Category: Comics in Context

WHEN BURTON MET BARNABAS

I went to an opening day showing of director Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows movie, starring Johnny Depp as its vampire protagonist Barnabas Collins, with trepidation. The film is based on the legendary daytime serial that was created by the late producer Dan Curtis, and ran on ABC from 1966 into 1971, attracting an immense audience, including myself. It was a modern, ongoing version of Gothic melodrama, incorporating nearly every element of classic horror and Gothic romance, and gripped the imaginations of young Baby Boomers like myself. (It has also been a source for comics adaptations, from Ken Bald’s 1970s newspaper strip to Dynamite Entertainment’s recent comic book series, which is why it fits in “Comics in Context.”) But the trailers and commercials for the movie appalled many of the show’s admirers, seemingly indicating that Burton and his collaborators had turned Dark Shadows into a heavy-handed farce, set to a 1970s rock score. In interviews Burton, Depp, and screenwriter Seth Grahame-Smith expressed bafflement at the negative reaction, saying they did treat the saga of Barnabas Collins seriously, but Burton and Grahame-Smith also ominously spoke about emphasizing the “weirdness” of the show. Then Warners put Danny Elfman’s score for the film online, and it was what I had hoped for: grand and powerful music for a Gothic drama on an operatic scale, with nice momentary homages to Robert Cobert’s score for the original TV series.

So I hoped that Burton and the others, as well as some reviewers who had seen preview screenings were right, and that the movie would turn out to be basically serious, but with Burton’s characteristically goofy touches here and there. But still, why would Warner Bros. marketing people go out of their way in the publicity to make the movie seem like a comedy? Did they somehow think that in this current wave of vampire fiction, from Anne Rice’s novels to Joss Whedon’s Buffy and Angel to True Blood and Twilight that there was no audience for a serious and romantic vampire movie? Did they think there would be more potential audience if they claimed Dark Shadows was the second coming of Burton’s horror comedy Beetlejuice? Or were they acting out of desperation because Burton’s Dark Shadows really wasn’t good?

Watching the movie, I felt considerably relieved. Yes, the goofy gags in the trailer and commercials are there, and rock music alternates with Elfman’s evocative score. But much of the movie is done more or less seriously, and much of it works quite well. But Burton and company’s lapses into comedy continually undercut the drama, and in various important ways they fail to bring out or even seem to understand the power of their source material. In short, I was relieved because the movie wasn’t as bad as I had feared. It was entertaining and sometimes even perceptive, but it is deeply flawed.

To understand what Tim Burton gets right about Dark Shadows and what he gets wrong, you should know something about the nearly half century history of this property. I’ve written a number of previous “Comics in Context” columns about Dark Shadows in the past, most recently “Remembering Barnabas Collins,” on the occasion of the recent passing of Jonathan Frid, the actor who originated the role. You may wish to read that column as background.

In the course of this current column, I will refer to the various past incarnations of Dark Shadows. There was the original 1966-1971 television series, created by Curtis and starring Mr. Frid as Barnabas, in which the character was introduced as a villain but evolved into a tragic antihero and finally into a genuine hero. Curtis directed the 1970 film House of Dark Shadows, starring Frid and other members of the television cast, which was an alternate version of the show’s continuity, in which Curtis carried out his original intent for Barnabas, presenting him as a villain. In 1991 a new Dark Shadows television series, produced by Curtis, starring Ben Cross as Barnabas, ran on NBC. This was a reboot of the original continuity, that covered Barnabas’s arrival in the present day and included the flashback to his 18th century origin. NBC canceled the show after its initial season, despite its popularity with the young demographic; by the time NBC realized its mistake and tried to revive the series, the cast had gone their separate ways and it was too late. In 2004 Curtis produced a pilot for yet another revival for the WB television network, but it did not work and was not picked up.

As usual I will discuss the entire plot for the 2012 Dark Shadows movie, so consider yourselves given spoiler warnings.

CAMP AND THE COLLINS FAMILY

An awful lot of the recent newspaper and magazine articles about Dark Shadows and even many of the reviews of the new movie predictably recycle the old cliches about how the original Dark Shadows television series was camp: actors blew their lines, props malfunctioned, scenery fell down. Most of these pieces are written by lazy journalists who seem to have done more research on old articles about the show than bothering to watch any of it themselves. The worst case is critic Terrence Rafferty’s feature article about the original Dark Shadows in The New York Times in which he gives no sign of having watched any of the old episodes himself. Instead he interviews Tim Burton about the original series although Burton has a particularly eccentric take on the show, even missing aspects that lie at the heart of the series, as we shall see. David Edelstein in New York Magazine recalls watching the original series as a child but he too spends more time discussing the bloopers than explaining why he found the show so appealing back then. At least he perceives the Burton movie as a “camp travesty” of the original. Time‘s Richard Corliss, to his credit, watched original episodes more recently and declares them show to be “creakier than it is creepy”. I suspect he watched some of the earlier episodes when the show moved as slow as molasses, which is to say, as slowly as a typical soap opera of that time. By the time Dark Shadows reached its peak, it was moving at a rapid clip that had me and my friends on the proverbial edges of our seats; if you missed a few episodes and you were somewhat lost. Projecting their own attitudes onto the audience, some critics have persuaded themselves that the millions who watched the original Dark Shadows in the 1960s liked it precisely because it was camp. Sigh. No, we didn’t.

If the original Dark Shadows was camp, then it was unintentional camp, unlike the Batman TV show which ran in this same period. Due to its low budget, the show was done “live on tape,”and it was extremely rare for retakes to be done. Therefore, any mistakes were preserved for posterity on the videotapes. Dark Shadows is the only 1960s daytime serial that has survived through the decades through reruns and home video. I wonder how many other soap operas of the time had similar bloopers.

You can easily find Dark Shadows blooper reels on YouTube, they are indeed funny, and they might give you the impression that the show was a continual series of onscreen calamities. But if you watch the actual episodes just looking for amusing bloopers, then you’re wasting your time. The actors are professionals, not bungling amateurs. If you spend enough time watching enough episodes, sooner or later you will indeed come across a mistake, but most of them, which simply involve an actor forgetting a line, aren’t funny, but simply reminders that you’re watching something close to live drama. (For example, in the recent live episode of 30 Rock, the show’s creator Tina Fey mixed up two characters’ names in one of her lines.) So if you’re just watching the show looking for blunders, you’re wasting your time. Don’t you have better things to do?

Another reason for Dark Shadows‘ “camp” reputation is that it is acted and directed in a theatrical style. The cast mostly consisted of New York theater actors, and the show, in its best years, was written in a theatrical style. This is not to say that the actors are overacting and chewing the scenery, but that they are performing in a larger than life manner. Some cast members, included David Selby, have pointed out that this style gives the show its dramatic intensity. Certainly it is appropriate for a modern recreation of melodrama. To appreciate the show, you have to allow yourself to accept the style.

I suspect that many people who dismiss the show as camp simply can’t bring themselves to accept fantasy material like vampires and ghosts as the stuff of serious drama. Comics aficionados who read this column should be aware that this is the same mindset that dismisses superheroes and some other comics genres.

Finally, it should be pointed out that the writers and actors put some intentional comedy into the show. Certain characters provide comic relief, notably John Karlen’s portrayal of Barnabas’s high-strung servant Willie Loomis, and even more so Karlen’s literally hysterical half-mad Carl Collins in the 1897 story arc, as well as Nancy Barrett’s bawdy Cockney songstress Pansy Faye, also in the 1897 sequence. But Willie, Carl and Pansy all had serious sides, as well. More often the humor in Dark Shadows comes through the wry and sardonic comments of various characters, on the action, notably Quentin Collins, Professor Stokes, and the villains Nicholas Blair and Count Petofi; one can sense the writers’ pleasure in scripting dialogue for these characters. The discerning Dark Shadows enthusiast can even detect occasional in jokes, delivered straightfaced, on the show: for example, at one point Donna McKechnie, who was already becoming famous as a Broadway dancer, claimed in her DS role of Amanda Harris that she could not dance. But almost never does Dark Shadows go over the top with such humor; instead it’s done stylishly and usually subtly.

Over the years I have attended a great many Dark Shadows Festivals and there watched episodes of the original series, or excerpts from them, alongside large audiences. So I know how Dark Shadows aficionados react to the show. Yes, when there is a blooper onscreen, or an actor goes over the top in a line reading, or a line seems over the top, the audience laughs affectionately. But otherwise the audience is riveted to the story, dedicated to the characters, and applauds loudly and sincerely at the end of powerful scenes. In other words, they take the show very seriously indeed; the unintentionally amusing moments are just a bonus.

BARNABAS COLLINS

After Barnabas is freed from his coffin, he sees the golden arches of a nearby McDonalds, and wonders aloud if this giant “M” stands for Mephistopheles, the name of the devil. This is the first of the movie’s many, many gags about Barnabas’s bewilderment by 1970s culture, and it’s not funny, nor are any of the others. This isn’t just my opinion; the audience I was with laughed at only one of these gags (not the McDonalds one), and even then their laughter sounded muffled.

Just why did Burton and Depp decide to set their Dark Shadows movie in 1972? That’s the year after the original series ended. But Burton isn’t continuing the continuity from the original series, like Lara Parker does in her novels, which are set in the early 1970s; he’s rebooting the series instead. The easy answer is that Burton wanted to make fun of popular culture from this decade of his youth. But Dark Shadows is really part of 1960s popular culture, as I will show elsewhere in my commentary on this movie. Moreover, making fun of the 1970s is hardly a new phenomenon (See, for example, Mike Myers’ Austin Powers in Goldmember) and is like shooting fish in a barrel. Besides, I expect that Warners is aiming this movie at a young demographic who weren’t even alive yet in the 1970s. How much sense does it make to have Johnny Depp’s Barnabas reading and commenting on the notoriously kitschy 1970s novel Love Story when much of the intended audience has never heard of this book?

Dan Curtis’s various film and TV versions of Dark Shadows never explored any culture shock that Barnabas might have experienced in coming to the 20th century. The only clear example that Barnabas felt out of place in this new century was the fact that he did not have electricity installed in his home, the Old House, preferring to use candlelight. The characters who did not know he was the 18th century Barnabas presumably regarded this as his eccentricity, and certainly it added to the atmosphere of scenes set in the Old House. Barnabas also typically wore a kind of cape, though it was a modern one, and kept his 18th century hairstyle, but these were subtle signs that he was attempting to find modern equivalents to his 18th century wardrobe.

Of course it was essential to Curtis’s concept of Barnabas as an 18th century vampire posing as his own descendant that Barnabas seem outwardly to be a modern man. Viewers were left to presume that between the time that Willie released him from his coffin and Barnabas’s first visit to Collinwood that Barnabas had quickly learned enough about the 20th century to pass for a man of that time. That presumably meant that Willie Loomis, hardly the brightest or most cultured of men, must have been Barnabas’s principal source of information!

But a major reason that the TV series did not delve into Barnabas’s culture shock was that Curtis and his collaborators were very careful to minimize their references to modernity on the show. Original cast member Nancy Barrett has joked that the wealthy Collinses apparently did not own a television set. Indeed, there were telephones at Collinwood, and a tape recorder played a key role in one story arc, but one never saw a television set. In the second episode Carolyn is seen dancing to rock music, but that is the first and last use of rock music on the show. There are no references to current events. In 1969 and 1970 the younger actresses on the show and in House wear miniskirts in the present day sequences, but the characters’ wardrobes and hairstyles are nonetheless rather conservative for the late 1960s and early 1970s. When there is a major exception, like actor Christopher Pennock’s very 1970s outfit as astrologer Sebastian Shaw, it seems like a shock in the setting of this show. I also like a clever touch at the start of the 2004 Dark Shadows pilot: on arriving in Collinsport, Victoria Winters discovers that her mobile phone no longer works. (That’s actually true in some isolated small towns, such as Woodstock, New York.)

It seems that Dan Curtis and his collaborators wanted to create a timeless sort of atmosphere on Dark Shadows, that was suitable to their goal of creating a modern version of a traditional Gothic romance. Though set in the late 1960s, Dark Shadows from its beginning, with young Victoria Winters journeying to become governess at a great old mansion on the rocky coast of Maine, evoked the plots of novels of past decades, like Daphne DuMaurier’s Rebecca or even Jane Eyre. As the show delved increasingly into the supernatural, it would do its own versions of story elements from 18th and 19th century romances and horror tales, like Dracula and Frankenstein. Collinwood and Collinsport seemed to stand apart from modernity and the outside world, so they seemed more credible settings for traditional romance and horror storylines. Perhaps this is why the show’s audiences were willing to accept the long story arcs on the show that were literally set in the 18th and 19th centuries. Surely this was part of Dark Shadows‘ appeal. Imagine: millions of young people in the late 1960s were watching a show that spent months doing period drama set in past centuries! This timeless air of Dark Shadows presumably is another reason why the show has continued to flourish in reruns and home video for nearly half a century; it doesn’t date as badly as many other shows from its period.

By emphasizing 1970s popular culture, Burton’s Dark Shadows subverts Curtis’s strategy for his creation. It’s as if Burton and Depp and Grahame-Smith were fans wondering how Barnabas would react to television or to lava lamps or to rock music. In other words, this aspect of their Dark Shadows movie comes off as fan fiction, attending to irrelevant trivia while missing the point of the series they are adapting.

Moreover, they are distorting Barnabas’s own character. They have him ranting about the devil, when confronted by some aspect of modern culture he dislikes and does not understand. Thus Barnabas sounds more like one of the show’s versions of Reverend Trask, the witch-hunting religious fanatic who was one of the series’ most memorable villains. Barnabas was always Trask’s adversary. In the original series’ 18th century arc, Barnabas, before his transformation, was depicted as a man of reason who regarded Trask’s ravings about witches as dangerous superstition; Barnabas strove to save the time-traveling Victoria Winters from being tried and executed by Trask for witchcraft. The 1991 series emphasized that Trask was an anachronism in the 18th century, still hunting alleged witches a century after the Salem witch trials, and that Barnabas was a rational man of the 18th century Enlightenment. Indeed, Joshua Collins, Barnabas’s father, was a supporter of the American revolution, and Barnabas would have been a contemporary of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. It’s more likely that Barnabas, as depicted on the TV series, would be amazed and fascinated by modernity than that he would react to its manifestations as if it were the devil’s work.

But I think that Burton may have had another reason for setting this film in 1972, and this one works. All the past film and TV versions of Dark Shadows have started out set in whatever year is then the present one. Thus Barnabas was imprisoned in his coffin in the late 18th century, but he is released in the present. I think that we all tend to assume that the present day represents the height of human achievement to date, and that we in the present are more enlightened than people were in the past.

But as the present turns into the past, its flaws become evident in retrospect. For example, to many people who lived in the early and mid-1960s, that was a period in which American culture was making great strides forward: the Kennedy Administration, the space race, the civil rights movement, and so forth. Yet now in the 21st century the Mad Men television series portrays that same period as deeply flawed by our contemporary standards, with faults ranging from sexism to smoking. (The Mad Men episode that debuted on Sunday May 13, 2012 was set in 1966, was titled “Dark Shadows” and even made reference to the show, although one character dismissed it as “crap.” Well, it wasn’t good until Barnabas showed up in 1967.)

In Burton’s Dark Shadows, Barnabas still comes from the 18th century, but is released not into our present but into a less distant past, the 1970s, and now aspects of the popular culture of that decade look dated and strange and even absurd to us from our vantage point of the 2010s. Burton’s Barnabas seems out of place in the 1970s, but we in 2012 would not fit in that easily either, nor might we want to. Barnabas’s teenage cousin Carolyn sneers that he is “weird,” but so are the 1970s as Burton pictures them. Moreover, despite Barnabas’s many faux pas in the movie, his gentlemanly manners from another century still seem admirable in this new setting. Barnabas’s courtly manners endure well over the passage of time, whereas so much of the 1970s culture that the movie pictures has fallen from fashion and nearly disappeared. If Barnabas’s personal style makes him a “weird” outsider in 1970s Collinsport, the film seems to be saying that’s a good thing, better than adopting the trappings of 1970s culture, which is what the movie finds to be truly weird.

This is an aspect of Barnabas that Burton, Depp, and Grahame-Smith have perceptively recognized and emphasize: Barnabas as the model of a true gentleman, who has carried his sense of proper behavior and style, and indeed his own moral code, including devotion to family, into a new and more vulgar time period.

It might be helpful to regard Burton and Depp’s Barnabas as an older, less innocent version of their earlier character, Edward Scissorhands, another “weird” outcast, an innocent good person who tries to fit into a conventional society that is itself rather odd – that film’s caricature of 1950s-1960s style suburbia – but is handicapped by his own potential to destroy and kill, represented by the knives he possesses instead of hands.

And what of Barnabas’s own murderous side? As in the original series, it is the witch Angelique who, jealous that her former lover Barnabas had rejected her in favor of Josette, transformed him into a vampire. In Burton’s film Barnabas blames Angelique for the killing he has done.

Dark Shadows creator Dan Curtis introduced Barnabas into the series as a villain, but within a year Barnabas had wreaked a revolution in vampire fiction. He became a “reluctant vampire,” a good man who was forced to attack victims die to the curse placed upon him. Whereas Dracula and vampires up until then seemed willingly to kill their victims, Barnabas was depicted as a victim himself of the curse. His vampiric bloodlust was depicted by both the writers and by actor Jonathan Frid as an addiction, as if to alcohol or drugs. The rising use of drugs was a phenomenon of the 1960s; this mat be another way in which Dark Shadows tapped into the zeitgeist of that decade.

Regular viewers of the original TV show are familiar with one of its recurring tropes, a scene that was repeated with variations numerous times in the course of the series. A young woman on the Collinsport docks, sometimes implied to be a prostitute, encounters Barnabas. They strike up a conversation. Barnabas turns hesitant, and tries repeatedly, even desperately, to break off the conversation and get away, but the woman persists in flirting with him. Then it is as if a switch is flipped in Barnabas’s mind; he has passed the point of no return, and the addiction takes control. His face and manner turn sinister and predatory, and then he bares his fangs and attacks.

Jonathan Frid was excellent at performing Barnabas’s struggle with his addiction as well as his sense of guilt and self-hatred after being compelled to give in to it.

But what about Depp? When the workmen free him from his coffin early in the film, Depp’s Barnabas informs them in a matter-of-fact tone of voice that he is sorry, but he is very thirsty, and then proceeds to slaughter them all. In previous versions it was Willie Loomis alone who found and released Barnabas, who then bit him, putting Willie under his control, but did not kill him. It makes a certain amount of sense that in Burton’s film Barnabas kills so many people on first being freed; after nearly two centuries of confinement, a vampire must need a lot of blood and quickly. Why the workmen do not rise again as vampires is not explained.

But Depp’s Barnabas shows no sign of struggling with his conscience before or after he attacks and kills those men. Indeed, his matter-of-fact manner when he tells then he is about to kill them shows no sign of emotion whatsoever.

Similarly, Barnabas later encounters a group of hippies. (Not only does this movie try to find humor in 1970s pop culture cliches, but drags in one from the 1960s as well.) And he ends his conversation with them by informing them that he is about to kill them all, as he proceeds to do. Again, Burton and Depp do not have Barnabas display any emotion at all when he delivers this line, not predatory bloodlust nor anguish over being unable to control his predatory urges nor shame over them. Burton and Depp seem to be playing Barnabas’s deadpan declaration of mass murder to get a laugh out of the audience. But why should we laugh at the deaths of these hippies. If you are to take this story seriously, Barnabas is murdering people, not abstract objects of 1960s pop culture.

As in previous versions of Dark Shadows, Dr. Julia Hoffman attempts to cure Barnabas, and succeeds to the extent that he is able to walk outside in daylight. (The movie does not make it clear why Barnabas is able to exist in sunlight at some points in the movie and not in others, and New York Times critic Manohla Dargis pointed to the seeming inconsistency without realizing the reason for it in the plot.) In the Burton film Barnabas discovers that Julia’s real motive is to use his blood to make herself immortal; angered at this betrayal, he murders her. Later, Barnabas claims that by putting the curse on him, Angelique is responsible for this as well as his other killings. But is she? When Barnabas killed Julia I got no sense that he was being driven to do it by forces beyond his control. He never shows regret over murdering her, and keeps her death a secret. Watching the movie, I wondered if at this point Burton was trying to get the audience to turn against Barnabas. Was this a turning point at which we are to regard Barnabas as a villain, as in Curtis’s House of Dark Shadows, when the murder of Julia marks Barnabas’s reversion to evil? But no, Burton and Depp continue to present Barnabas as the movie’s hero, as if the murder of Julia had no moral consequences.

At one point earlier in the movie, Depp’s Barnabas tells Michelle Pfeiffer’s Elizabeth about his curse and how it forces him to kill, and Depp does let anguish show in his voice and manner. But Burton and Depp subvert the dramatic impact by having Barnabas hit his head repeatedly against the keyboard of an electric piano, producing discordant notes until Elizabeth turns it off. Thus Burton and Depp turn Barnabas’s agony over his curse, something at the core of the character in previous versions of Dark Shadows, into an unfunny joke. One must draw the conclusion that they simply don’t care about the tragic side of Barnabas, and hence about the essence of this character they claim to love.

And just why is Depp’s Barnabas telling Elizabeth that he is a vampire, anyway? In previous versions of Dark Shadows Barnabas hid the fact that he was a vampire from the present day members of the Collins family, claiming instead to be a “cousin from England,” the lookalike descendant of the 18th century Barnabas. The initial reason why is clear: he didn’t want to be hunted down and destroyed as a menace. When Barnabas evolved into the guilt-ridden vampiric antihero of the series, another reason was implicit: Barnabas’s deep shame over his curse. This is another aspect of Barnabas’s character that one would have assumed was essential. But Burton and Depp’s Barnabas freely admits what he is to Elizabeth, and it is she who has to get him to agree not to tell anyone else. But Barnabas seemingly cannot help himself, and keeps talking about his secret to other members of the family (who don’t realize he’s talking about being a vampire) and to those hippies (who end up dead). Despite Barnabas’s supernatural hypnotic powers, Dr. Hoffman is able to hypnotize him easily; this is hard to believe, but Burton and Depp seem unable to resist such a cheap joke. But she didn’t have to hypnotize this Barnabas to find out that he is a vampire; all she had to do was just listen to his dinner table conversation! So where is this Barnabas’s sense of guilt and shame?

Or his wish to disguise his true nature? In the previous versions Barnabas sought to pass as a modern day human, and apart from his unusual hair style, he looked the part. Depp’s Barnabas has a more extreme version of Barnabas’s bangs, chalk-white skin, and long, claw-like fingernails, and appears in public in 18th century costume! (I have seen concept drawings that Burton did of Barnabas Collins; he pictured Barnabas as something of a cartoon-like figure.) If the good people of Collinsport believed in vampires, as they seemingly come to do in the course of the film, then Barnabas is the obvious suspect. And if Burton and Depp intend to do a sequel (as the final revelation about Dr. Hoffman seems to set up), isn’t it a problem that the townspeople all seem to know in the film’s last act that Barnabas is a vampire? And I do hope that since Burton sets Collinwood, the mansion where the family lives, that the fire department arrives after the closing credits to put out the blaze. Even Burton admitted in an interview that Collinwood is essential to Dark Shadows.

But Burton’s Dark Shadows does get some things about Barnabas right. For one thing, Angelique tells him that they are both “monsters.” Josette, the woman that Barnabas loves, represents the nobility and goodness to which Barnabas aspires. But Barnabas’s vampirism represents and brings out his potential for violence and ruthlessness. Arguably, he and Angelique are alike in that both are capable both of passionate and obsessive love and of terrible violence and vengefulness.

For another, Depp’s Barnabas tells Elizabeth that he values family and will be a protector of the Collins family of modern times. That was indeed one of Barnabas’s principal motivations in the original television series after he became its hero: he was the guardian and defender of his family and friends, who would risk his existence for them. This is something that even Dan Curtis omitted in House of Dark Shadows, in which Barnabas even slew two members of his own family. But to the credit of Burton, Depp, and Grahame-Smith, they get this aspect of Barnabas Collins’ personality right. And in a future “Comics in Context” about Burton’s Dark Shadows movie I will explore how the film handles the other members of the Collins family and other principal characters.

“Comics in Context” #244
Copyright 2012 Peter Sanderson

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REMEMBERING BARNABAS COLLINS

The Silver Age of the 1960s brought an explosion of creativity in the superhero genre that has not been equaled in it since; now, a half-century later the Marvel characters created during that decade are now conquering movie screens. But the Marvel revolution was only one aspect of the change in American comics in the 1960s, which also launched the underground comix movement which evolved into today’s alternative comics and graphic novels. And what happened in comics is only one aspect of the major revolution across popular and political and sexual culture that took place during the 1960s. I don’t think there has been as seismic a generational shift since. Just look at all the middle-aged people using computers and smartphones and social networking; the Boomers have proved to be adept at adopting new cultural developments.

The rise of a new wave of superheroes in the 1960s paralleled a similar creative explosion in science fiction, fantasy, and adventure series on television during that decade. Think of all the memorable series that debuted in the 1960s and that live on in reruns, remakes and home video. When I think back on 1960s television series that dealt in the fantastic, I think of iconic character portrayals by various actors: among them, William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy and (my favorite of the three) DeForest Kelley on Star Trek, Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg in The Avengers (the UK spy series, not the Marvel superhero comic), Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner. And then there was Jonathan Frid, who passed away on April 13, 2012, as the vampire Barnabas Collins in Dark Shadows.

Probably all of you reading this are aware of the new Dark Shadows movie, directed by Tim Burton and starring Johnny Depp as Barnabas, that opens in May. Younger readers may not be entirely aware that the Burton film is based on the original Dark Shadows, a daytime serial – a soap opera, in other words – that was created by the late producer Dan Curtis, ran on the ABC network from 1966 into 1971, dealt in reworkings of classic horror stories and tropes, and was an astonishingly huge success with the Baby Boomer generation. Dark Shadows is also “the show that would not die,” that spawned two successful movie spinoffs, House of Dark Shadows (1970) and Night of Dark Shadows (1971), and continued in reruns for decades, on PBS stations and later on the Sci-Fi Channel (now Syfy). The entire original series is available on DVD. There was a short-lived revival, with an entirely new cast, in 1991 on NBC, and you can still see this entire 12-episode series, legally and free, on YouTube. Hence, Dark Shadows is not just known by aging Boomers; it gains new fans with each generation.

And yes, this has something to do with comics. There was a Dark Shadows newspaper comic strip, in which artist Ken Bald superbly captured Jonathan Frid’s likeness as Barnabas Collins. There have also been various Dark Shadows comic books, from Gold Key’s version in 1969 to the Dynamite Entertainment version that debuted in 2011.

Arguably, more than anyone else, even Curtis himself, the late Jonathan Frid is responsible for Dark Shadows‘ success. On meeting Mr. Frid on the set of the new Dark Shadows movie, Johnny Depp reportedly said that none of them would be there without him, in other words, without Frid’s original portrayal of the character. If not for Jonathan Frid’s Barnabas, Curtis’s show would have been canceled, probably after only a year on the air.

Why did this performance have such impact? It was because Jonathan Frid and Barnabas Collins revolutionized the concept of the vampire. Frid’s Barnabas was the first vampire with a soul in popular culture, the first one with a multidimensional personality, and the first to become a truly heroic figure. Perhaps there had been sympathetic vampires in past, little-known stories of which I am unaware; Barnabas was the first to reach an audience of millions.

Hence, every subsequent major example of fiction about heroic or antiheroic vampires owes a debt to Dark Shadows, Barnabas, and Frid. That includes Anne Rice’s books such as Interview with the Vampire, Joss Whedon’s Angel, Forever Knight, the Twilight series, and HBO’s True Blood, among others. Ms. Rice has acknowledged knowing Dark Shadows. But even if some subsequent vampire fiction creators did not watch the show, that does not matter, Curtis, Frid, Barnabas and Dark Shadows laid the groundwork that made contemporary vampire fiction possible.

Keep in mind what the popular image of the vampire was before Dark Shadows. Look at F. W. Murnau’s classic silent film Nosferatu, his unofficial adaptation of Bram Stoker’s landmark novel Dracula. Its vampire, played by Max Schreck, is a grotesque creature, and it is difficult to believe that anyone in the film could think he was human. Of course the dominant popular image of the vampire became that of Bela Lugosi in the title role of Tod Browning’s film Dracula, based on a stage adaptation of Stoker’s novel. Stoker, Browning and Lugosi presented Dracula as a being who not only looked outwardly human, but appeared to be a sophisticated European nobleman with refined manners, who travels from his homeland into English society; this, however, was merely a facade disguising a vicious predator on other humans.

Subsequently, most vampires in popular culture were based on the Stoker/Lugosi/Dracula template. So too is Barnabas Collins, another man with aristocratic manners and bearing, who arrives from abroad, and conceals his darker nature. But the difference is that Barnabas proved to be a vampire with a sense of guilt, an aura of tragedy, and a human heart.

In large part, the revolution was Frid’s creation. Producer Dan Curtis created Dark Shadows, which debuted on the ABC Network in 1966, as a modern daytime serial version of a classic Gothic romance. In the first episode heroine Victoria Winters follows in the footsteps of Jane Eyre by taking a job as governess in a gloomy and mysterious mansion. This was Collinwood, the ancestral home of the Collins family, headed by Elizabeth Collins Stoddard – played by Joan Bennett, a star of Hollywood’s Golden Age – on the rocky coast of Maine.

In its initial months Dark Shadows struggled to find an audience. The specter of cancellation gave Curtis the incentive to experiment with introducing supernatural elements into the series, including a ghost of an 18th century woman named Josette.

Then, nine months into the series, in April 1967, Curtis went “for broke” as he put it, and introduced a vampire into the show. A disreputable drifter named Willie Loomis, played by John Karlen, hunting for a legendary lost Collins treasure, discovered a secret room in the family’s 18th century mausoleum. Inside Loomis found a chained coffin; removing the chains, he opened the lid, and was horrified when a hand reached out and seized him by the throat.

Soon afterwards, a man with courtly, gentlemanly manners arrived at Collinwood, where he introduced himself as Barnabas Collins, a “cousin from England.” The family members were amazed by his resemblance to their 18th century ancestor, the original Barnabas, whose portrait hung in their foyer. The newcomer claimed to be the descendant of that Barnabas, who, according to family history, had left for England in the late 1790s. Pleased with their new relation, the Collins allowed him to live in another mansion on the property, the abandoned Old House. Of course the “descendant” was the original Barnabas, who had become a vampire and survived for nearly two centuries trapped in his coffin.

In the first months that Barnabas was on the show, Curtis and his writers dealt subtly with the fact that he was a vampire. Perhaps he or the network was worried about going too far; after all, there had never been a vampire on a daytime soap. The word “vampire” was never used in this early period. There were references to strange attacks and deaths in the village, which were attributed to bites by animals. For many months Barnabas was never shown with fangs or biting anyone. Instead, he seemed to have a sinister, Svengali-like hypnotic hold over his victims: first Willie Loomis, who became his submissive servant, and then local waitress Maggie Evans, played by Kathryn Leigh Scott. Dominating her will, Barnabas compelled her to dress as Josette, the woman he had loved in the 18th century, and made her his prisoner in the Old House.

