry gains in this experience is both “real” and correct.

So Harry crosses the return threshold, in Campbell’s phrase, in order to become the leading figure of the forces of good in “The Battle of Hogwarts,” in which the entire school battles Voldemort’s forces of evil. Here I found myself thinking of the finale of season three of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Like Harry, Buffy had been regarded with suspicion by many of her classmates. But in the final episode of the third season, Buffy leads her high school graduating class in combat against that season’s leading villain, the Mayor. Voldemort is a sorcerer with serpentine features who is accompanied by a large snake; the Mayor, in that climactic episode, transforms into a colossal serpent. I’m not saying that Rowling is imitating Whedon, but that in dealing with mythic archetypes, great creative minds can often think alike.

It looks as if Rowling studies Campbell as closely as George Lucas does. But what makes Harry’s figurative death and resurrection specifically Christian? I believe that it’s the fact that Harry goes voluntarily to what he believes will be his death at Voldemort’s hands, in order to save the lives of others, or like Christ going to his crucifixion without resistance, in order to redeem humanity. For me, a key moment comes when Voldemort insists on parading Harry’s supposed corpse before the Hogwarts community. Rowling’s narrator notes that “it must be subjected to humiliation to prove Voldemort’s victory” (p. 726). Christ, too, was mocked and humiliated by his tormentors, through means such as the crown of thorns. As the Beat observed, Rowling is an admirer of C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books, and its Christ figure, Aslan the lion, in order to save a life, willingly surrenders himself to the evil White Witch, and allows himself to be humiliated (though such means of the shearing of his mane) and killed, before rising from the dead to destroy the white witch. Harry is clearly treading in Aslan’s–and Christ’s–path.

Much earlier in Hallows, Harry, Hermione and Ron invade both the Ministry of Magic and the Gringotts bank; they are also captured and brought to Malfoy Manor. In each case Harry finds himself underground (below Atrium level at the MInistry, in a subterranean vault at Gringotts, and in the Malfoys’ basement). In Campbell’s terms, these are all descents into the underworld, or into the “belly of the beast” (and in Gringotts’ case, there is a literal beast: a dragon). When Harry and company escape from the Ministry and the Malfoys, they bring prisoners to freedom with them. I suspect that these are allusions to the “Harrowing of Hell,” whereby Christ, immediately after his death, descended into hell and freed souls of the just that had been imprisoned there. Even in his descent into Gringotts, Harry and company free a captive: the dragon whom the goblins kept chained underground.

I have still more to say about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, but this week’s column is running long, and this is a busy summer, with more topics waiting in the wings. I hope to return to Hallows in the future to address, among other questions, just why did so many people expect that Harry would die–and stay dead? I’m glad to see that J. K. Rowling has a far more positive outlook.

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

In my childhood it was a special event when an animated feature film, almost always from the Disney studio, turned up in movie theaters. Nowadays, there are so many animated feature films these days that I wait to catch many of them when they reach cable TV.

That’s where I recently saw Ice Age: The Meltdown, 2006’s sequel to Fox’s previous animated film about a mammoth, a sabertooth tiger, and other animals of the Pleistocene period, and it was just as well that I had waited. I don’t care for computer-animated animals or humans that look more plastic than organic, as the Ice Age animals do to me, and it seems less forgivable in the second Ice Age film (and, for that matter, the third Shrek), considering the successes other computer animated films (like The Incredibles) have made in this regard.

I wonder if the premise of this second Ice Age, that the glaciers are melting, was inspired by the contemporary concerns with global warming. Yet considering that the end of the Ice Age made possible the worldwide growth of human civilization, why is the “meltdown” a bad thing?

One of the Ice Age movies’ most popular characters is Scrat the squirrel who is in continual, vain pursuit of an elusive acorn. This squirrel’s treading in the Sisyphean path of Wile E. Coyote’s pursuit of the Roadrunner, but falls far short of the comedic invention and brilliant staging and timing of Chuck Jones’s Roadrunner cartoons. However, I did like Scrat’s brief visit to a hereafter especially designed for him in Meltdown.

