The unexpected and astonishing deluge of museum and gallery shows dealing with comics and cartoon art continues in the New York City area. One that I hadn’t mentioned before is “The Masters Series: Jules Feiffer,” a retrospective at the School of Visual Arts’ Visual Arts Museum, continuing through December 2. Each year SVA chooses a different artist to honor in its Masters series: Feiffer appears to be the first cartoonist so honored. But perhaps this isn’t so surprising. For decades comic strips dealing in political satire, such as Feiffer’s, Walt Kelly’s Pogo, and Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury, have been the exceptions to the cultural establishment’s attitude that comics are junk. Only three years ago the New-York Historical Society staged its own Feiffer retrospective, “Julz Rulz: Inside the Mind of Jules Feiffer.”
But I was surprised, four separate times, on my recent visit to the Brooklyn Museum. The introductory wall text for one of its current temporary exhibitions, “Tigers of Wrath: Watercolors by Walton Ford,” stated that “The satirical edge Ford adds recalls artists such as Pieter Brueghel the Elder (Dutch, circa 1525-1569), J. J. Granville (French, 1803-1847), and Robert Crumb (American, born 1943).” In content and visual style Ford has nothing to do with Crumb: Ford is really doing postmodern riffs on John James Audubon’s paintings of wildlife. But yes, Crumb and Ford are both satirists, and I was pleased to see one of the “Masters of American Comics” cited in a museum exhibition of painting.
The Brooklyn Museum was simultaneously staging another temporary exhibition showing how another form of popular culture had risen into the precincts of fine art: “Graffiti Basics.” Here I was surprised again: a section of this exhibit was titled “Comics and Cartoons.” Here the wall text asserted that “Comics and cartoons have inspired many graffiti artists, Their works often appear to be single panels taken from comics. . . .The artist Crash (John Mathis) is illustrative in this regard. “˜From colorful faux wallpaper to Marvel Comics,’ he writes, “˜this was my youth.”
Later the text declares, “As with comic book heroes, the alter-ego of graffiti artists is often a simplification of the person’s identity.” The text continues, “In both comic books and graffiti art, simplified characters allow the viewer to identify with the people in the story.” At first reading, this struck me as nonsense. Is the uncredited text writer referring to comics superheroes? Starting with Stan Lee, superhero comics writers have used the dual identity convention to dramatize the complexity of the hero’s psyche. Typically, the hero’s dual identity represents two sides of his personality. Moreover, whether they are dealing with superheroes or other protagonists in their comics, Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, to name two prominent examples of contemporary comics authors, unquestionably deal in complex characterizations.
I wonder if the uncredited text writer is actually referring to Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, in which he theorizes that comics readers can more easily identify with a simply drawn, caricatured figure, like Scott’s own comics version of himself, than with a highly detailed, realistically drawn human figure.
In either case, the curators of “Graffiti Basics” are right in perceiving a link between comics and the panel-like pictures drawn by graffiti artists.
References to comics in art museums are surprising, but finding actual comic books on display is even more startling. The Brooklyn Museum is also currently holding an exhibition called “Looking Back from Ground Zero: Images from the Brooklyn Museum Collection,” marking the fifth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center. Most of the at works on display are photographs. But in one display case, I found a comic book open to a double-page montage of the devastation at the World Trade center site and the heroically depicted rescue workers, titled “Impossible Acts. . . “, drawn and inked by Neal Adams. It was a magnificent work of illustration, and it certainly belonged in the exhibit. However, I winced upon reading the accompanying label, stating the title of the 2001 comic book on display: Heroes: The World’s Greatest Superhero Creators Honor the World’s Greatest Heroes (see “Comics in Context” #61). I have no problem with the understandable praise for the policemen, firemen and others who dealt with the disaster, but I was appalled by Marvel’s self-congratulatory bombast in referring to its team of comics pros, which was thoroughly inappropriate in the context of 9/11. Notice that Marvel even gave the comics people top billing in the subtitle over the “world’s greatest heroes.” (And then there’s the question of whether the writers and artists who worked on Marvel’s Heroes book really do comprise all of “the world’s greatest superhero creators,” and how many of them actually did help create major superheroes.) I found myself wondering how and whether Marvel, and indeed mainstream comics, will adapt as comics come under greater scrutiny from art critics, scholars and curators, who will have little tolerance for such chest-thumping grandiosity.
Nearby was another display case, containing a copy of Art Spiegelman’s 9/11 graphic novel In the Shadow of No Towers (see “Comics in Context” #59, 60 and 61), open to one of Spiegelman’s own double-page spreads. Spiegelman’s self-deprecating irony towards himself in No Towers came as a relief after Marvel’s blatant self-promotion. Moreover, whereas the Neal Adams spread was really a single illustration, the Spiegelman spread was comprised of narrative sequences of panels. In other words, here were actual comics on display.
This set me thinking about yet another change in the status of comics in the early 21st century. For decades comics speculators have been driven by the notion that, given enough time, collectible comic books can be sold for many times their original cover price. This conventional wisdom, of course, led to the comics bubble and bust of the 1990s. Yet now the Brooklyn Museum is exhibiting a comic book that is only five years old and a graphic novel that is merely two years old. The museum isn’t showing the original art for these comics, but copies of the actual printed comics themselves.
In his New York Times review of the “Masters of American Comics” show at the Jewish and Newark Museums, Michael Kimmelman writes, “The show includes one of Mr. [Will] Eisner’s drawings for a “˜splash,’ or title, page of his Spirit strip, and the printed version of it, each of which has its own aura, and raises the issue central to comic art: What is an original?”. In other words, since Eisner created Spirit stories specifically for reproduction in newspapers, are his drawings the real “original,” or is it any of the mass produced printings in the newspapers in which the stories first appeared?
Although the “Masters” show is dominated by the actual drawings by the artists it celebrates, there are many printed comic books and pages from actual newspaper comics sections on display as well. In the Brooklyn Museum show there are printed comics that are half a decade old or less. In other words, I realized, any printed comic book in my personal collection–or yours–should it be judged to be of sufficient artistic merit, is potentially the museum exhibit of tomorrow. (However, I doubt that the Brooklyn Museum paid more than cover price for the two comics it is exhibiting.) Art museums attempt to persuade important collectors of fine art to donate their collections to them in their wills. Will the time come when museums and libraries seek to become the heirs of longtime comics collectors, too?
Over the last four weeks I’ve covered the Newark Museum’s portion of “Masters of American Comics,” covering the history of the newspaper comic strip from Winsor McCay to Charles Schulz. This week I move to the latter portion of “Masters,” which is currently at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan, and covers comic books, beginning with the work of Will Eisner (1917-2005). Chronologically, Eisner precedes Schulz in entering comics, but co-curator John Carlin states in Yale University Press’s Masters of American Comics catalogue that “The Spirit was the most important bridge between newspaper comics and comic books” (p. 94). After all, each Sunday version of The Spirit was a seven-page comic book story that was originally published in newspapers.
It can be revealing to get fresh perspectives on familiar subjects. On one of my visits to the Jewish Museum to see “Masters,” I went with Gina Misiroglu, my editor on The Supervillain Book, published by Visible Ink Press (which should now be available in bookstores). I pointed out to her a splash page featuring Eisner’s most notorious femme fatale, P’Gell, from the May 25, 1947 Spirit story “Il Duce’s Locket” (on page 251 of the Masters book and in The New York Times‘ “online slideshow” for “Masters” at
). Gina commented that P’Gell looked to her like the young Lucille Ball, who, she pointed out, was a “sex symbol” in movies in the 1940s before becoming more famous as a screwball comedienne on TV in the 1950s. That’s true about the pre-TV Lucy, as you can see in movies like the MGM musical Ziegfeld Follies (1946), and once Gina had mentioned it, I too saw the resemblance between the young Ms. Ball and P’Gell, at least in this vintage splash page. If Eisner intended this, it’s another sign of how The Spirit was influenced by the movies of the 1940s.
Only last year the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MOCCA) in lower Manhattan staged “Will Eisner: A Retrospective,” a far more complete survey of his career than the “Masters” show currently provides. (MOCCA published a catalogue of the show, so you can see for yourself.) The MOCCA retrospective was roughly evenly divided between The Spirit and Eisner’s pioneering graphic novels from the last three decades of his life. Some of the same pieces of original art have now turned up in both shows, including the notorious splash page of the Spirit spanking Ellen Dolan, which should give pause to anyone who claims to detect a feminist sensibility in The Spirit. But I was surprised to find that the “Masters” section on Eisner is entirely devoted to The Spirit, with the sole exception being the opening pages of his first graphic novel, A Contract with God (1978) (see “Comics in Context” #69), with its near-Biblical deluge of “Eisnerspritz” (Masters p. 257). According to “Masters” co-curator Brian Walker, the show emphasizes visual design over story content. It is in the Eisner section that this divergence becomes most clear. Carlin states in the catalogue that “Eisner developed the language of comic books in much the same way that McCay perfected the formal language of comic strips” (p. 94). The show appears to be arguing that it was in The Spirit that this development took place and Eisner proved to be a visual innovator in the comics medium. By implication, Eisner did not make further visual innovations in his graphic novels; that seems to me to be a reasonable judgment. Yet by virtually ignoring Eisner’s graphic novels, “Masters” likewise ignores Eisner’s continuing evolution as a writer in the latter part of his long career. Significantly, Kimmelman dismisses Eisner’s graphic novels in his review: “Mr. Eisner’s later career as a graphic novelist. . .led him toward maudlin stories ruminating on God, but before that, he set a standard for the industry.” (Though Kimmelman seems unaware of this, most of Eisner’s graphic novels are not about theology. Oddly, Kimmelman also calls Eisner the “master of the sweatshop,” as if he had spent his career helping to run the Eisner-Iger studio, although neither The Spirit nor the graphic novels were created via such impersonal assembly line methods.) I wonder if, eventually, it will be The Spirit, not his graphic novels, that will emerge as Eisner’s primary legacy to the artform.
Despite the emphasis on visual style over literary content, the “Masters” show includes the original penciled and inked pages for several complete Spirit stories, including perhaps the most famous, “The Story of Gerhard Shnobble” from September 5, 1948 (pgs. 98-99). (See “Comics in Context” #68.) Now, since comics art is designed for mass reproduction, you may wonder, as I have, what the point is in seeing the original artwork rather than the printed pages. There is certainly an advantage at seeing the artwork at the size at which it was drawn, not the smaller size at which, so often, it has been reproduced. The overhead shot in which Shnobble leaps off a roof into a virtual canyon formed by towering skyscrapers gains in vertiginous power when viewed in its original dimensions.
Although Carlin misses the obvious analogy between Milton Caniff’s visual storytelling and the cinema, he sees the connection in Eisner’s work: writing in the catalogue about “Shnobble,” Carlin observes that “Eisner’s arrangement [of panels] conveys the sense of drama and movement in the rooftop the same way editing would in a well-crafted film.”
A good number of the Eisner pages selected for “Masters” appear to have been chosen because they further exemplify the show’s continuing theme of metafiction. For example, Eisner puts himself in The Spirit as its artist in the splash page for the May 3, 1942 story “Self-Portrait” (p. 246), which is also part of the Times‘ online slideshow. Another complete Spirit story on display, “Li’l Adam, the Stupid Mountain Boy” (July 20, 1947), satirizes not only the comic strip Li’l Abner and its strip-within-a-strip, Fearless Fosdick, a parody of Dick Tracy, but also Abner creator Al Capp (“Al Slapp”) and Tracy creator Chester Gould (“Hector Ghoul”), whom Eisner draws to resemble their respective characters, thereby implying that a cartoonist’s hero is an idealized projection of himself (as Eisner repeatedly confessed about the Spirit). Eisner also throws in “Homeless Brenda” as a jab at Little Orphan Annie. (The Masters book includes only a single page from this story, on page 253.) When the Spirit questions Dick Tracy lookalike Ghoul, meant to represent Gould, about a strip resembling Gould’s Dick Tracy, one of The Spirit comic’s competitors, Eisner has led us down a twisted labyrinth of levels of reality, indeed.
My favorite Eisner piece in the show (which, alas, is not reproduced in the Masters book), is the splash page for the 1949 Spirit story “Dolan Walks a Beat.” Temporarily demoted, Commissioner Dolan, wearing a police officer’s uniform, walks past a billboard. The billboard contains its own comic strip, a narrative sequence of three panels, each featuring the Spirit; in the last panel, the Spirit stares in shock at the demoted Dolan. It’s another case of a comic strip within a comic strip, but in a different sense than Fearless Fosdick, who is merely a fictional character in the “reality” of Li’l Abner’s world. The Spirit is a real character in his series, and so is Dolan. Yet in this splash, the Spirit appears to be confined to a reality that exists merely as a comic strip on a billboard within which Dolan exists! This is an effect that one could only achieve in the comics medium.
Though Carlin wrote the main text for the Masters book, various other writers were invited to contribute appreciations of specific Masters. The only failure among these fifteen essays is Raymond Pettibon’s incoherent piece about Eisner. Pettibon rants about comics fans (“Although comic books are made for reproduction, while comics fans are not”) and even The New York Times’ coverage of the Iraq war, while managing not to provide the least insight into Eisner’s work. When Pettibon submitted this essay to the editors, their proper response should have been “No.”
Kimmelman concludes his “Masters” review with accolades for Jack Kirby (1917-1994): referring to Kirby’s Marvel series of the 1960s, Kimmelman writes, “Their radicalism was plain to see. Being visual space busters, they have done more or less for the art of comics what Cubism did for painting.”
That’s high praise indeed, but justified, given Kirby’s dynamic reinterpretations of the human figure moving through the space within comics panels. Pablo Picasso was the co-creator of Cubism, but elsewhere in his review, Kimmelman declares that “As for Mr. Crumb, he’s still the Picasso of comics. . . .” Crumb wasn’t a revolutionary “space buster” like Kirby, so in that regard the comparison of Kirby to Picasso makes more sense. However, Kimmelman is claiming that Crumb is “the Picasso of comics” specifically in the sense that he believes Crumb is “the unavoidable influence on all younger artists” in comics, as Picasso is in painting. But Kimmelman is making an unjustified supposition about comics. Crumb probably is an “unavoidable influence” on alternative cartoonists who follow in the tradition of the underground comix of the 1960s, and perhaps even on contemporary newspaper humor cartoonists. But how much influence does Crumb have on the action-adventure comics published by DC, Marvel, Image, Dark Horse and the rest? In this realm Kirby has long been the “unavoidable influence,” although that influence seems to be waning somewhat due to the strong influx of manga into the American comics market. But Kimmelman’s error is understandable considering the “Masters” show’s implicit thesis about comics history, as we shall see.
In the Masters book Carlin sometimes goes overboard in praising Kirby. Carlin states that in his comics Kirby was “creating heroes and myths that were the cornerstones of American pop culture from the 1940s through the 1970s” (p.101). One problem with this assertion is that Kirby collaborated with Joe Simon and Stan Lee in creating most of these characters and stories. Later in the text Carlin explicitly refers to the Lee-Kirby collaboration and declares that “It influenced not only other comic book artists but sixties culture as a whole” (p. 104).
As someone who grew up reading Lee-Kirby Marvel books, I can assure you that they were not “cornerstones” of pop culture in their time. Can Carlin really mean to suggest that Kirby’s comics had more influence on American pop culture over those four decades than movies or rock music or television? Millions of people, mostly kids, read those comics, but the culture at large disdained superhero comics. If you were still reading comics in high school and college, you risked being mocked by your classmates, who considered them to have “outgrown” the medium. Whatever influence Marvel Comics had on the culture remained under the radar until the recent explosion of movies based on Marvel characters. It’s wonderful that Carlin, Kimmelman, and other scholars and critics are starting to treat comics as an artistically significant medium. But let’s not get so carried away that we indulge in revisionist history without factual foundation.
Carlin also contends that Kirby’s The New Gods influenced “George Lucas’s Star Wars series, which combined Kirby’s cosmic space opera with complex Westerns, notably John Ford’s The Searchers“ (p. 104). Kirby has Darkseid and the Source; Lucas has the “dark side” and the Force. Kirby’s Orion, like Lucas’s Luke Skywalker, turns out to be the villain’s son. So that connection seems clear. But just how does Luke Skywalker resemble The Searchers‘ protagonist, the racist, violent loner Ethan Edwards? Or is Carlin possibly talking about Anakin Skywalker’s devolution into Darth Vader (who is, of course, a lookalike for Kirby and Lee’s Doctor Doom)? Note to Carlin: Lucas has acknowledged the influences of Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon and Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress (1958) on the Star Wars movies.
Even worse, in briefly discussing Steve Ditko in the Kirby section of his text, Carlin not only excludes Stan Lee from any part in creating Doctor Strange, but asserts that the Doctor Strange series “dealt directly with drugs. . . .” (p. 104). Just where in any of Lee and Ditko’s Doctor Strange stories do drugs appear? Can it be that Carlin subscribes to the assumption, devoid of proof, that Lee and Ditko had to have been taking drugs to come up with the surreal worlds pictured in Doctor Strange? Was Winsor McCay high on rarebit? (And couldn’t one draw an analogy between Doctor Strange in Ditko’s occult dimensions and Little Nemo visiting Slumberland?) Is there any evidence that Lee or Ditko regarded Doctor Strange’s journeys into occult realms as metaphors for drug trips?
Then Carlin asserts that “some people recognized that Ditko took the baroque elements of Spider-Man’s distinctive red-and-blue costume and webbing and developed them into free-floating, psychedelic designs.” So Dormammu’s Dark Dimension is based on Spider-Man’s webbing? Isn’t it more likely that Ditko had seen work by Salvador Dali and other Surrealists?
Carlin also stumbles into the familiar mire of attempting to divide the credit for their collaborations between Lee and Kirby. Carlin declares that “Stan Lee wrote the story outlines and some of the dialogue, but Kirby created the casts and the conceptual layout for each title” (pp. 101-102). What does Carlin mean by “some of the dialogue”? Perhaps Carlin has learned that Kirby wrote border notes on the pages he drew, describing the action and often what the characters were talking about. But really, the dialogue for the books Lee did with Kirby reads no differently than the dialogue for books that Lee did with Ditko or any other artist. The style of dialogue is consistent throughout the books that Stan Lee is credited as scripting; that’s the proof that he came up with more than “some” of the dialogue.
Stan Lee has long admitted that Kirby came up with the Silver Surfer on his own (although Lee surely deserves credit for creating the Surfer’s style of dialogue and hence much of his personality). But that does not mean that Kirby “created the casts” for all the comics he did with Stan Lee. And what the hell does “conceptual layout” mean?
The Kirby sections of both the “Masters” show and the book suffer from insufficient comprehension of the collaborative process in creating mainstream comic books. For example, in describing part of the “Galactus Trilogy” (from Fantastic Four #48-50, 1966), Carlin points to a panel featuring the “radiating effect of feathered lines and brilliant colors that was one of the hallmarks of Kirby’s style.” Feathered lines, yes, but did Kirby have any influence over the coloring? As editor Lee would have assigned the colorist. And who was the colorist anyway?
This leads to a serious problem with the “Masters” show. The first piece on display is a handsome portrait of Captain America from Captain America #109 (January 1966), credited on the accompanying label to Jack Kirby and Syd Shores (Masters p. 259). Presumably Kirby drew it and Shores inked it, but this division of labor is not explained either on the label or in the Masters book. Neither the show nor the book ever explains the role of the inker. Worse, most of the labels for the Kirby pieces at the Jewish Museum do not list the inker. Of course, that information is easy to find, either in the original comics, or online, or from asking authorities on Kirby’s work. In some cases, the artwork on display is a splash page, complete with credits, and the inker’s name still doesn’t make it onto the label! The forgotten man of the “Masters” Kirby mini-retrospective is inker Joe Sinnott, although he and other inkers do get credited in the attributions in the Masters book. One could also argue that Stan Lee as scripter and co-plotter and the various letterers of the Kirby pages on display should also be credited on the labels. Since there are also numerous printed comics on display in the show’s Kirby section, perhaps the colorists for those pages and covers likewise deserve credit.
While there are many original Kirby pages on display at the Jewish Museum, there are also numerous printed comics pages on display from the Galactus Trilogy and from Lee and Kirby’s finest single issue story, “This Man, This Monster!” From Fantastic Four #51 (1966). Presumably the original art from these stories was unavailable. Not only does the show display original printings of Lee-Kirby stories, but it also exhibits copies of Marvel Treasury Edition, which reprinted their Fantastic Four tales in larger, tabloid size. Having expected to see only original artwork, I found myself wondering, does this mean that a longtime comics collector could stage a museum exhibit about Kirby or another Silver Age artist, simply by using original copies of 1960s comics? In the Masters book I see reproductions of printed comics pages attributed to “Private collection.” Most of the comics artwork in my book Marvel Universe for Harry N. Abrams was reproduced from books in my own collection. In retrospect, maybe I should have listed each picture as being from “The Peter Sanderson Collection.”
Despite my various qualms, I am favorably impressed by the treatment of Kirby in the “Masters” show and book. As he did with Eisner, Carlin praises Kirby’s cinematic style of storytelling, commending “his ability to link individual panels into a unified effect, unfolding like an action sequence in a well-made movie” (p. 101).
In discussing the Galactus Trilogy, Carlin rightly states that “Kirby and Lee raised this simple story into a great contemporary myth by doing two things that greatly influenced later comic book adventures. First, they grounded their characters in a world that was tangibly real and morally complex.” This is true of all of Lee and Kirby’s work in the 1960s, and indeed of Lee’s work with Ditko and his other collaborators during that decade. Carlin continues, “Second, they experimented with a number of new visual devices, including a higher degree of intentional patterning elements than previously found in comic books” (p. 102). This implies that Lee and Kirby actually sat down and consciously thought out and discussed how to work abstract visual elements into their stories. I suspect that Kirby worked more intuitively than that, and that Lee simply had the good taste to appreciate and accept Kirby’s visual innovations. Nonetheless, I am grateful that Carlin draws the reader’s attention to just such visual patterning in the pages from Fantastic Four #49 and 50 showing the Human Torch’s journey through space to Galactus’s worldship and back (pp. 103, 107). The book (p. 105) also runs one of Kirby’s amazing photo collage pages (from Fantastic Four #48, 1966) without comment, though it certainly deserves some (as well as providing another link with Picasso, who also worked with collages).
The highlight of the Kirby section of “Masters” may be an extraordinary double-page spread from Devil Dinosaur #4 (July 1978) (p. 266 and here). I don’t know what this story was about, but the spread is dominated by what looks like Devil Dinosaur’s gigantic, demonic twin, whose body is covered by semi-abstract patterning, who leaps up against a typically semi-surreal Kirby skyscape, which in this case includes giant glowing eyes that seem to have drifted in from Ditko’s Doctor Strange. In his essay in the Masters book, contributing writer Glen David Gold recalls Eisner telling him that he thought Kirby was “not pursuing some aesthetic ideal” in his work. Then Gold showed this spread to Eisner, who then conceded, “Okay, I might be wrong” (p. 261). Eisner had made the mistake of thinking that genre fiction, including adventure comics fantasies, could not be vehicles for personal expression and serious artistic achievement.
I also am very pleased with Gold’s insight that the Silver Surfer not only is “Jesus Christ to Galactus’s God,” which I knew, but is also Adam, banished from space–the Surfer’s version of Paradise–to the world of mortal man (p. 262). Gold also confirms my belief that that magpie Roy Lichtenstein’s painting “Image Duplicator” was semi-duplicated from an image drawn by Kirby in X-Men #1 (p. 261).
Another Kirby piece included in the show, the book (p. 100), and the Times online slideshow exemplifies the dominant impression the Kirby comics pages in this mini-retrospective left me with. This is the cover for Fantastic Four #50 (May 1966), a rather simple composition with a large figure of the Silver Surfer on his board, faces of three members of the Fantastic Four, and an inset panel of the fourth member, the Torch, at college. At first I wondered why this rather simple composition was selected for display. But looking at this cover as well as other Kirby originals in the Masters book makes clear his skill for using seemingly simple means to give figures like the Surfer a sense of power, to render them iconic, to give them a sculptural look (as if they were figures of Greek gods), and an aura of monumentality.
Carlin sums up, “The combination of Lee’s metaphysical plotting, Kirby’s forceful stylization, and their combined love of unlikely heroes made their work the best the medium had to offer” (p. 104) This time Carlin is giving Kirby too little credit for co-plotting, but it’s rewarding to see him confirm that Stan Lee was right in the 1960s when he called Fantastic Four “The World’s Greatest Comic Magazine.”
Kirby influenced so many comics artists who followed in his wake, but neophytes to comics would not know that from the “Masters” show. The saga of the mainstream comic book tradition comes to a stop in the “Masters” show with Kirby. From this point onward, “Masters” follows a parallel line of development, which leads from Harvey Kurtzman’s MAD through Robert Crumb’s pioneering underground comics to the alternative comics of today. Certainly no subsequent comics artist has surpassed Kirby in mainstream comics, but is it right for the exhibit to give the impression that not only newspaper comic strips but also mainstream comic books ceased being creatively vital and innovative after the 1960s?
In his review Kimmelman notes, “comics aficionados will argue about which masters have been grievously excluded from the show. (Where’s Charles Burns? Daniel Clowes? Lynda Barry? Milt Gross? Jules Feiffer? Alex Raymond?)” Apart from comic strip legend Raymond, most of the artists Kimmelman names would be considered closer to the Kurtzman-Crumb family tree of comics. It’s as if the “Masters” show left him with the impression that no one of interest continued and built upon the comics tradition of Caniff and Kirby.
For years PBS has been running a documentary series called American Masters. Recently shown episodes included profiles of architect Frank Gehry, artist Andy Warhol, dancer Gene Kelly, television journalists Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, playwright Arthur Miller, director Elia Kazan, filmmaker Preston Sturges, and television writer Rod Serling. As this comics exhibition proves, cartoonists can be American Masters too? How long do you think it will be before American Masters gets around to doing a show about Will Eisner or Jack Kirby?
ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF
This weekend, from Friday, November 17 through Sunday, November 19, the Big Apple Convention will present its annual National Comic Book, Art & Sci-Fi Expo at the Penn Plaza Pavilion (across from Penn Station) in Manhattan. I’ll be interviewing John Romita, Sr., and John Romita, Jr. on Saturday and artist Michael Golden on Sunday.
–Copyright 2006 Peter Sanderson
In a shocking turn of events, the honeymoon is already over for Pamela Anderson and Kid Rock as the two 
Alright, let’s hope all of you out there helped to continue America’s reputation as the fattest country in the free world, which, ironically, isn’t but that’s neither here nor there. What IS here, though, is a shortened column this week as I am well aware that the numbers of you who are presently reading this equate to nearly zero, the only people genuinely looking at these letters I’m writing right now is the result of what happens when you have a boss who thinks the day after Thanksgiving is a great time to catch up on all that work you neglected from Monday to Wednesday of this week. Believe me when I say I’ve been there. It’s crap for those who have to work today, it’s enough for you to think that yes you need to look for a new job where you get these one-offs every now and then, and instead of just hanging my keyboard up for the week I want to continue what I’ve been doing for you shackled people of the world for the past two years: giving you new content.
I am taking my mother, father and wife to see BORAT.
Besides this situation reflecting why Dave Chapelle is not the great emancipator of comedy like he truly could have been, and why he’s a whiny little girl, this shows why getting together three different people of varied backgrounds was such a neat idea. The questions bounded everywhere in my mind: “What would they find funny?” “Would they feel comfortable laughing at material that is beyond anything their sensibilities have ever been socked with before” “Would they really be offended by the movie’s main thrust?” or “Would they simply write everything off in this film as just sophomoric, and dismiss any grand notions about what this film says about America as simple overreaching on my part?”
Jack. Jack, oh Jack. Dad would’ve peeled his face for the duration, I would posit, if I would’ve also taken him to the above films. He probably would’ve liked the wire-fu of CROUCHING TIGER but, he no doubt, would’ve bitched like a school girl that he had to read the screen. Yes, dad, they’re subtitles; there are some places in the world that don’t speak “American.” He is a guy, however, that any college dude with a predilection for explosions and the desire for there to be nary a trace of any noticable amount of character development could relate with. He loves STRIPES, ANIMAL HOUSE, THE BLUES BROTHERS. He was a fan in recent years of OLD SCHOOL, WEDDING CRASHERS and even the recent release of OVER THE HEDGE had the man in stiches; the man travels every week by plane so many of his cinematic adventures of late have been sanitized for his protection by the airlines. He has zero desire to see anything daring, in my opinion, and would’ve done well in Roman times when it was all about the bread and circuses and not much else. You all know a man like this, especially one like my father who enjoys absorbing himself in DIE HARD and showing-off his pimp surround system to his other WASP-y friends with the first five minutes to TOP GUN. Someday I hope he understands there has been great strides since TOP GUN was remastered and that the lobby scene from THE MATRIX, the club scene from BLADE or even the opening sequence of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN would allow the paternoster of the family to show how good his built-in system (I mean, the guy had the speakers installed INTO the walls and ceiling) really is.
This is what I was dealing with as the lights went down and I hoped at least someone would see what I did; just one would’ve made this experiment worth while.
Dad: “The rodeo. I thought he was going to get killed or beaten up when he started singing his national anthem.”
[Kids, you know you’ve arrived at a certain plateau in your life when you’re able to share in the frivolity of a good breast milk joke with your mother.]
Many people could have directed Deja Vu, the new sci fi romance action thriller with Denzel Washington as an ATF agent who time travels in order to squash a terrorist attack. It’s the sort of idea that would appeal to numerous directors. For example, if Terry Gilliam had directed the film, it would end tragically, with time ineluctable and resistant to revision (as in his film 12 Monkeys), the lovers dying and the explosion going off as planned. If Brian De Palma had directed it, Deja Vu would have devolved into Denzel Washington learning that his best friend had sold out and helped the terrorists, and evil would once again triumph. If Michael Mann had helmed the film, the focus would be on the wear and tear on the team of agents, their exhaustion and the lack of appreciation for their labors. If Tony Scott had directed it, the film would be a non-stop tapestry of visual effects, MTV editing, and even text and other advertising techniques across the screen.
Success and innovation come to those who have a general interest in helping others. Music supervisor Thomas Golubic is an example of this. His own creative innovation has brought about a new sound in cinema and music that hasn’t been heard before. He started a monthly scene in Hollywood, CA called Synchronize Live where he re-scores classic films, putting new songs and mixes in them. A few of the films he’s re-scored are 2001: A Space Odyssey, Requiem for a Dream, and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.  Golubic got his start in the business as a DJ on Los Angeles station KCRW, after having a not so successful internet magazine. “I volunteered at the station because I wanted to help them avoid the mistakes I made from having an internet magazine,” he stated. Being heard on the air eventually landed him the opportunity to be a music supervisor. Some of the projects he’s done music supervision for are the TV show Las Vegas, and the HBO series Six Feet Under.
I can just imagine the pitch meeting.
Casino Royale was published in 1953, and was quickly adapted into a TV show called Climax Mystery Theater in 1954 with Barry Nelson as an unlikely Bond, at least as we now know him. But after that, the annual Bond novel flourished only in England, not unlike the Patrick O’Brien seafaring novels, until someone reviewed them with such enthusiasm that suddenly 17 O’Brien books appeared in trade paperback virtually simultaneously. In the case of Bond, as is now famously known, JFK mentioned to a Life reporter that the Bond books were among his favorite reading matter, and if indeed he really read them and didn’t have a press secretary make something up on his behalf, it is clear to see why Kennedy might like the books. They mirrored his real life: saving the world, bedding the planet’s best looking chicks. Once the books started to become movies it was clear to see why they might appeal to the masses, especially a society that had grown easily airborne to exotic locations, and a reborn movie going public that was enjoying more freedom, fueled by the Pill, the Playboy philosophy, and the collapse of the movie Production Code.
STIPP: Yup. Thankfully it was changed, just coming from my end of things, because it was really difficult”¦in fact, one story involves you.
ARONOFSKY: Not quite. I think it’s always a struggle and I think the film was kind”¦a beginning of an exploration by me to start thinking about these things or at least think about it in a more formal way.
And, on top of that, they are the most ridiculous musicians you’ve ever seen as far as skill. You’re like listening to some rhythm and you’re like, “Is that a 1/16th?” and they’re, “No, it’s a 1/32.”
I know Hugh talks about in some of his interviews”¦I took him to see brain surgery. We went in and saw an actual brain surgery on an actual person. And Hugh, I think, had a conversation with the woman beforehand. During the surgery the doctors were saying that she was going to die and this was just a last hope to extend her life a little bit.
So, as they’re going down this path the ironic thing is that the families, who are healthy, are so indoctrinated into western medicine and science are like, “You’ve got to fight. You’ve got to keep fighting. You’ve got to fight.”