Curtis’s original intention was that Barnabas was a villain who would menace other characters for thirteen weeks and then be destroyed. But Barnabas proved to be unexpectedly popular with the audience. It is an oversimplification to think that the early Barnabas was entirely a villain. In Barnabas’s early episodes, the writers did provide the character with some material that allowed the audience to feel some sympathy for him. Notably, for example, when Barnabas first arrives at the Old House, he is given a speech expressing his joy at returning to his original home after so long an exile. Jonathan Frid’s triumph was that he seized the opportunities that a speech like this gave him to make Barnabas much more than a one-dimensional villain.

A Canadian actor who had played major Shakespearean roles, Jonathan Frid thought that Barnabas was only a brief, 13-week assignment. He had no interest in playing Barnabas simply as a conventional horror movie monster. Instead, from his first appearance on the show, Frid was intent on playing Barnabas not as a as a credible, three-dimensional character. He played Barnabas’s charm and gentlemanly manners not as a deceptive facade, but as genuine; they also seem to have been part of Frid’s actual personality. Barnabas did not come across as an invader of Collinwood, but as someone who belonged there, who loved the Old House and cared about the family history. Frid always said that the key to his performance was in seeing Barnabas as a man with a secret. Barnabas may have been a menace, but Frid conveyed the character’s insecurity beneath his outer confidence, his gnawing worries that his dark secret, being a vampire, would be exposed. Frid said in interviews that his own insecurity about performing on television, and worries about remembering his lines, came across on television as Barnabas’s insecurity. Perhaps this is so, but Frid took advantage of it, and surely used his own nervousness to shape his performance. The audience responded to this vulnerability of Barnabas’s; they did not want him to be exposed, either. This early Barnabas was obsessed with his lost love Josette, so much so that he tried to mold Maggie Evans, her lookalike –both roles were plated by Ms. Scott – into a recreation of her. Even so, the audience could sense a genuine romantic longing when Barnabas spoke of his “ancestor’s” love for Josette. Through much of 1967 Barnabas was written and played as a villain, menacing poor Maggie, but there was something intriguing about Barnabas’s villainy as Frid played it. Frid had a charismatic presence that worked well on television. Frid’s Barnabas was just what this modern day Gothic romance needed: a dark, brooding, sinister antihero in the Gothic novel tradition. Audiences responded positively and grew in number. The ratings went up, and the plans to destroy Barnabas after thirteen weeks were set aside. Frid’s Barnabas had saved Dark Shadows from cancellation, and soon became the dominant character on the show.

The next major step in Barnabas’s evolution came when Curtis took another big chance. During a séance Victoria Winters vanished from 1967 Collinwood and reappeared in the 1790s. For the next several months Dark Shadows was set in the 18th century, with most of the already established regular cast playing characters of that period, as the show told Barnabas’s origin story. Jonathan Frid now got to play Barnabas as a human being, who was engaged to marry Josette DuPres (played by Kathryn Leigh Scott). But he had to fend off her servant, Angelique (played by Lara Parker), with whom he had had an affair and who was still passionately in love with him. Unknown to him, Angelique was a witch, who used her sorcery to cause Josette to fall in love with Barnabas’s uncle Jeremiah, whom he then shot in a duel over her. Angelique again secretly used sorcery to manipulate Barnabas into marrying her, but he then discovered she was a witch and turned against her. In retaliation, Angelique sent a demonic bat that killed him. Barnabas’s family entombed him in the secret room in the mausoleum, but he then rose as a vampire.

Through this first part of his origin story, the audience could sympathize entirely with Barnabas. He was was capable of killing in anger, but who was also devoted to Josette and to his sister and mother, and willing to befriend and defend the time-traveling Vicki, whom Angelique had framed for witchcraft. He was not portrayed as an evil man, but as a good but flawed man who unjustly fell victim to a curse.

Here began the truly revolutionary change in depicting vampires. Dark Shadows now presented Barnabas’s vampiric list for blood as an addiction and compulsion that he despised but that he could not ultimately resist. As he descended into killing victims for their blood, Barnabas was wracked by guilt. Here Jonathan Frid found the emotional core of his role; he was superb at dramatizing Barnabas’s remorse over his attacks, and his anguish as he lost his loved ones: his sister Sarah, his mother Naomi, and his true love, Josette. At first he stayed away from Josette, not wishing her to learn what had happened to him. But ultimately he was unable to stay away from her, and began putting her under his power, believing that they could only be together if she became a vampire as well. Frightened by a vision Angelique sent of the fate that awaited her, Josette leapt to her death from Widow’s Hill, a cliff overlooking the sea.

The Barnabas-Josette-Angelique triangle became the heart of the show’s narrative; in subsequent storylines Barnabas would fall in love with other women, who took over Josette’s place in his heart (and who, in one case, turned out to be Josette reincarnated), as Angelique and fate continued to thwart his hopes for happiness.

Angelique’s curse not only gave Barnabas vampiric lusts that, in these early days, he could not control, but also unleashed the dark, violent side of his personality. He became ruthless and even sadistic with his adversaries, memorably walling up the witch hunter Reverend Trask in the basement of the Old House.

Yet Ben Stokes, Barnabas’s servant in the 1790s, seemed to be a point-of-view character for the audience. Appalled though he was by his master’s violent excesses, Ben remained loyal to him, recognizing that his master was not only the victim of a curse but was still basically the good man he had always been. For example, Barnabas still tried to rescue Trask’s victim, Victoria Winters, from being hanged as a witch. After his father Joshua discovered what had happened to his son, Barnabas decided to have his father destroy him by a stake through his heart. Unable to bring himself to do it, Joshua chained Barnabas’s coffin shut, the way that Willie Loomis would find him two centuries later.

By the time this 1790s origin sequence had ended, Frid and the series’ writers had radically transformed Barnabas from charismatic villain into the show’s genuinely tragic antihero. Again, this was appropriate to Curtis’s original intent of creating a modern Gothic romance: Frid’s Barnabas was a a romantic figure of grand passions, a good man struggling against the dark side of his own nature, a man suffering under a curse that he could not control, a victim of the fates. Significantly, Angelique’s curse was that anyone whom Barnabas loved would die.

In fact, when Vicki returned to the present (now 1968), the show was briefly in something of a quandary, since the ominously threatening Barnabas that the show had been depicting in the present no longer matched the tragic antihero who had emerged in the 1790s sequence. The problem was quickly solved when the show began its own version of the Frankenstein story. Barnabas’s confidant, Dr. Julia Hoffman, who had discovered his secret and had been trying to cure his vampirism, completed a colleague’s experiment to bring an artificially created man, Adam, to life. In transferring part of Barnabas’s life force into Adam, she somehow caused Barnabas to revert to a normal human. Over the subsequent months the writers scaled back Barnabas’s capacity for ruthlessness. Instead, they focused on his contention against the enraged monster he had helped to create, as well as Angelique, who had appeared in the present and was determined to restore her curse. Barnabas was now earning the audience’s sympathy in his struggle to prevent reverting to vampirism and to protect himself, Vicki, and the Collinses from the menace of Adam. By the summer of 1968, Barnabas and Julia, though middle-aged and unglamorous, had clearly become the unlikely heroes of this daytime serial that was attracting a large audience of the young.

Through much of the Adam sequence, Barnabas was motivated by self-interest: protecting himself. But the character’s heroic altruism began to emerge through the summer and fall. He risked his life to save Julia from a vampire, Tom Jennings, who had made her his victim. In the climax of the Adam storyline, the warlock Nicholas Blair had forced Barnabas and Julia to create Eve, a mate for Adam, using Maggie Evans to provide the life force. Realizing that the experiment would kill Maggie – the woman he himself had once victimized – Barnabas defied Blair by sabotaging the life energy transfer, destroying the body of Eve. When Adam retaliated by capturing Vicki to throw her off Widow’s Hill (thereby recreating the death of Josette), Barnabas shot Adam, despite learning that if Adam died, he would revert to vampirism. In other words, Barnabas had now grown so heroic that he was willing to sacrifice his life – or worse, take on his hated curse once more – in order to save the lives of two innocent women.

In the next story arc, Barnabas and Julia discovered that Tom Jennings’ brother, Chris, was a werewolf, This made Chris another victim of a curse that he could not resist, and that transformed him into a murdering monster. Barnabas befriended and sought to help Chris, who was grateful but puzzled by Barnabas’s benevolence. But the audience realized that Barnabas saw himself in Chris, a fellow victim of a curse. The series was moving Barnabas into a new role, that of a guardian figure.

To my mind the greatest story arc in the original Dark Shadows was the sequence set in 1897, which continued for nine exciting months, through most of 1969. The set-up was the haunting of Collinwood by the ghost of Quentin Collins, in a story arc inspired by Henry James’ novella The Turn of the Screw. In early 1969 Quentin’s ghost had driven the Collins family from their mansion, Collinwood, and taken full possession of the mind of the youngest Collins, the boy David; then Chris seemed permanently transformed into werewolf form. To try to communicate with Quentin’s ghost, Barnabas, continuing his new role as family guardian, went into a mystical trance. Instead, the trance sent his spirit back intro his body lying in the coffin in the mausoleum’s secret room back in 1897, the year of Quentin’s death. Escaping from the coffin, Barnabas was again a vampire, but though he still needed to find victims, he was also determined to find out all that he could in order to try to change history for the better, thus saving David in the present. Thus, during the 1897 sequence Barnabas was using his powers as a vampire, not as a menace but as the defender of the Collins family against a series of memorable adversaries, including the “phoenix” Laura Collins (years before X-Men‘s Phoenix), Reverend Trask’s equally fanatical descendant, and Count Petofi, whose supernatural powers exceeded even Angelique’s. Several months into the sequence, Barnabas’s mission was complicated by his exposure as a vampire, the very thing he had long dreaded in the present. As a result he became a hunted outlaw, an outcast from the Collins family, even as he continued to risk his undead life to protect them from the menaces surrounding them.

As riveting as Jonathan Frid had been as the series’ villain, he made an even stronger impression as this champion of his family, a true hero rather than an antihero. He vividly projected Barnabas’s determination to oppose evil, his persistence despite continual obstacles, his sense of vulnerability when trapped by foes, and his compassion for innocents. It was a pleasure to watch Frid’s Barnabas when he triumphed over his adversaries; the character still had an edge. But perhaps to the surprise of longtime viewers, Frid’s Barnabas now conveyed a powerful sense of saintliness: he was the man who would risk everything for his family and friends, past and present. (Moreover, Petofi, and later in the series the Leviathans, ultimately posed a threat to the world, as did Nicholas Blair’s plans for Adam and Eve, which Barnabas had earlier thwarted.) Barnabas had even seemed to gain a greater measure of control over his vampiric urges, had fewer victims, and sought not to kill them. His main victim in the 1897 sequence was the second Reverend Trask’s daughter Charity, yet Barnabas desperately sought to prevent her from dying from blood loss. Intriguingly, the show even presented the repressed Charity’s liaison with Barnabas as a sexual liberation that brought her happiness.

Why was Barnabas so popular with millions of viewers during the show’s original run? Looking back, it seems to me that even though Dark Shadows sought to evoke the Gothic romance tradition, and did variations of numerous classic horror stories and romances, it and Barnabas were also very much creations of the 1960s. The Sixties were famously the time of a cultural shift away from the conformist culture of America in the 1950s, which, at its worst, was exemplified by the witch hunting of the McCarthy period. It should be no wonder, then, that the various incarnations of Reverend Trask, a literal witch-hunter, were among the most memorable villains on Dark Shadows. 1960s popular culture has many examples of secret nonconformists hiding behind a conformist facade from the disapproval of society. Of course there are the Marvel super heroes who arose in that decade, with their secret identities, like Spider-Man, as well as the immense 1960s television success of another double-identity superhero, Batman. But there are also various popular television comedies of that decade which follow the theme of an outwardly normal person who secretly leads a private life with nonconformist elements, often represented by the metaphor of the supernatural or science fictional: Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, My Favorite Martian, even Mister Ed. Using the imagery of horror films, the comedies The Munsters and The Addams Family presented families who disdained the outer trappings of normality and were proudly, freely nonconformist.

In interviews Jonathan Frid repeatedly stated that from the start his key to playing Barnabas was not as a monster but as a man with a secret. The core members of the Collins family lived in the Great House of Collinwood, usually unaware of the supernatural events that were taking place (although this situation changed over the course of the series, as when Quentin’s ghost drove the family from the house). The townspeople of Collinsport were similarly unaware of the supernatural, blaming vampire attacks on animals, for example. In his own home, the Old House, Barnabas became the center of a small alternate community of allies, notably his confidant Dr. Julia Hoffman, his servant Willie Loomis, and later Quentin (both in 1897, and, after history was altered, in the present), who were aware of the supernatural and contended against it, thereby protecting the others.

Originally Barnabas guarded his secret, being a vampire, to prevent his exposure and destruction. Unlike current vampire fictions like Twilight and True Blood, Dark Shadows did not present vampirism as an acceptable alternative lifestyle; it was a destructive curse. But when Barnabas evolved into a hero, the show depicted his vampirism not as an expression if his inner evil but as a literal affliction, one that Dr. Hoffman sought to cure (and at times, temporarily succeeded in doing so). Vampirism was the source of Barnabas’s power, and in effect gave him super-powers (hypnosis, disappearing, near-invulnerability, etc.), anticipating Joss Whedon’s treatment of vampires as superhumans. But vampirism was also his weakness for which, when exposed in 1897, Barnabas was unjustly persecuted by people who could not recognize that he was on the side of the angels.

Barnabas was the hero as outsider and even sometimes as outcast, fighting for the safety of a society that would turn against him if they knew he was not a conventional human being like themselves.

The more I think about it, the more I see parallels to the Marvel super heroes of the 1960s. There is Doctor Strange, in his own mysterious house, from which he combats supernatural menaces of which the public is unaware. There are the mutant X-Men, another small community in their own mansion, who in the 1960s posed as ordinary human beings when out of costume, and fought to protect a public who famously feared and hated mutants. Other classic Marvel heroes, like Spider-Man and the Hulk, are outsiders and outcasts. Bruce Banner suffers from his own werewolf-like curse, transforming into a destructive monster (originally, like a werewolf, at night), yet he is shown to be less of a menace than the villains he combats.

Jonathan Frid made such a strong impression as a vampire hero that the viewers resisted the show’s subsequent attempts to change Barnabas. Following the 1897 sequence, Dark Shadows tried turning Barnabas back into a villain in the present (late 1969), when he fell under the influence of the cult of the Leviathans, an ancient race of monsters that were clearly inspired by the works of H. P. Lovecraft. Viewers rebelled, ratings fell, and the show hurriedly had Barnabas rebel against his new masters and return to the side of good. Moreover, in late 1969 Barnabas had once again been freed of his curse; presumably to bring back departing viewers, the show had the Leviathans turn Barnabas back into a vampire in early 1970. Once more Barnabas had his vampiric super-powers, and once more he was in the grip of his addiction to blood, which had heightened, enabling Frid once again to play Barnabas’s guilt, his self-hatred, his attempts to resist his urges and ultimate succumbing, all of which he portrayed so powerfully and well. Indeed, regular viewers of the show would become accustomed to one of its favorite tropes, in which Barnabas encounters a woman (usually a prostitute) on the Collinsport docks, attempts to resist his vampiric urges even as she flirts with him, as we witness his distress, and then we see him reach the point of no return, as his attitude shifts, turning grimmer, and he finally attacks.

Perhaps that is another aspect of Barnabas’s appeal to viewers. After his early months on the show, he was no longer a sinner without conscience, but he was a person, who like us all, but on an operatic scale, struggles with his weaknesses, temptations, and character flaws, and regrets them when he gives in to them. But at the same time he is the noble hero on his journey, struggling to survive, trying to safeguard his family and few friends, seeking redemption. That, indeed, is a familiar pattern on Dark Shadows: Quentin, too, started on the show as a menace, but, as played by David Selby in the 1897 sequence, evolved into a multifaceted character with whom the audience could sympathize, and turned from villain to antihero to the show’s second hero. Even Angelique became more sympathetic over the years, sometimes becoming Barnabas’s ally, and finding redemption in the show’s late 1970 episodes.

After the misstep with the Leviathans, Barnabas remained a hero for the rest of the series, and stayed a vampire for most of the rest of it. The show had been so astonishingly successful at its height that producer Dan Curtis made the 1970 MGM film House of Dark Shadows with the television series’ cast and writers. Directed by Curtis, the film was a big commercial success, but perhaps it showed that not even Curtis quite understood Barnabas’s appeal. In the film Curtis did what he had initially intended to do with Barnabas on the show: present him as a villain who is justly hunted down and destroyed. Hence, House of Dark Shadows is a reboot, once again starting with Willie releasing Barnabas from his coffin, but taking the familiar characters from the show, including Barnabas, in a very different direction. Fans of the TV show get glimpses of Barnabas’s sympathetic side, but ultimately he becomes a monster who murders various characters from the show. The television show was notoriously done “live on tape” and retakes were a rarity, since video editing back then was far more expensive. Able to do multiple takes thanks to the movie’s bigger budget, Frid consistently demonstrates in House just how powerful his portrayal of Barnabas was at its best. But even when I first saw the film, I realized that it captured only one side of the character. This was Barnabas as villain in House, with brief flashes of the antihero; the guilt-ridden, long-suffering but indomitable hero of the television series was missing.

Like the 1960s Batman show, Dark Shadows‘ popularity, though once immense, faded quickly. That may not be surprising: though always good, the later storylines could never match the greatness of the 1897 arc. Moreover, Dark Shadows had become much more fast-paced than normal daytime soap operas; if you missed a day, you missed important developments, and perhaps much of the young audience tired of making that five day a week commitment. But there was another movie, 1971’s Night of Dark Shadows, with Selby as the lead rather than Frid, who declined to do it.

And not only did Dark Shadows live on, in reruns, home video, and revivals, but so did its influence, even in comic books. Roy Thomas mentioned Barnabas in Daredevil, and in 1970 did a story in Daredevil #65 and 66 about a supernatural daytime serial named Strange Secrets with its villain Brother Brimstone, clearly inspired by Dark Shadows and the early Barnabas. Surely Barnabas Collins influenced Thomas’s co-creation of Marvel’s own guilt-ridden vampire, Michael Morbius. Later in the 1970s Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan created Hannibal King, a vampire detective, in Tomb of Dracula, following the new path of heroic vampires that Barnabas and Frid had begun. When Wolfman and Colan subsequently created Night Force at DC Comics, its lead character, Baron Winters, bore a strong visual resemblance to Frid’s Barnabas, including his distinctive hair style (and coincidentally or not shared a last name with Dark Shadows heroine Victoria Winters). And of course there were the many heroic and antiheroic vampires in novels, film and TV that followed Dark Shadows, many of which I mentioned earlier.

Surely it is the success of contemporary vampire fiction that laid the groundwork for the latest resurrection of Barnabas Collins, in the new Dark Shadows movie, directed by Tim Burton, which opens in May, starring Johnny Depp in the role of Barnabas. The trailer and commercials have proved to be controversial with admirers of the original Dark Shadows.

The marketers at Warner Bros. Are promoting the film as if it is a comedy, even a farce, as if it were like Burton’s classic Beetlejuice (1988). Some who have seen the film contend that it actually is a blend of serious Gothic horror and romance with comedy, closer in tone to Burton’s Sleepy Hollow (1999). Certainly Danny Elfman’s musical score for the film, which you can hear free and legally online here sounds not like a comedy but like the grand operatic version of Gothic horror that longtime Dark Shadows fans surely hope for.

We will learn in just a few weeks, when the film opens, whether Burton and Depp’s Dark Shadows realizes the potential of the original material. In this column I have attempted to show how complex and powerful a role Barnabas Collins became in the hands of Jonathan Frid and the original TV series writers. Burton and Depp claim to have been fans of the original Dark Shadows from their childhoods on. I hope that they do not trivialize the iconic character of Barnabas, but instead rise to the challenges it presents. I plan to write a column about the film after I see it, so we will return to this subject then.

Barnabas Collins was Jonathan Frid’s most famous role by far, but I was fortunate to see him in many other stage appearances over the decades. When Dark Shadows was still in its original run on television, I saw him perform St. Thomas Becket in T. S. Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedral, staged in an actual church. He was excellent in the role, and I was pleasantly surprised to spot other Dark Shadows cast members in the audience. Years later he was in a production of the classic black comedy Arsenic and Old Lace on Broadway, playing the role originated by Boris Karloff. A few times, as a New York theatergoer, I even sighted him in the audience at a play or opera. I met him briefly at one of the first Dark Shadows Festivals in the New York City area; for many years the Festivals’ daytime programming concluded on Sundays with one of Mr. Frid’s one-man shows of “reader’s theater” shows in which he performed dramatic readings in his sonorous voice, captivating his loyal audience. Then he disappeared from the Festivals, remaining in semi-retirement in Canada. But in recent years he returned to the Festivals, looking much older and more frail, hosting programs of video clips of memorable scenes from Dark Shadows, on which he incisively commented. I saw him in his last Festival appearance, only last summer in Brooklyn.

And I also own a copy of his final performance as Barnabas Collins, which I highly recommend. Over the last decade the British company Big Finish Productions has produced numerous Dark Shadows audio dramas featuring members of the original series cast, and even some actors from the 1991 NBC-TV reboot/revival. Big Finish had to recast Barnabas for his appearances in the audio dramas. But finally Mr. Frid consented to do one of them, and recorded his role in Canada for the 2010 audio drama Dark Shadows-The Night Whispers. You can hear his advanced age in his changed voice, but you will also hear the authority he still projected in his performance, the acting skills undiluted by time.

Then last year Mr. Frid journeyed to England along with three of his former castmates, Mr. Selby, Ms. Parker and Ms. Scott, to make came appearances in Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows movie. At the time that I write this, it remains to be seen whether Tim Burton and Johnny Depp will be able to capture what Mr. Frid brought to the role of Barnabas. But Mr. Frid himself will lend a haunting presence to the film, reminding us of what Barnabas Collins can be.

“Comics in Context” #242
Copyright 2012 Peter Sanderson

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On July 21 The New York Times ran an article with the headline “Batman’s Dark Knight Sets Weekend Record.” In the piece reporter Michael Cieply wrote that ” Fevered fans pushed The Dark Knight, the sixth in Warner Brothers’ series of Batman movies, to record three-day ticket sales of $155.3 million over the weekend, ” surpassing the record set by another superhero movie, Spider-Man 3, the previous year. The next day Cieply provided an update: “A final tally raised the three-day box-office sales for The Dark Knight to $158.3 million”.

And yet New York Times movie critic A. O. Scott, who has been a source of exasperation ever since this column began a half decade ago, weighed in on July 24 with a Times essay titled “How Many Superheroes Does It Take to Tire a Genre?”. “Are the Caped Crusader and his colleagues basking in an endless summer of triumph, or is the sun already starting to set?” What an odd way to interpret The Dark Knight‘s extraordinary commercial success. Superhero movies are more successful than ever therefore, they must be in decline. Scott acknowledges not only that The Dark Knight is not only a major financial success but also that it has received considerable critical praise from his colleagues. Nevertheless, Scott says, “Still, I have a hunch, and perhaps a hope, that Iron Man, Hancock and Dark Knight together represent a peak, by which I mean not only a previously unattained level of quality and interest, but also the beginning of a decline. In their very different ways, these films discover the limits built into the superhero genre as it currently exists.”

The key phrase here is, of course, “perhaps a hope.” Other critics welcome Dark Knight‘s thematic ambitions and skill in characterization as signs that the superhero movie genre is maturing and growing in sophistication. For example, another Times film critic, Manohla Dargis, in her July 18 review of the movie, wrote that director “Christopher Nolan’s new Batman movie feels like a beginning and something of an end. Pitched at the divide between art and industry, poetry and entertainment, it goes darker and deeper than any Hollywood movie of its comic-book kind–including Batman Begins,”

However, Scott believes that The Dark Knight states its themes without truly exploring them. Even were that true, Scott, were he more favorably disposed to the genre, would urge superhero filmmakers to go still further in exploring the thematic potential of the genre. Instead, Scott has decided that the superhero genre is inherently too limited for thematic complexity. He just doesn’t like superhero movies, and, as he concedes, he hopes they will go away and stop bothering him. “I don’t want to start any fights with devout fans or besotted critics,” he claims, trying to be conciliatory on the surface but actually marginalizing anyone who disagrees with him as either fanboys whose enthusiasm borders on worship or as “besotted” critics whose emotions override their reason.

Towards the end of his essay Scott observes that “˜’The westerns of the 1940s and ’50s, obsessed with similar themes, were somehow able, at their best, as in John Ford’s Searchers and Howard Hawks’s Rio Bravo, to find ambiguities and tensions buried in their own rigid paradigms.” Scott claims that superhero movies cannot do the same. Yet when classic Westerns such as these came out, the critical establishment was blind to those very “ambiguities and tensions,” and the true complexity and depth of these films was not recognized by American critics until many years later.

Scott has stumbled across an important point, that the superhero genre is a in various respects represents a recasting of the archetypes of the Western for a contemporary urban America. Yet I have the feeling that if Scott had been around in the 1940s and 1950s, he might well have been insisting that Westerns were by their nature shallow entertainments, and disparaging any filmmakers who attempted to infuse them with “ambiguities and tensions” as pretentious.

Scott’s willful ignorance of the genre is also annoying. He claims in his essay that the movie Hancock “which played with the superhero archetype by making him a grouchy, slovenly drunk rather than a brilliant scientist, a dashing billionaire or some combination of the two.” Hasn’t the idea of the typical superhero being either a genius scientist or millionaire playboy been out of date for forty-some years? (All Scott need have done is think back to the Spider-Man movies.) With the Watchmen movie coming out early next year, can’t someone induce Scott to read the graphic novel beforehand? Maybe that will change his ideas about the limitations of the superhero genre. Or will he be blind even to Alan Moore’s sophisticated subtexts? I recall when I showed a comic boom I liked to a friend decades ago, when most adults disdained the medium, and she just started reading the sound effects aloud, unwilling to pay attention to the dialogue or art. Her mind was made up that comics were silly, and therefore she fixated on a convention of the genre she could easily mock.

Since Scott predicted the fall of the superhero movie, The Dark Knight has continued to break records. On July 28 the Times reported that “Among other records it delivered the best second-weekend gross in recent Hollywood history” and “The Dark Knight has sold $314.2 million in tickets domestically in its first 10 days of release, a record”. This is not the start of a decline. This is a sign that the superhero movie has firmly established itself as a 21st century mainstream film genre. In G4’s coverage of this year’s San Diego Comic Con, Michael Uslan, executive producer of the Batman movies and producer of the forthcoming Spirit film, said that we are now experiencing a “Golden Age” of comics-based movies. The evidence, I think, is in his favor.

Critic David Ansen, in his Newsweek review of The Dark Knight, is more open in his insistence that superhero movies should be empty entertainments: “[Director Christopher] Nolan wants to prove that a superhero movie needn’t be disposable, effects-ridden junk food, and you have to admire his ambition. But this is Batman, not Hamlet. Call me shallow, but I wish it were a little more fun”.

I get the sense that history is moving forward, and that Scott and Ansen, in their condescension towards the superhero genre, are being left behind. I might call it a generational divide, except that there are older critics who get it.

For example, Roger Ebert begins off his review of The Dark Knight thus: “Batman isn’t a comic book anymore. Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight is a haunted film that leaps beyond its origins and becomes an engrossing tragedy. It creates characters we come to care about. That’s because of the performances, because of the direction, because of the writing, and because of the superlative technical quality of the entire production. This film, and to a lesser degree Iron Man, redefine the possibilities of the “˜comic-book movie’”.

While I agree with Ebert about the movie, I am dismayed that he felt he had to imply that Batman had transcended its origins as a comic book series, implying that the comics medium is incapable of matching the artistry and depth of cinema. In other words, he seems to be saying that comics are necessarily shallow and superficial; movies can achieve the level of tragedy. Further, he seems to be implying that a “comic-book movie” and a superhero movie are the same thing, as if comics only dealt in that single genre, and as if the movies American Splendor, Ghost World, A History of Violence, Persepolis and Road to Perdition were not all based on comics of the same name. However challenging The Dark Knight movie may be, to my mind it still falls short of masterpieces of Batman comics such as Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke, and the Steve Englehart-Marshall Rogers Batman collaboration, all of which surely influenced the new film, directly or indirectly. (By calling the film The Dark Knight, Warners may consciously be attempting to associate it in audience members’ minds with the Miller series, since it was he who popularized this name for the Batman.)

But still, Ebert recognizes that as this decade of superhero movies proceeds, filmmakers are pushing the envelope ever further: “Something fundamental seems to be happening in the upper realms of the comic-book movie. Spider-Man II (2004) may have defined the high point of the traditional film based on comic-book heroes. A movie like the new Hellboy II allows its director free rein for his fantastical visions. But now Iron Man and even more so The Dark Knight move the genre into deeper waters. They realize, as some comic-book readers instinctively do, that these stories touch on deep fears, traumas, fantasies and hopes. And the Batman legend, with its origins in film noir, is the most fruitful one for exploration.” Batman debuted in 1939, just before the rise of film noir in the 1940s and 1950s, and it would be pleasant if Ebert gave some of us “comic-book readers” credit for the intelligence to consciously realize that the superhero genre deals in “fears, traumas, fantasies and hopes.” But whereas Scott insists on limiting the superhero genre, Ebert perceives both its great potential and the ways in which filmmakers are exploring it.

As in the past, I continue to be impressed by veteran film critic Andrew Sarris’s open-mindedness towards the superhero genre. Though he admits never having been a comics reader, he seems unfettered by preconceptions about the medium or the superhero genre. Admitting in The New York Observer that “it may seem strange for many that so much weight is being given to a movie about a comic-book superhero,” Sarris nonetheless declares The Dark Knight to be a “masterpiece,” acknowledges that “the moral despair in The Dark Knight has moved me so strongly” and asserts that “after The Dark Knight, I may have to rethink my past reservations about Mr. Nolan’s place in the 21st-century cinema”.

To my mind, The Dark Knight is a far greater achievement than its director/co-writer Christopher Nolan’s previous movie about the character, 2005’s Batman Begins, which I found disappointing in various respects (see “Comics in Context” #89: “Batman Reboots”).

One of my biggest problems with Batman Begins was its failure to properly portray its principal villains. The film’s Ra’s al Ghul–both the Asian Ra’s in the beginning and the “real’ Ra’s later on–lacked the regality, the sense of sinister force, and the sheer presence that the character should convey. (It’s certainly not impossible: think of Ian McKellen as Magneto, Christopher Lee as Saruman, or Ralph Fiennes as Voldemort, whose performance is growing in me with repeated viewings, among recent on-screen villains.) The Scarecrow’s brief reappearance at the beginning of The Dark Knight serves as a reminder of the first film’s failing. He returns with his grotesque mask, and yet doesn’t seem intimidating or eerie in the least. Compare this to the way that Jeffrey Combs makes a chilling impression from his first moments voicing the Scarecrow in “Never Fear,” a 1997 episode of the classic Batman animated series. So I worried that Nolan was simply incapable of handling the operatic dimensions of Batman’s larger-than-life villains and would similarly blunder with the Joker.