For me Ice Age: The Meltdown is an animated movie in which the celebrity voices pull me out of the story, preventing me from sufficiently suspending disbelief. That’s because the characters are too thinly conceived, so the familiar personalities of the celebrity voice actors overwhelm them.

In contrast, I quite liked another 2006 animated film I caught on cable, DreamWorks Animation’s Over the Hedge, based on the newspaper comic strip of the same name. In large part this was specifically due to the voice casting: the voices may have been recognizable, but they were suited to the characters. This was especially important with the two lead roles. Bruce Willis’s typical screen persona fit the role of R.J., the trickster raccoon, who is something of a rascal but in the end loyal to his comrades. Similarly, Garry Shandling’s familiar comedy persona as a neurotic worrywart fit the part of Verne the cautious turtle.

Regular readers know that I like to compare adaptations to their source material, whether it’s Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s “Galactus trilogy” (over the last two weeks) or the Disney Tarzan musical to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ first Tarzan novel (see “Comics in Context” #133).

Several weeks ago I took a look at writer/illustrator William Joyce’s 1990 children’s book A Day with Wilbur Robinson, the source for this year’s Disney animated film Meet the Robinsons (see “Comics in Context” #174). The eccentric, futuristic family is taken from the book, but It turns out that the movie’s entire time travel plot was the moviemakers’ invention. Director Brad Anderson and the screenwriters wove their story around Joyce’s book, while leaving Joyce’s material essentially intact. This is an approach that I admire, since it simultaneously shows respectful fidelity to the original author’s work while still allowing the adapters considerable creativity.

On the other hand, finally reading the late New Yorker cartoonist William Steig’s 1990 picture book Shrek! revealed how very different it is from the trilogy of DreamWorks Animation movies that are very loosely based upon it.

Though supposedly ugly, the movie version of the ogre Shrek, when he isn’t scowling, looks like he could be turned into a cuddly doll that parents can buy for children (as indeed they can). I think he looks more visually appealing in the movies than the human characters do, who look like animated waxworks. In the first film Princess Fiona, the seemingly human leading lady, is revealed to transform into a green-skinned ogre like Shrek. But as an ogre she seems pleasantly plump, with facial features that are sweet and endearing rather than ugly: she thus becomes a cuddly doll, as well.

In the book, however, Shrek is repellent in physical appearance, in behavior, and even in smell. Shrek is utterly antisocial, enjoys frightening people, and revels in his own repulsiveness. Steig’s story is a parody of Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey. Unable to stand him any longer, Shrek’s parents kick him out, and he overcomes one opponent after another (by breathing fire at them, for example), until finally he reaches the princess, who never takes human form in Steig’s book. She is an ogre as repulsive in looks and behavior as he is. In other words, they are perfect for each other. Steig’s description of their meeting reads like sexual foreplay (“Shrek snapped at her nose. She nipped at his ear. They clawed their way into each other’s arms. Like fire and smoke, these two belonged together.”) In Steig’s parody of the hero’s wedding that concludes both a typical fairy tale and the typical Campbellian hero’s journey, he informs us, “And they lived horribly ever after, scaring the socks off all who who fell afoul of them.”

The appeal of Steig’s Shrek is like that of Sesame Street‘s Oscar the Grouch or the Bizarro World in 1960s Superman comics. Through Shrek the reader can vicariously experience the release of not having to obey the rules, of not having to conform to standards of proper behavior, of letting one’s aggression loose, and being bad and not only getting away with it, but being rewarded. In short, Steig’s version of Shrek is a far stronger, more interesting, and more memorable character than the considerably watered-down Shrek of the movies. (See some examples from Steig’s Shrek! for yourself at http://www.williamsteig.com/shrek-int.htm).