But Nolan surprised me by turning Batman Begins‘ greatest flaw into The Dark Knight‘s greatest triumph, through the late Heath Ledger’s remarkable performance as the Joker.

Nolan and actor Aaron Eckhart handles Two-Face effectively, though he does not rise to the heights of Ledger’s Joker. I was particularly pleased with Nolan’s first revelation on-screen of Two-Face’s scarred facial features. At first Nolan teases us: we think Eckhart is going to turn his head to show us the scarred side of his face, but he doesn’t; it reminded me of the unmasking scene in Lon Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera (1925), with its similar suspenseful feints before the grand unveiling. Finally, Eckhart turns his face fully, and the makeup surpassed my expectations. capturing the grotesquerie of some of the most memorable depictions of Two-Face in the comics.

One might have expected that Two-Face would get to be the lead villain of his own Batman movie. But, as I will show, it’s necessary to the thematic structure of The Dark Knight that Harvey Dent not only becomes Two-Face in this movie but even goes through a complete character arc ending with his apparent demise by the film’s end.

As for Ledger’s Joker, as other reviewers have observed, this is the post-9/11 Joker. He blows up a hospital; through bomb threats and actual assassinations, he forces the evacuation of Gotham City. It is as if the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center were followed by a sustained series of terrorist assaults on New York City. The Joker of The Dark Knight thus becomes the realization of nightmare scenarios inspired by 9/11. In the movie Alfred, Bruce Wayne’s butler and counselor, points out that the Joker doesn’t abide by rationality: he wreaks havoc just for the sake of seeing a city “burn.” This points to suspicions I suspect that many of us have about the real life terrorists: that despite their professed ideologies, their real motivation is pleasure in inflicting mass destruction.

Amazing as Ledger’s performance is, and as different as it is from previous on-screen characterizations of the Joker, I am not going to claim that it renders previous actors’ portrayals of the character obsolete, as some reviewers have suggested. Granted, I’ve never been a fan of Cesar Romero’s comparatively harmless Joker in the 1960s Batman TV show. But I happened to see the part of the 1989 Batman movie on television the same day I saw The Dark Knight, and was paying attention to the more sinister aspects of Jack Nicholson’s performance as the Joker. When I saw The Dark Knight there was a big audience reaction when Ledger’s Joker rams a criminal’s head onto a pointed pencil, a sign of the character’s sadism; I had forgotten that Nicholson’s Joker kills an enemy much the same way, impaling his forehead with a quill pen.

Batman first appeared in 1939 in Detective Comics; the Joker debuted the following year in Batman #1. These are iconic, archetypal characters who have proved capable of being interpreted in numerous ways. Nolan and Ledger’s version is a Joker for the post-9/11 period, but that does not invalidate different approaches to depicting the character.

Romero’s and Nicholson’s Jokers, and the Joker as so memorably voiced by Mark Hamill in the 1990s animated series, are all showmen. They turn crime into performance art, and they always seem to be “on,” always putting on a show, whether for their henchmen or Batman or the entire city, when delivering one of their threats over the airwaves. They may be killers, but they’re also trying to make their audience laugh. These Jokers are over-the-top extroverts, and there’s something appealing about their boisterous laughs and high spirits even as we may be appalled by their crimes.

Nolan is said to have based his Joker on the character as he first appeared in Batman #1, the grim serial killer who did not laugh, and whose smile seemed more like a death’s head grin. In a radical departure from previous Joker portrayals, contrast, Ledger’s Joker seems introverted, quiet, even laid back. He occasionally laughs loudly, but not all that often. Ledger’s Joker isn’t putting on a performance: he is only interested in amusing himself through manipulating the people–and the city-at his mercy. His sense of humor is more clearly something that is entirely his own, unlike anyone else’s, his own perverse, ironic, cynical way of looking at his fellow man. If there were such a person as the Joker, he would more likely be like Ledger’s Joker, someone cut off from the sensibilities of other people, someone with a sadistic sense of humor that is wholly his own. This creepy self-centeredness is what makes Ledger’s Joker seem more truly demented than the supposedly crazy Jokers of Nicholson and Hamill.

One of the most striking differences about Heath Ledger’s Joker is the coloring of his face and hair. It’s referred to as “makeup” in the movie, yet when Ledger’s Joker is in police custody, his makeup is not removed. That suggests that it can’t be, and that, as in the comics and the 1989 movie, the Joker’s face and hair have been permanently discolored by chemical wastes.

But in the comics and the 1989 movie, is it really credible that those chemicals could have so nearly dyed the Joker’s face chalk white, his lips red, and his hair green, making him look as if he had made himself up to look like a circus clown? Ledger’s Joker is the first one I’ve seen who looks as if he were the victim of a horrible accident. The chalk-white face color isn’t solid: in closeups you can see through, here and there, to his original Caucasian skin hue. The red on his lips no longer looks like lipstick; instead, it looks like a thick red smear across his myth and the scars to either side.

Something that many writers don’t seem to get is the power of mystery. Sam Hamm’s screenplay for the 1989 Batman film gave the Joker a real name, Jack Napier (“Jackanapes,” get it?). In contrast, in offering an origin for the Joker in The Killing Joke, Alan Moore did not give him a real name, and even made clear that this was only a “possible” origin story for the character, who may tell different accounts of his past at other times. In other words, the reader may accept or reject this origin as he or she likes. By not giving the future Joker a name, Moore may have been implying he was an everyman figure, or that the horror that drove him to become the Joker could do the same to anyone. More importantly, if the Joker has no real name and no definite origin, then it is as if the Joker is the only identity he now has, as if he is cut off from humanity, as if he is some mysterious evil force. Batman is grounded in humanity through his alter ego, Bruce Wayne; in the Joker’s case, it is as if his original human identity has ceased to exist.

Following this idea, Dark Knight‘s director/writer Christopher Nolan has repeatedly referred to the Joker as “an absolute”. I very much like the scene in the police station in which we learn that the Joker can’t be identified through fingerprints, dental records or even DNA samples: this is the 21st century version of utter anonymity. In The Dark Knight the Joker also gives differing accounts of how he got his scars, suggesting that Nolan is carrying on Moore’s idea that the Joker is an unreliable narrator of his own past.

At one point the Ledger Joker shows off his “card,” a Joker. But it’s not the typical playing card Joker figure that looks like a medieval court jester. Instead the Joker on the card looks like a laughing devil, complete with a tail. That’s appropriate, since the Joker in Batman is a modern descendant of the vice figure in medieval drama, a figure of evil who, as the drama evolved, also became the principal comedy character.

The Vice’s original dramatic function in medieval morality plays was as a tempter of human souls. One of The Dark Knight‘s primary innovations in portraying the Joker us to cast him as a tempter. As Roger Ebert realized, “He’s a Mephistopheles whose actions are fiendishly designed to pose moral dilemmas for his enemies.”

Nolan and Ledger’s Joker also fits the Vice mold in that the Vice will cause trouble simply for its own sake. Shakexpeare’s Iago, a descendant of the medieval Vice, is notorious for what the poet Samuel Tayloir Coleridge called his “motiveless malignity.”

Hence, the Joker sets a series of challenges for Batman and the people of Gotham City, forcing them into positions in which they have to make painful moral decisions. The Joker’s apparent goal is to expose morality as a fraud, and compel people to choose self-interest over the fate of others. He says at one point, “These civilized people, they’ll eat each other.” The Joker is out to demonstrate that the rest of humanity is on his moral level; the difference is that he admits it and they don’t.

This begins with the Joker’s first criminal scheme in the movie, in which he has organized a team of criminals, disguised by clown masks, to rob a bank. The Joker has also arranged for each member of the team, once his function is fulfilled, to be shot dead by another team member: in the end, the Joker himself, wearing one of the masks, kills the final member of the team. We learn later in the movie that the Joker doesn’t care about money; perhaps he regarded his real triumph in this case to be inducing each of the criminals to betray the others. No honor among thieves, indeed.

Later, the Joker declares that he will continue killing people every day unless Batman publicly reveals his true identity. Despite Alfred’s counsel that the Joker can’t be trusted to stop his killing spree, Bruce Wayne is unwilling to let anyone die if he can help it, and is willing not only to reveal his dual identity but also to go to prison, since Batman is wanted by the police. In the end, the Joker is thwarted when an unexpected alternative is found, and Harvey Dent announces that he is Batman. (Watching this part of the film, I wondered, is he Spartacus, too?)

Stiil later, the Joker simultaneously puts both Harvey Dent and assistant district attorney Rachel Dawes in peril, forcing Batman to choose which of them to rescue. (Ironically, the Joker is unaware that Batman is Bruce Wayne and is in love with Dawes.) Again, Batman solves the problem by coming up with an slternative that perhaps the Joker hadn’t considered (though it is fairly obvious), sending Gordon to saved Dent. (Perhaps the Joker sought to learn more about Batman by seeing who he would choose to rescue himself.) But in the end the explosives go off, killing Dawes before she can be rescued.

Finally, the Joker threatens to blow up the bridges and tunnels leading out of Gotham City, the city begins evacuating people by ferries. The Joker announces that he has planted explosives on two of the ferries, one carrying convicts and the other carrying ordinary people, and that he will blow both ferries up at midnight. However, each ferry is provided with a trigger for detonating the explosives on the other ferry. The Joker claims that if either ferry’s passengers blow up the other ferry, he will spare the survivors. It seems as if some of the convicts are willing to blow up the other boat, whole people on that second boat argue that the convicts don’t deserve to live as much as they do. But in the end, the passengers on neither ferry are willing to blow up the other, apparently hoping for a miracle. And the miracle occurs: since Batman succeeds in besting the Joker, neither ferry blows up. Batman forces the Joker to confront this fact: he attempted to prove the darkness of human nature by corrupting hundreds of people on the ferries and failed. Similarly, the Joker recognizes that he has failed to corrupt Batman himself.

Even apart from the challenges he explicitly sets, the Joker’s very presence in Gotham serves as a temptation to Batman. One of the key lines in the movie is the repeated observation that in time a hero eventually becomes a villain. How often in Batman stories in different media have we seen Batman threaten to drop a criminal from a great height unless he gives him certain information? We never see Batman drop the criminal, and so most of us probably assume he’s bluffing. But in The Dark Knight, when Batman so threatens Boss Maroni, the latter calls his bluff, saying the fall wouldn’t kill him. But Batman wasn’t out to kill Maroni but to hurt him, and drops Maroni, who lands painfully on his legs; the audience at my screening was audibly shocked. Does Nolan mean us to think of the contemporary controversy over the U. S. government’s use of torture? Does he mean us to think that Batman is going too far? Similarly, when Batman interrogates the Joker at the police station. Batman begins punching him, but Nolan does not stage the scene in a manner to invite the audience to enjoy the Joker’s punishment; instead, Nolan emphasizes the brutality, and makes certain we see that Commissioner Gordon, looking in, is horrified. And yes, the Joker ends up telling Batman where his men are holding Harvey Dent and Rachel Dawes captive, but it becomes apparent that the Joker wanted Batman to go after them, and the Joker reverses their locations. So what good did that torture via beating accomplish?

Towards the movie’s end, Wayne’s confidant Lucius Fox is shocked to discover that Wayne has found away to monitor all the cell phones in Gotham City. Contending that this is too much power for any man to have, Fox declares he will resign once the Joker crisis is over. Does Nolan mean us to think of the current administration’s vast expansion of warrantless wiretapping? Is he, perhaps, alluding to V’s similar wall of TV screens, enabling him to look through the fascist government’s omnipresent “Big Brother”-style video cameras in Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta? Or the real life video monitoring system that the British government installed after Moore wrote V? Could Nolan even be alluding to Batman’s satellite monitoring of metahumans in the comics some years ago (said to be returning in the forthcoming Justice League movie)?

But Dark Knight‘s Batman does not ultimately succumb to the temptation of misusing his own power. He instructs Lucius Fox to enter his (Fox’s) name into the monitoring system after the Joker crisis is over, and this causes the system to self-destruct. In other words, Batman/Wayne only temporarily assumed this power over people’s privacy to defeat a massive threat to their security, and then gives up the power once the need is over. One reviewer referred to Alfred and Lucius Fox as serving as Batman’s “consciences,” so it’s appropriate that it is Fox’s name that destroys the monitoring system.

Moreover, perhaps we are meant to contrast the Joker’s final fate in the movie with Batman’s earlier treatment of both the Joker and Maroni. At the end, Batman lets the Joker plunge from a high building, but then saves his life, suspending him upside down. (Earlier the Joker had hanged Batman in effigy; now Batman “hangs” the Joker without killing him.) The Joker is responsible for killing Rachel Dawes and turning Harvey Dent into Two-Face, yet the Batman resists any temptation to avenge them by killing him.

There’s a tradition in the Batman movies from 1989 on of killing off most of the major villains. It’s ironic that The Dark Knight keeps the Joker alive, as if setting up his return in a sequel. That was presumably the original plan: the Joker even says in his last scene that his feud with Batman will go on eternally. Since Heath Ledger died after completing the movie, it’s now unlikely that Nolan and Warners would attempt to recast the role in the current series of Batman movies, forcing a different actor to compete with Ledger’s extraordinary performance. Will Ledger posthumously become the first actor to win an Academy Award for playing a role that originated in comics?

The character who fails the Joker’s moral challenges is Harvey Dent, who, as in the comics, starts out as the idealistic District Attorney who is out to clean up Gotham City. Bruce Wayne regards Dent as the potential savior of Gotham City, the man who can do a better job of ridding it of crime through legal means than Batman can through vigilantism. Once Wayne’s girlfriend, Rachel Dawes is now in love with Dent. Perhaps Dent, in this movie, can be seen as Wayne’s doppelganger, showing what might have happened had Wayne chosen to fight crime as a lawyer or a government official instead.

But this one man, Harvey Dent, proves all too vulnerable. After being captured by the Joker’s men, half of Dent’s face burns and is horribly scarred. His disfigurement and the murder of Rachel surely push him to the brink of madness. Then, disguised as a nurse, the Joker confronts Dent in the hospital and pushes him over the brink. As Two-Face, Dent’s crusade against crime is twisted into a series if murders of those he holds responsible for Rachel’s death. Thus Dent becomes a corrupted version of Batman, the crimefighting vigilante, crossing the moral line that Batman refuses to. This ultimately leads to Two-Face’s clash with his thematic doppelganger Batman and to his death. (Or so it seems. Two-Face’s fall may not have been as lethal as it looked. See here)

The Joker, as tempter, won a major victory by corrupting the crusading district attorney Harvey Dent, turning him into the criminal Two-Face. Batman is determined to deprive the Joker of his victory and is adamant that the people of Gotham need the image of Dent as incorruptible champion of the law. Therefore, at the end of the movie, Batman insists that Gordon blame him–Batman–for the murders Two-Face committed, so that Gotham will look up to Dent as a martyr to the cause of law and order.

I’m not the only person who has noticed the resemblance here to the ending of John Ford’s The Man who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). (See, for example, here). In that movie, it is Tom Doniphon, the character played by John Wayne who actually shoots the outlaw Liberty Valance dead. But the public believes that the hero was Ransom Stoddard, the lawyer played by James Stewart, who eventually rises to become a United States Senator. As in The Searchers, Wayne’s character, who takes the law into his own hands, is necessary to rid the territory of evil so the rule of law may take root. But once a society governed by law arises, the gunslinger has no place in that world. Doniphon allows Stoddard to take the credit for killing Valance, because Doniphon recognizes that he belongs to the past, and Stoddard, and the rise of law and government, are the wave of the future. Years later, when Stoddard returns to attend the now forgotten Doniphon’s funeral, he tells the local press the true story of who killed Valance. The members of the press, acting very unlike members of the press, decided to bury the story; as one of them famously puts it, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” It is more important to them that Stoddard still be credited with the heroic act that launched his political career. Ford’s earlier Fort Apache (1948) ends similarly, with Wayne’s character continuing to speak of his deceased former superior officer, played by Henry Fonda, as a hero, even though the movie has shown that the Fonda character was a martinet who was responsible for leading his troops into a disastrous massacre.

As I said earlier, Scott had hit upon something important by comparing superhero movies with Westerns: Dark Knight seems to be invoking Liberty Valance. Batman is the vigilante who operates outside the law, who seeks to preserve the good reputation of Harvey Dent in the hope that Harvey’s memory will inspire the people of Gotham to rise up against crime through legal means, thereby rendering Batman’s vigilantism unnecessary.

Fort Apache and Liberty Valance appear to advocate this “print the legend” philosophy. But arguably both films actually advocate the opposite. In both Ford reveals the truth behind the “legend,” thereby indicating it is better that we know that truth. At the end of Valance, Senator Stoddard seems trapped in a lie that falsely gives him credit for the heroism of another man, who has died in poverty and obscurity.

Nolan’s Batman films radically differ from the comics in depicting Batman’s motivation. In the comics, traditionally, Bruce Wayne takes a vow to battle all criminals when he is a young boy, right after the murder of his patents. From childhood on he is driven to pursue this goal. Some stories, including Paul Levitz’s origin for the Earth-2 Batman’s daughter, the Huntress, and the animated film Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (1993), have indicated that if Batman/Bruce Wayne found fulfilling love, he would no longer feel the need to continue his crusade against crime. Other stories, such as Englehart and Rogers’ tales of Silver St. Cloud (see “Comics in Context” #84: “Dark Definitive” among others), and Tim Burton’s first Batman movie (1989), instead shows that love would not deter him from his self-appointed mission. Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns shows that if Bruce Wayne ended his costumed career, he would be left an empty shell of a man. The Dark Knight Returns and its sequel, The Dark Knight Strikes Again, also show that Batman would continue his crimefighting career well into middle age, as long as he was physically able. The animated series Batman Beyond presents an elderly, wizened Bruce Wayne, still dedicated to his mission, even if he must now work through a young costumed protege. In short, it is difficult to imagine the Batman of the comics ever turning aside from his lifelong crimefighting career. His dedication to it is arguably an obsession, and it may end only with his death.

In sharp contrast, Nolan’s Batman Beyond presented Bruce Wayne as a lost and directionless youth, who merely became fixated on killing his parents’ killer, Joe Chill; once Chill was assassinated by someone else, Wayne had no goal in life until his childhood friend Rachel Dawes turned his attention to combatting crime in general, and Ra’s al Ghul subsequently molded him into the warrior he became.

In Batman Begins, as in Miller’s Batman: Year One, Batman is learning on the job how to operate as a costumed vigilante. In The Dark Knight Batman has mastered his new career and has become the commanding figure we know from the comics.

But, rather surprisingly, Nolan’s Batman can not only envision the end of his costumed career but actively seeks to bring it to an end. Nolan’s Bruce Wayne supports Harvey Dent as district attorney because he comes to believe that Dent is a truly dedicated man who can break the grip of crime on Gotham City. Indeed, Dent succeeds in bringing Gotham’s mob bosses to trial.

It appears, then, that the Bruce Wayne of The Dark Knight regards Batman as a necessary only in a Gotham with a dysfunctional system of law and order: the corrupt Gotham depicted in Batman Begins–and in Batman: Year One–in which James Gordon seemed to be the only honest cop. It’s rather like the Robin Hood legend, in which nobleman Robin of Locksley turns outlaw, battling the Sheriff and Prince John–only until good King Richard returns and restores the rule of law. The Bruce Wayne of The Dark Knight hopes to make Batman obsolete: if Harvey Dent can clean up Gotham City through legal means, then Wayne will happily retire Batman.

Moreover, The Dark Knight gives no indication that Bruce Wayne would become that purposeless, self-destructive man from Miller’s Dark Knight Returns if he gave up being Batman. The Bruce Wayne of The Dark Knight believes that once he ends his other life as Batman, he will be free to marry Rachel Dawes. However, she is intent on marrying Dent instead, a secret that Alfred keeps from Wayne, even after Dawes’ death, perhaps believing it is necessary for Wayne to think that a happy life with her was indeed a viable alternative for him, and that he was not necessarily doomed to be alone.)

So Bruce Wayne is in the position of Tom Doniphon from Valance, and Harvey Dent takes the role of Ransom Stoddard. Wayne is the man who takes it upon himself as Batman to battle outlaws, who makes it possible for Dent, like Stoddard, to bring about the rule of law through the government, making Batman unnecessary. The parallel even extends to Rachel Dawes, since Vera Miles’ character in Valance is originally in love with Doniphon but ends up marrying Stoddard.

In the movie Dent repeats the line that the night is darkest before the dawn. I expect that Nolan wants us to spot the pun here: Batman is the Dark Knight, whose presence is necessary to bring about the dawn, the new period of a Gotham that rises above the mire of crime, that Dent, this secular Messiah, promises to bring about.

Nolan’s Bruce Wayne even seems to regard Batman as a necessary evil. Nolan establishes early in the movie that there are various incompetent Batman wannabes in Gotham, attempting to imitate Gotham’s new vigilante. Batman disapproves of them. One Batman wannabe is later captured and apparently killed by the Joker, demonstrating that it is dangerous to try to imitate Batman.

I suspect it’s not just that this movie’s Batman wants to keep imitators out of danger, but that he doesn’t want people to treat him as a hero at all. By insisting that Gordon blame him for the murders that were actually committed by Dent as Two-Face, Batman ensures that the public will not think of him as a hero. If indeed Batman wants to bring about a Gotham City in which he will be unnecessary, then it makes sense that he does not want to be acclaimed as a hero, or to inspire any imitators. Batman operates outside the law because the law, compromised by government and police corruption, is ineffective in stopping crime; in the world he wants to bring about, in which the law regains its effectiveness, there is no place for a vigilante who operates outside the law. Bruce Wayne would hardly end up in poverty or obscurity, but his alter ego, Batman, would be “dead,” just as Tom Doniphon is.

There is further irony. It was Dent who kept predicting that a hero eventually becomes a villain, as he himself ended up doing. The Batman, however, begins to overstep moral bounds, but by the film’s end has pulled back. Yet he pretends to have turned villain in order to conceal Dent’s own villainy.

The moviemakers have it both ways: the people of Gotham City may regard Batman as a murderer and criminal, but Commissioner Gordon makes a stirring speech to his son, praising Batman as a true hero, willing to sacrifice his own reputation, and, of course, the audience will agree with Gordon. Is there a certain moral confusion here, though? If vigilantism is wrong, and the people of Gotham shouldn’t look up to Batman as a hero, then why should we?

Moreover, Gordon and Batman are engaging in a cover-up of the truth about Harvey Dent. Do cover-ups ever truly work? Doesn’t the truth eventually emerge? Is it ever really for the best to conceal wrongdoing in order to preserve someone’s public image?

Alfred is engaged in a cover-up as well. He has read the letter that Rachel Dawes gave him before her death, explaining that she will not marry Bruce and that he should not count on her to give him a normal life once he gives up being Batman. Alfred decides not to give it to Wayne. Perhaps Alfred believes Wayne is better off continuing to regard Rachel as a sort of muse and inspiration, continuing to believe that it would have been possible for him to give up being Batman and lead a normal life with her. But would it be better for Wayne to come to terms with the truth?

Does Nolan believe that these cover-ups are necessary? Or is he setting up another sequel. in which the lies will be exposed (especially should Two-Face return from his seeming grave)?

In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance Tom Doniphon perpetrates a lie that works; he rids the territory of its most dangerous criminal, and makes it possible for lawyer Ransom Stoddard to become a hero in his place, to lead the territory into statehood, and to establish civilization and the rule of law there. Doniphon makes tremendous sacrifices: he never gets his rightful credit for killing Valance, he loses the woman he loves to Stoddard, and he dies impoverished and nearly forgotten, his time having passed. But the film indicates that those sacrifices were worth it. In the framing sequence of Ford’s film, the vision that Stoddard had, of law and civilization, has come to pass and is firmly established.

But what about the sacrifices in The Dark Knight? When critic Andrew Sarris writes of the “moral despair” in The Dark Knight, he seems specifically to be referring to the fates of “Mr. [Aaron] Eckhart’s Harvey Dent and Ms. [Maggie] Gyllenhaal’s Rachel Dawes. Their deaths are testaments to the omnipotently anarchic evil of Ledger’s Joker. And for once, Bruce Wayne/Batman, for all his wiles and wizardry, is unable to save either Dent or Rachel, when earlier Batmen could have rescued them with a climatic swoop of their Batmobile, and have thrown in a wedding for the two virtuous lovers besides.” Sarris is quite right. The death of Rachel seems to have had something of the same effect that the death of Gwen Stacy had on Marvel readers in the 1970s: a violation of the conventional genre expectations that the leading lady will never die, and a shocking sign that happy en dings are no longer guaranteed. Consider too that in Bill Finger’s original Two-Face two-parter in the 1940s, Two-Face’s sanity was ultimately restored, as were his handsome facial features.

Rachel and Harvey each represented Bruce Wayne’s hopes for the future: that Harvey could release Gotham from the grip of crime, that he could make Batman unnecessary, that Rachel would someday marry Bruce. With Rachel and Harvey both dead, Bruce now seems trapped in his role as Batman.

Batman is determined to conceal Dent’s transformation into Two-Face and to keep the image of Harvey Dent, crusader against crime, alive. That image, Batman appears to think, will motivate others to believe that the fight against crime and corruption in Gotham is not hopeless, and to carry on Dent’s crusade.

Arguably, this Batman needs to believe in the memory of Harvey Dent himself, so as not to concede that the war on crime is hopeless.

Still, Batman is perpetrating a lie and an illusion, deceiving the people of Gotham, supposedly for their own good. But at the movie’s end, with Harvey Dent dead, his case against Gotham’s criminal bosses has apparently collapsed. There us no sign that anyone will take Dent’s place or that Gotham will indeed be freed from criminal domination. Doniphon died knowing that his sacrifice had borne fruit. It remains an open question whether Batman’s sacrifices will bring about that new dawn that Dent prophesied.

And Batman too is the victim of illusion. Just as he and Gordon have deceived Gotham about Harvey Dent, so too Alfred has deceived Bruce Wayne about Rachel Dawes, in order to preserve his illusion that she would one day have married him.

So Bruce Wayne/Batman is trapped in lies, trapped in what may be his endless one-man war on crime, and he has willingly forfeited the support of the very citizenry if Gotham that he has saved from the Joker. Ebert is correct about the tragic aspect of The Dark Knight.

But Sarris is not entirely correct about the film’s “moral despair.” The Joker, that force of anarchy and amorality, remains alive, but the Batman has thwarted him for now. Batman has transcended the temptation to abuse his own power. Dent’s legacy is his appointment of the honest James Gordon as Police Commissioner. And, most importantly, those two ferryloads of Gothamites, some criminals, some not, passed the moral challenge that the Joker set them. There us hope in Gotham City after all. But one cannot rely on a single savior like Harvey Dent. The struggle of Batman, Gordon, and their fellow Gothamites to save their city will be a longer, harder struggle than they had hoped.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF

However condescending some of today’s critics may be towards comics, matters were far, far worse in the 1950s, when comics were widely accused of contributing to juvenile delinquency, the comics industry was investigated by Congress, and hundreds of comics professionals lost their jobs. Columbia University professor David Hadju recounts this dark period in disturbing detail in his new book The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America. You can find my review of the book in the July 7 edition of Publishers Weekly‘s online newsletter Comics Week. It has taken a half century for comics to recover and progress to the point that it is now no surprise to see graphic novels taken seriously in the pages of Publishers Weekly, The New York Times and other leading publications.

LINKS IN THE AMAZON CHAIN

You can find Hadju’s book at Amazon here.

As for one of my own books, since much of this week’s column is about the Joker, I’ll recommend The Supervillain Book: The Evil Side of Comics and Hollywood, edited by Gina Misiroglu and Michael Eury. Published by Visible Ink, this is an encyclopedia of supervillains in comics, film and television, for which I was a contributing writer.

–Copyright 2008 Peter Sanderson

Reading my report on the press preview of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s current exhibition, “Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy” (see “Comics in Context” #224: “My Cinco de Mayo”), you doubtless realized that the emphasis of the show is not on superhero costumes, but on how creations by leading contemporary fashion designers parallel the costume designs used in comics. So you might expect that when the Metropolitan devoted one of its “Sunday at the Met” symposiums of lectures and panels to this exhibition on June 22, the emphasis would likewise be on the show’s sponsor Giorgio Armani, Alexander McQueen, Jean-Paul Gaultier and other leading fashion designers whose work is represented in the exhibit.

But you would be wrong.

If comic books got their figurative feet through the doors of the Metropolitan through providing background for this fashion exhibit, they took center stage in the symposium, which was entirely about superhero costume design, whether in comics or in the movies. That’s because the Metropolitan’s Costume Institute entrusted the task of organizing the symposium (within a mere six weeks) to Dr. Peter Coogan, who should be a familiar name to regular readers of this column. Dr. Coogan wrote the landmark book, Superhero: The Secret Origins of a Genre, which defines both the superhero concept and the genre, and which I critiqued at great length over five weeks last year (See “Comics in Context” #162: “The Superhero Defined”, #163: “Are They on the List?”, #164: “Super Slayer”, #165: “The Supervillain Defined”, and #166: “Megahero vs. Megavillain”). Coogan is also co-founder and co-chairman of the Comic Arts Conference, which is held every year at the San Diego Con (Go see him there this month!), and has just founded the Institute for Comics Studies.

Introduced at the symposium by the exhibition’s curator, Andrew Bolton, Coogan set the stage for the day’s panels by delivering a talk entitled “E Pluribus Unitard: Notes toward a Theory of Superhero Costuming.”

He began by projecting onscreen an image of the cover of Action Comics #1, the comic that introduced Superman, the first true superhero, complete with colorful costume. Coogan told the audience that publisher Harry Donenfeld thought the cover looked so “ridiculous” that he banned Superman from appearing on the cover for the next five issues. Of course, Superman and Action #1 actually turned out to be enormous, revolutionary successes. But Donenfeld’s reaction suggests how new the idea of an action hero in costume was in 1938, so startlingly different that the close-minded thought it laughable. (Many people still have this knee-jerk reaction to the idea of heroes in costume today.) But Coogan declared that “superheroes wear costumes” and that the costume is a “central element” of the genre.

The costume, Coogan continued, projects a sense of authority. He described an experiment in which people proved more likely to obey individuals wearing gray uniforms reminiscent of policemen’s than they would obey people wearing casual street clothes.

Different colors convey different meanings. A light-colored uniform, Coogan said, seems “a bit weak,” whereas a black one conveys “power” and “strength.” The color blue, he said, projected “comfort” and “security.”

Coogan showed us a photograph of two police officers (a man and a woman, if I recall correctly), whose uniforms included blue shirts, thereby conveying the sense of security, and dark pants, projecting power, this achieving an appropriate balance.

Superman, Coogan went on, wears blue, the color of security, and also red, sa color that he said conveys “excitement,” “speed” and “action.”

Next up on screen was the original Captain Marvel, a character who is ignored in the exhibition. The Captain wears primarily red, the color of excitement. But he also wears the colors white and yellow, which Coogan contended, are “a little weak.” The result, he asserted, is that Captain Marvel is appropriate for “lighter” kinds of stories than Superman, even more “comedic” ones. The yellow in the Captain’s uniform, Coogan went on, is more properly identified as gold, which has “upper class connotations.”