The Shrek movies and Steig’s Shrek! book both turn the traditional fairy tale upside down by making ogres the hero and heroine. The difference is that Steig’s ogres act like ogres. The movies turn Shrek into a conventionally lovable children’s hero, with a heart of gold beneath his bad temper, who risks his life to save the humans’ kingdom, and who by this year’s Shrek the Third has mellowed into dullness. The first Shrek movie, especially, seemed to be preaching racial tolerance, presenting ogres Shrek and Fiona as a sort of racial minority in the human world. Shrek may have green skin and these odd knobs on his head, the movie seemed to be saying, but he’s really a sweet, loving, and even heroic individual, Just Like Us. Steig’s point, on the other hand, was that his ogres aren’t Just Like Us, or stand-ins for minority groups, but rather, are like the nasty sides of our personalities that we don’t dare show in public. The Shrek movies sentimentalize the title character and his wife; the book Shrek! gleefully acknowledges the side of children–and adults–that would love to breathe fire at people who get in our way. Steig’s Shrek! gives its readers a harmless means of vicariously releasing that negative energy, and seeing the title character get rewarded for it. Indeed, in the book Shrek’s marriage to the ogre princess signals to the reader that he or she is not alone in having this shadow side: other people do, too.

Steig’s Shrek even has a certain admirable integrity, in that he is true to himself, however nasty and gross that self may be. Steig also takes care that Shrek does not become truly evil. Steig’s Shrek even reminds me of Marvel’s own bad-tempered, green-skinned “ogre,” the Hulk, who nonetheless comes off as preferable in comparison to his adversaries.

If Steig’s Shrek! follows a satiric version of Campbell’s hero’s journey, Shrek the Third founders by getting Campbell’s monomyth wrong. Early in the film we see Shrek trying to fulfill the role of a prince in Fiona’s royal family and clumsily failing at it. Steig’s Shrek, of course, would set all the regal costumes he was supposed to wear on fire with his breath and take pleasure in scaring all the courtiers away. But the movie Shrek fits into conventional society, and I have different expectations for this version of the character. So I assumed that this was a set-up, and that in the course of the film, Shrek would learn to adapt to his new role as prince. With great power must come great responsibility, right?

Princess Fiona’s father, the king, who has been transformed from a human into a frog, is on his deathbed. Yes, that’s right, he is about to croak. The king’s dying wish is that Shrek become his successor. Shrek declines, in a clear case of what Campbell calls “refusing the call,” which will leads to disaster. (For example, Luke Skywalker initially refuses to go with Ben Kenobi, and insists on staying with his uncle and aunt, and then the Storm Troopers kill his relatives.) It also seems downright cruel to refuse the king’s dying wish. Instead, Shrek promises the dying king that he will find someone else to become the new monarch. I thought, okay, the film will be about how the movies’ socialized Shrek matures and learns to accept the responsibility that his father figure, the king, sought to give him. It is necessary that the son must in time assume the role of the father (as in, say, Disney’s Bambi).

But no. The movie Shrek really does find someone else to take over the throne: the youth who becomes King Arthur.

This isn’t how Campbell’s monomyth works! Luke Skywalker doesn’t go into space looking for someone else to become a Jedi Knight instead of himself. Harry Potter doesn’t try to talk Ron into becoming Voldemort’s archenemy so Harry can go back and live under the stairs at the Dursleys. Whereas Steig presented a mock heroic version of the monomyth, Shrek the Third proclaiming that ambition and taking responsibility are better left to Somebody Else. This does not make for a gripping plot or an inspiring protagonist.

Arthur manages to quell the threat posed by most of the movie’s villains by sympathizing with their being treated as outcasts and persuading them to accept themselves. Any child watching this movie will surely realize that if he tried this tactic with schoolyard bullies, he would be beaten to a pulp. So much for this Arthur’s leadership abilities.

At the end of the movie, Shrek and Fiona have moved back to Shrek’s cottage in the woods, abandoning their thrones, the kingdom of humans, and, it seems, any role in that society, But this isn’t the movie Shrek reverting to Steig’s antisocial version. Earlier in the movie, Shrek balked at the idea of becoming a father, and even had a nightmare about having a baby that vomits at hurricane force (enabling the filmmakers to put in the sort of gross bodily functions joke that seems inescapable in non-Pixar animated films these days). But by the film’s end, without explanation, Shrek has changed his mind, and has a trio of babies (his equivalent of Huey, Dewey, and Louie, I guess). In the book, Steig’s Shrek has a nightmare about babies, but this is part of Steig’s assault on sentimentality. The book’s Shrek has no tolerance for cuteness and doesn’t change his mind about babies; the movie Shrek dives right into a sea of sentimentality. Becoming a father is accepting responsibility, of course, but Shrek doesn’t seem to have any goal beyond that. It’s not even clear how he will support this new family. It’s as if he has combined parenthood with retirement; he’s a slacker with kids.

In the July 28, 2007 issue of The New Yorker, film critic David Denby points out that contemporary romantic comedy movies are dominated by male slacker heroes who are “absolutely free of the desire to make an impression on the world and still [get] the girl.” Shrek the Third shows that the 21st century slacker hero has moved into animation, as well. Denby refers to these stories as “slacker-striver romances,” in which it’s the woman who has the real career. Yet Fiona gives up her “career” as princess to join Shrek in slacker parenthood.

So there’s Shrek the Third‘s message for kids: ambition is for other people.
When the call to adventure comes, refuse it. The movie Shrek is neither a true hero nor Steig’s distinctive antihero, but now merely a boring, unfunny disappointment. I think when the inevitable fourth Shrek movie comes out, I may wait to see it a year later on cable.

On the other hand, the great new Disney/Pixar film, Ratatouille, is about an unlikely protagonist–a rat named Remy–with an even unlikelier dream–to become a great chef–which he both pursues and triumphantly achieves.

As has been widely reported, Ratatouille‘s initial director was Jan Pinkava, who came up with the original story, but Pixar ended up reassigning the project to Brad Bird, writer-director of The Iron Giant (1999) and Pixar’s The Incredibles (2004) (See “Comics in Context” #62). It was Pinkava who apparently set the story’s principal themes: Ratatouille producer Brad Lewis told The Hollywood Reporter (Thurs. June 28, 2007) that “The story was boiling over with themes dealing with prejudice, family, following your passion, art and criticism.” before Bird took over. Nonetheless, Ratatouille in its finished form clearly fits thematically with Bird’s other animated feature films: Bird is Ratatouille‘s auteur.

First, although Remy is specifically a chef, he represents any kind of creative artist. Bird acknowledged in an interview with Time Out Chicago that he was not himself a gourmet: “No, not at all. I am becoming more appreciative of good food every year, but I didn’t know that much about it going into this project and had to learn a lot”. On the website “The House Next Door,” Ryland Walker Knight argues that Remy as chef is specifically a metaphor for the filmmaker, even more specifically the director of an animated film. Knight points out that Remy thinks in visual images: “when he tastes something, the world disappears and a discothèque flurry of colors swirls around his head. He also imagines Chef Gusteau floating around his head as his own Jiminy Cricket, a figment of his imagination acting as guide and conscience.” Moreover, Remy directs his human ally, Linguini, in cooking by hiding beneath Linguini’s chef’s hat and pulling on his hair, as if they were the strings of a marionette, or, Knight says, “as would an animator bend characters to his or her will”. (I suppose that this could also be a less than complimentary visual metaphor for the way that an auteur director supervises the rest of the moviemaking team in implementing his creative vision.)

But Ratatouille settles the matter when one of its characters, the critic Anton Ego, asserts that “Not everyone can be a great artist. But a great artist can come from anywhere.” In his June 29, 2007 review, New York Times critic A. O. Scott observes that this is the “moral” of the film. Though in this weekly column I have repeatedly disagreed with Scott’s reviews, I agree with his declaration that Ratatouille is “one of the most persuasive portraits of an artist ever committed to film”.

Looking back to Bird’s The Iron Giant, I recall that it had an artist character, too: Dean, who builds sculptures out of scrap metal, and who becomes a father figure to the boy protagonist.