The color black, Coogan stated, is appropriate for a “more aggressive” kind of hero. Hence, he said, Batman wears “dark colors” which convey “dominance.” Coogan pointed out that it was Batman’s original writer, Bill Finger, who suggested that Batman wear dark colors; Bob Kane, who first drew Batman, wanted to put him in a bright red shirt. Coogan explained that the Batman creators achieved “balance” by adding the sidekick Robin, who wore bright colors instead.

(Reflecting on Coogan’s lecture, I found myself thinking that he had made it clearer why Spider-Man’s notorious black costume was wrong for the character, who traditionally wears red–representing excitement and action–and blue, conveying his goal of protecting ordinary people.)

Showing Captain Marvel’s enemy Black Adam on screen. Coogan noted that Black Adam wears black, but also gold, denoting “royalty” and “privilege.”

“Costume expresses character,” Coogan summed up. It also provides “credibility,” indicating “expertise” and denoting that the wearer is worthy of “trust.” Coogan referred us to a sequence in which Dick Grayson, in between abandoning his role as Robin and becoming the superhero Nightwing, realized that he needs a costume in order to be taken seriously as a superheroic crimefighter. The costume is the outward sign that the wearer is a competent, trustworthy superhero.

Then Coogan drew our attention to the superhero’s traditional chest insignia, which Coogan calls his “chevron.” Superman’s “S,” he said, stands for “Superman,” itself, a name that indicates the “best we can be.” Batman’s bat chevron refers to “his biography,” specifically the moment “when the bat flew through his window”: a part of his origin that the public does not know. So the chevron, too, expresses something important about the hero’s character.

In contrast, Coogan then showed us Doctor Occult, an early character devised by Superman’s co-creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. this image was from a storyline in which Doctor Occult, a detective who investigates the supernatural, abandoned his ordinary street clothes and donned a costume, including shorts and a cape. But, Coogan pointed out, this “costume doesn’t convey anything.” Indeed, it lacks a chevron; it’s a generic outfit with no specific reference to Doctor Occult’s mission, biography or character.

Returning to Batman, Coogan noted that the character is primarily devoted to “vengeance” on criminals, not “saving” innocents,’ and that Batman’s dark costume and bat chevron “reinforce” that idea. (I suggest that it’s not quite that simple. Certainly the contemporary tendency is to put Batman in very dark colors, and in the Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan Batman movies, he’s all in black. But for much of his history Batman’s costume was colored light gray or even light purple, with his cape, cowl, boots and gloves in ordinary blue, the color of security and “saving.” This color scheme was more appropriate to the Batman of the 1950s and 1960s, including the 1960s TV show, when Batman was portrayed as neither grim nor gritty, and he was not written as if he were compulsively driven by a need for vengeance on all criminals. Indeed, the Batman of this period would exchange wisecracks with Robin in combat.)

Showing us a picture of the Golden Age Flash, Coogan pointed to his combination of red, for “power, speed and action, and blue, communicating trustworthiness. (So what does it mean that the Silver Age Flash is dressed almost entirely in red with no blue at all? That the Silver Age series put more of an emphasis in his unearthly speed, as indeed it did? That its focus was on Flash battling super-villains rather than rescuing ordinary people?)

Captain America, of course, wears the colors of the American flag, representing, in Coogan’s words, “the best of America.” But Coogan reminded us that in the 1970s, when writer Steve Englehart reacted to the Watergate scandals by having the Captain become disillusioned with the government, he temporarily adopted the persona and “dark costume” of Nomad, the man without a country.

As for super-villains, Coogan noted that they “tend to lack chevrons” inasmuch as they “don’t need to establish credibility” for trustworthiness. A super-villain’s “whole costume” or “whole body” is what “expresses character.” (The Green Goblin would be a good example, I think, or the face of the Joker.) Super-villains with chevrons, Coogan continued, include “doppelganger villains” like Black Adam and Venom. (They wear the chevrons of the heroes of whom they are the opposites.)

Coogan also pointed out that DC uses chevrons more than Marvel does, that “Jack Kirby created the Marvel costume tradition,” and that the Hulk’s entire body expresses his character: that he is a monster. Coogan may be overstating the difference between Marvel and DC. When the Fantastic Four acquired their costumes, they had “4” chevrons, indicating the individuals’ primary role as being members of this team of four. Of course, Spider-Man has his spider chevron; Daredevil has his “DD” insignia, reinforcing his name; the original X-Men had their “X” belt buckles indicating their team membership, their allegiance to Professor X, and their “x-tra” mutant powers; and Thor had a hammer symbol, shaped like a “T,” the first letter of his name, on his belt buckle. Even Doctor Strange’s Eye of Agamotto amulet doubles as a chevron. But yes, with Marvel’s emphasis on heroes who were “different,” Kirby co-created heroes who were identifiable from their unusual shapes and physical appearances, like the Hulk, the Beast, the Angel, Iceman, and the Thing. This continues a tradition that goes back at Marvel to the original Human Torch back in 1939.

Coogan next turned to Zatanna, who in the 1960s and today wears a classically sexy variation on a stage magician’s traditional top hat and formal wear. Indeed, Zatanna is a professional stage magician who also knows real magic, which she employs when acting as a superheroine. Then he showed us the cover of Justice League of America #161, in which, in perhaps DC Comics’s greatest fashion faux pas in its history, Zatanna switched to what seems a more generic sort of costume. Coogan noted that Zatanna now seemed more like a “sorceress” or “witch,” but not a “stage magician.” In other words, her costume “didn’t express character,” since show biz is essential to Zatanna’s character. So there’s one reason why it was a relief when DC put Zatanna back in her original costume. (Her long legs in her trademark net stockings were a good reason, too, but Dr. Coogan didn’t mention them.)

Concluding his talk, Dr Coogan showed the audience a costume design that he and his brother had created based on that real life iconic figure, Dr. Stephen T. Colbert, D. F. A.. As “Americon,” Dr. Colbert was garbed in the patriotic colors of the American flag, since, as Coogan noted, Colbert has been pictured literally wrapped in the flag on his television show. The credit sequences of The Colbert Report prominently feature an American eagle, which Dr. Colbert has clearly adopted as a symbol of himself; Dr. Coogan reminded us about “Stephen Jr.,” the baby eagle named after Colbert. And so there’s an eagle chevron on Americon’s costume. Americon also wears cowboy boots, since Dr. Colbert advocates “cowboy politics.” And, of course, Americon wears prominent bracelets, reminiscent of the real Stephen Colbert’s celebrated “wriststrong bracelet.” Now here is a costume that truly expresses character, mission and biography!

My one quarrel with Americon’s costume is that he doesn’t wear glasses, which seem to me to be Colbert’s foremost iconic visual trademark: even his science fiction avatar, Tek Jansen, wears glasses. Dr. Coogan told me that Americon as Colbert’s secret identity, so he wouldn’t want to be recognized. But it seems to me that Stephen Colbert, in his TV persona, always wants to be recognized. So Dr. Coogan and I have agreed to disagree. Dr. Colbert, if you somehow find and read this, only you can resolve our dispute.

Next came the writers’ panel, moderated by British scholar Richard Reynolds, whose pioneering book, Superheroes: A Modern Mythology, I acquired and first read many years ago: it was a pleasure to meet him at last. The panelists were Paul Levitz, president and publisher of DC Comics, and Danny Fingeroth, whose books Superman on the Couch and Disguised as Clark Kent I have reviewed in this column (see “Comics in Context” #41, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204). Both Levitz and Fingeroth have also been superhero comics writers and editors, Paul for DC, and Danny at Marvel.

On the auditorium screen. Reynolds displayed images from Action #1. Referring to Disguised as Clark Kent, Reynolds noted that Fingeroth regards Superman’s adoption of his Clark Kent identity as as “metaphor for the assimilation of the immigrant.” Before answering, Fingeroth drew our attention to Joe Shuster’s strikingly drawn panel in which Superman, having just rescued Lois Lane for the first time, tells her she “needn’t be afraid of me.” As Danny pointed out, though Superman is smiling and trying to be reassuring, he is also leaning into her. She looks terrified, and why not? Superman is definitely sending mixed messages. I suddenly realized that Siegel and Shuster may be more sophisticated in their writing and art than I had credited them for.

Then Fingeroth referred to Quentin Tarantino’s screenplay for Kill Bill, Part 2, in which he raises the question of whether Superman or Clark Kent is the “real one.” “The real one is Kal-El,” Fingeroth declared, referring to Superman by his Kryptonian name. As for Superman and Clark Kent, “both are assumed identities.” (This is actually still more complex. In the Golden Age continuity and in John Byrne’s revamped Superman continuity, Superman/Clark did not learn he had been born on Krypton–and had been Kal-El–until after he became an adult.) As he does in one of his books, Fingeroth referred to film director Sam Fuller’s observation that each of us has three faces: the one we show to the world, the one we show to family and friends, and the face we see in the mirror. Presumably in Fingeroth’s view, Kal-El is this third face.

Fingeroth said he was also now accepting the idea of the superhero costume as a “full-body mask”: he means that it is an extension of the mask, helping to create the alternate persona as the mask itself does.

Fingeroth also took an approach making the point that for a superhero to adopt a costume is not all that different from what all of us do in everyday life. Earlier that day, I had asked Danny if he had seen the statement on the Met’s website regarding the “Superheroes” symposium that no one in costume would be allowed admission to the museum. I wondered if the Museum staff really thought there was a danger of fans in costume showing up, as at a comic con. Danny replied, quite correctly, that all of us are in costume, meaning that anything we choose to wear is, in a sense, a costume.

Indeed, it was amusing to see how some of the symposium’s panelists defied the ban on costumes in minor ways; Danny wore a tie with Spider-Man images, another speaker, Scott Bukatman, wore a shirt covered with reproductions of comics panels, and even the characteristically properly attired Paul Levitz wore a black necktie with a Batsignal on it.

Now on stage, Fingeroth made the same point: “We all make choices what to wear.” He assured us, “I don’t wear a Spider-Man tie every day.” But his unspoken point was that he wore it today in his role as comics expert and veteran Spider-Man writer and editor.

Fingeroth observed that “people wear a suit and tie to work” but then “dress casually on weekends,” as if to say, “that’s the real me.” In contrast, he went on, “people who work with their hands,” such as construction workers, “will often dress up on weekends,” as if to say “this is the real me.” Thus the character who dresses in a superhero costume is raising the question of which side of a person represents his job, and “which is the free part of ourselves.”

I’d go further by saying that the superhero persona and the civilian identity both represent real sides of the character’s personality. Neither the “suit and tie” nor the “casual dress” by itself represents a person’s “real” character. Rather, each represents a different side of the same person’s character. But what Fingeroth insightfully pointed out seems to indicate that people have a need to believe that they can alter their identities, that they are not defined by the humdrum duties of life, and that they each have a “real” personality that manifests itself outside the world of daily drudgery. Obviously, this is part of the psychological appeal of superheroes: the costumed superhero represents that liberated inner self who doesn’t have to wear the uniform society imposes on him in his job.

Displaying images of Batman over the decades, Reynolds described a shot of Adam West and Burt Ward as the Dynamic Duo in the 1960s as “playful, easy on the eyes” and not scary.” In contrast, he showed the battlesuit worn by Michael Keaton in Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman film. which Reynolds described as “more technological, more like armor.” The later, more serious Batman is clearly more formidable and intimidating, and lives in a more dangerous and sinister world than the paternal, protective, but somewhat ludicrous Caped Crusader of the 1960s television series. Reynolds then showed a picture of the Batman costume from the current film series, which he described as “even more technological” in appearance. The 1960s TV Batman now seems to live in a very innocent world indeed, where he needs no more bodily protection than his cloth costume affords, and his principal weapons are his fists, not anything technological.

Next Reynolds showed the classic Captain America costume on screen. Probably thinking back to Peter Coogan’s discourse on costume colors, Paul Levitz observed that “˜like most comics artists,” Jack Kirby was “not very analytical.” Levitz said that such artists would say that if the hero wore blue and red, then “the villain must be green,” implying that these artists would not have thought about what each color signified psychologically. However, Levitz praised “Kirby’s instinct” in creating enduring superhero costumes. I believe that a number if the great comics creators of the past, including Kirby and Stan Lee, to a large extent worked from instinct, devising characters and stories with depths and subtexts that they may not have consciously been aware of.

The original Captain Marvel was followed in the auditorium screen by Jack Cole’s Plastic Man. Reynolds likened the stretching Plastic Man to “the mutant body,” the term that Andrew Bolton applies in the exhibition to the unusual bodies of various X-Men characters. Paul Levitz proposed that “Jack Cole’s work descends more from animation than other comics of the time,” and that Cole “saw the character in motion.”

Moving to Wonder Woman, Reynolds commented on how a Greek statue of an Amazon, complete with a “short skirt, even” (clearly alluding to Wonder Woman’s costume) stands on the way to the Met’s “Superheroes” exhibit. Paul Levitz noted that Wonder Woman and the original Captain Marvel were the major characters in the “1940s pantheon” of superheroes who were not created by Jewish immigrants. Both Captain Marvel and Wonder Woman are explicitly “influenced by classical mythology,” and Levitz speculated that their creators were “perhaps more likely to be exposed to that on a formal level.”

When he got to Iron Man, Reynolds pronounced him the “first completely technological superhero.” (Well, there’s the Golden Age Robotman, but I see Reynolds’ point.) Reynolds pointed out that from Iron Man’s first appearance in Tales of Suspense #39 to his next, he switched from gray armor to gold armor, and within less than a year to the more familiar, far less bulky red and gold armor. Paul Levitz then commented that it was Jack Kirby who drew the first cover with Iron Man (Though Levitz did not say so, it seems that Kirby designed the original armor) and Steve Ditko who designed the red and gold armor. Levitz called this an example of the “improvisational feeling” of the comics of this period: “We’re making this up as we go along.”

Levitz was struck by the fact that the new Iron Man movie “finally explains the circle on his chest.” (It is the power source that keeps his heart beating.) “forty-six years later” (after Iron Man’s creation) Levitz said, a “facet” of Iron Man’s costume “becomes a storytelling facet.” Fingeroth marveled that this circle. which he called an “insignia,” was “always just above his heart. . .always subtly there.” I’d say it was as if Kirby subconsciously connected the circle to the heart, and it took all these years for someone to consciously figure out that connection. (To nitpick, past Iron Man writers and artists, including Stan Lee, have used the circle on Iron Man’s chest as a device to project energy beams. But I agree that the movie came up with a better explanation which turns that circle into a chevron linked to Iron Man’s character and history: the outwardly invincible, armored warrior dependent on an injured heart within.)

Next on screen was the cover of Amazing Spider-Man #3 with the introduction of Doctor Octopus, whose body, with its four metal tentacles, serves as the equivalent of a costume. Reynolds observed that Doctor Octopus is a villain “mirroring” his nemesis Spider-Man, since Doctor Octopus actually has eight limbs, just as a real spider does.

Reynolds then moved from the Ditko Spider-Man to John Romita, Sr.’s work on the series. Romita made Peter Parker much handsomer and is justly known for his glamorous depictions of female leads Gwen Stacy and Mary Jane Watson. Reynolds remarked that Romita captured the “swinging ’60s” in his portrayal of the supporting cast. Paul Levitz commented that “Many great artists clearly didn’t look at people in the streets,” perhaps because a comics artist would be “locked in a room by yourself” working long hours. But Romita, Levitz asserted, was an exception, who not only paid attention to “fashion” but also the “physicality of motion” and “acting” in portraying his characters.

Then up on the screen came the cover of The Incredible Hulk #195, showing those two current movie stars, the Hulk and the Abomination, grappling with one another (see “Comics in Context” #226″ “Half a Decade with the Hulk”). The Hulk’s green skin serves the identifying function of a costume, and as Danny Fingeroth explained, so too the Abomination’s grotesquely reptilian hide became “an identifying covering for the character.” Fingeroth also pointed out that the Abomination was a “darker, more powerful, crazy house mirror version of the Hulk.”

On showing of the cover of X-Men (first series) #100, by the late Dave Cockrum, Reynolds said that Levitz had told him that Cockrum loved creating costumes. Levitz remarked that typically, an artist will do one costume sketch for a character, but that Cockrum was different: “he’d do a dozen different costumes” (see “Comics in Context” #172).

Then Reynolds showed the cover to Captain America and the Falcon #176, in which the original Captain, Steve Rogers, instead wore the Nomad costume that Peter Coogan had mentioned earlier, rather than submit to government control. Reynolds segued from this tale inspired by Watergate, to a story that Paul Levitz had written regarding masks and costumes, inspired by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s political witch hunts of alleged Communists in the 1950s. In Levitz’s “The Defeat of the Justice Society” in Adventure Comics #466, Senator McCarthy demands that the Justice Society, the leading superhero team of the 1940s, unmask and reveal their true identities if they are truly law-abiding citizens. Rather than comply, the Justice Society disbands and the individual members retire from their superhero careers (see “Comics in Context” #217: “The Next Frontier”). Of course, in real life it was during the McCarthy era that most Golden Age superhero series came to their end. Levitz explained on the panel that the “1950s witch hunts” provided him with a “good metaphor to explain the “absence of the heroes,” adding that their position was that “Our faces–our names–our lives are our own business.”

Reynolds then suggested that Levitz’s McCarthy story had “opened” the way for the political themes later on in Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore’s Watchmen. Levitz shrugged and said, “I don’t think this story has linkage to Dark Knight” or Watchmen, but noted that as a comics writer “you’re working on the shoulders of others,” and comics writers “are conscious of stories that have gone before.”

Reynolds’ array of images included not only costumes being worn by heroes, but also empty costumes that proved strangely affecting. The cover for Avengers #230, in which Yellowjacket (Henry Pym) is expelled from the Avengers for betraying them, shows his teammates looking down at an empty Yellowjacket uniform. Danny Fingeroth said that the artist, Al Milgrom, “conveyed a sense of shame in the empty costume,” so much so that “you want to look away.”

A little later, Reynolds showed John Romita, Sr.’s classic “Spider-Man No More” cover from Amazing Spider-Man #60. This iconic image, which director Sam Raimi recreated in his Spider-Man 2 movie, shows Peter Parker walking away from his empty costume, which he has consigned to a trash can. Danny Fingeroth pointed out how the figure of Peter Parker was “framed by rain clouds,” and how the abandoned “costume has a life of its own,” with the glove lying on the ground looking “forlorn.” Fingeroth also noted “what you can do with the eyes of Spider-Man’s mask, as in this picture,” to convey emotion, despite the fact that the eyes are blank.

Reynolds also showed the cover of Amazing Spider-Man #252, which introduced Spider-Man’s black costume, which eventually became the costume for Venom, a character who better suited the costume’s color scheme. Fingeroth, a former Marvel editor, explained that the black costume was originally “tied in with he promotional series Secret Wars” and “was a thing we were going to do for a few months,” but it “was popular,” so it “went on and in.” I remember that at the time Marvel gave the impression to the public that Spider-Man’s costume change was permanent, or at least for the foreseeable future. (I was working at Marvel, and that’s the impression even I got!) So it was gratifying to hear Danny admit that the black costume was always meant to be a short-term gimmick.

Images from Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen showed lovers Nite Owl and Silk Spectre both in costumes and completely nude; Paul Levitz confirmed that next year’s Watchmen movie “will be R-rated.”

When Todd McFarlane’s Spawn came onto the screen. Reynolds commented that he was an example of “heroes who look like villains,” with his red and black color scheme for his costume, and his “complete head mask” completely concealing his face. (Then again, Spider-Man also wears a full face mask, and his costume was originally colored more as red and black, with blue highlights. Surely it’s the angular, even pointed design elements of Spawn’s costume, masking the natural, rounded shape of the human body, that makes it seem more sinister than Spider-Man’s costume.)

Moving further towards the present, Reynolds unexpectedly showed the concluding sequence from Alex Ross and Mark Waid’s Kingdom Come, set in the “Planet Krypton” theme restaurant. Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman turn up in everyday “civilian” clothing, but the waiters and waitresses are all garbed as members of the Justice League. Reynolds confessed that he found this role reversal “very disconcerting.” I personally am not disturbed by this, but I’m aware if another, metafictional level of reversal that perhaps Reynolds is not: Alex Ross depicted some of the people in this scene as lookalikes for real life comics professionals.

Next came a group portrait from Alan Moore’s Top Ten series, which Reynolds described as “Hill Street Blues with superheroes.” Reynolds drew our attention to the way that this series combines characters in superhero costumes with characters who look like they’re from horror movies, and characters dressed to suit other genres as well.

Then there were two sequences from Marvel’s The Ultimates, which presents the Avengers of an alternate continuity. The first sequence paralleled the one from Kingdom Come: Captain America, Iron Man and Thor were in everyday dress at a restaurant, though they chose not to go to a theme restaurant. Danny Fingeroth pointed out how each character retained a distinctive look, even out if costume. You couldn’t say that Captain America was in his civilian identity: as Steve Rogers, he wore a military uniform. Tony Stark (Iron Man) was described as wearing a “royal” collar, suggesting his status as a member of America’s wealthy elite. So even their everyday clothing expressed their characters.

The other segment spotlighted the Ultimate universe’s version of the Defenders, whose tacky outfits reflected their status as incompetent superhero wannabes. Reynolds pointed to what he termed a “peekaboo” shot of Valkyrie in a thong and suggested that her costuming indicated her real motives for trying to become a superhero.

Then came a sequence in which the Justice League meet with Lex Luthor, when he was President in DC’s continuity, in the Oval Office. Reynolds said he found this image “disconcerting” and tried, but failed, to draw comments from his wary fellow panelists on the subject of a super-villain as U. S. president. Danny Fingeroth joked, “But a lot of old Jewish people in Florida voted for Lex Luthor,” a reference to the confusion about the “butterfly ballots” in the 2000 election.

Whereas the Justice Leaguers in this scene are in full costume, Luthor wears an ordinary black business suit. But Paul Levitz perceptively pointed out that “In a sense the Oval Office is an analogue to the costumes.” Not only is the Oval Office itself an iconic image, but it incorporates symbolic imagery”: as Levitz said, “even the presidential seal in the carpet,” thus creating what he termed “a ceremonial space.”

Then Reynolds showed the cover from Darwyn Cooke’s DC: The New Frontier Vol. 1 paperback, in which Cooke both recreates traditional superhero costumes of classic characters as they looked in past decades but also, in Reynolds’ word, manages to “refresh” their look. Levitz hailed Cooke’s work as an example of the “power of the individual artist to interpret” tradition and to utilize a “personal style” to make “a new statement with characters that are as much as “seventy years old.”

Towards the end of his PowerPoint presentation, Reynolds showed the audience a picture of costumed superheroes from comics in India, telling us that this “way of storytelling”–the use of that American creation, costumed superheroes–has spread outside the United States, across the world.

However, later that day, after the end of the symposium, the participants headed to an Upper East Side bar, where Richard Reynolds and I discussed just why as Reynolds contended, attempts to create British superheroes never quite worked. What is it that is specifically American about the superhero concept, and that is alien to British culture, even if so many Brits read superhero comics and even write and draw American superhero comics?

But that was still hours off. I’ve only covered the first two panels in this day-long landmark Metropolitan Museum symposium on superheroes, and I will return to my account of the day in the near future.

LINKS IN THE AMAZON CHAIN

You can find the following books by participants in the “Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy” symposium at the following locations on Amazon.com:

Andrew Bolton, Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy

Peter Coogan, Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre

Danny Fingeroth, Superman on the Couch

Danny Fingeroth, Disguised as Clark Kent

Richard Reynolds, Superheroes: A Modern Mythology

Paul Levitz’s “The Defeat of the Justice Society” from Adventure Comics #466 is reprinted in the paperback Justice Society Vol. 2.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF

Two of my own books are being sold at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in connection with “Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy.” They too are available on Amazon: The Marvel Vault, which Roy Thomas and I wrote, and The Official Marvel Travel Guide to New York City.

–Copyright 2008 Peter Sanderson

I find it hard to believe, but it was five years ago this month that I started writing “Comics in Context,” which was originally at IGN and has since moved here to Quick Stop Entertainment. From time to time I wonder how many people are out there reading this, and whether or not the effort of turning out over two hundred installments has been worth it. It doesn’t help that certain members of the comics blogosphere have described my online writings as “insane” or “crazy” because each is as long as, say, a magazine feature article. Then recently a colleague advised me that none of the critical essays I’ve done for this column could be taken seriously by cultural institutions, because they’ve been published on the newfangled Internet instead of in good old-fashioned books. (I may be a Luddite in many respects but I can already imagine Graduate Students of the Future reading this week’s column and reacting to this with shock and disbelief.)

But I prefer to think that over these last five years I’ve built a substantial body of work in this column. And every once in a while I run into somebody who turns out to be a reader of this column and expresses his appreciation. Due to upheavals in my life and the pressing need to find paying work, lately I haven’t been producing new installments of “Comics in Context” as often as I’d like. But I intend to continue with the column, and once again, I’d like to thank my editor for these last five years, Ken Plume, for talking me into starting the column in the first place, and for supporting my efforts all this time.

I write my second “Comics in Context” piece (“Comics in Context” #2: “Crouching Banner, Hidden Faust”) about director Ang Lee’s disappointing Hulk movie for Universal back in 2003. By coincidence, June 2008 brought the opening of a new movie about Marvel’s green-skinned monster, The Incredible Hulk, directed by Louis Leterrier, produced by Universal and Marvel Studios, and featuring a newscast, including Edward Norton as Bruce Banner, Liv Tyler as Betty Ross, and William Hurt as her father, General “Thunderbolt” Ross.

So, on this anniversary of the start of my column, this gives me the opportunity to revisit some old subjects of mine, and not just the topic of cinematic treatments if the Hulk. One of my motives for starting my column was my irritation at mainstream media writers who had begun writing about comics and comics-based movies only to vent their prejudices against–and flaunt their ignorance of–the comics medium and the superhero genre.

In the last half decade the treatment of comics in the mainstream media has vastly improved. But the battle is still far from over. Take, for example, Rex Reed’s review of The Incredible Hulk movie in the June 23, 2008 issue of The New York Observer, titled “Marvel Mush”, in which he writes, “If you didn’t waste your allowance on the Marvel comics created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby 46 years ago.” Some of us think that the Lee/Kirby Hulk is a classic of American popular culture. (And anyone who spent his allowance on Incredible Hulk #1 in 1962 and didn’t throw it out now made a very valuable investment.)

It was way back in the first and second installments of “Comics in Context” (See “Comics in Context” #1: “Big Dumb Fun” and #2: “Crouching Banner, Hidden Faust”) that I first took to task New York Times film critic A. O. Scott for his clueless approach to the superhero genre and to comics in general. In his June 13, 2008 Times review of The Incredible Hulk movie, Scott at first seems unchanged and unrepentant in his attitude to the genre: ” If you really need a superhero to tide you over until Hellboy and Batman resurface next month–and honestly, do you? really? why?–I guess this big green dude will do.” I suppose that Mr. Scott finds it utterly inexplicable why any of you would venture into a comics shop once a week to buy even one superhero comic.

But I find myself agreeing with Scott when he remarks that “The Adequate Hulk would have been a more suitable title” for this movie than The Incredible Hulk. I thought that Ang Lee had no real feel for the superhero genre; the new movie, directed by Louis Leterrier, is much more successful in staging the action sequences and maintaining the momentum of an adventure story. The Incredible Hulk movie was reasonably entertaining in those terms. But beneath the shiny surface of CGI monsters and spectacular battles, the movie felt thin and superficial.

Why? Scott answers “without a vivid, complex character at the center of the movie, even the more inspired bits. . .feel perfunctory and familiar.”

Certainly Edward Norton’s performance as Bruce Banner inspires sympathy for the character: a good man whom fate has afflicted with a curse that would break the spirit of most people, and yet he struggles on, seeking a cure, literally seeking the peace of mind that would free him from his inner demons. But why should we care about the rampaging, rageoholic monster that is this movie’s version of the Hulk?

In his June 23, 2008 review in The New Yorker, critic David Denby contends that “And the truth is that, in any version, the Hulk is a dull beast. He’s just a big angry guy; he has no soul, no oddities, no vulnerable or tender spots. King Kong and Frankenstein’s monster are Byron and Keats in comparison with the Hulk, as I wrote when Ang Lee’s version came out.”

First, I should point out Denby’s overreaching in implying that he knows every version of the Hulk. Really? How many Hulk comics has he read, do you suppose? Is he aware of Peter David’s various versions of a smart Hulk during his long run on the comic? I doubt it: later in this review Denby expresses his wish that the new movie “would transcend its comic-book origins,” implying that comics are a medium lower in the artistic hierarchy than the cinema.

But I agree that the Hulk of this movie is indeed “a dull beast.” He mostly expresses literally violent rage. This may lead to spectacular battle scenes, but it makes the character, as a personality, tiresome. It’s not quite a one-note performance, though. Despite what Denby says, the Hulk has a “tender spot” since the Hulk grows calm and even seems emotionally vulnerable when he’s alone with Betty Ross. That makes for a two-note performance, which still isn’t enough.

The new movie pits the Hulk against his opposite number from the comics, another gamma-irradiated monster, the Abomination, whom Stan Lee and Gil Kane created in Tales to Astonish #90 (April 1967). But why should we root for the Hulk when he fights the Abomination? What makes the Hulk better than the Abomination? Is it simply that we know that the Hulk can transform back into Bruce Banner, who is a nice guy? Shouldn’t we care about Banner in his Hulk form as well, if the Hulk is the protagonist of the film?

But in the film, the Hulk is presented at almost all times as a destructive monster. This may lead to spectacular battles that will excite the action lovers in the audience. But why should one feel any sympathy for a creature continually snarling with anger? In the movie Banner proposes to General “Thunderbolt” Ross that he turn into the Hulk in order to stop the Abomination from tearing up Harlem. Inexplicably, General Ross agrees. But why? As he is presented in the movie, this Hulk would more likely go start a destructive rampage of his own through New York City, or perhaps even join with the Abomination in wreaking havoc in Harlem.

At least since he wrote the Simon and Schuster paperback Origins of Marvel Comics, Stan Lee has stated that his vision of the Hulk was inspired by Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and by Frankenstein’s Monster, specifically as portrayed by Boris Karloff on film. Karloff’s Monster was dangerous, easily enraged and violent, to be sure, but he was also like a child in a powerful, grotesque adult body, lonely and longing for companionship, often not engaging in gratuitous violence but fighting back against his persecutors. In the Hulk’s original six issue series, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko experimented with the character, portraying him more like a Mr. Hyde to Banner’s Dr. Jekyll: this Hulk was brutal and had a violent temper, but was intelligent. It was in the Hulk’s subsequent series in Tales to Astonish in the 1960s that Lee and his collaborators perfected the classic Hulk, moving more in the direction of the Karloff Frankenstein’s Monster. This is the Hulk as a child in a superhuman adult body. Banner’s brilliant mind has regressed to the undeveloped state of a small child. Like a toddler, the Hulk is egocentric, thinking the world revolves around him: hence his continual boasts about his own power. He is also easily prone to temper tantrums if he doesn’t get his way, but whereas a small child is powerless to cause major damage, the Hulk’s tantrums have catastrophic consequences. Stan Lee’s classic Hulk is caught in a contradiction. He insists he just wants to be left alone, like a sullen child. In Tales to Astonish and Stan Lee’s stories in the Hulk’s second series, the Hulk primarily fights only against those who have disturbed his solitude and attacked him first, whether it’s the armed forces or a super-villain. But the Hulk, in seeming contradiction, also longs for companionship and love. Hence the Hulk regards Betty as his friend, and Rick Jones too, although their relationship has its ups and downs. (Since the classic Hulk has the mentality of a prepubescent child, he doesn’t have conscious sexual feelings towards Betty.) The classic Hulk is not merely Bruce Banner’s Mr. Hyde, he is Banner’s inner child, granted superhuman power. By extension, the Hulk represents the reader’s dark side and his inner child as well.

It is crucially important that Stan Lee allowed his classic Hulk to talk. Of course, a character given only to roaring wouldn’t have worked well as a protagonist in the comics medium. But though the Hulk’s dialogue, Lee enabled the character to express not simply his rage but also his other emotions, his loneliness, his preference for avoiding conflict unless provoked, his understandable resentment of his persecutors like general Ross, and his sentiments for the few individuals who treat him kindly. One of Stan Lee’s greatest talents is his ability to delineate characterization through dialogue. Through his writing of the Hulk, both the Hulk’s dialogue and his narration, he cast the Hulk as a genuine anti-hero, more sinned against than sinning, a persecuted outcast from society, who nonetheless was capable of genuine bravery and heroism in fighting back against his persecutors. Through the Hulk, as with the other classic Marvel heroes of the 1960s, readers can see their own feelings of alienation writ large. In short, Stan Lee made it possible for readers to sympathize with the Hulk. Through dialogue, Stan Lee presented the Hulk as a thinking, feeling person, even if he was mentally handicapped. The Hulk in the new movie is more like an animal, vicious against intruders but submissive towards his mistress Betty, as if he were her pet.

In Ang Lee’s Hulk the monster never spoke. (Nor did the Hulk speak in the now-classic 1970s live action television series. (But I was never a fan of that series in part because it too strayed too far from my concept of the Hulk as a character.) Towards the end of Louis Leterrier’s Incredible Hulk, the monster utters his first words, “Hulk smash!” in keeping with the movie’s depiction of his as a continually raging beast. What if in the next Hulk movie, the filmmakers let him speak more. Instead of portraying the Hulk as a “beast” incapable of speech, let him voice his thoughts, however clouded they may be. Let’s see the primitive, primal human within the monster.

In his June 12 review in Newsweek, David Ansen hits upon a further problem with the film, writing that “When the sensitive, physically unprepossessing Banner/Norton turns into the gargantuan, muscle-bound, growling Hulk, there’s a total disconnect. They don’t seem remotely related to each other, which makes it hard to have an emotional through-line. The actor is replaced by a special effect, and though you may develop feelings for this heroic beast they aren’t the same feelings you have for Banner.”

I don’t think that the Hulk in the new movie seems “heroic” or even antiheroic, but simply a threat. The fact that the human playing Banner is replaced by a CGI version of the Hulk worsens the “disconnect” between Banner and his alter ego, who seem to have very little in common. Is there any psychological resemblance between them at all?

Having now seen a good number of superhero movies, A. O. Scott has developed enough insight into them to make a very perceptive point in his aforementioned New York Times review: “Superhero movies depend not only on virtuosic special effects or action set pieces, but also, perhaps even more, on the psychological drama of existential division. The mild-mannered reporter is also the man of steel; the reclusive millionaire dons mask and cape to fight evil.”

Scott continues, “The better superhero performances explore the tensions inherent in their protagonists’ double lives. . . . But the contradictions and continuities between Bruce Banner and the monster he becomes figure surprisingly little in The Incredible Hulk. When Betty asks Bruce what the transformation feels like he answers that the Hulk “˜isn’t me,’ and in taking this disavowal at face value the movie sacrifices opportunities for pathos as well as humor.”

Scott missed the ambiguity in that exchange between Bruce and Betty. When Banner claims the Hulk “isn’t me,” Betty points out that the Hulk seemed to recognize her. Indeed, the fact that the presence of Banner’s beloved Betty soothes the Hulk is a strong indication that the Hulk and Banner are indeed psychologically connected. In claiming that the Hulk “isn’t me,” Banner is therefore engaging in denial, repelled by the Hulk’s savagery.

Even in the classic Stan Lee Hulk stories of the 1960s there seems little or no psychological connection between Banner and the Hulk. Indeed, in the story “The Monster’s Analyst” in The Incredible Hulk #227 (September 1978), written by Roger Stern and Peter Gillis, Banner’s psychiatrist Doc Samson contends that the Hulk and Bruce Banner are two separate beings. In other words, they have different minds which battle for dominance within the same physical form.

It was writer Bill Mantlo who decisively overturned this interpretation in Incredible Hulk #312 (October 1985), in which he demonstrated that the Hulk was the expression of the powerful, but long repressed anger that had been building in Bruce Banner since his deeply unhappy childhood, dominated by his psychologically and physically abusive father. Mantlo’s story appears to have been a strong influence on Ang Lee’s Hulk movie, which used Banner’s father as its principal villain.

There are other hints in the new movie of a psychological link between Banner and the Hulk. At the university in Virginia, it is when Banner sees Betty get hurt by a soldier that his pulse rate finally goes over the top, triggering his transformation into the Hulk. In other words, it was his anger at seeing Betty hurt that triggered his violent rage to punish those he held responsible.

Moreover, when we last see Banner in the movie, he is engaging in one of his meditation rituals to achieve inner calm. It doesn’t work, and the pupils in his eyes turn green, the signal (borrowed from the 1970s Incredible Hulk live action TV series) that he is about to transform into the Hulk. Yet Banner wears a thin, enigmatic smile in this final close-up.

Denby argued in his review that “If he [Bruce Banner] were ambivalent about the powers that lie within him – drawn to the excitement but also repelled by it – the tension for the audience might be overwhelming, because Bruce’s mixed emotions would speak to the way we’re tempted and repelled by anger, too. But the movie presents Bruce conventionally, as a man who has a strange, hateful disease that he can’t get rid of. Bruce is merely disgusted by his situation (there’s no make-my-day gleam in his eye as he approaches fury), and, afterward, he’s just exhausted and empty. If he could only describe for us the wild pleasure he feels – the allure of the forbidden struggling against morality and sense – then the movie would transcend its comic-book origins and become a kind of tragic fable of id released and regretfully tamed. But Bruce is just a decent, sorrowful guy who’s been dealt a bad hand, and, for all Norton’s skill, we lose interest in him.”

I think that this image of Banner as “decent, sorrowful guy” tormented by his condition has more emotional and psychological resonance than Denby thinks. Banner is an archetypal figure of a man living under a curse, translated into science fiction terms. The Hulk is not only a variation on Jekyll and Hyde, but also on the werewolf, or, indeed, of any human who unwillingly is transformed into a beast. The werewolf and Hyde and similar beings can serve as metaphors for anyone who finds himself struggling to survive despite burdens or afflictions that seem impossible to control or overcome.

One of the aspects of the new movie that I most admire is the way it portrays Banner as literally a homeless person, a scientist who has lost his place in society, and who repeatedly ends up in rags, forced at one point in the film to beg for money. Being the Hulk could serve as a metaphor for alcoholism or drug addiction, for crippling psychological problems, or just for twists of fortune that plunge a successful man into dire poverty. The figure of Banner represents the good within a person, striving to reclaim a normal life despite the inner or external demons represented by the Hulk.

Yet doesn’t the film’s final image of Banner suggest the “make-my-day gleam in his eye as he approaches fury” that Denby mentions. Is it a hint that the next Hulk film might show Banner begin to embrace the appeal of his inner Hulk, at least to some degree?

After the soporific Ang Lee Hulk film, Marvel Studios was understandably intent on making the new Hulk movie succeed as an action movie. But the key to Stan Lee’s Marvel revolution is characterization, and the movie’s characterization of the Hulk (as opposed to Banner) seems hollow. If the Ang Lee Hulk film was all intellect and no energy, the new Hulk movie has energy and spectacle, but insufficient intellectual substance or heart. It’s especially disappointing coming after Marvel Studios’ Iron Man movie, which so successfully combined characterization and action in what was recognizably the classic Marvel Comics tradition.

There’s also a lack of connection in the movie between Emil Blonsky, played by Tim Roth, and his gamma-irradiated alter ego, the Abomination. In Stan Lee and Gil Kane’s original storyline, Blonsky was an enemy agent, presumably working for the Soviets, posing as an American soldier. (Lee did not come up with the name Blonsky; the comic book Abomination’s real name and Yugoslav nationality were established much later.) There’s no longer a Soviet Union, so it makes sense that the moviemakers changed Blonsky into a Russian-born member if the Royal Marines (justifying Roth’s native British accent) working with the American armed forces. I rather enjoyed Roth’s portrayal of Blonsky as this feisty little man, unafraid to take in the much larger Hulk, but concerned that he is already past his physical prime and envious of the Hulk’s power. The movie does such a great build-up to the point at which Blonsky forces scientist Sam Sterns to transform him into the Abomination. But there is no clear connection on screen between Roth and the CGI Abomination that takes his place. The Abomination can talk, but does so in that ancient cliche, a voice that has been electronically altered to sound much lower and deeper. I would have preferred that the Abomination still speak with a voice recognizable as Roth’s. One of the points of the Abomination in the comics, after all is that, unlike the Hulk, Blonsky was changed only physically, not mentally by the gamma rays: he retains his normal intelligence and personality. And that leads to another important point about the Abomination: that his normal personality, obsessed with power and dominating others, proves to be more truly monstrous than that of the Hulk who, in his classic 1960s-1970s persona, prefers to leave other people alone as long as they return the favor. For that matter, couldn’t the movie Abomination’s face have retained some resemblance to Roth’s?

The movie’s Abomination is generally disappointing. I would have much preferred that the filmmakers had adapted Gil Kane’s classic design for the character, with his large, batlike ears and scaly, reptilian hide. Kane’s design is simply far more distinctive and memorable than the blander, more humanoid movie version. (Alas, I see that Marvel’s own online “Marvel Universe” entry for the Abomination now uses a picture of the movie Abomination rather than a picture of the Kane design. See here.)

I also don’t understand why Blonsky, once he turns into the Abomination, begins running amok, wreaking destruction through Harlem. The dialogue that the movie gives the Abomination shows that he retains his normal intelligence. Did the gamma treatment drive him mad? Did it increase his aggressiveness beyond control? Or did Blonsky remain sane, but simply want to flaunt his new power? But what’s the point of perpetrating all that damage? Couldn’t the movie have made the answer clearer?

Just as the Iron Man movie quietly sets up the Mandarin as the evil mastermind behind the scenes, presumably to take the spotlight in a future film, The Incredible Hulk surreptitiously introduces the Hulk’s own archenemy. Banner and Betty meet with another scientist, the afirementioned Dr. Samuel Sterns (played by Tim Blake Nelson), who has been aiding Banner via the Internet. (Banner and Sterns use the code aliases “Mr. Green” and “Mr. Blue” on the internet. Could this be a sly reference to the similar color-based code names in one of Tim Roth’s best known films, Reservoir Dogs?) Well-informed Marvel aficionados know that Sam Sterns is the real name of the Leader, who was endowed buy gamma radiation with green skin, an enormous skull and brain, and superhuman genius. If the Hulk represents ultimate brawn, then the Leader represents ultimate brain power. Through the opposition of the Hulk and the Leader, Stan Lee was making the point that the Hulk, monster though he is, is a kind of savage innocent who is morally preferable to the Leader, who turns his great intellect to attempts to dominate humankind. I prefer the Leader’s origin in the comics, with its pleasing irony: in the comics Sam Sterns was a janitor of low intellect who, through sheer accident was exposed to the gamma radiation that transformed him into an evil genius. I certainly hope that in the next Hulk film Nelson plays the Leader seriously, and not as the goofy nerd that he played in the current movie. (Yes, once again we had to suffer through the stereotype of the scientist as nerd, though, of course, Banner and the movie Betty are scientists, too, and they are portrayed respectfully.) You may notice that in the final shot of Sterns in The Incredible Hulk his head already seems to have begun transforming.

I like the movie’s references and homages to the 1970s Incredible Hulk TV series and to the Hulk’s history in the comics. Lou Ferrigno, who played the Hulk in that TV series, has an on-screen cameo as a security guard and also plays the voice of the Hulk. (It was a pleasure seeing his surprise appearance in the Hulk movie panel at this year’s New York Comic Con.) It was a nice and unexpected surprise to see a “cameo” by the late Bill Bixby, who played “David” Banner (renamed from Bruce) on the Hulk TV shows; Bixby turns up in the movie on a TV screen in a clip from another of his TV series, The Courtship of Eddie’s Father. (Next time, Marvel Studios, I want to see a clip from My Favorite Martian!) Even the name “David B.” turns up in the movie as one of Bruce’s aliases. Two young people who witness the Hulk’s battle with the military on a college campus turn out to be named Jack McGee (after the reporter on the 1970s Hulk TV series) and Jim Wilson (after the Hulk’s young African-American friend in the comic during the 1970s). I didn’t realize it while watching the movie, but Betty’s psychiatrist boyfriend in the film turns out to be named Leonard Samson, after Doc Samson, the character in the Hulk comics.

There’s a character in the new movue named Stanley, presumbly after Stan Lee, and the real Stan makes his usual Hitchcockian cameo, this time as a man who imbibes a soft drink without realizing it’s been tainted with Bruce Banner’s gamma-irradiated blood. (So does Stan turn green? The movie never tells us.) I am again disappointed that Stan doesn’t get any lines. Having seen him brilliantly perform onstage time and again at comics conventions, I find it hard to believe he wouldn’t be good in front of movie cameras. Besides, he did perfectly well with speaking roles in Ang (no relation) Lee’s Hulk, Spider-Man 3 and the Fantastic Four movies. (I even tend to think his appearances are the high points of the FF films!)

I’m impressed by how Marvel Studios continues to knit together its separate films into a cinematic Marvel Universe. Following the closing credits in the Iron Man movie, SHIELD director Nick Fury, as incarnated by Samuel L. Jackson, meets with Tony Stark, played by Robert Downey, Jr., to propose the formation of the superhero team that will become the Avengers. SHIELD turns up in The Incredible Hulk movie as well. Moreover, in the final scene of this new Hulk movie, Downey, as Stark, turns up and starts to tell General Ross about the team idea. Although the positioning of this scene at the end of the movie suggests that it was intended as a surprise, Marvel Studios showed it at their Incredible Hulk panel at the New York Comic Con. Clearly, Marvel wants the fans to realize that they are tying the continuity of the movies together. After all, the “shared universe” continuity of Marvel Comics has been one of the company’s great strengths since the early 1960s.

It’s already been announced that Marvel Studios will release an Avengers movie in 2011. In the comics the Hulk and Iron Man were both founding members of the Avengers. But in Avengers #1 in 1963, the Hulk was portrayed as considerably more intelligent than the classic 1960s version that evolved later. Just how the Hulk of these first two movies, who seems to be constantly enraged and uncontrollable unless Betty Ross is around. could function as a member of a team of superheroes is beyond me. Marvel Studios is going to have to change the movie Hulk considerably.

A big surprise was the new Hulk movie’s references to the “super-soldier serum” and even to its creator, Professor Reinstein. Blonsky is treated with the serum to boost his physical prowess before he becomes the Abomination. As many Marvel aficionados know, Reinstein and his “super-soldier serum” are elements in the origin of Captain America, who also gets a movie in 2011. I look forward to watching how mainstream movie critics react three years from now when it sinks in on them that Marvel had been subtly setting up the premise of the Captain America movie as far back as the late spring of 2008!

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF AND OTHERS

This week (the last in June 2008), TwoMorrows Publications releases issue 18 of Danny Fingeroth’s magazine Write Now!, a special issue celebrating the writing career of Stan Lee. Among the many comics professionals who contributes appreciations of Stan’s work to this issue are Roy Thomas, Denny O’Neil, John Romita. Sr., Tom DeFalco, Joe Quesada, Louise Simonson, Jimmy Palmiotti, J. M. DeMatteis, Jim Salicrup and me! The magazine also showcases examples from Stan’s movie and television scripts from the official Stan Lee Archives at the University of Wyoming. (I confess to being impressed that a university holds an archive of Stan’s work. If only it weren’t so far away!) You can find out more about Write Now! #18 at the TwoMorrows website here.

On the occasion of my own online column’s anniversary, I’d like to draw my readers’ attention to the work of a fellow toiler in the vineyards of cyberspace. Peter B. Gillis, a former comics writer for Marvel, DC and First Comics, consistently writes brilliantly insightful essays in a wide variety of subjects, from politics to music to, yes, comics, for his blog “No Time to Explain“ which deserves a far greater readership than it currently receives. Recently he has written two of his best entries for the blog. On June 16 there was “The Smartest Guy in the Room,” on June 16, which not only deals with Barack Obama’s campaign but discovers a historical pattern of differences between Democratic and Republican presidential candidates. Then. two days later, on June 18, upon completing a rereading of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, Peter posted “There and Back Again Again,” in which he not only demonstrates how The Hobbit served as Tolkien’s template for the entire Lord of the Rings, but also illuminates Tolkien’s unusual choice to utilize protagonists–Bilbo and Frodo–who do not succeed in their quests. Of all the websites I regularly visit, Peter Gillis’s blog is the best written and most intellectually surprising and stimulating. It serves as proof that essay writing on the Internet can have depth, seriousness, and lasting value. (Peter Gillis will also soon return to comics writing for the ComicMix website, and I will alert you when his story appears.)

–Copyright 2008 Peter Sanderson

Here’s something I’d dearly love to write about in this column. I’ve been to Walt Disney World three times, but it’s been over half a decade since my last visit. Similarly, I’ve been to Disneyland several times, usually in connection with a trip to the San Diego Con. but I haven’t been there since the opening of its sister theme park, Disney’s California Adventure. I’d love to do a detailed, novelistic report on my visit to a Disney theme park, but considering that I’m virtually broke (and I’m not kidding about this), I don’t know when I’ll be able to afford to go to one if them and see the new attractions.

If only somehow the attractions could come to me, instead.

Well, when one lives in New York City, the impossible sometimes becomes reality.

On Saturday, May 31, the first World Science Festival held a program titled “The Science of Disney Imagineering” at New York University’s Skirball Center. And what, you may ask, is Imagineering? According to the Walt Disney Company’s careers website, “Walt Disney Imagineering is the master planning, creative development, design, engineering, production, project management, and research and development arm of The Walt Disney Company and its affiliates. Representing more than 150 disciplines, its talented corps of Imagineers is responsible for the creation of Disney resorts, theme parks and attractions, hotels, water parks, real estate developments, regional entertainment venues, cruise ships and new media technology projects.” In short, Walt Disney Imagineering conceives and designs the attractions at the theme parks.

Walt Disney Imagineering originated as WED Enterprises, a company that Walt Disney himself founded in 1952, in large part to come up with ideas for what became Disneyland, which opened in 1955. (Disney’s full name was Walter Elias Disney, hence the initials.) Owned personally by Walt Disney, WED Enterprises was initially a separate company from Walt Disney Productions, but eventually was absorbed into it.

There were three performances of “The Science of Disney Imagineering” that Saturday, at 10, 12:30, and 3. When I arrived at the Skirball Center around 9 AM, the latter to shows were already sold out, and it seems that I purchased one of the last remaining tickets for the morning show.

Waiting in line to enter the Skirball Center auditorium, I saw some volunteers wearing silver mouse ears caps and shirts bearing the name “Disney Voluntears.” Not until I started writing this essay did I realize that this was a reference to the mouse ears; at the time I kept thinking that this was an unfortunate spelling, as if volunteer work for Disney resulted in tears. A well-placed hyphen would have been useful.

Looking at the line, I was surprised to see that there were more women than men. By the time that the show started, the division between men and women in the audience was more even. Still, this was a surprise, and not the first time that day that any preconception I might have had that the show would primarily attract stereotypical male technology geeks was proven wrong.

Saturday was the World Science Festival’s “Kids and Family Day,” and there were plenty of kids in the audience for this show, but they were still far outnumbered by adults, mostly under forty.

To judge from the people sitting around me, there were also well-informed Disney buffs there. One of the volunteers was asking kids sitting near me what the name of the first Disney animated cartoon was. She was looking for Steamboat Willie (1928), the first Mickey Mouse cartoon to be released. But one kid in front of me suggested Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, the star of the animated series that Walt Disney produced before the creation of Mickey, and which, until recently, the Disney Company did not own (see “Comics in Context” #211: “The Silent Rabbit”). And someone behind me insisted that the correct answer was Plane Crazy, the Mickey cartoon which Walt Disney made before Steamboat Willie but released afterwards. Not bad. I applaud these young audience members’ sense of history.

On the stage was a large video screen, in which one could perceive the dim outline of Mickey Mouse’s head and ears. Yes, it was a “Hidden Mickey,” like those in the theme parks. Small groupings of three circular lights, positioned in the formation of Mickey’s head and ears, drifted across the screen.

The first person to appear on-stage was Brian Greene, the physics professor from my alma mater, Columbia University, the author of The Elegant Universe, and the co-founder of the World Science Festival, along with his wife, television journalist Tracy Day. The audience greeted Greene with effusive applause: perhaps they merely thought that someone walking into the stage signaled the start of the show, but I rather suspect that this audience recognized him. Greene welcomed the audience and thanked various people who had contributed to the Festival.

After Greene left the stage, a voice over the sound system proclaimed, “Attention, all future scientists. Please take your seats.” That was a reminder that this show was intended for family audiences, but also had the commendable purpose of encouraging young kids to pursue science as a career.

The disembodied voice continued, “Keep your hands, feet, arms and legs inside the theater at all times,” getting a laugh. Of course that was a joke alluding to theme park rides, but it also helped give me the feeling as if I was back at a Disney theme park. That gag had the sense of wit, even aimed at Disney itself, which I associate with the Disney theme parks at their best. And indeed, throughout the show it was as if the Disney theme park atmosphere had somehow materialized briefly in New York City. (I felt the same way when I saw the Mary Poppins musical on Broadway when I noticed that the ushers and elevator attendants demonstrated a kind of friendliness I more associate with Disney park “cast members’” than with typical Broadway staffers.)

Then an offstage voice introduced our host for the performance, “Imagineer Scott Trowbridge.” We waited, but no one appeared; the sound of crickets was heard. The voice introduced Trowbridge again, and this time he appeared on the on-stage video screen in what seemed to be a live transmission. He was outside, across the street, somewhere in Washington Square Park, perusing a map, trying to figure out where the Skirball Center was. (In other words, he was doing what I had been doing a little more than an hour previously.)

Then, unexpectedly, as we watched, a dinosaur’s head appeared on=screen and took Mr. Trowbridge’s map in his mouth! This was one of new Disney theme park attractions that I had longed to see, and which had made the journey to New York instead: Lucky the audio-animatronic dinosaur.

Once again I have to define my terms. “Audio-animatronics” is the term used by Walt Disney himself and the early Imagineers to describe the firm of robotics that they pioneered at Disneyland and the 1964 New York World’s Fair. (Hey, so there’s a reason why it’s appropriate that Lucky should visit New York.) Robotic figures of animals and people in the Jungle Cruise, Pirates of the Caribbean, the Country Bear Revue, Splash Mountain, and the Hall of Presidents, including the celebrated figure of Abraham Lincoln, are audio-animatronic devices. I assume that the “audio” part of the word refers to the fact that the figures move in sync with prerecorded sounds, music and voices. The term “animatronics” suggests that Walt Disney and the Imagineers regarded themselves as “animating” these three-dimensional robotic figures if characters just as the Disney studio famously animated cartoon characters on-screen. In both cases Disney and his staff were attempting to impart the “illusion of life” and even to express characterization through movement.

In the American Adventure pavilion at EPCOT, an audio-animatronic figure of Benjamin Franklin amazingly ascends some steps. But apart from limited examples of movement like this, Disney audio-animatronic figures stay rooted in one place. That changed in 2003, when Lucky made his debut. He represented a breakthrough, in that he is the first fully mobile audio-animatronic figure, able to walk back and forth, even in a natural, outdoor setting like Washington Square Park. (You can find out more about Lucky here and watch YouTube videos of Lucky in action here and here.)

Lucky first appeared at Disney’s California Adventure, and later traveled to Animal Kingdom at Walt Disney World and to the new Hong Kong Disneyland. a place I expect I will never ever visit. But I never expected him to come to New York City!

Holding the map in his mouth, Lucky drooled on it and grunted amusedly at Trowbridge, who wanted to know where the Skirball Center was. Lucky, who grunts rather than talks, directed his attention to a nearby sign, “To Skirball Center.” But why should Trowbridge trust a dinosaur? Lucky indicated another sign, reading, “listen to the dinosaur.” That seemed to resolve the issue. Trowbridge bid goodbye to Lucky, and introduced a brief film (or video) while he hustled over to the auditorium.

The film appropriately began with footage of Walt Disney himself talking about Disneyland and the Imagineers. The film then stated that the present day Imagineers’ mission was “to grow and expand Walt’s vision.” Further, the film declared (if I transcribed this correctly), “No other company in the world has a team dedicated to inspiring the imagination.” It seems to me that other creative enterprises, from the curatorial staff of an art museum to the faculty of a school of the arts and even to a good editorial staff of a comics company could claim the same goal, but I like the fact that the Imagineers conceive of their purpose in these terms.

Once the film ended, Trowbridge raced onto the stage, seemingly out of breath. (Considering how much ground he had to cover in a short time to get from Lucky’s position in the park to the stage, he may not have altogether been faking.)

Scott Trowbridge is actually vice president for creative research and development at Walt Disney Engineering; until last fall, he was vice president of Universal’s Creative Studios, where he had been senior show producer on the Spider-Man ride for Universal’s Islands of Adventure. None of this was mentioned in the “Science of Disney Imagineering” show; I found it out on my own, afterwards. Instead, Trowbridge, as master of ceremonies, shifted in and out of playing himself ss a comedy character, and rather effectively, too. He reminded me of Steve Carell’s characters: earnest, but sometimes in over his head. As this character, Trowbridge needing the other Imagineers in the show, who all play it straight, to set him straight on the subjects under discussion.

What does science have to do with the Disney theme parks, Trowbridge asked. He began by explaining Imagineering. “We make amazing, cool things come to life,” he told us, in a decided improvement on General Electric’s slogan. Behind him on the screen appeared pictures of Walt Disney, Mickey Mouse as Steamboat Willie, and Albert Einstein, thus not only connecting popular art with science, but also suggesting that Walt Disney was a creative visionary in Einstein’s league.

“Imagineering,” Trowbridge pointed out, is the combination of two words: “Imagination” and “earring.” No, he quickly corrected himself: “imagination” and “engineering.” Imagineers, he said, “use science and engineering” in order “to bring dreams to life.” Imagineers, he continued. come from a wide variety of fields; writers, performers, designers, producers, engineers, and scientists. (What was that about writers?)

“Science and imagination are actually two sides of the exact same page,” Trowbridge said. And speaking of pages, he then took out a red notebook, which he said was standard equipment for any Imagineer: it’s where an Imagineer jots down ideas. A huge image of a similar notebook appeared on the screen behind him. “Today you guys are going to be Imagineers,” Trowbridge told the audience, who enthusiastically responded. They were hooked, and so was I.

Trowbridge read an entry from the notebook: “The vast majority of gravity-powered conveyances that utilize rapid changes in acceleration to generate various G-forces. . . .” Then he translated for us: this entry is about roller coasters, the subject of the first segment of the show. Trowbridge then introduced Ric Turner, an Imagineer who specializes in roller coasters. Turner brought out a man-sized mechanism resembling a huge gyroscope. It’s apparently really called a force vector simulator, but Turner dubbed it the Basic Articulated Rotational Force Simulator, which the audience quickly realized went by the acronym BARFS. Then they brought up a volunteer, dubbed an “honorary Imagineer,” from the audience, as the rest of us applauded. This was Max, a young lad of few words, as you shall see. They outfitted hum with a vest that measured the amount of G-force (the force of gravity) pressing upon him and then strapped him into the BARFS. Was he comfortable? “Kind of,” replied the less than loquacious Max.

Turner was going to simulate for Max the experience of riding the California Screamin’ roller coaster at Disney’s California Adventure, which he described as the “longest looping roller coaster in the world.” Max was given another essential piece of equipment: an airsick bag. And then Max was off. Turner manually manipulated the BARFS while on the screen a video showed what it would look like if he were actually riding a car on California Screamin.’ When the video reached a point where the roller coaster did a loop, Turner actually spun the BARFS upside down with Max inside. (You can watch a video of Max’s misadventure here. It looks as if the video cameraman was sitting fairly close to me.)

Turner explained that this simulator couldn’t “generate” the full G forces of the actual ride. When the roller coaster does a loop, and the riders are upside down, you “don’t feel like you’re going to fall out” because of the pressure of two G’s on you. What i found particularly interesting was when Turner explained that at one point in the ride, the force generated by acceleration impels the roller coaster car to keep going up, but the tracks head down, with the result that the forces cancel each other out, and the rider experiences zero gravity!

His adventure in the BARFS over, Max was asked how he felt. Ever economical with language, Max replied, “Okay.” “Nobody leaves empty-handed,” declared Trowbridge, who allowed him to keep the airsick bag as a memento.

I don’t find roller coasters appealing, and don’t understand why the terror of falling is supposed to be enjoyable, but even I appreciated Turner’s presentation. His goal, Turner said before exiting, was to “blend science and physics with great storytelling.”

The next portion of the show was about “special effects” to produce “chills,” and was introduced by a video montage of such attractions as the Haunted Mansion and the dragon in Fantasmic. Trowbridge brought out another Imagineer, Asa Kalama, and they set about attempting to transform the Skirball Center stage into a “creepy and spooky environment.” The first step was getting the appropriate music. The first selection over the sound system, “The Girl from Ipanema,” didn’t work, nor did the second, the theme from “It’s a Small World,” though to be sure that is scary in its own way. (“That’ll be stuck in your head the rest of the day,” Trowbridge warned us.) Finally we got music that was reasonably eerie, and a cemetery under moonlight appeared on the video screen.

We were told that the next demonstration would create a “sound from right inside your head.” A new volunteer from the audience, a young boy named Nick, was directed to whisper “I am a spooky ghost” into a microphone. Trowbridge asked us to raise our hands when we heard Nick speak. Most people in the audience could not hear Nick whispering, but this didn’t quite work with me, because I was sitting so close to the stage that I could hear Nick whispering easily. Trowbridge pointed a speaker around the audience, and when he directed it straight towards me, suddenly, yes, I could hear Nick very clearly, as if the sound were right inside my head! Kalama explained that this special speaker sent out “frequencies of ultrasound,” which ordinarily we cannot hear. But the ultrasound travels along “narrow beams” which the Imagineers “can steer around the audience.”

Then Kalama and Trowbridge began discussing “fluid dynamics,” or in other words, using “air allied with water vapor” to create stage fog. And as they talked, seemingly oblivious to what was happening behind them, a large mass of stage fog rolled in from stage left, to the audience’s audible surprise.

The Imagineers explained that the fog was generated by liquid nitrogen that was “two and one half times colder than any temperature recorded naturally.” Then, wielding the end of a long, serpentine metal tube, Trowbridge began spraying the front rows of the audience with the gaseous nitrogen. And did I mention that I was sitting in the center of row three? The spray was pleasantly cool. (However, later when I was wandering about the World Science Festival’s street fair in Washington Square Park, I saw a flower that had been dipped in liquid nitrogen or some other frigid chemical and been rendered hard and stiff.)

But what about the audience sitting up in the balcony? How could they share the liquid nitrogen experience? In Carell mode, Trowbridge pulled out a little “masterblaster” gun that proved ineffectual. But then out came an enormous circular machine, that looked like some sort of mad scientist’s blasting device. This was the Big Puffer, which the Imagineers then employed to shoot “vortex rings” of artificial fog up to the balcony. (See for yourself on YouTube here.)

The next segment, on fireworks, was introduced by a video montage of spectacular fireworks shows from Disney theme parks around the world. Trowbridge introduced Dr. Ben Schwegler, who was described as Imagineering’s chief scientist. Though Trowbridge, acting like an eager fan, was excited at the prospect of a fireworks show, Schwegler patiently explained that there wasn’t enough room indoors to launch them (“We’re not going to do booms in here.”). Instead, Schwegler said he would demonstrate how they transform “chemical energy into light energy” in fireworks shows. Both men donned safety glasses to work with three dishes, each of which contained alcohol mixed with a different chemical. The dish with strontium produced a red flame, the one with copper had a blue flame, and the third dish, containing barium, issued a green flame.

They then explained that Disney had invented a method of using compressed air to launch fireworks. While they couldn’t launch fireworks indoors, they could use the same principle to shoot t-shirts into the audience. A huge gun was brought out, large enough for Cable or the Punisher to carry on a comics cover, and, after an initial malfunction, Trowbridge starting stuffing T-shirts into the gun and firing them at the audience; the first one landed in the row right behind me.

The next segment of the show, Trowbridge told us, concerned a “relatively new science” that “helps create new kinds of shows.” He then introduced another Imagineer, computer scientist Amber Sandahl, an attractive young woman (who thus explodes another stereotype about computer techies). She told the audience that Imagineers “still use physical models for some things,” they use “computer models more often” in their design work.

What she then showed us was more advanced than I’d expected. Upon the video screen appeared tiny images if people walking about, as if at one of the Disney theme parks. Sandahl called them “virtual guests,” and explained that they were “driven by artificial intelligence,” and that “each” figure was “driven by a tiny computer program.”

Using this computer model, the Imagineers can experiment with how guests might react to changes in the parks. Using a pen-like device on the computer she held in her hand, Sandahl caused a giant cactus to drop onto the middle of the screen; the virtual guests changed direction in order to avoid walking into it. She introduced a giant ice cream cone, and the virtual guests walked toward it and crowded around it. Then she manipulated her computer again, and a big red tyrannosaur (Jack Kirby’s Devil Dinosaur? Nah, just a coincidence!) landed in their midst, and the virtual guests understandably started walking away.

Referring to Disney’s 1960s audio-animatronic figure of Abraham Lincoln, Sandahl said that today with computers they could take a real human performance to drive characters.” She proceeded to give us a demonstration of “motion capture” technology. I haven’t had much good to say about motion capture in the past (see “Comics in Context” #205: “Identity Theft”), but, as with roller coasters, the Imagineering show made it look both amazing and entertaining.

Two more volunteers, a father and son, came up from the audience. The video screen rose, and a large motion capture box came forward on -stage, with video screens on two sides. Sandahl told us that there were fourteen cameras to monitor the performer within the box. The boy got inside the box, and a CGI figure of a skeleton in pirate garb appeared on-screen. Following Sandahl’s instructions, the boy jumped and spun about, and the CGI character copied his every movement. Getting into the spirit of things, the boy spontaneously tucked one of the legs behind the other, and the character did the same.

Then the father exchanged places with his son inside the box. He got three CGI counterparts onscreen, including a monster (reminiscent of Monsters, Inc.), an astronaut, and a teddy bear, on what seemed like a disco floor, complete with disco ball. As the Village People’s “YMCA” played (surely one of the songs I least expected to hear at a Disney event) the dad started dancing away, as his CGI counterparts matched him move for move. The dad wasn’t at all bad, either, and Sandahl and Trowbridge got the audience to clap in time to the disco beat.

Just before Amber Sandahl left the stage, Trowbridge asked her, “You’re not a robot, are you?” “I can’t tell you that,” she replied. Darn! I knew she was too good to be real.

In introducing the next segment, Trowbridge noted that not everything in theme parks is “operated by computer.” There followed a video montage about Disney’s Animal Kingdom, which is Walt Disney World’s blend of theme park and zoological park. Then Trowbridge introduced Dr. Anne Savage, another attractive young woman who was described as Animal Kingdom’s senior conservation biologist. (Are the scientists who care for the animals at Animal Kingdom also considered Imagineers, then?)

Dr. Savage (The real Doc Savage?) said that that there were 1500 animals at Animal Kingdom, and that she also studied animals out in the wild. For example, she’d just been in Florida tracking sea turtles, since it was their nesting season, and “a few weeks ago” she had been in Botswana, tracking elephants. She them mentioned the “Disney Worldwide Conservation Fund,” which serves “to protect some of the world’s most endangered animals”. This received a spontaneous wave of applause from the audience.

Dr. Savage described some of her experiences tracking animals while pictures appeared on the video screen. She noted “lion tracks” outside her tent in Botswana, commenting that she had to “stay in the tent all night long.” She showed pictures of Rhesus monkeys taken in Asia with “camera traps,” which take photos when triggered by the animal’s presence. (Trowbridge observed that camera traps, therefore, don’t “trap cameras.”) Then Dr. Savage noted that one can also track animals through things they leave behind, “like poop.” (Nope, I didn’t expect this, either.) “Match the feces to the species,” rhymed Dr. Savage. Scott Trowbridge turned to us and said, “No.”

So Dr. Savage turned to a new topic, the use of transmitters to track animals. For example, a tiny transmitter is attached to the back of a Tamarin monkey, and she spoke about another transmitter that was attached to a sea turtle. Such a transmitter, she said, “communicates with a satellite in outer space,” and you can follow the turtle via a website.

But larger animals require larger transmitters, and Dr. Savage put on a collar designed for an elephant, containing GPS technology. The collar looked enormous, but this was a small one–eight feet long, for a female elephant. She told us that a collar for a “giant bull” elephant would be fifteen to twenty feet! To demonstrate how the collar worked, they brought a whole family out of the audience and then encircled the whole group within the collar. Then Trowbridge and Savage sent them “out into the wilds of New York City” so we could track them later in the video screen with the GPS technology. Their ability to move considerably limited by the collar, the “Elephant Family,” as Trowbridge dubbed them, moved offstage in tiny steps.

Dr. Savage then told us that the collars also contain microphones that “can record vocalizations” the elephants make, and that elephants engage in “normal conversation” with each other through “low frequency rumbles” that are below the range of human hearing.” They then played the sound of such rumbles (apparently adjusted for human hearing range) for the audience. Dr. Savage said that an elephant will have a “best friend” and they will “talk to each other all the time, over real long distances.” Moreover, the Disney scientists had identified “two new vocalizations” elephants do.

We did not realize it, but this discussion of elephant language was setting us up for the show’s grand finale, which also involved an animal making conversation. The video screen now presented an underwater scene. with a school of fish swimming in the background. And then, into the scene swam Crush, the sea turtle from Pixar’s Finding Nemo (see “Comics in Context” #40: “Beasts and Beauty”). Crush chatted with Scott Trowbridge, but lest you think that Crush’s dialogue was scripted and prerecorded, he then began talking back and forth with a little girl from the audience!

This was the renowned “Turtle Talk with Crush,” which is at Walt Disney World’s EPCOT, Disney’s California Adventure, and Hong Kong Disneyland, and was high on my list of new attractions to see if I ever made it to the one of the Disney theme parks. And now it had come to me!

Although the Imagineers did not spell it out during their show at NYU, thinking about it afterwards, it was easy to figure out that the motion capture demonstration must have something to do with the way that “Turtle Talk” works. Whoever was doing Crush’s voice was quite good, combining the familiar California surfer vocal rhythms with an Australian accent. I especially liked the wryly ironic expressions that would sometimes cross Crush’s face during the show.

The little girl from the audience took Crush aback when he attempted to engage her in “turtle talk.” She protested that she had hoped to hear him make actual turtle sounds. Speechless with surprise, Crush put a flipper to his brow in shock. The girl’s mother played along, though, telling Crush he was “totally awesome.” When Crush asked a young audience member where the kid’s “home” was, the kid forgot. “I have a friend named Dory who forgets all the time,” Crush assured the child, referring to a character from the movie and winning an appreciative laugh from the audience.

In closing, Crush asked the audience to “promise to use the word “˜dude’ for the rest of the day. Trust me, your parents will totally love it.”

(And if you want to see the “Turtle Talk” attraction, check out the YouTube videos here and here)

And thus “The Science of Disney Imagineering” came to an end. Scott Trowbridge told us that we would be given Imagineers’ notebooks as we left “to jot down your ideas, thoughts, sketches, dreams and imagination.” (Hmm, sort of like a blog.) Via the video screen, GPS focused in on Washington Square Park, and we received a live video feed of “the Elephant Family,” who were now hobnobbing with Lucky the dinosaur, bringing the show full circle. And the show finally ended with a quotation from Walt Disney on the screen: “If you can dream it, you can do it.” It reminded me of a similar line from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, another connection I never expected to make with Disney, but it’s an inspiring sentiment nonetheless.

As we filed out, the Imagineers from the show were lined up, chatting with audience members. If only one friend of mine, who has long dreamed of being an Imagineer, had been able to make it to the show! I made sure of getting an Imagineer’s notebook for myself, and one for him, before I left the Skirball Center.

Then I spent some time exploring the World Science Festival’s street fair, inside and alongside Washington Square Park, including watching a surprisingly clever playlet about the life cycle of a butterfly enacted by three young women from the Central Park Zoo.

Finally, I saw Lucky the Dinosaur in person! He was again interacting with Scott Trowbridge, while a man trained a video camera, and I later realized that they must have been reenacting the opening segment of the “Science of Disney Engineering” for the 12:30 PM show.

In person, one sees that Lucky is presented as a beast of burden: he pulls a little wagon behind him, labeled “EXPLORERS CLUB.” (Shouldn’t it be the Adventurers’ Club from Disney World’s Pleasure Island?) I realize that the wagon is necessary because it conceals the computer and power source necessary for Lucky’s operation. Still, I wondered if whoever had dubbed the dinosaur “Lucky” was thinking of the similarly burdened Lucky in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

But despite having to pull this wagon, Lucky the Dinosaur maintains a cheerful temperament. Once Scott Trowbridge had left, Lucky interacted with a kid from the crowd. Lucky allowed himself to be petted; he moved his head to look at the people near him, grunted in what seemed friendly responses, and, when he was photographed with the kid, even looked into the camera and smiled. If you ever imagined a pet dinosaur when you were a child, this is your dream come true. (AOL Video shows Lucky in Washington Square Park during the World Science Festival here).

But then it began to rain, lightly but ominously. Grunting, Lucky walked backwards into a tent behind him, and soon there was a downpour. I headed to a nearby restaurant for lunch; my visit to the World Science Festival was over.

“The Science of Disney Imagineering” was such a well put-together show that I assumed that this was an event that Disney stages from time to time in different cities and venues. But no, I’ve since read that this was a one-time event that Disney Imagineering staged solely for the three performances at the World Science Festival. Well then, I’m even more glad that I was able to see it and then to write up this report for my readers. (If you want to see photographs from the show, you can find them here and here.)

The World Science Festival was reportedly a tremendous success, so perhaps it will become an annual event, and perhaps Walt Disney Imagineering will return to the Festival next year. Now, what other new Disney theme park attraction do I really want to see? How could they possibly bring “Soarin’ over California” to New York?

LINKS IN THE AMAZON CHAIN

I very much like Disney Imagineering’s pocket guides to several of the Disney theme parks. The books are highly informative, each squeezing an amazing amount of information about the attractions and how they were created into a mall volume, while being surprisingly inexpensive. And Amazon is selling them for even less! There you can find The Imagineering Field Guide to EPCOT at Walt Disney World,
The Imagineering Field Guide to the Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World, The Imagineering Field Guide to Disney’s Animal Kingdom at Walt Disney World and The Imagineering Field Guide to Disneyland.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF

In the mail I’ve just received Marvel’s latest reprint volume of the Marvel Universe Handbooks I co-wrote in the 1980s: The Essential Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, Master Edition Vol. 2: Garokk to Proctor, which Amazon is also selling. I see that Volume 3 will come out this fall.

Besides advertising myself, I also want to promote my Quick Stop colleague Fred Hembeck’s voluminous and ceaselessly amusing The Nearly Complete Essential Hembeck Archives Omnibus, which is out at long last, both in comics stores and on Amazon. Having already been awarded well-deserved accolades by Entertainment Weekly and by Stan Lee himself (in the June 12 entry of Fred’s blog), Fred doesn’t need me to add to the praise. But I intend to review his book, too, once I finish reading the whole thing. And considering its immense size, holding most of the work of his entire cartooning career, this may take a while!

–Copyright 2008 Peter Sanderson

This week I was going to plug my new course at New York University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies: “The Superhero as American Icon.” But then last week I received bad news: only two people had signed up for the course, so NYU was canceling it. This keeps happening. Where is this wave of serious interest in the comics medium that I keep hearing about?

Well, I saw that wave–a tidal wave–hit on the fifth of May. That was the day that I attended the press opening of a new exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: “Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy.” Organized by curator Andrew Bolton for the Costume Institute, the Metropolitan’s department of fashion, this exhibition explores similarities between superhero costumes and contemporary trends in fashion. (See the Met’s own online version of this exhibition here)

Moreover, the most glittering social event of the year in New York City is the Costume Institute’s annual gala. This year the gala was being held for the opening of “Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy” the night of May 5, mere hours after the press preview. Two of the co-chairs of the gala were Julia Roberts and George Clooney, who, of course, played Batman in the 1997 movie Batman and Robin.

So there I was, heading towards the Metropolitan on a beautifully sunny, warm spring morning, clutching the envelope with my invitation to the press preview. I was amazed when I first saw the invitation: it had a reproduction of artwork by none other than comics’ premier creator of painted illustrations, Alex Ross (Marvels, Kingdom Come, Justice).

Arriving on Fifth Avenue outside the Museum, I was excited to see a sign “Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy” hanging above the main entrance of America. This is the Metropolitan, America’s leading art museum, and one of the greatest art museums in the world, on a short list with the Louvre. And there on the Fifth Avenue facade were signs advertising the Met’s Courbet retrospective and its “Poussin and Nature” exhibition, and in the center, a sign about a show inspired by comics.

I expected to see that “Superheroes” sign; I did not expect what I saw as soon as I passed through the front doors. There, in the center of the Museum’s Great Hall, standing atop an immense pedestal, were statues of DC Comics’ trinity, Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, twelve feet tall, towering above the arriving guests. It was a sight that I dare say none of us ever imagined we’d see in the main entrance hall of this temple of high art. Was this the Bizarro World’s Metropolitan?

Despite what the Beat wrote in her blog, the statues, which had temporarily displaced the visitor information desk, were there only for the day of the gala. I subsequently found out that for the Gala’s dinner that evening, the Met’s wing housing the ancient Temple of Dendur, transplanted from Egypt, was decorated with gigantic mock ice crystals to resemble the Fortress of Solitude from the Superman movies–again, for one day only.

Turning left in the Great Hall, I entered the long central gallery of the Greek and Roman wing, passing an ancient statue of a wounded Amazon, on my way to see a show dealing with Wonder Woman. How appropriate it is that visitors must enter a hall of statues of idealized bodies, in a wing featuring images of ancient gods and heroes, in order to make their way to the Special Exhibitions Gallery where the Met’s new exhibit hails those figures of modern pop mythology, comic book superheroes.

Indeed, “Superheroes’” first wall text, accompanied by a 1981 Superman print by Andy Warhol, curator Bolton demonstrates that he too understands the connection: “Like the biblical and mythological heroes who are their ancestors. superheroes have served as avatars of our hopes, dreams, and desires. Perhaps because they . . .evolved from comic books, superheroes have been dismissed as frivolous and superficial. But superheroes should not be underestimated. Their apparent triviality is the very thing that gives them the ability to address serious issues of merit and worth, that frees them to respond to and comment upon shifting attitudes toward self and society, toward identity and ideology.” Bolton continues, “The superhero is most effective as metaphor.” Yes. He Gets It.

And what is the connection between fashion and superhero comics, you may winder? The wall text states that fashion and the superhero genre both deal with “the power of transformation. Fashion, like the superhero, celebrates metamorphosis, providing unlimited opportunities to remake and reshape the flesh and the self.” (The wall texts also appear as parts of Bolton’s essays in the Met’s catalogue for the exhibit.) To dress up, to thereby adopt a more glamorous persona, or to don clothing that expresses a side of your personality that ordinary clothing does not, is like Clark Kent turning into Superman.

In fact, early in the show there is a display in which, through lighting tricks, a mannequin dressed as Clark Kent transforms before your eyes into one dressed in Christopher Reeve’s Superman uniform from the movies. DC Comics, Warner Brothers, and Marvel cooperated with the exhibition, which includes a good number of movie costumes, including Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman uniform from the 1970s TV series (She attended the Gala that evening), Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman costume from Batman Returns (1992), Christian Bale’s Batman uniform from The Dark Knight (2008), and even the second version of Iron Man’s armor from the new movie. Both Tobey Maguire’s red and blue costume and the black costume from Spider-Man 3 (2007) are on display; the mannequin in the black costume clings to the wall, reminding me of Kiki Smith’s black sculpture of Lilith in the Met’s modern art galleries. Atop a rotating pedestal is a mannequin covered with the appliances simulating blue-skinned nudity of the sort that Rebecca Romijn wore as Mystique in the X-Men movies.

Among the printed backdrops behind the costume displays are blown-up reproductions of Alex Ross artwork from JLA: Secret Origins (2002) for the Flash section, and from Batman: War on Crime (1999), behind the Bale uniform. Yes, Alex Ross’s work is now on display at the Met, and he gets credited for it, too, unlike certain other artists, as we shall see.

There are a number of costumes in the exhibition that explicitly work variations on Superman’s “S” emblem. But the majority of the clothes in this show do not demonstrate direct influence from the comics. Rather, the “Superheroes” exhibition shows comic book artists and fashion designers following parallel paths in working along various themes. Hence, the section called “The Aerodynamic Body” compares the sleek uniform of the Silver Age Flash, suitable to a man who runs at super-speed, with bodysuits from Nike and Speedo intended for athletes. “The Patriotic Body” segment deals with American flag motifs in the uniforms of Captain America and Wonder Woman as well as costumes from the House of Dior. The Maguire Spider-Man costumes appear alongside fashions utilizing webbing motifs designed by Giorgio Armani, John Galliano, Jean Paul Gaultier, Thierry Mugler and others. (Armani even pointed out in an interview that he was not thinking of Spider-Man when he designed the costume in the show.)

The athletic bodysuits serve a practical function. As for the other costumes in the show, it is hard to imagine anyone wearing them on the street. That is probably the point: this exhibit is about fashion as dressing up for display at parties and galas, for putting on alternate identities, not as practical everyday wear.

The fashion designers’ costumes are not only often entertainingly over the top, but in a number of cases delve into kinkiness. The show links Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman costume, torn in intriguing places, to dominatrix garb, and the other mannequins in this display wear variations on that theme. Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man armor, its eyes and chest beam lit up, stands among female mannequins wearing “armored” costumes that, far from providing protection, expose vulnerable body parts, even the breasts.

The Beat described Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman costume as comparatively demure in this company. I’d say that it has a simplicity and regality that most of the fashion designers’ costumes here lack. The Met’s show emphasizes the side of superhero fashion that pushes against the limits of social acceptability. (Indeed, during the press conference that morning, curator Andrew Bolton reportedly described the costumes in display as “extreme, phantasmagoric, hard edged, aggressive, overtly sexualized fashion.”) But superhero costumes, like Captain America’s, Wonder Woman’s and Superman’s, have an iconic dimension, setting to inspire audiences with visual representations of the community’s ideals. This is a side to superhero imagery that the Met’s show fails to address.

Before I could finish going through the entire exhibit, taking notes, everyone moved out the other end of the gallery to what is perhaps my favorite space within the Met, the Petrie Sculpture Court, for a press conference. This usually quiet, sparsely populated indoor courtyard was now packed with press representatives, with photographers jammed together along one side.

The first speaker was the third co-chair of the gala, Anna Wintour, the editor in chief of Vogue. The Beat has pointed out that Wintour was the only guest at the evening’s gala who came dressed in a way that genuinely evoked superhero costumes. Wintour was quoted as saying she came as Storm from X-Men, but seeing the photos of Wintour at the Gala, I realized she looked like a very different X-Men character: a real life version of Emma Frost, the White Queen, as originally drawn by John Byrne!

Wintour devoted her speech to praising Philippe de Montebello, who has served as director of the Metropolitan since 1977, longer than anyone else in its history, and who is retiring at the end of this year. (He’s going to be teaching at NYU!) “This will be Philippe’s last Costume Institute exhibit at the museum,” she pointed out. “Alone among world class museum directors,” Wintour asserted, de Montebello had “the vision to acknowledge the role that style, self-presentation, and design play in modern culture,” and has “executed that vision in a way that has inspired millions to think of fashion as one of our most complex and rich decorative arts.” She extolled de Montebello for giving his curators “the freedom to explore the connections between what we wear and how we live,” even though “the fashion world may not be his world,” and declared de Montebello to be “superheroic.”

This should remind us that there are other artforms besides our own–fashion, film, photography–that have had to struggle for serious recognition, and that it is important to have allies in the world of high culture who are open to recognizing what is important and enduring in popular culture. It’s rather wonderful from my standpoint that de Montebello’s final Costume Institute show also represents, as far as I know, the Met’s first dabbling into the artform of comics in a half century. (Readers of R. C. Harvey’s new biography of Milton Caniff will learn that the Met did a survey of American comics back in the 1950s, and still owns an original Caniff somewhere in its archives.)

Wintour then introduced de Montebello, who had not expected her lavish praise: “I have been accused of many things,” he said, “but loss of words was never one,” confessing that he felt “so utterly overwhelmed” and “surprised” by her speech. He returned her compliment, stating that Wintour “is our superheroine” in her contributions to the Costume Institute.

Agreeing with Wintour, de Montebello said that he “did not presume” to have “expertise in fashion,” but “I did give them quite free rein,” referring to the Costume Institute’s curators. De Montebello declared that the Costume Institute had proved itself to be “not an ancillary curatorial department but a full-fledged member of the academic part of this institution.”

Significantly, de Montebello made the point that art can come in a variety of forms. “Do they have to be rectangular or framed, or carved out of stone” he asked, “as opposed to being worn?” This too is a point applicable to our own artform.

Then, demonstrating that he too “got” one of the major points of the Superheroes” exhibition, de Montebello spoke of the nearby Greek and Roman wing (whose recent renovation and reinstallation is the crowning achievement of his long directorship), “which is filled with great mythic superheroes of ancient times.” He spoke of “the representations of Hercules” as the forebear of Superman, “or the huntress, Diana” which “led to Wonder Woman,” and pointed to Antonio Canova’s statue of Perseus, slayer of the Gorgon Medusa, standing before him in the Petrie Court.

Praising “the myth itself of Anna Wintour, who has co-chaired this event for the past ten years,” de Montebello then introduced “in our midst a true myth of this field,” the honorary co-chairman of the evening’s gala, and sponsor of both the exhibit and its catalogue, fashion designer Giorgio Armani.

Armani spoke in Italian, translated by a woman standing nearby. He confessed he’d lost the paper with his prepared speech, but told us he “will figure something out,” and proceeded to improvise quite well. He first thanked New York City for supporting his work for thirty years and remarked on the “love of fashion that imbues the city [New York] at all levels–rich people, not so rich people.”

Armani said he was “surprised” to be asked to sponsor this show, since he is famous for “a fashion that is worn mainly”; as I noted, one wouldn’t wear the outfits in this show in everyday life. Armani joked that the “curators must have worked very hard to find something in my past production to be in the exhibit.” Nonetheless, he “would’ve made twenty dresses to be in this exhibit, but they said, “˜Shut up, Armani!’” Though he found the costumes on display “quite spectacular,” Armani admitted to wondering, “Did these guys have the guys to show them in London and Paris?”, referring to “the brave designers.”

Armani closed by thanking the “cartoonists from the 1930s and 1940s who conceived of these characters,” and making a reference to Flash Gordon (not a superhero, but close enough!). And as soon as he was done, the translator told us they “just found the speech.” He hadn’t needed it: he was wonderful.

Next up was curator Andrew Bolton, who revealed that “Philippe admitted in a moment of candor” to reading Captain Marvel as a child. Bolton then went on to explain that the letters of Captain Marvel’s magic word, “Shazam,” stood for the names of ancient gods and heroes; thus Bolton reinforced the point of connecting ancient mythology with the pop mythology of the superhero genre. Bolton also praised de Montebello for his “intellectual elasticity,” presumably meaning his openness to doing shows not just about unusual fashions but about comic book superheroes as well.

Bolton revealed that they had first “toyed” with the idea for this show five years ago, and that originally the idea was to focus on clothing that actually enhances one’s physical abilities. There are still some of these in the exhibit, including “wingsuits” from Atair Aerospace that enable the wearer to glide through the air. (Over at the Museum of Modern Art, in its recent “Design and the Elastic Mind” exhibition, I had seen an exoskeleton-like device that amplified the strength of the wearer’s arm, much like Iron Man’s armor!)

Bolton explained that both fashion and the superhero genre reflect the “zeitgeist” and “mirror’” themes that are “social, political, even sexual,” and that both fashion and superhero stories allow you “to act out your fantasies” and “to transform yourself.”

Bolton said that the show was “partly inspired” by Michael Chabon’s novel about the early days of comic books, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and he thanked Chabon, who wrote an essay in the catalogue and was present at the press preview (although, alas, I never saw him there).

Bolton also thanked DC and Marvel for their cooperation with the show” and their patience over our somewhat idiosyncratic interpretation.” (You mean, like Catwoman as dominatrix?)

Then Bolton introduced the final speaker, Nathan Crowley, the British production designer for the films Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, who designed the exhibition space for “Superheroes.” Crowley told us that he’d never designed a museum space before, and how he’d employed a trick from the movies, using mirrors to “elongate corridors.” I can attest that he did a great job: the first floor Special Exhibitions Gallery is usually a dark, even somewhat claustrophobic space, but “Superheroes” is brightly lighted, and the mirrored walls create a powerful illusion that the exhibit space is far bigger and more filled with people (who turn out to be reflections of ourselves) than it truly is. And can we credit Crowley for the idea of using the Alex Ross printed backgrounds?

With the press conference over, I returned to the “Superheroes” exhibition. Along a wall at the end of the exhibit was a row of vintage comic books, each relating to one of the characters featured in the show. There was Amazing Fantasy #15 (1963, the first appearance of Spider-Man), Amazing Spider-Man #252 (1984, the first appearance of Spider-Man in his black costume), Sensation #1 (1942, the first cover appearance of Wonder Woman, who had earlier debuted in All-Star Comics #8), Captain America Comics #1 (1941, the debut of Captain America, famously punching Hitler in the jaw on the cover), Incredible Hulk #1 (1972), Fantastic Four #51 (1966, “This Man, This Monster,” featuring the Thing), Batman #42 (1947, featuring the Catwoman in her Golden Age costume, which the exhibit never mentions), Detective Comics #33 (1939, an early Batman comic whose cover illustration makes his cape look particularly like bat wings), Tales of Suspense #39 (1963, the debut of Iron Man), Flash Comics #1 (1940), X-Men #1 (1963), Amazing Spider-Man #129 (the first appearance of the Punisher), and Marvel Spotlight #5 (the premiere appearance of the Ghost Rider).

Yet there was something missing. The museum’s labels for the covers on display specified the titles of the comics, their cover dates, and the name of the person or company that lent the copies of the comics. But what about the names of the artists? Like Jack Kirby, who drew the covers for Amazing Fantasy #15, FF #51, Incredible Hulk #1 and X-Men #1, and collaborated with Joe Simon on the cover of Captain America Comics #1?

For that matter, in the exhibition catalogue, distributed by Yale University Press, there are many, many reproductions of classic comic book covers, and once again, the titles of the comic books and their cover dates are specified, but not the artists’ names.

The book’s essays and the exhibition’s wall texts make a practice of listing the creators of each comic book character they mention. Some errors creep in. The Metropolitan follows DC’s official line that Bob Kane was the sole creator of Batman; once again, Batman’s first writer, Bill Finger, is the forgotten man. The wall text for Iron Man lists his creators as Stan Lee and Larry Lieber, neither of whom drew the character’s first story. (I salute the credits for the Iron Man movie for getting it right, listing Lee, Lieber, Don Heck, who drew the first story, and Jack Kirby, who designed Iron Man’s original armor.) In the case of the Flash, the exhibition and the book correctly name Gardner Fox and Harry Lampert as the creators of the original Flash back in 1940. But “Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy” is concerned not with the Golden Age Flash’s costume, but with the streamlined, modern uniform worn by the Silver Age Flash. The name of its designer, Carmine Infantino, is not to be found in the show or the catalogue.

Is it imaginable that the Metropolitan Museum would exhibit artwork in its galleries for drawings and prints on the second floor without naming the artist in the accompanying label, if that artist’s identity was known? How hard is it to identify the artists for classic DC and Marvel covers in the age of the Internet’s Grand Comics DataBase, or when there are acknowledged experts both within and outside the Big Two comics companies?

No, if the Metropolitan failed to name the comics artists responsible for those covers, then it must be that the museum did not feel that their identities are important. How different is this from the way that Roy Lichtenstein would base his pop art paintings on comics panels drawn by Kirby or by Russ Heath without crediting them? Or that Warhol at the start of the Metropolitan exhibition that is so clearly based on a Superman drawn by Curt Swan–but not credited as such?

Moreover, some of the artists who helped create the superhero costumes acclaimed in the exhibition are still with us: Joe Simon (Captain America)–95 years old but still active, Carmine Infantino (The Silver Age Flash), John Romita, Sr. (The Punisher), and Mike Ploog (Ghost Rider). Wouldn’t it be wonderful if these artists were invited to appear at the Metropolitan during the run of the exhibition, which does not close until September 1?

With “Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy,” the Metropolitan has come a long, long way towards acknowledging comics as an artform. But the Metropolitan also still has a long way to go.

There was something else at the end of the exhibit, the biggest surprise of all for me. Near that wall of vintage comics is a little gift shop, which, among other things, sells Alex Ross superhero prints and books about superior comics. And I was flabbergasted to see among them my own Marvel Comics Travel Guide to New York City! Looking further, I found The Marvel Vault, which Roy Thomas and I wrote. As I watched, one of the attendees even bought a copy of the Travel Guide, which I quickly offered to autograph. (He said yes.) And on a subsequent visit to the Metropolitan, I discovered that both books were also prominently displayed on a table in the front if this Met’s main gift shop, as well! I had never anticipated this, but I was a part of the Met’s “Superheroes” show!

Following the press conference, most of the attendees quickly left, but I stayed nearly till the exhibit closed at 1 PM, and was even interviewed by a reporter for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. (She said she had been told I was a comics historian, and I still don’t know by whom. Did any of my readers up in Canada see the CBC report on the exhibit? Did they use my interview?)

On my way out of the Museum I saw that the red carpet for that evening’s gala opening had been laid down along the Metropolitan’s celebrated front steps. I thought, why not? And I made my exit walking down the red carpet. My books were being sold at the Met, and I had just been interviewed by Canadian television; I felt like a bit of a celebrity myself.

THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK

My next stop was a nearby movie theater, where I saw a matinee screening of the new Iron Man movie. In the Beat’s annual survey last January, I wrote that one of the big comics-related stories to watch in 2008 was Marvel Studios’ first efforts at producing motion pictures in their own. There have been so many disappointing Marvel-based movies over the last decade–Ang Lee’s Hulk, Ghost Rider, Punisher, Daredevil, Elektra, the two Fantastic Four films; they may have made money, but they weren’t good. Marvel had input into these movies, but major Hollywood studios had been in charge. Could Marvel Studios, a newcomer attempting to become a new major, fare any better producing on its own? Iron Man demonstrates that the answer is yes. Iron Man has not only proved to be a commercial blockbuster, but it’s a superb translation of the comics series to the screen. To my mind, Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy is still at the very top, but director Jon Favreau’s Iron Man ranks right below them, above even the X-Men movie series. Maybe Marvel Studios’ main role was simply to give Favreau and his writers and cast creative freedom, but that has proved to be a wise decision.

From seeing the trailer for the Iron Man movie, I was concerned that Robert Downey, Jr., despite looking like Tony Stark, complete with mustache, would project too lightweight a persona for the character. I was expecting a more conventional leading man performance. But watching the movie, I was quickly won over, just like the soldiers accompanying Stark in the opening scene, who swiftly segue from seemingly regarding him as obnoxious to be charmed and delighted by him.

When Stan Lee and his collaborators introduced Tony Stark in 1963, he was a “millionaire playboy” in the mode of Bruce Wayne and other pulp and comics heroes.

It’s now well known that Lee was inspired by the young Howard Hughes in depicting Stark. Movie reviewers who find it unlikely that there could be someone like Stark who was a brilliant inventor, a multimillionaire, and a handsome ladies’ man should be reminded that the young Hughes was all of these things before he was swallowed up by madness. After the Fantastic Four movies caricatured the genius Reed Richards as a stereotypical geek, it’s refreshing that the Iron Man movie makes it clear that you can be smart and simultaneously be the complete opposite of a social misfit.

Moreover, the “playboy” persona fit the early 1960s, with the rise of Playboy magazine and its definition of cool. I suppose that makes Stan Lee’s Hitchcockian cameo in this movie particularly appropriate: a gag in which Stark mistakes him for Hugh Hefner. (But Stan is so entertaining at comics cons that I wish more filmmakers would let him talk in his cameos! He’s wonderful in his bit parts in the FF movies.)

In retrospect, Stan’s treatment of Stark as playboy seems rather naive. If Stark was trying to keep secret the fact that he wore a metal chestplate that kept his injured heart beating, how did he hide it from his lovers? Even if he never took off his clothes, which would seem downright strange, wouldn’t they feel the chestplate?

How do you make the “millionaire playboy” persona work in the 21st century? Isn’t it dated? Downey, Favreau and company found a way to make it work. In the early part of the movie Downey’s Tony Stark is self-centered, often irresponsible, and frequently exasperating. And yet he’s also witty, charming, ingratiating, and genuinely fond of his friends like James Rhodes. You can see how he annoys and irritates his friends and close colleagues, like Gwyneth Paltrow’s Pepper Potts, and yet it’s also perfectly clear why they continually forgive him and why he wins their loyalty and love. Downey’s Tony Stark has genuine charisma, and that is an essential part of the Stark character. Moreover, after he becomes Iron Man and develops a stronger sense of responsibility, he is credibly heroic and committed to his newfound ideals as well.

In the movie Stark starts out being irresponsible in many ways, from being inattentive to schedules to perhaps drinking too much (in an allusion to Stark’s becoming an alcoholic in the comics, quite possibly a storyline that will emerge in the movie’s sequel), to womanizing, to, most importantly, manufacturing weapons of mass destruction, even if they are intended for the U. S. government. The movie suggests that Stark’s brush with death, which leads to his becoming Iron Man, shakes him out of his immaturity, and makes him realize Stan’s famous lesson, that with great power- must come great responsibility. On returning to his factory after nearly dying in Afghanistan, Stark immediately announces that he is getting out of the munitions business. Indeed, in the movie Stark is fatally injured by his own weaponry, which has fallen into the hands of terrorists: his own bad karma has struck him down.

I didn’t think that in Stan Lee and Larry Lieber’s origin story for Iron Man back in Tales of Suspense #39 that they meant for Stark to be presented in a negative light. As noted, the playboy was considered the epitome of cool in the early 1960s. Moreover, Lee and company created Iron Man during the Cold War, only a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis (Lee’s 1960s Stark could also be regarded as Kennedyesque), and although the origin story is set in Vietnam, this was long before the antiwar movement if the 1960s became a major political force. Stan’s Iron Man stories of the 1960s take a militant Cold War viewpoint, with a parade of Communist villains, like the Titanium Man, and, of course, Wong Chu, the terrorist who captures Stark in the origin tale. I believe that Stan Lee thought that Stark was entirely admirable, both in devising weaponry for his country’s defense, and in traveling to Vietnam to witness his weaponry used in combat. In becoming Iron Man, a weapon himself, who could battle Communist super-menaces hand to hand, Stark was going to the next level.

But I don’t object to Favreau and Downey and company turning Iron Man’s origin story into a saga of personal redemption. That is very much in the Stan Lee tradition, and perhaps more specifically, in the tradition of the Stan Lee-Steve Ditko collaboration on Spider-Man and Doctor Strange. On becoming Spider-Man, Peter Parker starts turning into, well, an a-hole, using his amazing new abilities merely to seek fame and fortune, and allowing a fleeing criminal to escape because it’s none of his business. But it is indeed his business: that same Burglar murders Peter’s Uncle Ben, and Spider-Man must forever live with the guilt of knowing that he could have prevented Ben’s death but didn’t. Dr. Stephen Strange is an arrogant New York City surgeon, who is more interested in using his medical talents to make himself rich than genuinely concerned with the health of his patients. When an automobile accident injures his hands enough so that he can no longer perform operations, Strange loses everything, sinking into poverty. Only when he discovers a new purpose in life, selflessly battling evil as the student of the Ancient One, does Strange begin moving towards redemption.

I have no problem within Favreau and his collaborators turning Iron Man’s origin into a similar take of pride going before a fall, and that fall leading to moral rebirth. This is true to the overall themes of Stan Lee’s Marvel work, and it is an excellent way of making a hero whom Lee portrayed as a munitions maker and playboy acceptable to contemporary audiences.

Even in Stan’s and Larry Lieber’s original version of Iron Man’s origin, I perceive a theme that crops up repeatedly in Lee’s work. Tony Stark is a man who has everything, who seems to lead a perfect, charmed life, when it is abruptly taken away from him without warning: the multimillionaire genius is unexpectedly felled by a booby trap in Vietnam and left near the point of death. Similarly, Peter Parker did not expect that the Burglar would kill Uncle Ben, Reed Richards did not anticipate the radiation storm that struck his spaceship, Stephen Strange did not realize he would be in a car crash, and Bruce Banner did not predict that his assistant would try to kill him in the gamma bomb test. There is a disturbing side to Stan Lee’s classic origin stories: happiness and security and life itself are unstable and ephemeral, and can end at any time.

As a comics historian. I am impressed at how the Iron Man movie skillfully weaves together elements from throughout the character’s history. I do not expect movie adaptations to literally transfer every detail from the comics to the screen. It does not bother me that the site of Iron Man’s origin has been moved from Vietnam to Afghanistan: that is an intelligent updating. Moreover, given the shift in venue, I could not have hoped for a better, more powerfully effective dramatization of Stan Lee and Larry Lieber’s Iron Man origin story. The fact that in the movie the terrorists have gotten hold of Stark’s own technology makes it easier to believe that Stark could have created the original Iron Man battlesuit in primitive surroundings than it is in the original comics story.

The movie’s terrorist group is called the Ten Rings, an obvious allusion to Iron Man’s archenemy, the Mandarin. It was John Byrne, in reworking Iron Man’s origin, who first established that the Mandarin was the mastermind behind Wong Chu. Some have speculated that the bald terrorist leader in the movie will turn out to be the Mandarin in the sequel, although I would think that the filmmakers would try to cast a leading Asian star in the role. Stan Lee’s Mandarin is one of the great Marvel villains if the 1960s. But he is clearly inspired by Fu Manchu, and it will be interesting to see how Favreau and company can revamp the Mandarin to keep him from seeming to be a racist stereotype. (To Stan Lee’s credit, I never got the sense reading his stories that he meant the Mandarin to represent the Chinese in general.) with China as a rising economic power, perhaps it makes sense to portray the Mandarin as a Chinese counterpart to Tony Stark as high tech entrepreneur.

Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow even visibly has Pepper’s freckles in some close-ups) and Happy Hogan (played by Favreau) come from Stan Lee’s Iron Man stories from the 1960s. Stark’s decision to stop making munitions reflects Mike Friedrich’s Iron Man run in the 1970s. James Rhodes comes from the David Michelinie/Bob Layton collaboration that began in the late 1970s. Editor Mark Gruenwald challenged Denny O’Neil to come up with an Iron Man villain who would rival O’Neil’s great Batman villain Ra’s al Ghul: the result was Obadiah Stane. (So O’Neil has co-created the main villains for both the Iron Man movie and Batman Begins.) Initially, Jeff Bridges’s portrayal of Stane as a glad-handing corporate master of spin doesn’t seem anything like O’Neil’s sinister, enigmatic figure, but in the film’s final half hour, Bridges’s Stane projects evil worthy of O’Neil’s character. I like the fact that the movie turns Stane into the business partner of Tony’s late father. This makes Stane into a symbol of the dark side of Tony’s father, a morally ambiguous figure who went into the munitions business. Initially Tony reveres his father’s memory in the movie, but he must turn against his business.

As in O’Neil’s storyline, the movie Stane dons his own armored battlesuit, becoming the Iron Monger. The movie’s Iron Monger is enormous, like a monstrous version if Iron Man himself, representing the dark side of Tony, had he remained a munitions merchant and acceded to Stane’s policy of selling arms to any buyers, including terrorists. After seeing the movie I realized that this enormous Iron Monger also reminded me of Iron Man’s Cold War nemesis, the equally gigantic Titanium Man, and their epic combats in the 1960s.

And then there’s Samuel L. Jackson’s surprise cameo as Nick Fury after the movie’s closing credits. Marvel had already been depicting the Fury of the alternate continuity of its Ultimate line as a Jackson lookalike. With all that has been written lately about the Jewish-American heritage of early superhero comics creators, and Mark Evanier’s observation in Kirby: King of Comics that Jack Kirby regarded Nick Fury as an idealized version of himself, casting Jackson as Fury seems to be missing a big point. On the other hand, if I had to choose between David Hasselhoff, who played Fury in a TV movie, and Samuel L. Jackson, well, of course I’ll pick Jackson!

CARTOON CENTENNIALS

I wound up the day by attending one of the “Monday Nights with Oscar” monthly screenings that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences holds at its theater at Lighthouse International on 59th Street in Manhattan. (Yes, this is the Academy that gives out the Oscars, and an enormous reproduction of an Oscar statuette looms in one corner of the theater.) This evening’s program was titled “Tex Avery, Michael Maltese: Putting Looney in the Toons: A Double Centennial Tribute.” Avery was the great animation director who pioneered the classic “Looney Tunes” style of comedy but who created his surreal, absurdist, even postmodern, and explosively funny animated masterpieces for MGM (see “Comics in Context” #100, 101 and 188). Animation writer Maltese worked on cartoons with Warners director Friz Freleng, and later in the early Hanna-Barbera TV cartoons, but reached his peak collaborating with director Chuck Jones in the 1940s and 1950s.

The Academy had already presented this program in Los Angeles, but for the New York screening it was hosted by animation historian and New York University Professor John Canemaker. (Apparently NYU students sign up for his classes!) In last years I’ve attended Canemaker’s lectures at the Museum of Modern Art, where he promotes one of his books and shows animation relating to it, including a program of Winsor McCay animation, Disney’s Peter Pan (1953), in which Walt Disney’s great animators known as the “Nine Old Men” all worked, and Disney’s Alice in Wonderland (1951), to illustrate Canemaker’s lecture on his book about the Disney conceptual artist Mary Blair. Canemaker always presents a well-spoken, informative lecture, and I keep meaning to mention them in my column; now I finally have. He’s also written a book about Tex Avery, hence his presence this evening.

But Canemaker also pointed out that 2008 was also the centennial year for Warners’ master voice artist Mel Blanc, and the program served as an admirable retrospective of his work as well.

I could quibble with the selection of cartoons. None of the Avery cartoons on the bill reached the manic energy and reality-warping heights of his Northwest Hounded Police (1946), King Size Canary (1947), or Bad Luck Blackie (1949). For dazzling dialogue and masterful gag construction, I would have picked one of the cartoons from Jones and Maltese’s Bugs Bunny-Daffy Duck-Elmer Fudd trilogy of Rabbit Fire (1951), Rabbit Seasoning (1952) and Duck! Rabbit! Duck! (1953).

But still, the selection we got was good enough, including Avery’s Porky’s Duck Hunt (1937), in which Blanc took over voicing Porky Pig and also played Daffy Duck in his debut cartoon.

The show also included Avery’s A Wild Hare (1940) in which the trickster rabbit from previous Warners cartoons finally became the Bugs Bunny we know, complete with a New York-accented voice provided by Blanc. It was wonderful to see this cartoon again and study how well constructed the gags were; even apart from Bugs’s debut, it demonstrated how far Avery had already come in defining and mastering animated cartoon comedy.

Avery’s sultry songstress Red and stoic Droopy turned up to good effect in Little Rural Riding Hood (1949) and the Western parody Drag-a-Long Droopy (1954).

Freleng’s You Ought to Be in Pictures (1940), combining animation with live action, was shown because Maltese turns up on screen vividly playing a nasty studio guard–with a voice dubbed by Blanc!

Sometimes I feel uneasy about Pepe le Pew cartoons, since they’re really about sexual harassment, but I like it when the female cat turns the tables on Pepe as she does at the end of Jones and Maltese’s For Scent-imental Reasons (1948) in this program, providing another showcase for Blanc, channeling and parodying Charles Boyer.

By showing both the Freleng-Maltese Back Alley Oproar (1948) and the incomparable Jones-Maltese What’s Opera, Doc? (1957), the program enabled us to compare examples of Maltese’s ability to turn not only opera but even death scenes to humorous effect, as well as demonstrated Mel Blanc’s talent at conveying comedy through song, whether as Bugs acting Brunnhilde or Sylvester imitating Spike Jones (see “Comics in Context” #101 and 102). Putting A Wild Hare and What’s Opera, Doc? on the same bill also makes clear that the latter is, in effect, Jones turning his mentor Avery’s cartoon into an opera!

The program came to a satisfying close with Avery and Maltese’s collaboration on The Legend of Rockabye Point (1955) for Walter Lantz’s studio (see “Comics in Context” #189).

And what a pleasure it is to see these classic cartoons on a big theatrical screen with a large, appreciative audience, as they were originally meant to be experienced!

So: in the morning, an exhibit honoring superhero comics at America’s leading art museum, in the afternoon a critically acclaimed commercial blockbuster if a superhero movie, and in the evening, the Motion Picture Academy honors giants of the Hollywood theatrical cartoon. It was a good day for cartoon art.

But then I got the bad news about my comics course at NYU, and I thought, perhaps the cultural status of comics still hasn’t changed as much as I’d like to believe. Yet later that same week, I was invited to be a keynote speaker at an academic conference on superheroes, to be held next year. (I’ll tell you more about it when they’re ready to make a public announcement.) And I was invited specifically on the basis of my work writing “Comics in Context.”

We’re not in the Bizarro World. No, the world is changing around us, faster than we could have imagined. Many of us who have long taken comics and cartoon art seriously have dreamed that someday the world would recognize the true value of our artforms. Our dreams are now becoming realities.

LINKS IN THE AMAZON CHAIN

The Metropolitan Museum’s illustrated catalogue Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy, written by curator Andrew Bolton, is available at Amazon. com here.

As for the books by John Canemaker I referred to, their titles are The Art and Flair of Mary Blair, Tex Avery: The MGM Years, 1942-1955, Walt Disney’s Nine Old Men and the Art of Animation, and Winsor McCay: His Life and Art.

And you can find The Marvel Vault, by Roy Thomas and myself, here, and my Marvel Comics Travel Guide to New York City here.

–Copyright 2008 Peter Sanderson

“In about 2 hours 13 minutes and 14 seconds, any mention of last weekend’s New York Comic-Con will be thoroughly passé,” said the Beat two weeks ago in her blog. But of course I’m still writing about it, and will be for many weeks more.

But regular readers of this column know that my main interest in convention panels is not in reporting the kid of news that other comics websites would have posted within twenty-four hours after the panel took place. No, my intent is to record in detail what I witnessed that will be of lasting interest to comics fans, scholars, and historians weeks, months, and, I hope, years after the convention took place. I am a comics historian, and in this week’s column I give you a panel all about the history of comic conventions in the city of New York.

FRIDAY 1 PM
On the first day of the convention, the general public is not
admitted until 3 PM. Until then, the convention is for comics professionals, retailers, and press, enabling them to interact and relative calm before the crowds arrive to clog the aisles.

The programming before 3 PM is likewise aimed at professionals. It was the Beat herself who suggested that I attend the 1 PM panel, “Phil Seuling and the New York Con.” This was a good idea.

Perhaps most of you don’t know who Phil Seuling is. I see that his Wikipedia entry is a mere stub consisting of a single sentence. Wikipedia’s entry on “Comic Art Convention”  is considerably more informative.

There had been conventions for science fiction fans since the mid-1930s, which inspired small comics conventions starting in the mid-1960s, including the New York Comicon in 1964, a one-day event with roughly a hundred attendees.

It was a Brooklyn high school English teacher named Phil Seuling who organized the first large scale comics convention, held in New York City in 1968. In 1969 Seuling held his first in his series of “Comic Art Conventions,” which usually took place in New York City over the Fourth of July, and which continued through 1983; Seuling passed away the following year.

The Seuling conventions set the mold for all the major comics conventions that followed, including the San Diego Comic Con.

Inventing the modern comics convention would be enough to earn Seuling a place in the medium’s history, But Seuling was also the visionary who pioneered the direct sakes market for comics distribution.

From the 1930s into the 1970s, comic books were primarily sold on a returnable basis through newsstands and in small “mom and pop” stores. (In high school, I bought my first Marvels at a small store owned by a classmate’s father; in my college years I bought comics at a tiny luncheonette near Columbia University.)

But over time, probably due to the usual suspects like the rise of television, comic book sales fell from the heights they had achieved in the Golden Age, and as the decades passed, fewer newsstands carried them, and their owners realized they could make more money selling higher priced magazines. Moreover, the “mom and pop” stores were dying out, supplanted by chains. The comics industry might not have survived, had Seuling not pioneered a system by which the publishers sold their comics through distributors like himself to comic book specialty shops. This is the system with which we are familiar today, even though nowadays there is essentially only one specialty shop distributor, Diamond.

Moreover, whereas comics publishers felt they had to appeal to mass tastes through the newsstands, they could aim at dedicated comics fans through the direct sales shops. This was both good and bad: comics became a niche market, but the shops also made the rise of independent comics and lines like Marvel’s Epic and DC’s Vertigo possible. Thus Seuling spurred the evolution of American comic books towards appealing to an older readership and readers with more discerning, sophisticated tastes.

So Phil Seuling definitely deserves more than one sentence from Wikipedia. If you want to see what he looked like, I refer you to this entry in Mark Evanier’s blog, with a photo of Seuling appearing on television’s The Mike Douglas Show in the 1970s alongside Elfquest co-creator Wendy Pini, costumed, as she regularly was at conventions, as Red Sonja. (You don’t want to miss this, I assure you.)

I only attending the Seuling cons in their final years, and, although I was aware of their historical importance, I had the sense that I had already missed their golden age. By that point Creation was holding its own conventions in New York, notably a big one on Thanksgiving weekend, and in other cities. Between the monthly dealers’ shows, several annual Creation cons, and the Seuling show, comics conventions in New York City were already losing the sense of a being special. The San Diego Con took over that aura of a special, once-a-year event, perhaps in large part because attending the San Diego Con, back in the 1980s, when it was far less crowded and hectic. was like going on a summer vacation with your friends to a gorgeous locale with perfect weather. (This was back when comics pros could actually take the time during the Con to hit the beach.)

Considering how expensive attending San Diego has become, consider this Wikipedia factoid, if indeed it is true: “That 1969 convention, held Independence Day weekend at the Statler Hilton Hotel in New York City, cost $3.50 for a three-day ticket, with daily passes at $1.50. Admittance was free with a hotel room rental, which cost $15-and-up per day.”

Creation, then Fred Greenberg, then Dynamic Forces, and currently Big Apple kept the New York comics convention tradition going. But they could not afford the space for a truly major convention. Only now, with Reed Exhibitions’ New York Comic Con in its third year, successfully surmounting its growing pains of the past, has the sense that New York City has a potentially world-class comics convention begun to return.

So what were the Seuling conventions like in their early years? That’s what I attended the panel to find out. When I arrived, it had already begun. Milton Griepp, CEO of ICv2, was the moderator of a panel that included DC Comics president and publisher Paul Levitz; Diamond vice president (and former Pacific Comics co-founder) Bill Schanes; Greg Goldstein, recently vice president of gaming and entertainment at Upper Deck; and Michael Uslan. the comics writer who became executive producer on the Batman movies and producer of the forthcoming Spirit film.

When I came in, Milton Griepp was asking the panelists to recall their “favorite moments” from the Seuling conventions.

Paul Levitz recalled what he termed “an important point in my education.” At this point, 1971, “there was no Artists’ Alley, per se,” but some artists would do sketches for fans. “Neal Adams was at perhaps the first crest in his career,” and “I got him to do a sketch of Superman. a very, very quick sketch. . .for the enormous sum of six dollars.” Levitz ran it on the cover of his fanzine, and “I got an energetic lecture from Mr. Adams educating me on the difference between original sketch purchase price and reproduction right purchase price.” Levitz commented that this “has served me well in my understanding over the years, as I started to learn that original art should be returned to artists. . . .”

Schanes said that he “drove for three thousand miles” to attend Seuling’s con. “I was literally a teenager, and Phil was a very imposing figure” with “big bushy eyebrows” who “looked down at you. . .as he yelled at you–with love and affection.”

Schanes continued, “He scared the bejeebers out of me for years because he was such a big guy. . . .” But, as you might guess, beneath this fearsome facade, “he was really a very affectionate person once you knew him. And took us under his wing and really shepherded us. He took me into his house that night,” where Schanes gazed in wonder at the “very spectacular” collection of original comics art on his walls.

Greg Goldstein agreed that Seuling “was an imposing figure” who sternly ruled his convention and his monthly dealer shows. (As a former English teacher myself, I enjoy hearing that one of my kind can be this formidable.)

It was at one of the latter, Goldstein said, that “I recall Phil being arrested because of the “˜obscene comics’–quote-unquote–which were the underground comics.” (An audience member later identified the comics in question as Zap #4 and Armageddon.) Goldstein continued, “that was quite an education for me, because some guy just got arrested for selling comic books.”

This was like a flashback to the anti-comics hysteria of the 1950s, and as the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund will tell you, this sort of thing still happens today.

“It was very sad,” added Paul Levitz. “Because he was an English teacher” the Board of Education put him “on desk duty” for “a stretch” “until he gave it up.” Levitz observed, “That’s what really moved him into full time distribution at that point. It was in many ways probably good for the business, because he became more of an entrepreneur as a result, but it was certainly one of the tragedies of his life.” And people now and in the future will hear or read this story and be appalled and amazed at the blindness of years past towards the comics medium and those visionaries who were associated with it.

Michael Uslan sought to establish “the proper context” to explain exactly how Phil Seuling changed comics conventions. When Uslan was thirteen years old, he went to his first comics convention, which was run by a guy named Bernie. “He was in a black leather jacket with a duck tail, pompadour, and I seem to recall chains. . . .I was sure this guy was going to pull a switchblade on me if I didn’t cough up the right money at the right time.” And Schanes and Goldstein thought Seuling seemed intimidating!

“But back then, very few pros would come to the conventions. Stan–it was beneath him. He sent Flo Steinberg,” his secretary who didn’t mind interacting with fans. “Julie [Schwartz, DC editor–and a pioneer of science fiction fandom in his youth] didn’t show up.. . .But the pros looked down on this, They said, “˜These guys are nuts, they’re fanatical,’ and they kept their distance.” (This, of course, is before comics fans started becoming comics professionals in significant numbers.)

“In the early days,” Uslan continued, “we’d have people like. . . John Benson tell us how to behave and present ourselves, and how to dress on some occasions, He said, “˜There’s going to be press here. There’s going to be TV cameras. . .and it’s really important that people out there in the public take us seriously. . . . Let’s give them the impression that we are. . serious about our hobby, and what we’re doing, and our profession.”

When Seuling started running cons, Uslan continued, “There was a sophistication to it. Because all of a sudden I was going to a con and Stan Lee was here, and Will Eisner was there, and Burne Hogarth [of the Tarzan comic strip] was there, and Milton Caniff [of Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon] was there.” This was interesting to me for a couple of reasons. Newspaper comic strips were long considered to be a superior field to comic books (like movies were vis-a-vis television, I suppose), so it’s interesting that Seuling managed to persuade comic strip giants like Caniff and Hogarth to attend a convention for comic book fans. And it’s also intriguing that comic book convention attendees of that time apparently would have been interested in Caniff and Hogarth as special guests. What percentage of today’s comic con attendees care about classic newspaper adventure strips?

Uslan continued, “the one thing Phil Seuling really brought us as fans and as comic cons was respectability. It was respectability for the fans, it was respectability from the pros, and I think that changed everything forever.”

I don’t know that the mainstream media considered comics conventions respectable in the 1970s or 1980s. Even quite recently mainstream news reports on the San Diego Con often seem to belittle the attendees as a community of geeks and act as if virtually everyone comes in a wacky costume. Only now, I think, is the tone of mainstream press coverage really starting to change. But yes, it was important that Seuling brought comics fans and pros together. It’s rather startling to realize there was once a gap between them that had to be bridged.

Schanes explained that in the old days, it was New York’s comic con, not San Diego’s, that was acknowledged as the country’s greatest. Schanes was from the West Coast, “But In “˜71 San Diego was a very small show, and we had hundreds of people, not thousands. So we wanted to go to the mecca. We wanted to go to New York City and see the famous New York comic con. They were actually putting original artwork on the covers of the program books,” something else that we take for granted now, but was a big step to take at the time.

Moreover, “we were always very, very envious, being in the West,” Schanes went on. “We knew Jack [Kirby] was in Sherman Oaks [California], but. . . that’s where all the [other] artists were, was in New York City.”

Paul Levitz added, “Most of them were within fifty miles.” Nowadays comics writers and artists for American comics live all over the country and even in Britain, But in those days before FedEx and the Internet, the American comics industry was almost entirely centered within easy commuting distance of New York City.

Summing up, Schanes told us, “it was a very zen thing to go to New York and make the pilgrimage and see all the famous people. . . .”

Then Paul Levitz expounded a theory I find quite impressive. ” At dinner with Stan [Lee] about six months ago,” he began, “I made the argument that everything that’s going on here in comics today is his fault. . . . ” Well, that’s indeed true, not only in that Stan pioneered three-dimensional characterization in mainstream adventure comics, and demonstrated how genre comics could be used as a mode of personal expression, but also because without his Marvel revolution, American comics might well have virtually died out decades ago.

Levitz continued, “I think there’s a domino theory of the evolution of the comic book business that takes in both Stan’s work and the comic convention. . . .In the 1960s you have Stan. Julie Schwartz, really a very short list of people, starting to do comics for intelligent kids. They didn’t view it as something you could do for adults. This was just, “We’re going to do this for the bright kids instead of the stupid kids, because we’re going to have some fun doing this.

“Egotistically, we’ll all describe ourselves as being among that generation of smart kids who found this interesting, ” Levitz continued (Well, of course!), “and mostly those were the smart kids who showed up at the comic conventions. Those kids are the ones who came into the business, whether they came in as marketers, distributors, publishers”–apparently alluding to Griepp, Schanes, Goldstein and himself–“working for the publisher for two minutes and then teaching a course in it and then going off on the film side”–and this is a concise description of Uslan’s career– “however and in whichever fashion, and began agitating for change.” Of course, though he didn’t mention this, lots of these convention attendees became comics writers and artists as well.

Levitz told the audience, “We said, “Comics can be great; we want to do great comics. We don’t want to be screwed like the guys before. We want to do wonderful work, and we want to make money doing it, and we want to have a good time doing it.’”

As regular readers know, I gave a lecture series at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art titled “1986: The Year That Changed Comics.” Paul Levitz likewise regards the mid-1980s as a key transitional period for American comic books. “When that broke through in the early “˜80s from all of these forces–and it would have happened without any one individual or any group of individuals, but it happened to be the bunch of us who were there at the time who were pushing for it–you very swiftly have a quantum leap in the creative quality of what happened in American comics. What’s going on here in this hall today is largely happening because of the group of people who read those books in the mid-80s. They became journalists and said, “˜Of course comics can be great. I read Maus, Watchmen, Dark Knight, Elektra, Daredevil,’ whatever it was that gave them the passion. ‘I’m going to judge by that standard.’ It’s not going to be, “˜Isn’t it amazing that they did a comic book that makes some sense?’ They said, “˜Of course, this is genuine art.’

“Some came into field as creators; many became the journalists who wrote about it; many became the booksellers. We had a couple of guys up two minutes ago who were Random House salespeople who just started handling our line. They said, “˜We love comics, we’re happy to be doing it.’ That generation really comes from all of it. The conventions brought us together. It’s where we met. I walk through this hall, and I have so many friends who go back to when I was 14, 15, 16 years old, with a shared sense of purpose. We might have been on the opposite side of business deals along the way, we might have been competing companies, certainly had our share of arguments, but we all shared a very high sense of common purpose and the conventions crystallized all of that.”

Schanes agreed, “It was the first gathering point.”

Then Levitz summarized, “It’s like, “˜We’re here. We’re the tribe.’ And he concluded, “we pulled together in all of that in a really unique fashion in American culture at that time. And we changed the culture, as a result.”

Michael Uslan then said, “I’m going to take the position as the crotchety old man for a minute, which I often do. I’m elated. As I had a chance to walk around for the last hour up here, my comment was, “˜Oh my God, I’m at a huge comic con and look, there’s comic books. There’s original artwork.’ My biggest complaint has been that so many of them have gotten so big and so diluted that you can walk through endless hallways and see no comic books and see everything else but comic books.” Do you suppose he could be referring to San Diego? Uslan continued, “For a comic con, especially for a New York comic con, to pull back to the roots and really get the old comics and the new comics and the art out there again is something I’ve been looking for for a long time, that I felt has been significantly missing.” In other words, Uslan seemed to be suggesting that the current New York Comic Con was recapturing something of the spirit of Seuling’s original New York comic cons.

“I couldn’t agree more with what Paul said,” Uslan told us. “It It goes back to what I said initially, finding out that there were other geeks like me out there,”–oh, no, not another comics person who uses this word!– “that I wasn’t alone in the universe and there were people who shared this passion and shared this joy and had this thirst for knowledge in the history of the subject matter. . . .” Now that part I agree with.

“And here we sit today,” Uslan continued. “The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is going to open an exhibit on May 7th showing how comic book superheroes have influenced fashion, and Action #1 [the first appearance of Superman] will be on display, and Detective #27 [the first appearance of Batman] will be on display, along with many other comic books.” This is the exhibition “Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy,” and I’ll be attending the press preview.

“And you’ve got to give the credit to the comic book conventions, to the tribe,” Uslan concluded, “for having gotten the message out that this is an indigenous, legitimate American art form and that this is our modern day mythology.”

For Greg Goldstein, who described himself as being “a young guy who was into writing and art” in the early 1970s, it was a revelation to go to the New York Cons and see the new comics pros of that time. “Stan and Jack and those other guys were in the legendary hall-of-famers category,” Goldstein said. But then there was the new generation: “There’d be Roy Thomas. . . and Len Wein and Marv Wolfman. It felt more attainable. But the whole thing felt like we were next. There were these guys; they weren’t much older than us; they had the same sensibilities; they had long hair; they dressed the same way we did. And it felt like, boy, they can do it and they can do some really wonderful things in comics, and therefore we had a shot.”

Returning to the subject of why comics professionals used to avoid conventions, Paul Levitz explained that “remember that as late as the late 60s, the characters in comics weren’t even WASPs. They were white Anglo-Saxons. They weren’t even allowed to be Protestants, much less have any sense of religion. They had no ethnicity. They had all been whitewashed into the blandest possible form, the creators, largely, too. Stan Lieber became Stan Lee.” Listing other Jewish-American comics creators who had changed their names, Levitz mentioned Jacob Kurtzberg, who became Jack Kirby), Batman co-creator Bob Kahn, who renamed himself Bob Kane, and artist Eli Katz, who took the name Gil Kane. “They were embarrassed,” Levitz said, apparently suggesting they feared how people would react if they knew their true ethnicity.

And then there was what had happened only a decade before: “They were recovering from the 1950s and Wertham.” Levitz was referring to Dr. Fredric Wertham, the man most associated with the anti-comics crusade of the 1950s, which claimed that comic books of various sorts contributed to juvenile delinquency, and which devastated the comics industry and the lives of its writers and artists. The story has recently been retold in the new book The Ten Cent Plague by author David Hadju.

Levitz recalled that “Joe Orlando”–one of the artists at EC Comics in the 1950s, who later worked at DC–“would tell the story, when I was working for him, that in those years [the 1950s] if he went to a party and a girl was asking him what he did for living, he was an artist. If pressed, he was an artist of things for children. Maybe somewhere between his picking up the girl or his despairing of any hope of picking up the girl, he’d finally admit that he was a comic book artist.” Back then comics were considered the bottom of the artistic barrel.

“The conventions have had an astounding power in all of this,” Levitz continued. ” ” It’s the first time anybody told these guys that what they did meant a damn thing. It’s still has that power for some of the older ones as they get to places like San Diego and they get an Inkpot [Award from the San Diego Con], or they come here. Arnold Drake”–the recently deceased co-creator of Deadman and the Doom Patrol–“was here a year or two ago and just delighting in the fact that, “˜People care about what I did? You remember who I am?’” Levitz pointed out that artist Jim Mooney, who passed away earlier this year, had not received credit on his work at DC for decades; he too finally got to meet his fans at comics conventions.

“But in the history of comics, when we start these early conventions,” Levitz asserted, “these brilliantly talented people are still battered children. They really are totally unrecognized. And the conventions were a vital part in the step of acknowledging them as the artists that they are.”

With the panel nearly at a close, an audience member asked if the panelists had any regrets about the old New York conventions.

Michael Uslan told an amusing story that also bore witness to just how worthless comics were considered only three decades ago. “We had a treasure trove down the shore in New Jersey: Collingswood Auction. It was a flea market. My friend Bobby and I would get my parents to take us every Friday night because . . . the guy would come in every Friday night with boxes from New York loaded with old, old, old comic books, and because they were so old, he sold them for a nickel a piece. Bobby and I returned every soda bottle we could find within three towns. We brought in the nickels, and over the course of a couple years, we walked off with literally thousands and thousands of comics dating back to 1936 that we bought for a nickel apiece.”

Great, huh? But then television started to report on the New York Comic Con and the prices collectors were paying for old comics. “And the word goes out, “˜comic books selling for $100 apiece,’”–which, from today’s standpoint, seems cheap for Golden Age material–“and that was the end. My supply was cut off.”

Paul Levitz had a different, more somber regret: “the questions I didn’t get around to asking. I was too busy running tables, but the history that we’ve lost. I constantly say to myself, I wish I had asked this guy about that. And I’m probably still not getting around to doing nearly enough of it.”

Back in the 1980s I was asked if I wanted to be part of an oral history project about the history of comics. I said yes, but it never happened. And that was back when Jerry Siegel. Joe Shuster, Bob Kane, Jack Kirby, Will Eisner, Julie Schwartz, John Broome, and, indeed, most of the giants from comics’ Golden and Silver Ages were still alive.

But in my next New York Comic Con report, I’ll tell you about a panel that brought together many of the surviving giants of early comics history, right here in New York City in April of 2008. But i may be tempted to write about the Iron Man movie first!

LINKS IN THE AMAZON CHAIN

You can get David Hadju’s The Ten Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America at Amazon.com here. I shall soon be reviewing it in my column “Books about Comics” in Publishers Weekly‘s online newsletter Comics Week.

And since I’ve promised to mention each week one of the books my own work appears in, how about Marvel’s Daredevil by Frank Miller and Klaus Janson Omnibus (as opposed to the Bendis Daredevil Omnibus), which collects much of Frank Miller’s work on the character, as well as an interview I did in the 1980s with Miller and Daredevil collaborator Klaus Janson? You can find the Miller-Janson Omnibus at Amazon here.

–Copyright 2008 Peter Sanderson

In writing about Mark Evanier’s new book Kirby: King of Comics (2008, Harry N. Abrams), I’ve expressed my astonishment at the blindness that so many people in the comics industry showed towards Jack Kirby’s amazing talents from the 1940s onward. Just look at all the magnificent illustrations with which Evanier has filled this book, from throughout the entire length of Kirby’s career. Wasn’t his greatness as an artist obvious?

In my last installment, I didn’t have a chance to describe the extraordinary artwork in the chapter devoted to Kirby’s work at Silver Age Marvel. For instance, look at the splash page for “A Monster at My Window!” from Tales to Astonish #34 (August 1962) (Evanier, Kirby: King of Comics p. 113). As you might expect from that title, there’s something humorous about this grotesque monster clinging to this apartment house wall. But nonetheless the image is simultaneously both comical and genuinely eerie, like a nightmare set down on paper.

My favorite illustrations in this chapter are the reproductions of Kirby’s pencil art, before it was inked, of four pin-ups of members of the Inhumans Royal Family from Fantastic Four Special #5 (1967). There’s the regality of Black Bolt, conveyed through a simple pose with his arms raised as if in benediction (Evanier, p. 142). There’s the power and speed of Karnak splitting a machine in half, a perfect example of Kirby’s prowess in capturing a sense of energy and movement within a static picture (Evanier, p. 145). Then there are portraits of the two sisters, Crystal and Medusa, which radiate different sorts of sexiness. Crystal leans forward and looks and smiles enchantingly directly at the audience, as if forming a personal bond with the individual reader (Evanier p. 143). Her big sister Medusa stands further back from the “camera,” and seems more mature and independent in attitude, but even more physically impressive (Evanier, p. 144).

Immediately after these Inhumans pictures comes another extraordinary portrait which resembles a pin-up in that it is another full-length depiction of one of the FF‘s cast of characters. But in this page Kirby turns the full-length portrait to dramatic purpose, providing the unforgettable splash page introducing his and Stan Lee’s single greatest issue working as a team: Fantastic Four #51, featuring “This Man. . .This Monster!” (Evanier p. 146). There stands Ben Grimm, the Thing, whose monumental figure incarnates power, and yet his pose and the expression on his face convey bewilderment and melancholy, as if he has no purpose in life for his power, as if he does not know where to turn. Torrential rain pours down around and in front of him, creating a three-dimensional effect. The downpour might be a visual metaphor for the harshness of Ben’s fate. It could also signify Ben’s own inner melancholy, or even the heavens weeping for this man trapped in a monster’s body.

The “Masters of American Comics” museum exhibition had to resort to displaying a printed version of this iconic splash page (see “Comics in Context” #155: “Two American Masters”). At first I assumed that Kirby: King of Comics’ reproduction of this page was shot from a photostat (as indeed the Inhumans pinups were), which might explain the black border and the notations on top. But Mark Evanier has informed me that he and Abrams used the original art for FF#51’s splash page, and that, indeed, most of the illustrations in Kirby: King of Comics were shot directly from the original art.

Then there’s a page from Tales of Suspense # 80 (August 1966) pitting Captain America against the Red Skull in single combat (Evanier p. 151). Compare this to the relatively primitive but promising Cap vs. Skull sequence from Captain America Comics #3 (1941) that Evanier reprinted earlier in his book (Evanier pgs. 52-53) to see the vast strides that Kirby had made as an artist in twenty-five years. It’s not just that by 1966 Kirby was drawing handsomer, more powerful figures with a heightened realism to them, but also that Kirby had so greatly grown as a dramatist. Look at the characters’ facial expressions, body language and movement, the composition and staging, and the pacing of the battle.

This page also demonstrates Stan Lee’s mastery of dialogue. Lee conveys Captain America’s deep commitment to his ideals without making it seem dated or hackneyed. Look at the Captain’s speech to the Red Skull, vividly voicing the hero’s hatred of tyranny and contempt for cowardice and hs fervent respect for “the forces of freedom.” (Could this be the same Captain who passively underwent that tongue-lashing from that reporter who claimed he was out of touch with America in the aftermath of Civil War?) Look at how Lee shows us Cap’s anger at the Skull, but also how Cap–unlike the Skull–controls his anger: the thought balloons (which have fallen from favor with today’s writers) provide a running subtext to Cap’s dialogue, showing us the professional soldier in action, continually formulating and evaluating his strategies. As for the Skull, nowadays writers would claim that everyone rationalizes his own actions and would therefore consider it unrealistic that the Red Skull would consciously, even proudly, align himself with “evil” and the “forces of bigotry, greed and oppression.” But even though he added so much psychological realism to the superhero genre in through the Marvel revolution, Lee must have realized he was still dealing with the mythic. Stan Lee endows the Red Skull with a skill with language as great as the Captain’s and makes the Skull’s glorying in his own evil dramatically persuasive. In defiantly declaring that “so long as men take liberty for granted” that “the forces of the Red Skull creep ever closer to the final victory!” Lee powerfully makes clear that the Skull is as passionately committed to his ideology as his eternal rival, Captain America, is to his patriotic ideals.

Kirby: King of Comics also reprints the splash page from Lee and Kirby’s “The Silver Burper!” (Evanier p. 156), probably the funniest story from the entire run of Not Brand Ecch, Marvel’s version of the sort of superhero comics parodies that Harvey Kurtzman put into the early issues of MAD. Kirby is so good at this surreal visual slapstick that I wish he’d had more opportunities to draw comedy. Wacky as this page is, the rest of the story is way funnier (such as the page I located and displayed in “Stan Lee: A Retrospective” last year at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art). When is Marvel going to get around to publishing an Essential Not Brand Ecch paperback?

Later in his book, Evanier devotes a two-page sidebar to Kirby’s experiments with combining drawn figures with photographic collages to create astonishing effects in his comics (Evanier pgs. 170-171). This is yet another instance in which this visionary creator was ahead if his time: comic book printing was not yet sufficiently good to convey the effects he intended his collages to convey. If only Kirby were able to create and publish his collages now.

Even when I saw my first Kirby Fantastic Four as a boy, I was impressed by his artwork, which was more powerful and dynamic than any comics I’d ever seen previously. As I looking through Kirby: King of Comics, it seems to me that Kirby’s greatness as an artist is clear to anyone who has eyes to see.

But are there comics readers today who, like DC’s editors in the 1950s and 1960s, just don’t “get” Kirby’s work? Will there be comics aficionados who look at Kirby: King of Comics who won’t appreciate the extraordinary art within?

I was struck by the Beat’s recent comments on a debate at Blogarama about the tumbling sales for Mark Waid and George Perez’s revival of DC’s Brave and the Bold. Quoting comics artist Ryan Dunleavy’s comment, “I don’t like George Perez’s artwork,” the Beat exclaims, not entirely ironically, “”˜Don’t like George Perez’???? Wha”“? That’s heresy!” Perez, after all, has had a long career as one of the top artists of the superhero genre, going back to the 1970s, perhaps peaking with his work on The New Teen Titans in the 1980s, and experiencing a resurgence of fame in the last decade with projects like the long-anticipated JLA/Avengers (see “Comics in Context” #14: “Continuity/Discontinuity”). And now he’s suddenly fallen from favor?

The Beat then quotes Ed Ward’s comments that “The fact that it reads like older, pre-decompression comics is, I’m pretty sure, one of the reasons it’s a tough sell to contemporary readers. . . .

“I know that it definitely takes a lot more effort for me as a reader to find an “˜in’ to a book by George Perez than it takes me for almost any other contemporary books, and it it’s more work for me to stay involved. The adjustment in my headspace feels very similar to the adjustment in headspace I need to make as a film viewer when I’m watching something from the silent-era as opposed to something contemporary.”

The comparison to film is important. When I entered college, I quickly became a cineaste, not only going to see contemporary American movies, but also foreign language films, and classics from the past, from Buster Keaton to Ingmar Bergman, at the many revival film theaters in New York and boston back in the days before home video. I never had any difficulty adjusting to the different looks and styles of films from different countries or decades: the basic principles of cinematic storytelling remain consistent. So I have always been somewhat baffled by people who refuse to watch black and white films or movies with subtitles and by the people who, as Roger Ebert put it, act as if film history began with Star Wars.

But I certainly can’t deny that these people not only exist but comprise the vast majority of today’s movie audience. I may know plenty of people who share my devotion to Turner Classic Movies, but I am well aware that even though it shows so many films that were popular with the mass audience in their time, TCM has only a small niche audience now compared to scores of other TV networks. For me the downside of the collapse of the Tower Records chain was that its stores sold DVDs of classic films from the first half of the 20th century whereas most video stores do not.

Similarly, as faithful readers know, in this column I write about comics and cartoon art from throughout the 20th century into the 21st. The recent explosion of books reprinting classic comic strips and comic book stories from the past demonstrates that there is substantial interest in the classics of the medium. A classic, after all, is defined as a work that remains vital and relevant despite the passage of time.

But classics don’t necessarily appeal to the mass audience. Far more people are going to watch American Idol than a telecast of a play by Shakespeare. The mass audience is usually drawn to more contemporary work that fits the tastes and fashions of the time. Some of this may endure, much of it will not. Recently Fox reran The Simpsons episode titled “That 90s Show,” which drew much of its humor from pointing out just how silly various fashions and fads of the 1990s already seem less than a decade later.

This dispute about George Perez’s comics allegedly being hard to read reminds me of anecdotes I’ve heard about people simply being unable to read comic books. The visual language of comics may seem intuitively obvious to you and me, but apparently it bewilders other people. They haven’t learned how to read comics. Are there people who don’t know how to read Jack Kirby comics?

George Perez, like so many other comic book artists who began their careers in the 1970s, 1980s and even the 1990s, was greatly influenced by Jack Kirby’s work. If the current mainstream comic book readership finds it difficult to “adjust” to Perez’s art, what would they think of Jack Kirby’s work? Is it possible that a generation of comics readers has arisen, most of whom do not “innately” respond to Kirby’s artwork?

The aforementioned Ed Ward wrote in a comment to The Beat’s blog that “I didn’t like Kirby’s work as a kid either! I’ve only been able to start appreciating his work over the last few years, and I’ve still got a TON of friends who grew up the same time I did who can’t stand his stuff and dismiss it as “˜ugly,’ “˜old,’ and “˜unreadable.’” (“Ugly”?! Did they see those pin-ups of Crystal and Medusa?)

You, the reader of this column, may protest that you’re in your teens, twenties or thirties, and you love Kirby art. Good for you. There will be plenty of exceptions to the rule, just as there will continue to be a substantial number of teens and twentysomethings who become aficionados of classic movies, as I did. But I’m talking about the tastes of the majority of the audience.

The Beat asserts that “there is no denying that the Ultimate/Identity Crisis/52 generation of superhero comics readers IS a generation of superhero comics readers, and not just the lingering survivors of an older tribe.” She continues, “While old timers like The Beat turn up their noses at this “˜decompressed’ storytelling–rejecting what seems like plotlessness and a lack of pacing, for today’s readers, this is what they expect from comics.”

Regular readers know that I am no admirer of “decompressed” storytelling, either. I believe that this style straitjackets the artist, preventing him or her from realizing the visual potential of a story. The Marvel revolution was not just in writing but in visual storytelling. Before, comic book artists worked from full scripts, and so the writer was dominant. Through his “Marvel method,” Stan Lee came up with basic plot ideas, often in collaboration with the artist, and then let the artist draw the story, filling out the plot; the Lee would script the dialogue and captions to fit the visuals. This method allowed Jack Kirby and other artists much more freedom in co-plotting (or entirely plotting) the story, conceiving it in visual terms, and establishing its pace. As a result Marvel developed a new, dynamic firm of visual storytelling.

For decades the “Marvel method” was used not only at Marvel but at DC and throughout the American book industry. But in recent years the fashion has apparently shifted back towards writers doing full scripts, plotting and dialoguing the story before the artist starts drawing it. So it should be no surprise that writers have self-indulgently resorted to “decompressed storytelling,” turning out dialogue-heavy but visually static sequences. If Lee and Kirby launched the “Marvel revolution,” then this is the Decompressed Generation’s counterrevolution. (So first the Baby Boomers were succeeded by the “MTV Generation” that wanted their entertainment to move faster, like the rapid cutting in music videos, and now, somehow, we have a generation of comics readers that prefers a tediously slow pace. How did this happen?)

Allegedly “decompressed storytelling’ is more “cinematic.” But I recall Frank Miller saying, at the time that he was doing Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, that in writing comics he sought to pare away any panels or dialogue that weren’t necessary. He believed in dramatic economy. There was important meaning in every shot and every line of dialogue; otherwise, Miller would have deleted it. This seems much more like a genuine cinematic storytelling to me. There are now movie and TV writers who perpetrate “decompressed” scenes in comic strips, perhaps because if they tried to inflict such longueurs on screen, the scene would hit the cutting room floor.

According to my “Rubber Band Theory of Cartoon Art” (see “Comics in Context” #75), this state of affairs will not last. The Image “look” of the early 1990s eventually largely fell from favor, and someday some new young artists will rediscover the lessons of the great visual storytellers of the 1960s, like Kirby. The Beat observes that “The average Oni, D&Q or Top Shelf book has more “traditional” storytelling than corporate comics these days, and are created by young cartoonists with completely different sensibilities.” It’s as if “corporate comics,” by their very nature, saturate themselves in the excesses of current commercial fashion, while an even younger generation rebels against the current establishment by rediscovering “traditional” visual storytelling.

One of the miracles of Marvel in the 1960s is that Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, et al. were consciously experimenting with new ways of doing comics. They didn’t have the “corporate” sensibility that now seems to dominate DC and Marvel. Indeed, Stan was continually making jokes about DC, which he called “Brand Ecch” (hence the title of Not Brand Ecch): he saw Marvel as the innovative, visionary rebel and DC as the stodgy establishment, following a conventional wisdom that was quickly growing outdated.

Might there be another, perhaps more disturbing reason why some readers might not properly appreciate this book devoted to the life and work of Jack Kirby?

Recently the Beat also ran a blog entry on the “fallout from the court decision granting the heirs of Jerry Siegel partial ownership of the copyright to his mythic co-creation, Superman. She wrote this moving commentary:

“Obviously, this case will go to appeal, and the legal battle will go on for years and years. I couldn’t find any mention anywhere of the age of Joanne Siegel, the original inspiration for Lois Lane, but she has to be in her 90s. Begin to ponder the years of fighting this woman has gone through, and this legal victory–one that has come not through any groundbreaking legal precedent, but through the application of established copyright law–and you can’t help but think the good guys have won, at least for a day.

“With that in mind, the attitudes displayed on many message boards accusing the Siegel family of “˜greed’ or worrying that this is a terrible decision for the character of Superman are stunning examples of ignorance and selfishness. . . .the case of Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel–living in poverty for years even as a character no ever denied they created made hundreds of millions of dollars–is infamous as one of the most unfortunate examples of financial disparity in the history of intellectual property.”

One of the comments for this blog entry noted, “Fandom has really embarrassed itself this go-round.” I’ll say. This is followed by a debate in the blog entry’s commentary section over whether Siegel should be blamed for bringing his bad fortune upon himself by signing a bad deal (the only one he was offered) for Superman in the first place.

One of the primary themes of Mark Evanier’s Kirby: King of Comics is to show how Jack Kirby, a man of creative genius, one of the people most responsible for Marvel’s spectacular financial success, had to struggle for recognition of his achievements and even to make enough money to support his family. Does the ignorance and selfishness of many people’s reactions to the Siegel court decision mean that there are people who will read Kirby: King of Comics and will not sympathize with Kirby’s struggle? Are there readers who will argue that since Marvel had no legal obligation to give Kirby the credit and financial rewards he deserved, that they had no moral obligation to do so?

How different is this from the circa-1968 Marvel executives’ attitude that Evanier so bitingly describes in his book? “Not only was Jack refused [such credit and financial security], but he was lectured like a child with no sense of the world in which he lived” (Evanier, p. 153).

So, if Jack Kirby were still with us, still doing important work and still underpaid, would the Decompressed Generation of comics readers care?

Although my own generation of comics aficionados regards Kirby as an icon, much of that audience also turned against him and his work thirty years ago. Those who don’t already know the basic narrative of Kirby’s career may be shocked to learn from Evanier’s book that in 1978, his career in comics seemed finished, and “Readers of the day didn’t seem to notice” (Evanier, p. 197). By then Kirby felt “hostility from the Marvel editorial staff,” who, the decade before, had been such passionate admirers of his work. But by that point he was being referred to as “Jack the Hack” (Evanier, p. 187).

Hard as many of you may find that to believe, it was true. By that time I had gotten to know various people at Marvel, even though I was still years away from turning comics pro, and I heard people disparage Kirby with that nickname. I didn’t, but I found myself disappointed with Kirby’s mid-1970s work, although I’ve learned to appreciate some of it more with the passing decades, as you can see from my lengthy appreciation of his Eternals series and Neil Gaiman’s Eternals revival that ran in this column last fall (starting with “Comics in Context” #194: “Eternal Verities”).

By 1970 Kirby left Marvel and went to work as editor, writer and artist for DC Comics; his former nemeses Jack Schiff and Mort Weisinger were no longer there. This was when Kirby began work on his amazing “Fourth World” family of comics–The New Gods, The Forever People, Mister Miracle, and a radically revamped Jimmy Olsen–centering on the war between the “new gods: of the planet New Genesis and Kirby’s greatest, most monumental villain (next to, or arguably greater than Doctor Doom) Darkseid, master if the planet Apokolips. Bursting with astonishing creativity, continually spawning brilliant new characters and concepts, the Fourth World books are now rightly regarded as classics.

Evanier notes the parallels between The New Gods (in the first half of the 1970s) and George Lucas’s Star Wars (starting with the first film in 1977): “In New Gods, Orion had called upon a power called the Source in confrontation with his father, Darkseid. In Star Wars, Luke Skywalker called upon a power called the Force when he battled his father, Darth Vader” (Evanier p. 177). Evanier could have tweaked that line to make the comparison even stronger: Darth Vader, after all, draws power from the “dark side” of the Force!

For whatever reason, the “Fourth World” books did not rival the sales of Marvel’s top books, as DC presumably expected, and instead came to be regarded, correctly or not, as commercial failures. Another Kirby creation, Kamandi, The Last Boy on Earth, proved to be a moderate success. (Oddly, Evanier says the series had “a young human protagonist and a lot of people with animal heads” [Evanier p. 181]. That may be what they looked like, but characters such as Tuftan really were animals who, following “the Great Disaster,” had evolved the abilities to talk and to stand upright like humans.)

But Kirby ended up returning to Marvel, by which time Stan Lee had moved up to the position of publisher and was no longer scripting comic books on a regular basis. Now Kirby edited, wrote and drew his own comics, including Captain America and Black Panther, as well as his new creations The Eternals, Machine Man and Devil Dinosaur. But these too were commercial disappointments, and the ambitious Eternals, which I regard as Kirby’s last great series, was canceled. “Jack wasn’t connecting with the [then] current Marvel readership,” Evanier concedes. And thus, startlingly, the man aside from Stan Lee who was most responsible for the Marvel revolution found himself treated as a has-been only seventeen years after Fantastic Four #1.

Why did the audience turn against Kirby? In his book Evanier suggests that one reason might have been the “florid, theatrical voice” of Kirby’s dialogue and captions (Evanier, p. 165). But Stan Lee also often wrote narration and certain characters’ dialogue in an operatic, larger-than-life style, and it worked for him. It’s not that readers resisted a “theatrical” style of scripting back then; it’s that Stan did it far better than Jack did. (Again, compare Kirby’s suggested dialogue in the borders of his original art for Silver Age Marvel with the way that Lee reworked it.)

I wonder if in part Kirby was a victim of his own previous success at Marvel. Stan Lee had urged artists to draw more like Kirby, and by the mid-1970s a new generation of artists who had grown up reading the Silver Age Marvels, and who had incorporated Kirby’s influence into their own work, dominated mainstream comics. So perhaps Kirby’s own mid-1970s work no longer looked as distinctively different to the readers of that time.

My hypothesis is that comics readers of the 1960s expected–or–hoped–that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, each operating on his own, would produce work that was on the level of their great collaborative work of the 1960s. Stan Lee, who had relied so much on Kirby’s concepts and plot input, retired from writing comic books on a regular basis only two years after Kirby quit Marvel in 1970. On his own Kirby was capable of doing some remarkable work with characterization. For example, it strikes me that through Orion, in The New Gods, who hid his true, bestial features and his savage temper behind a handsome outer facade, Kirby anticipated what Chris Claremont and others later did with Wolverine. But Kirby’s tendency was to depict his lead characters as rather one-dimensionally good and heroic, as demonstrated by Ikaris in The Eternals, Mister Miracle, and his mid-1970s depiction of Captain America. But Stan Lee had accustomed readers to heroes with multidimensional personalities, who had character flaws, who engaged in introspection and self-doubt. A new generation of writers were arriving at Marvel and DC who would attempt to push the envelope on characterization yet further. Again, Kirby could come up with intriguingly complex characters in this period, like Kro and the Reject in The Eternals, but I suspect that the bland one-dimensionality of so many of his 1970s characters seemed dated to readers of that time.

But from this nadir in the 1970s, Kirby’s reputation would take a considerable upward turn only a decade later, as I shall examine in the final installment of my commentary on Kirby: King of Comics in the near future.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF

I will be appearing on four, count “˜em., four panels at the third New York Comic Con. which is being held at Manhattan’s Javits Convention Center from Friday, April 18 through Sunday, April 20.

On Friday, April 18 at 6 PM, I will moderate the panel “Comic Artists Talk about Drawing,” with an eclectic lineup including Colleen Doran (A Distant Soil), Dean Haspiel (Harvey Pekar’s The Quitter), Jim Lee (All Star Batman and Robin), Leonard Starr (the classic comic strips Mary Perkins On Stage and Annie), and maybe more.

Then if you just stay put in the same room, you can watch me moderate the 7 PM panel “Marvel 1958-1968” featuring Silver Age artists Dick Ayers and Stan Goldberg, writers Gary Friedrich (co-creator of the Ghost Rider) and Denny O’Neil (who began his comics career at Marvel in the mid-1960s), Fantastic Four inker Joe Sinnott, and perhaps some surprise guests.

Then on Saturday, April 19 at 1 PM I will moderate the “Legion of Super-Heroes 50th Anniversary Panel” featuring Keith Giffen, Paul Levitz and Jim Shooter.

Later that day at 5 PM I’ll be at the first ever Quick Stop Entertainment panel, as will Fred Hembeck, where we’ll finally get to meet our longtime editor Kenneth Plume for the first time, and the audience will find out more about Quick Stop proprietor Kevin Smith’s next movie.

And on Sunday at 1:30 PM, I’ll be at the Simon and Schuster booth signing copies of The Marvel Comics Travel Guide to New York City.

Back in “Comics in Context” #200 I remarked that I still hadn’t written about Herge, whose centennial was last year, and his celebrated creation Tintin. Well, now I have, in an article in the March 25, 2008 edition of Publishers Weekly‘s online newsletter Comics Week, “Herge at One Hundred” (http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6544443.html?nid=2789).

LINKS IN THE AMAZON CHAIN

You can order Mark Evanier’s Kirby: King of Comics here. And Mark will preside over a “Kirby: King of Comics” panel at the New York Comic Con on Sunday, April 20.

In the 1980s I co-wrote four different versions of The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, not counting the Update mini-series: the original; the Deluxe Edition with double-size issues; a multi-volume paperback version of the Deluxe Edition (which incorporated a small amount of new writing); and the Master Edition. Though Marvel has been publishing new Handbooks over the last several years, back in the 1980s the sales of the Handbooks were in decline. So Handbook editor Mark Gruenwald tried a new format: the Master Edition entries consisted not of text articles but of lists of basic data and statistics, with pictures of the characters to serve as a reference guide for artists, printed on looseleaf pages to be collected into binders.

Now, to my surprise, Marvel is now reprinting the Master Edition as two paperbacks. You can find the first of them here over at Amazon. Strangely, Amazon did not see fit to credit me or another of the principal writers, Murray Ward (though they have informed me that they will correct this), but you’ll find my name and Murray’s on the credit pages in the back of the book.

So now all of my past work on The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe is back in print! And will that be all the Handbook work I ever do? Stay tuned for further developments.

–Copyright 2008 Peter Sanderson