The title characters of The Incredibles are a family of superheroes who are forced by the government to stop using their super-powers and live conventional lives. They can represent any people with talents who are prevented from employing those talents, and who are thus not allowed to fulfill their true potential. Bob Parr, a. k. a. Mr. Incredible, is compelled to work at a mind-numbing job in an insurance company. Isn’t this the artist’s nightmare: to be trapped in an unfulfilling office job, without any outlet for his creative imagination? In The Incredibles a conventional lifestyle is depicted as a dreary desk job. In Ratatouille the conventional life that Remy wants to escape is literally eating garbage alongside the other rats, whose taste buds are nowhere nearly as refined as his.

There is an actual artist in The Incredibles: Edna “E” Mode, the woman who designs costumes for superheroes. Bird voiced the character himself, perhaps suggesting a degree of identification with her. Edna comes across as a critic as much as she does as an artist, continually dispensing her sardonic opinions. So her true counterpart in Ratatouille may be the fearsome critic Anton Ego, who ultimately becomes the title character’s ally.

The Incredibles draws on a standard motif of the superhero genre: the individuals who seem outwardly ordinary but who secretly possess superhuman abilities. In The Iron Giant there is an even greater disparity between the role that the title character’s unknown builders designated for him and the role that the Iron Giant aspires to achieve. The Iron Giant is a colossal metal robot that bonds in friendship with the young boy Hogarth: in effect, the Iron Giant behaves in a “human” manner, often seeming like a child himself. Furthermore, the film reveals that the Iron Giant was built and programmed to be a war machine. But through his relationship with Hogarth, the Iron Giant rejects this programming. Instead, he follows a goal that Hogarth set for him, to use his enormous powers for good. Hogarth told the Giant about the comic book superhero Superman, and towards the film’s end the Giant becomes a superhero himself, uttering the name “Superman” as he saves a small New England town from a nuclear missile. (Iron Giant fans would enjoy taking a look at this picture over at the John Byrne Forum) The Iron Giant rejects the destiny for which he was created, and instead chooses his own.

Similarly, in Ratatouille Remy might seem to be condemned by his very nature: he was born a rat. This film provides such a vivid, extreme metaphor for the dilemma of the creative individual whose opinions differ from the community around him. Remy’s community of rats, including his own father and brother, all literally eat garbage. Remy is the only one in his community who has more discerning taste and realizes that he can do better. And yet he is pressured by his family to follow the conventional behavior of the rat world, and not to act any differently. There is even social pressure in Remy to walk on all fours like the other rats, whereas he prefers to stand on his hind legs, to keep his forepaws clean enough to handle food hygienically. Bird told The Los Angeles Times (June 28, 2007), “Because our lead character is a rat who wants to move into the human world, let’s show him make that choice to be on two legs and let’s make him being on two legs something he has to hide from his dad and let’s show it as something that changes over the course of the film”.

In the Time Out Chicago interview Bird described Dean, the sculptor in The Iron Giant, as a “beatnik.” (The film is set in the 1950s.) Dean is a nonconformist who seems to be something of an outsider in the small New England town that is the film’s setting. Remy is a nonconformist in the world of rats. But just as the people of that New England town assume on sight that the Iron Giant is a menace (as indeed he was designed to be), Remy is doomed by his outward appearance to be rejected by (most) humans. In one key scene in the film, Remy’s father shows him dead rats displayed in an exterminator’s window: this is how the human race treats their kind. Like The Iron Giant, Ratatouille asks if one can transcend the role that the world has assigned him. I just wrote a short piece about existentialism for a client, and now I see this existentialist theme–freeing oneself from restrictive tradition, taking control of one’s own life, creating one’s own identity–in Ratatouille.

Remy’s inner self does not match his outer self, or rather it does not match the conventional assumptions that are made about that outer self. People assume, correctly, that rats are unclean and eat garbage. That is true about the rats in Ratatouille as well, but Remy, though he looks like the other rats, does not conform to those expectations.

Remy fits the recurring archetype of the figure whose outward appearance disguises his inner virtues and talents. Clark Kent fits that mold, of course. Consider, too, Luke Skywalker’s reactions on first meeting Yoda, who initially seems like an eccentric, grotesque little troll. Or look at detective series like Columbo, in which the title character’s somewhat slovenly appearance and servile manner masks his high intelligence and steely will, or USA Network’s current series Monk, whose title character, beneath his obsessive compulsive phobias, is a brilliant detective.

So Ratatouille is also about the limitations of judging by external appearances. In other words, it’s about prejudice. While working on this essay I found myself about to write that as a rat, Remy inspires “fear and hatred” from humans, and realized I was echoing a familiar description of mutants from Marvel’s X-Men, a series that is famously about bigotry. It’s as if Remy, with his own “special powers,” his sensitive sense of taste and his genius at cooking, is a mutant rat.

Through its metaphor of the creatively gifted rat, Ratatouille suggests that innovation in the arts may come from persons or areas of culture that are not held in high regard by the mainstream. Certainly there is a long history of members of the cultural establishment rejecting not only innovative artwork but also the innovators themselves as outsiders who aren’t like Us.

For example, think of how long comics were generally regarded in America to be a gutter medium, and those adults who perceived them as art were considered wrongheaded and downright strange. (We are all Remy.) Now, in the early 21st century, comics increasingly receive respect from mainstream culture. Ratatouille has received extraordinary critical acclaim, and yet in the Time Out Chicago interview, Bird observes the continuing prejudice against the animation medium: “People see it as a childish sort of hieroglyphics. They connect it with the comics on the funny pages, as something that’s only meant to be silly and can’t ever represent anything deep or serious.”

In Jungian psychology, the “shadow” can not only represent dark, fearsome psychological forces but also creativity. So it makes psychological sense that an artistic innovator, an outsider, should take the form of a rat in the fable that is Ratatouille.

I will have much more to say about Ratatouille in the near future, but right now it is time for me to turn to my new recurring feature.

ATROCITY OF THE WEEK

Actually, there are several. First, there is the posting of photographs of the entire text of Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows days before its official release date. I do not understand how people rationalize violating copyright laws and steal intellectual property. Do they somehow think that because it’s possible for them to steal it, then it’s not really stealing? In the case of these photographs, I wonder at the obsessive lengths to which someone would go to demonstrate to the world that he or she is an asshole.

Then on Thursday, July 19, two days before the release date, The New York Times published critic Michiko Kakutani’s review of the book, giving away elements of the plot. (I refuse to link to this.) This should give the Times‘s Public Editor, its in-house ombudsman, plenty to write about. And how would the Times feel if some mole smuggled Times articles to The Washington Post before the times published them?

But the atrocity which I choose to treat at length is the cover to DC’s Showcase: Batgirl book of reprint stories about the version of Batgirl, alias Barbara Gordon, who was created in 1966. The cover shows Batgirl casually, perhaps obliviously, putting on makeup (even though she has her mask on) while in the background Batman and Robin are fighting for their lives against crooks. Presumably people at DC thought this was charmingly funny, while themselves being oblivious to the idea that female readers might find this cover insultingly misogynistic.

One line of defense for the cover is that it not only refers to an actual Batman story of the 1960s, but that it reflects the attitude towards women in superhero comics during that unenlightened period long, long ago.

I was a boy during that time, long, long ago, and I remember the story in question: it was “Batgirl’s Costume Cut-Ups” in Detective Comics #371 (January 1968), whose cover showed Batgirl declining to help Batman and Robin in a fight against bad guys because, she tells them, she has a “bigger” problem: “a run in my tights”. Should you read the story, you’ll find that Batgirl is actually slyly diverting the criminals’ attention to her shapely legs, or, as one of the crooks, apparently fond of slang that was outdated even then, puts it, her great “gams.” Batman and Robin are then able to kayo the distracted malefactors.

I was one of the regular contributors to editor Julie Schwartz’s letter columns back then, and I distinctly recall writing a letter about how bad this story was. Today I suspect that it was Schwartz’s attempt at doing a humorous story for a change of pace, but the joke still fell flat. This story is stupid now and it was stupid then.

It was also an anomaly. In her other 1960s appearances Schwartz’s new Batgirl characteristically dove right into fighting criminals. In the comics of the mid-1960s, Batgirl’s willingness to engage in direct physical combat was bold and daring. (William Dozier, producer of the 1960s Batman TV show, is said to have forbidden the TV Batgirl from punching people with her fists because he considered it “unladylike.” Instead, she executed dance-like kicks, drawing on actress Yvonne Craig’s Ballet Russes background.) Marvel’s superheroines of the time-Invisible Girl, Wasp, Scarlet Witch, Marvel Girl–didn’t engage in fisticuffs. In the early Fantastic Four stories Sue Storm’s original power, invisibility, basically enabled her to hide.

For their period, Julie Schwartz’s Silver Age stories are actually surprisingly enlightened about women. Think of how Hawkman and Hawkgirl acted as equal partners, as spouses, as Thanagarian policemen, and as superheroes. Remember how Zatanna bravely traversed the world in search of her lost father. Consider how Schwartz and his collaborators presented several of the leading ladies of his series as career women: Iris West (The Flash) was a reporter (who did not snoop into secret identities), Jean Loring (The Atom) was a lawyer (who was perfectly sane, contrary to her depiction in Identity Crisis), and Carol Ferris (Green Lantern) ran a fictional counterpart to Boeing! Sue Dibny (The Elongated Man) was so intelligent and spirited a leading lady that her rape and murder in Identity Crisis seemed a cruel betrayal of the spirit of the classics of DC’s Silver Age. And I am of two minds about the fate that Alan Moore meted out to Barbara Gordon in Batman: The Killing Joke.

There was a lot of nonsense going on in Mort Weisinger’s Lois Lane stories in the Silver Age, but Schwartz and his writers John Broome and Gardner Fox shouldn’t be tarred with the same brush. Rather than fixate on that run in Batgirl’s tights like that dopey crook, DC could easily have found cover art for Showcase: Batgirl that would have captured the character’s true, empowered spirit.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF AND OTHERS

In last week’s column I was singing the praises of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Now you can read Ken Plume’s interview with another member of the MST3K team, Kevin Murphy, who played Tom Servo and the erudite Professor Bobo, and who partnered with Mike Nelson in the RiffTrax demolition of the first Fantastic Four movie. While you’re at it, go read Ken’s earlier interview with Murphy’s MST3K colleague Trace Beaulieu, the original voice of Crow T. Robot and the living embodiment of the show’s archvillain Dr. Clayton Forrester.

The July 23-Aug. 5, 2007 issue of TV Guide proclaims that “TV Guide hits Comic-Con International, the premier gathering of all things sci-fi and fantasy” (p. 29). Funny, I thought Comic-Con was primarily about, you know, comics (and what about WorldCon?). Well, this year I’m not going to Comic-Con, so you will be spared six to eight weeks of reports. Longtime readers will recall my past attempts to find the Marvel booth at the con. The Beat reports that this year Marvel will finally have a big booth in San Diego. And I still won’t see it. But I have plenty to write about here instead, as you will soon learn.

But if you do attend this year’s Comic-Con, and are not crushed to death by the crowds, please stop by the Comic Art Conference Session #9, “Superheroes, Villains and Vixens: A Discussion of the Top Pop-Culture Icons of 20th-Century America,” whose panelists include Gina Misiroglu, co-editor on The Supervillain Book (Visible Ink Press), to which I contributed. It’s in Room 30AB on Saturday at 10:30 AM.

One of this year’s special guests at Comic-Con, deservedly so, is Roy Thomas, one of the most important writers and editors in Marvel’s history. Mark Evanier will interview Roy during the “Spotlight on Roy Thomas” at 4:30 PM Saturday afternoon in Room 2. I understand that during the convention Roy will be doing a signing of The Marvel Vault (Perseus Books), the book on which he and I collaborated. Those of you with sufficiently large travel budgets should have Roy sign the Vault for you in San Diego, and then have me sign your copy at next April’s New York Comic-Con!

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson