SPIDER-MAN’S OEDIPUS COMPLEX

Thanks to the enormous success of the recent movies about the character, Marvel’s Spider-Man has become more popular than ever. Sam Raimi directed the first three live action Spider-Man films, starring Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker alias Spider-Man, all of which I’ve reviewed in past installments of “Comics in Context.” Raimi, Maguire, and the rest of the original cast have left the series, and Columbia Pictures and Marvel have now “rebooted” the film series, starting it over from Spider-Man’s origin, in this year’s new film The Amazing Spider-Man, directed by the appropriately named Marc Webb, with Andrew Garfield taking over the role of Peter Parker. And Mr. Webb and his collaborators are taking a strikingly different approach to the Spider-Man saga than Mr. Raimi did, including a focus on Peter Parker’s fathers, both real and figurative.

As usual, in analyzing this film, I will be discussing the entire plot. So if you haven’t seen the movie yet, it behooves you to go watch it before reading this critique.

But before I begin psychoanalyzing Spider-Man in his latest movie, I want to address just how long Spider-Man has been a part of American popular culture.

THE MARVEL REVOLUTION IN MIDDLE AGE

Back in college I signed up to take a course in Modern Literature, thinking that I would be studying novels from the previous few decades. Instead I discovered that “modern,” or “modernist literature” is a term used to describe fiction mostly from the 20th century before World War II; postwar literature was instead described as “contemporary.” Years later I similarly learned that the term “modern art” refers to works from the late 19th century up to the 1960s; after that comes “contemporary art.” Thus what is still called “modern” becomes old.

When I was growing up, the classic Marvel superheroes like Spider-Man were the new, cutting edge superheroes of the day. The Marvel Revolution of Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and their colleagues had revitalized the superhero genre, giving characters new psychological depth, their world greater realism, and their stories greater dramatic and emotional impact. The heroes of the Marvel Age of Comics sharply contrasted with the DC Comics superheroes, who had already been around in one form or another for decades. As time passed, we grew used to referring to the comics of the late 1950s and the 1960s as those of “the Silver Age,” a term that made it sound like a legendary period of past history. Yet probably to many of us, 1960s Marvel still represented modernity in the superhero genre, a new phase in the superhero genre that new writers and artists carried on through the 1970s and 1980s.

But now we have to face a startling fact: this year, 2012, is the fiftieth anniversary of the debut of Spider-Man in his origin story, by editor/scripter Stan Lee and artist Steve Ditko, in Amazing Fantasy #15. Spider-Man and the Marvel Revolution are a half century old. Kids discovering Spider-Man now are fans of a character whom their grandparents read about in comic books. To the new generation Spider-Man must seem to have been around as long as Superman. And when I was growing up, it seemed as if Superman had been around forever. I would have to remind myself that my father was born before the creation of Superman or Batman or Mickey Mouse or Bugs Bunny or various other characters in cartoon art who seem to be permanent parts of American popular culture.

Nowadays continuity at DC Comics is in continual flux, seemingly changing with the whims of whoever the latest editors and writers are. Back in 1986 John Byrne’s The Man of Steel famously rebooted the Superman mythos, supplanting the Silver Age continuity of Superman comics edited by Mort Weisinger and Julius Schwartz. The Byrne revamp held form for years, but then started undergoing revisions. Then Geoff Johns set down the new, post-Byrne version of the Superman origin in the Superman: Secret Origin series in 2009-2010. And that held for only a year before the Superman origin got rebooted yet again by Grant Morrison in the “New 52’s” Action Comics starting in 2011.

One of Marvel’s great strengths has long been its strong sense of history. For the most part, Marvel continuity has remained intact for a half century. Indeed, admirably, in recent years, through such books as the Marvel 75th Anniversary titles, The Marvels Project, and the Agents of Atlas series, present day Marvel has even reincorporated neglected superhero characters from Marvel’s pre-1960s history, as Timely and Atlas Comics, into the canon of Marvel continuity.

I suspect that in large part Marvel’s refusal (so far) to give in to the trend for reboots is due to the strength of the foundation of modern Marvel Comics: those classic 1960s stories by Lee, Kirby, Ditko and the rest. Newer writers may tweak and fiddle with them in retellings, but (for the most part) no one wants to replace them, not yet anyway.

Lee and Ditko’s origin story for Spider-Man is still so well conceived, so well told, and so dramatically powerful as to seem miraculous. (It is also concise, telling the origin in only eleven pages, whereas in the contemporary period of “decompressed” storytelling, the Ultimate Spider-Man series took six issues to tell its alternative version.) And to think that Lee and Ditko considered this story to be a throwaway, an experiment to run in the final issue of a cancelled comic, that may well never have led to a continuing series, much less to become Marvel’s flagship series and the source of blockbuster movies a half century later.

That is another proof of the power of the Marvel Revolution in the superhero genre. The Revolution may be a half-century old in the comics, but it was reborn in another medium, movies, in 2000 with the first X-Men movie. Great commercial and creative successes like Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy, Jon Favreau’s Iron Man movies, and Joss Whedon’s Avengers film demonstrate that the Marvel Revolution of the 1960s can be translated into vivid, brilliant contemporary work in cinema today. And through the movies, the Marvel characters and storytelling style of the 1960s is reaching a far wider audience, across the world.

Nonetheless, as more time has passed since Lee and Ditko did their classic Spider-Man stories, newer writers will reinterpret the character or be tempted to alter his past saga. In the comics, Marvel launched an alternative continuity in its Ultimate line of comics, starting with Ultimate Spider-Man, while continuing the traditional continuity in the main Marvel Universe line of comics. (The biggest change in Ultimate Spider-Man was the recent death of Peter Parker and his replacement by a new, African-American Spider-Man.)

Moviemakers feel free to revise traditional continuity from the comics; what is most important is that the films get the characters’ personalities and the spirit of their original comics series right, as the recent Marvel movies mostly have. In critiquing these movies, we should examine what they changed and why. In making a change to the original continuity, did the moviemakers make an improvement, or did they miss something important about the way the character and his series work?

FROM RAIMI TO REBOOT

When it was announced that director Sam Raimi and his cast were leaving the Spider-Man movie series, one prominent Marvel executive publicly asserted that the next Spider-Man film would not be a “reboot.” But of course that is exactly what The Amazing Spider-Man movie is, starting the Spider-Man saga over again from the origin story, with Peter Parker, Spider-Man’s alter ego, once again a high school student. Director Marc Webb and his screenwriters would understandably want to put their own stamp on this new Spider-Man film series. So they would presumably want to make revisions in the continuity, not only from what it is in the comics, but also to differentiate the new version from Raimi’s. So just what have Webb and company changed, for better or for worse?

For example, one thing that is decidedly missing from Sam Raimi’s trilogy of Spider-Man films is something that all of Spider-Man’s leading writers for the comics have understood and used. Spider-Man has a sense of humor. He continually makes wisecracks. In combat he makes jokes at his adversaries’ expense. As I asserted in a column I wrote way back in the 1980s, Spider-Man is Marvel’s Bugs Bunny. He is a trickster character. Raimi’s Spider-Man doesn’t make jokes when he is in action. Marc Webb’s Spider-Man in the new The Amazing Spider-Man film does have a sense of humor, most notably in the scene when he contends with the car thief and pretends to be frightened of his knife. I wish that there was more of the wisecracking Spider-Man from the comics in the film, but at least he is heading in the right direction. I also like all the comedy that Webb and company get out of Peter’s initial inability to control his new super-powers, sticking involuntarily to things. This is an imaginative and effective new approach to the part of the origin saga in which Peter discovers his super-powers, and I like it.

Actor Andrew Garfield seems to me to be too conventionally good-looking to be Ditko’s high school wallflower version of Peter Parker. But Garfield makes up for this by persuasively playing Peter early in the movie as a withdrawn introvert who is not adroit at social interaction. Over the course of the film Garfield’s Peter Parker gradually grows more self-confident and more at ease in interacting with people outside his family, and it’s a pleasure to watch the character thus evolve in the course of two hours or so.

The Raimi movies and even the Ultimate Spider-Man comics series turned Mary Jane Watson into Peter’s first love interest, going back to their high school days, introducing Gwen Stacy later on. In Stan Lee’s original comic book stories, it was Gwen who was Peter’s first true love, and Peter did not meet either Gwen or Mary Jane until he was in college. Although the comic book Gwen seemed standoffish at first, she evolved into an idealized girlfriend for Peter: beautiful, sweet, devoted, but actually rather lacking in psychological depth. Mary Jane, in contrast, was sassy, flirtatious, funny, openly sexy, but somewhat frivolous. Spider-Man writer Roger Stern used to maintain that Mary Jane was exactly the wrong woman for Peter Parker. However, after the shocking death of Gwen in the comics at the hands of the Green Goblin, Mary Jane, as the remaining important supporting female character who was Peter’s age, emerged as the obvious candidate to be Peter’s new girlfriend. Writer Gerry Conway brilliantly justified a relationship between Peter and Mary Jane through his graphic novel Spider-Man: Parallel Lives, which revealed that Mary Jane’s party girl persona was like Peter’s Spider-Man identity: alternate personas to compensate for the sadness in both their lives. On Stan Lee’s own suggestion, Peter and Mary Jane were married in the comic books and Spider-Man newspaper strip in the 1980s, although the wedding was recently undone in the comic books by Peter’s unfortunate deal with the devil Mephisto to alter past history.

With Gwen long gone in the comics, it was understandable that Raimi cast Mary Jane as Peter’s girlfriend from high school onward in the movies. But I think that Mary Jane in the movies and some other recent adaptations of Spider-Man ended up being depicted as Gwen with red hair, lacking the distinctive personality that Stan Lee and artist John Romita, Sr. had originally gave her.

So I’m glad that in the reboot Webb and his colleagues have restored Gwen to her traditional role as Peter’s first girlfriend. I like the fact that actress Emma Stone has been given a hairstyle and costumes to emphasize her resemblance to comics artist John Romita, Sr.’s version of Gwen. I also appreciate the fact that the movie gives Gwen more substance as a personality than the comics of the 1960s did. She is now a brilliant science student herself, although perhaps as a result Peter’s own talent for science seems less special. No mere damsel in distress, Gwen gets to act bravely in helping Spider-Man against his foe the Lizard. In the movie Gwen initially seems to like Peter because he stood up to bully Flash Thompson to defend one of his victims. I don’t know why she continues to like Peter after he nearly gets her in trouble at OsCorp when he poses as an intern there.

Early in the film, after Peter gets his super-powers but before he becomes a superhero, Peter is distraught over them. So why doesn’t he tell someone he trusts, like his Uncle Ben or Dr. Curt Connors, what happened to him? But instead, after becoming a costumed vigilante, Peter suddenly decides to trust Gwen with his secret identity, even though he doesn’t know her that well yet. Moreover, he does so at a dinner at her home after her father, Captain Stacy of the NYPD, declared Spider-Man to be a menace. In a subsequent scene Peter asks Gwen if she believes what the police say about Spider-Man; if she did, then it would have been a big mistake telling her he is the vigilante the cops are hunting. course Stan Lee got drama out of the misunderstandings between Peter and Gwen because he felt he could not tell her his secret. Still, even if the movie Peter is too quick to trust Gwen, his trust in her is not misplaced, and she works well in the rest of the movie as his confidante.

As Uncle Ben, Peter’s moral guide, the new movie cast Martin Sheen, who brings with him a certain moral authority due to his past roles, notably President Bartlet in The West Wing. To a Baby Boomer like myself it’s startling to see Sally Field – Gidget!–playing Peter’s Aunt May. Ah yes, we’re getting old. Ms. Field’s Aunt May isn’t as elderly as Rosemary Harris’s version in the Raimi films, or the ancient Aunt May of the Ditko stories. But nor is Ms. Field’s Aunt May as youthful and hip (for her age) as the Aunt May of the Ultimate Spider-Man comics and animated TV series; I came across one issue that depicted the Ultimate Aunt May in a miniskirt for a night on the town!

In the original comics it was Uncle Ben who taught Peter that “With great power there must also come great responsibility,” though in the Lee-Ditko origin story that line only appears in the narration for the final panel. Since then that line has been ascribed to Uncle Ben (as in Spider-Man: With Great Power #4 in 2008). But the line goes unspoken in The Amazing Spider-Man movie, although its version of Uncle Ben does talk about moral responsibility. Director Webb has said in an interview that he felt the line was too on the nose and unnecessary. I disagree. I think that in a retelling of a classic origin story for a major. mythic character in pop culture such as Spider-Man, there are certain notes that you have to hit. Just as you have to have the spider bite Peter Parker, you have to have the line “With great power there must also come great responsibility,” probably by bowing to tradition and having Uncle Ben speak the words.

Oddly, in the new movie, Uncle Ben ascribes the idea of moral responsibility to Peter’s deceased father. So Ben is just echoing the principle of Peter’s father! I get the sense that The Amazing Spider-Man movie is deemphasizing Uncle Ben’s role in Peter’s saga. That may be because, as Marc Webb has stated in various interviews, one of his goals in this new series of Spider-Man movies is to explore the mystery of Peter Parker’s missing parents. This, clearly, is one of the ways that Webb intends to put his mark on this version of Spider-Man’s continuity, differentiating it from both the comics and the Raimi trilogy.

PETER PARKER AND PATRICIDE

In Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s origin story for Spider-Man, they establish that Peter Parker is an orphan who was raised by his kindly, now elderly Uncle Ben and Aunt May. But Lee and Ditko demonstrate no interest in revealing anything about Peter’s deceased parents. Not until after Ditko has left the series does Lee finally reveal a backstory for Peter’s parents, Richard and Mary, in Amazing Spider-Man Annual #5 (1968): they were secret agents who were killed during a mission.

Why did Lee and Ditko show so little interest in Peter Parker’s parents? Indeed, why did they make him an orphan in the first place? There is a long tradition of heroes who are orphans, Harry Potter being a prominent contemporary example, or seeming orphans, such as Luke Skywalker before he discovers the truth about his missing father. Superman is an orphan twice over in some versions of his continuity: his birth parents, Jor-El and Lara, died in the explosion of Krypton, and in Golden and Silver Age continuity, he did not begin his adult career as Superman until after the deaths of his foster parents Jonathan and Martha Kent. Batman is famously an orphan. Perhaps heroes are presented as orphans to emphasize how the hero must define himself through his own efforts, without the help of parents. Perhaps, too, there is the implication that the son cannot truly achieve a position of authority as long as his father remains on the scene.

The death of the parents haunts the hero. Arguably, Superman copes with the loss of his parents and their world by becoming a fatherly figure who protects his adopted world, Earth. Batman channels his rage over his parents’ deaths into his never-ending war on criminals. One could also argue that Batman suffers from survivors’ guilt: even though, as a child, he could not prevent the murder of his parents, he still subconsciously blames himself and compensates by fighting other criminals as an adult.

In Amazing Fantasy #15 Lee and Ditko daringly took this idea much further, with a revolutionary effect that still does not seem to be fully appreciated. Traditionally, when a superhero gained his super-powers, he chose to use them to fight crime and to help people. Lee and Ditko took a more realistic approach: when Peter Parker gets his super-powers, he decides to use them to gain fame and fortune, albeit in a masked identity. So as Spider-Man he goes into show business, and is initially quite successful. Infatuated with his new fame, Spider-Man egotistically and selfishly refuses to help a studio guard catch a fleeing thief, claiming it is none of his business. Shortly thereafter Peter learns that a burglar broke into his home and killed Uncle Ben. Enraged, Peter dons his Spider-Man costume and hunts the burglar down, only to be devastated on realizing that the Burglar is the thief he let escape earlier. Hence, through his own irresponsibility, Spider-Man inadvertently allowed the Burglar to kill Uncle Ben.

But let’s phrase this differently. Uncle Ben was in effect Peter’s second father, raising him as if he were his own son. So Peter Parker was an unwitting accomplice in the murder of his father figure: Spider-Man bears the partial guilt for patricide!

Although I doubt that Lee and Ditko thought of this, the death of Uncle Ben echoes the myth of Oedipus, who killed an old man in a fit of anger, became king, launched an investigation into his father’s death, was shocked to learn that his father was the old man he had killed, and was overwhelmed by guilt.

Could it be that Lee and Ditko subconsciously decided to have Ben be Peter’s uncle, not his father, because the idea of a superhero being responsible for his father’s murder seemed too horrific?

Comics aficionados now take Spider-Man’s origin story for granted,. But it must have been shocking to its original readers in 1962. A superhero who, however unintentionally, caused his relative’s death! And that death was real; it was not a hoax or miraculously undone, as a death in editor Mort Weisinger’s Superman comics of that time would have been. Batman is driven by anger against criminals for killing his parents; Spider-Man must direct his anger against himself.

In the workings of Lee and Ditko’s Spider-Man origin story, Ben effectively was Peter Parker’s father, so Lee and Ditko had no reason to investigate who Peter’s birth parents were. Aunt May was still alive, but Lee and Ditko portrayed her as frail and ancient, in continual danger of succumbing to a heart attack (as was the much younger Tony Stark in 1960s Iron Man comics; clearly this was a subject much on Stan Lee’s mind). Having lost his uncle through his own irresponsibility, Peter was now obsessively driven by his need to protect Aunt May, and not lose her to death as well.

Uncle Ben was the brother of Peter’s father Richard Parker, yet Uncle Ben and Aunt May seemed old enough to be Peter’s grandparents. It’s as if Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, both middle-aged men when they created Spider-Man, were thinking of how old the parents of their own generation were when they created Uncle Ben and Aunt May. I wonder if Lee and Ditko may have had another subconscious reason for giving Peter two sets of parents. Richard and Mary were the idealized young parents, who took care of Peter when he was a small child. But as you grow older, so do your parents, and the young parents who protected you in childhood become the elderly parents who become your responsibility. The absent Richard and Mary represent one’s youthful parents when one is a child; Uncle Ben and Aunt May represent one’s elderly parents when one is an adult.

But if Lee and Ditko did not feel a need to investigate who Peter’s birth parents were, it was inevitable that the question would someday be addressed, as Lee finally did in Amazing Spider-Man Annual #5. It shouldn’t be surprising that he decided to make Richard and Mary into heroes. It’s also a familiar trope in the adventure genre to make the hero the son or descendant of other heroic figures. The heroes of myths are in many cases the children of gods: Hercules is the son of Zeus, and Siegfried is the son of Wotan/Odin. Superman is the son of Krypton’s greatest scientist, Jor-El, and Silver Age continuity made Superman’s ancestors in the House of El some of the greatest figures in Kryptonian history. A classic Batman story revealed that Bruce Wayne’s father Thomas once wore a batlike costume himself to combat criminals.

There is also a tradition of heroes having two sets of parents. Though raised I relatively humble surroundings by foster parents, the hero has birth parents from a more exalted background. The ultimate example is Jesus Christ, whose father on Earth is the humble carpenter Joseph, but whose real father is God. Superman’s foster father is humble farmer Jonathan Kent; his real father is Jor-El of Krypton. So if Peter Parker was raised by a ordinary couple in Queens, New York, Ben and May Parker, were his birth parents also of higher status?

In the alternate continuity of Marvel’s Ultimate Spider-Man, Richard Parker was not a C. I. A. operative but a biologist. The Amazing Spider-Man movie takes this further, indicating that Richard Parker was working with Dr. Curt Connors on experiments on transferring the genetic traits of one animal to another. The filmmakers have perceptively noticed that Spider-Man and the Lizard, Connors’ other self, each derived his super-powers from an animal, so it makes sense to link their origins together. So the movie seems to be implying that Peter derived his Spider-Man powers indirectly from his father’s experiments in genetic engineering.

Lee and Ditko’s origin story famously involved a radioactive spider, but the Ultimate Spider-Man comics and the Raimi and Webb films all substitute a genetically modified spider as the source of Spider-Man’s powers instead. This makes sense. In the 1960s, due to the threat of nuclear war, radiation was very much on people’s minds, and Stan Lee used it over and over as a means of endowing people with super-powers, as if it were magic. Nowadays the Cold War has long been over, and the public is probably more aware that nuclear radiation is more likely to kill than to produce benevolent mutations. In recent decades genetic engineering has become a reality and continued to advance; even cloning now is old news. So genetic engineering becomes a more credible explanation for Spider-Man’s powers.

FATE VS. COINCIDENCE

But I’m somewhat uneasy with what seems to be the new film’s implication that Richard Parker is ultimately responsible for his son’s super-powers, and that hence Peter was clearly destined to become Spider-Man. In the Lee-Ditko origin, Peter becomes Spider-Man through sheer chance: the unlikely accident of being bitten by that radioactive spider. And did Lee and Ditko mean to suggest that anyone bitten by a radioactive spider would get those super-powers? Or was Peter developing super-powers instead of radiation poisoning yet another act of chance?

Although in Lee and Ditko’s comics, Peter Parker is clearly brilliant in science (inventing that web fluid), he is basically an ordinary teenager from an ordinary background. He is not a god like Thor, or a wealthy and famous inventor and corporate head like Tony Stark/Iron Man. It is by sheer chance that he gains his super-powers. Amazing as those powers may be, they are limited. Even non-super-powered adversaries, if they are sufficiently adept, like the Enforcers and the Kingpin, can give Spider-Man a hard time in combat. Spider-Man’s super-strength is dwarfed by that of Thor or the Hulk. Moreover, Spider-Man basically operates in the streets of New York City. In the classic stories of the 1960s he rarely if ever traveled into outer space or other dimensions, like the Fantastic Four or Doctor Strange, and when he did, he was clearly out of his comfort zone. Similarly, though Spider-Man had a formidable rogues gallery of weird super-villains, he rarely dealt with the top echelon of Marvel villains, such as Doctor Doom in Amazing Spider-Man #5.

In short, Peter Parker is an Everyman, and Spider-Man, even if he is Marvel the company’s flagship hero, is, within the context of the Marvel Universe, a small time super hero. He is a local New York City superhero, using his limited super-powers primarily to battle crime in the streets, rather than the threats to the planet or to the universe that the Fantastic Four and Avengers deal with. He’s not Superman; he is a superhero on a smaller, more down-to-Earth scale.

Hence, there shouldn’t be a grand destiny that decreed that Peter Parker became Spider-Man. Nor should there be some great mystery involving his parents behind his acquisition of super-powers. The story should be as simple as possible. Peter Parker is an ordinary teenager who got super-powers through a chance event. What makes him a hero is how he behaved after his life was changed by this whim of fate. But though Spider-Man’s powers, background, and adversaries are not on the grand scale of Superman’s, Peter Parker’s life can nevertheless rise and has risen to the heights of great triumphs and tragedies.

Chance and coincidence are two of the themes of Lee and Ditko’s origin tale. Former Spider-Man editor Danny Fingeroth tells me that when he tells Spider-Man’s origin story to people, they roll their eyes at the coincidence that the Burglar whom Spider-Man lets escape turns out to be Uncle Ben’s killer. But simply telling someone the story is one thing; dramatizing it, whether in comics or a movie, is another. No one in the audience laughs when the thief is shown to be Uncle Ben’s killer in the movie screenings I’ve attended. Again, the coincidence is not unlike the one in Oedipus Rex, and the revelation in that play, if staged properly, should be harrowing.

An act of chance sends Peter Parker’s life off in a wholly unanticipated direction when the spider bites him. That works in Lee and Ditko’s story because it represents how unexpected, sudden events can greatly alter our lives. Remember Alan Moore’s Batman: The Killing Joke, which offers a possible origin of the Joker and compares it to Batman’s, and makes the point that the events of a single day can turn one’s life upside down.

There is also dramatic power in the coincidence that the Burglar that Spider-Man failed to stop went on to kill his uncle. It demonstrates how our actions – and inaction – can have effects that we cannot foresee. It shows how our small sins can lead to major consequences. It shows how an individual’s actions affect those around him, for good or for bad. Yes, it is a coincidence that the Burglar killed Uncle Ben. But the point is that it is not an impossible coincidence. And Spider-Man should have realized that by not stopping a fleeing criminal, he was allowing that criminal to perpetrate more crimes, which could well have included the murder of one or more people. The horror in Lee and Ditko’s story is that someone close to the hero proved to be the criminal’s next victim.

People think of comics’ Silver Age of the 1960s as a more innocent and optimistic time in the superhero genre. But Lee and Ditko’s origin story for Spider-Man is one of the darkest, bleakest stories in the genre. It ends unforgettably with Spider-Man trudging away into the darkness, realizing that the man who acted as his surrogate father was dead, and that it was his fault. Had the Spider-Man saga ended with that story, we would see it as ending in despair. Spider-Man is the villain of his own origin story.

POWER AND IRRESPONSIBILITY

Spider-Man’s origin story is famously about how “with great power there must come great responsibility,” as its narration states in the final panel. It is because of Spider-Man’s irresponsible refusal to catch the Burglar that Uncle Ben died. But Spider-Man’s refusal to act is only one example of a pattern of irresponsibility, which takes a different form in the new movie than it does in Lee and Ditko’s original story.

I believe it was writer/artist John Byrne who once described the Peter Parker at the beginning of Amazing Fantasy #15 as “the good son.” Peter is devoted to his studies and to his loving uncle and aunt, who have raised him as if he were their own son. This is a boy who plays by the rules, and does what he is supposed to do. And his reward is that he is an outcast at high school; we see on the first page how he is shunned and mocked by the supposedly cool kids. It is clear that Peter is a shy introvert, who, though he longs for social acceptance, follows solitary pursuits (his studies) and closely bonds with only a few people (his uncle and aunt).

Gaining super-powers enables Peter to break free of the pattern of his life up to that point. Whereas Peter Parker was an introverted bookworm and wallflower, as Spider-Man he goes into show business to become rich and famous. In part he intends his new career to help earn money for his family, a noble motive. But it becomes increasingly clear that as Spider-Man he is feeding his own ego by becoming a celebrity. Why does he assume the costumed identity of Spider-Man rather than perform as Peter Parker? On the surface his reason is that the masked identity of Spider-Man is a gimmick to attract public attention. But perhaps subconsciously he chooses to perform in a masked identity to distance his new self from “puny” Peter Parker, the object of ridicule in school. As Spider-Man Peter constructs a new identity for himself in which he can act out, act entirely differently than the shy and quiet Peter Parker. Up until now he has followed the rules, and been the “good son,” and been frustrated by social rejection; now, as Spider-Man, he can go in the opposite direction, and make his own rules. As New York’s newest celebrity, Spider-Man indulges his own swelling ego. You could say that he is becoming as smug and arrogant as Flash Thompson and his other high school tormentors; now that he is “cool” he is acting as badly as the cool kids among his classmates did. A victim of bullying, he is developing a bully’s mentality himself. He lets the Burglar escape because he considers it to be beneath him to help the security guard catch a thief. Spider-Man is preoccupied with himself and his career; he does not care about strangers. Spider-Man has a severe case of hubris, that traditional failing of tragic heroes who are about to undergo a fall.

Neither Sam Raimi nor Marc Webb chose to show Spider-Man going into show business. But I wish that someday, in some future cinematic retelling of the origin, that filmmakers decide to dramatize this. Wouldn’t it be entertaining to watch Spider-Man’s rise in show biz? Imagine if the filmmakers hired one or more of the late night talk show hosts to appea in the film, showing Spider-Man perform on their shows? Or what if Spider-Man had his own “reality” show?

In Sam Raimi’s retelling of the origin, a masked Peter Parker experiments in using his new powers in the wrestling ring, as he does in Lee and Ditko’s origin tale. When a man in charge pays Peter only $100 for winning, not the promised $3000, Peter lets the Burglar rob him. This is not the full-blown case of hubris that Lee and Ditko give Spider-Man; this is Peter just going into a snit over being cheated.

In Lee and Ditko’s version, it took the temptations of fame and fortune to turn a “good” kid like Peter Parker into a dangerously self-centered, irresponsible one. Surprisingly, in The Amazing Spider-Man film, Peter Parker was rather irresponsible all along. Learning about the connection between his father and Curt Connors, Peter sneaks into a high school interns’ tour of OsCorp labs, where Connors works, by lying about his identity and usurping a real intern’s ID. Parker looks on without guilt when the real intern shows up and is carted off by security guards. Gwen Stacy, who is already an OsCorp intern, recognizes Peter but warns him not to get her in trouble and not to wander off from the group. Peter immediately proceeds to wander off; in snooping about he goes into a room he shouldn’t, which is full of genetically altered spiders, one of whom bites him. So Peter acquires his Spider-Man powers as a result of disobeying instructions.

After gaining super-powers, Peter uses them to humiliate his nemesis, bully Flash Thompson, on their high school’s basketball court. And goes too far. As a result he and Uncle Ben have to appear in the principal’s office, and Peter is assigned punishment. Ben is not happy, since he had to rearrange his work schedule to go down to the school. Since Ben will have to work that night, he instructs Peter to pick up Aunt May at her job after dark. But Peter meets with Connors instead, ignores a cell phone call from Ben, and fails to meet May, forcing her to walk home after dark through what Ben considers a dangerous neighborhood.

A point is made about Peter forgetting to bring home eggs after he was asked to do so. Really, it becomes hard to understand why Ben and May are so devoted to Peter considering that he keeps screwing up and angering them.

After arguing with Ben, Peter goes out to a nearby convenience store, and tries to buy chocolate milk (I think), but because he is short by two pennies, the cashier won’t let him have it. This is when the Burglar appears and holds up the cashier. This version of Peter is also in a snit, and lets the robbery proceed as his own act of petty reprisal. In a nice touch, the Burglar throws something (money?) to Peter as a thank you gift, reinforcing the idea that Peter has just been his accomplice. Again, this Peter isn’t acting out of excessive ego and pride like the Lee-Ditko version; he’s just getting even with a stranger in a petty way.

Leaving the store, the Burglar immediately runs into Ben, who tries to stop him, so the Burglar shoots him. Well, that certainly does away with the coincidence in the original story in which the Burglar turns up in both a Manhattan television studio and the Parkers’ home in Queens. Of course Peter is shocked by Ben’s death, but he never expresses any sense of guilt over it. Did Webb and the screenwriters feel that it was obvious that Peter would blame himself? I don’t think it is; Peter has to say it, and in this film he doesn’t. Moreover, Lee and Ditko staged this much more dramatically. In their version, on learning that Ben is dead, Spider-Man vengefully hunts the Burglar down, and Lee and Ditko build to their powerful dramatic climax, as Spider-Man, shocked, realizes that the killer is the same thief he previously let escape. Then Lee and Ditko show us the unmasked Peter, distraught, overwhelmed by guilt.

The new movie’s Peter Parker appears motivated not by guilt, directed at himself, but anger, directed at the Burglar. So Peter begins hunting down criminals, creating first a mask and then a costume to disguise himself to avoid reprisals. But, as has been pointed out, the masked Peter is specifically hunting criminals who look like the Burglar. As a result of Ben’s death, he hasn’t decided to use his powers responsibly by fighting crime in general. Instead, he’s hunting down one individual, and, along the way, capturing any criminals who look like him.

In the new movie Spider-Man never captures the Burglar. Perhaps the filmmakers are saving that for a future film. But the result is that the film seems to forget about the Burglar as it moves on to other matters. The film also appears to forget about Uncle Ben as it progresses, although his recorded voice is heard at a significant point later on. But again, we hear no soliloquies from Peter, or conversations between him and Gwen once she becomes his confidante, about any guilt or sense of responsibility he feels over Ben’s death. This should be the motivation that propels him through the film, but it’s absent.

Instead the film builds towards a different turning point. There is a well-crafted sequence in which Spider-Man saves a boy from a car that is in danger of falling from the Williamsburg Bridge and bursts into flame. To calm the frightened by, Spider-Man takes off his mask, showing him a friendly human face, and has the boy don the mask instead, telling him it will make him “brave.” By implication, the mask has also served to make the formerly withdrawn Peter Parker courageous in his new costumed identity. And now Spider-Man has to accomplish an important feat without the mask and the psychological crutch it provides him. Although he is forced to let the car fall into the river, Spider-Man rescues the boy. His mask back on, Spider-Man returns the boy to his father, who wants to know who he is. It is at this point that the masked Peter calls himself Spider-Man for the first time. He has found his new identity, and it is defined by his using his powers to save people from danger; he has learned how to use his great power with great responsibility. This scene thus prepares the way for the last act of the film, in which Spider-Man acts to save the entire city from the Lizard.

THE CASE OF THE MISSING FATHER FIGURES

One of the themes of the movie seems to me to be the way that Peter Parker needs, but keeps losing, father figures. He is trying to learn about his deceased birth father Richard. He loses his foster father, Uncle Ben. Captain Stacy is Gwen’s father, making him a potential father-in-law for Peter, and is also a father figure in the sense that he represents authority. Captain Stacy spends most of the movie as a father figure as adversary, until he becomes a benevolent father figure, helping Peter and giving him his advice and blessing, towards the end of the film. But Peter loses him, too, since Captain Stacy sacrifices his life in helping Spider-Man battle the Lizard. Even Curt Connors is a potential father figure, since he is linked to Peter’s real father, Richard, and becomes Peter’s benevolent mentor. Connors becomes a nightmarish version of the father figure as adversary when he turns into the Lizard, thus enacting the mythic situation of the symbolic father who attempts to kill the symbolic son. So it is appropriate on a mythic level that the symbolic son, Spider-Man, with the aid of a formerly adversarial, now benign father figure, Captain Stacy, defeats the nightmare father figure, the Lizard. Spider-Man even redeems both adversarial father figures: Captain Stacy becomes his ally once he realizes that Spider-Man is Peter Parker, and Spider-Man literally cures the Lizard, allowing the benevolent personality of Dr. Connors to return. The clearest example of the theme of the son redeeming the adversarial father is George Lucas’s Return of the Jedi. That film and the new Spider-Man movie are both dealing in what Joseph Campbell described as the hero’s “atonement with the father.” Arguably, The Amazing Spider-Man movie is also about Peter Parker learning to assume the role of the father himself, as in the scene in which he rescues that small boy from death in the fiery car. Indeed, by the end of the film Spider-Man has taken over Captain Stacy’s role as protector of the people of New York City.

SHORT SPIDER-SUBJECTS

I think the hardest thing to accept in the original Lee-Ditko Spider-Man origin is the idea that Peter Parker was able to invent the fluid he uses to create his artificial webbing, something that is portrayed in the comics as a unique discovery that no one else has duplicated, and moreover, does it so quickly. The Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies got around the problem by having Spider-Man produce organic webbing directly from his hands. I kept wondering whether he would dehydrate himself by using large quantities of webbing, like when he uses webbing to stop the train in Spider-Man 2. In The Amazing Spider-Man film Peter Parker acquires (steals?) some “biocable” from OsCorp to use as his webbing. Later on Spider-Man claims he came up with the webbing himself, so I suppose he must have modified the biocable, converting it into webbing form. Still, I don’t like this. Did Parker steal the biocable from OsCorp? That’s not right. Will he have to acquire more from OsCorp in order to replenish his webbing supply? Will someone at OsCorp figure out that Spider-Man’s webbing is biocable? Will that mean that OsCorp can duplicate Spider-Man’s webbing and even sell it to other people? Lee and Ditko’s making Peter Parker brilliant enough to create his unique webbing does seem like a stretch of credibility, but maybe it is indeed the best answer.

I was surprised and disappointed when I learned that J. Jonah Jameson would not be in the new Spider-Man movie, but the Daily Bugle newspaper is shown prominently at one point. Moreover, Peter Parker is established as an amateur photographer early in the film. Perhaps the intention is to have the Daily Bugle and Jameson appear in the next Spider-Man film in the rebooted series, and then Peter will become a freelance photographer for the paper. Considering how many characters filled Raimi’s Spider-Man 3, perhaps it was wise to limit the focus of this first film in the rebooted franchise to a small number of characters.

I was also disappointed at my first looks at Captain George Stacy, as played by Denis Leary, in trailers and preview clips of The Amazing Spider-Man. As depicted in the comics by Stan Lee and John Romita, Sr., Captain Stacy was a wise, gentle, elderly man who became a father figure to Peter Parker. In the film Captain Stacy is not only much younger, but he seems at first to have usurped J. Jonah Jameson’s traditional role as Spider-Man’s implacable nemesis, convinced he is a menace and determined to end his career. Moreover, the relationship of Captain Stacy, his daughter Gwen, and her boyfriend Peter seemed to echo the similar nightmarishly Freudian triangle in the 1960s and 1970s stories of The Incredible Hulk: Bruce Banner is in love with Betty Ross, the daughter of General “Thunderbolt” Ross, who is obsessed with hunting and capturing Banner’s alter ego, the Hulk.

But in the end the movie’s Captain Stacy ends up in the same place as the Lee-Romita version: as a benevolent father figure towards Peter. You may recall that the Lee-Romita version of Captain Stacy figured out Spider-Man’s secret identity but protected it. Moreover, both the Lee-Romita and film versions of Captain Stacy die heroically during Spider-Man’s combat against a super-villain. I even thought that Leary’s final speech as Captain Stacy was more moving than Martin Sheen’s farewell speech as Uncle Ben.

Mr. Leary has been saying in interviews, including on David Letterman’s show, that three decades ago his fellow comedian Jeff Garlin told him he looked like Captain Stacy. Really? Would Mr. Leary in his twenties look anything like the sixtyish or seventyish George Stacy as drawn by John Romita, Sr. in the comics? Too bad that Mr. Letterman wasn’t a fan of superhero comics so he could have pointed out that this is nonsense.

It’s ironic that Sam Raimi kept setting up the eventual appearance of the Lizard on screen through the appearances of actor Dylan Baker as Dr. Curt Connors in his Spider-Man movies, but it is director Marc Webb who got to use the Lizard instead. I used to think that when the Lizard finally appeared onscreen, he would look something like the velociraptors in the Jurassic Park movies. So I was disappointed that the movie’s Lizard lacks the reptilian snout that Ditko gave the character. Instead he has a humanoid face, and looks to me more like Batman’s reptile-like foe Killer Croc; one reviewer observed that the movie Lizard looked like the Thing in the live action Fantastic Four movies. Director Webb has explained that he wanted the Lizard to have a humanoid face to enable actor Rhys Ifans’ emotions to come through; it seems that motion capture technology was used to translate Ifans’ performance into the CGI Lizard. I still feel disappointed: without the inhuman, lizard-like head, the movie Lizard looks as disappointing as old-time movie werewolves whose heads look more like those of apes than of wolves. Watching the movie, I was thinking I was going to write that I was also disappointed that the movie Lizard didn’t wear a lab coat, like the Ditko version, but in one scene he does! Ditko also had the Lizard retain Dr. Connors’ pants, though I eventually realized that when the Lizard turned back into Connors, there must have been a big hole in his pants where his tail had been! Good thing the lab coat was so long. In the comics the Lizard is bulletproof against low-caliber firearms, but I was surprised that he survived such a fierce gun attack by police in one scene. Perhaps his ability to regenerate limbs also enables him to recover nearly immediately from gunshot wounds?

Speaking of werewolves, I was somewhat confused by the film’s depiction of Dr. Connors’ personality. In the comics, Connors and the Lizard are very much like the traditional depiction of the werewolf. Dr. Connors is a good and benevolent man; the Lizard has an entirely different personality, savage and vicious. In the new film Dr. Connors seems to be a good man at first, befriending Peter, although it is hinted that he has willingly blinded himself to the way that his employer OsCorp treated Peter’s father Richard. (The film seems to hint that OsCorp arranged the plane crash in which Peter’s parents perished.) In the movie once Connors first transforms into the Lizard, he shifts back and forth between his human and reptilian forms; in the comics, the Lizard must take an antidote to revert to human form. We are shown a video in which the human Connors rants about the weakness of humans and how he prefers the power of his reptilian form. But towards the end of the film, after Spider-Man exposes the Lizard to the antidote, Connors, reverting to human for, saves Spider-Man’s life. Moreover, in the movie Connors/Lizard finds out that Spider-Man is Peter Parker, yet, though Connors is jailed at the end of the film, he apparently keeps Peter’s secret. I would assume, then, that the serum that transformed Connors into the Lizard distorted his personality even when he is in human form, and that the antidote finally enabled his real, benign personality to reemerge. I wish that the film had made this clearer: while I was watching the movie, considering his earlier rant, I didn’t understand why Connors saved Spider-Man’s life towards the end.

In the Raimi Spider-Man movies Spider-Man became a local hero in New York City, and there was even a “Spider-Man Day” in his honor. In Webb’s film Spider-Man is very much the outsider, hunted by the police as an outlaw vigilante. I assume that though Captain Stacy changed his mind about Spider-Man, the New York City police will continue to hunt Spider-Man as an outlaw in the next film. Will there be a new police character to lead the manhunt? Will this be the time to introduce J. Jonah Jameson, who could use the Bugle to continue to whip up public opinion against Spider-Man? Or might the next film adopt Jameson’s new role in the comics as mayor of New York, a fine position from which to direct the police’s attempts to capture Spider-Man?

The movie changes the name of Peter Parker’s high school, Midtown High, to Midtown Science High. “Midtown High” never made sense as the name of a school in Forest Hills, Queens; New Yorkers use “midtown” to refer to part of Manhattan. Would Midtown Science High be a special high school for science students? Are we to assume that Peter commutes from Queens to this school in midtown Manhattan? But if it’s a school specifically for students who are especially talented in science, what is a jock like Flash Thompson doing there?

New York City has been an important real-life location for Marvel Comics stories all the way back to 1939. Whereas Sam Raimi shot his Spider-Man movies extensively in New York City, The Amazing Spider-Man was filmed primarily in Los Angeles. Nevertheless, there was some location shooting in New York City; for example, I can add to my list of real life Marvel locations the U. S. Customs House, with its beaux-arts architecture, that “plays” the role of New York City police headquarters. There are also references to real life New York City locations, notably the Williamsburg Bridge, as well as shots of New York cityscapes (some added through CGI?). I notice that Peter stands in front of a sign reading “3 Columbus Circle” when he visits the fictional OsCorp building. Is there an in joke here? In real life Columbus Circle is the site of the new Time Warner Center, the headquarters of the corporate owner of Warner Bros. and DC Comics, the rivals of Columbia Pictures and Marvel Comics. And so in the world of this film, the headquarters of Spider-Man’s enemy, Norman Osborn, stands on the location of Time Warner’s HQ!

I was happy to see that Stan Lee and Steve Ditko get a credit up front and in nice big letters early in the film’s credits sequence as the creators of the comic book on which the movie is based. How strange that Sony is better at this than Marvel Studios; one has to search and not blink to find the credits to Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and other creators of the original comic in the credits for The Avengers movie and related films. I prefer Stan Lee’s cameos in Marvel movies when he is given lines to say, but his silent cameo in The Amazing Spider-Man as a school librarian wearing headphones, who pays no attention to the fight going on behind him is perhaps his funniest.

AN OMINOUS CONCLUSION

I’m surprised that I haven’t read more about the very end of the movie. In his dying speech, Captain Stacy makes Peter/Spider-Man promise not to involve Gwen in his life. The Captain clearly foresees that Spider-Man’s life will endanger people close to him; after all, it has claimed his own life. There is a graveyard scene for Captain Stacy’s burial, but Peter does not attend. Angrily, Gwen goes to confront Peter, who will not explain why he did not attend and has been avoiding her. Surely the filmmakers are aware that this echoes the end of Sam Raimi’s first Spider-Man film, which had a graveyard scene. Peter attended that burial, but it was there that he broke off with the bewildered Mary Jane, since he believed that his life as Spider-Man would continue to endanger her. At the end of Spider-Man 2, Mary Jane convinces him to reverse that decision, though, of course, she continues to be endangered by Spider-Man’s enemies in both Spider-Man 2 and Spider-Man 3.

I didn’t understand why Peter just didn’t tell her that her father made him promise to stay away from her, and that he agreed it was for the best. But it comes as a welcome surprise that Gwen figures this out for herself. But later, in class, there is a reference to “promises you can’t keep,” and Peter whispers to Gwen that those are the best kind. That implies that he is not going to keep his promise to the Captain, and that their relationship will continue.

It appears that the filmmakers are already setting up future developments in this new series of Spider-Man movies. As noted, this new film establishes that peter is a photographer and shows us a copy of the Daily Bugle, thus possibly laying the groundwork for J. Jonah Jameson showing up in the sequel. Norman Osborn’s company, OsCorp, figures prominently in the new movie, and Osborn is mentioned, but not seen. And who is that shadowy figure who appears in Curt Connors’ jail cell in the teaser sequence during the closing credits? Could that be Norman Osborn himself? Maybe not. We don’t see this figure’s face, but we hear him talk in a voice that I can’t identify. Surely the filmmakers will cast some prominent actor in the role of Norman Osborn, and haven’t done it yet. So more likely the shadowy figure is some Osborn underling. Still, the filmmakers are obviously setting up the introduction of Osborn into the film, and presumably his other identity, the Green Goblin, as well.

Moreover, Emma Stone, who plays Gwen, has hinted in two interviews I’ve seen (including the one on PBS’s Charlie Rose), that Gwen will meet the same fate in the movies as she did in the comics. If that’s right, then Gwen will be killed by the Green Goblin in a future film as his vengeance on Spider-Man. I wonder if moviegoers who don’t know her comics history will be as shocked by her demise as readers of the comics were in the 1970s. This new Spider-Man film series has already killed off Captain Stacy, as in the comics. If they plan to kill Gwen off, too, then this rebooted series will be far darker and more tragic than Sam Raimi’s brightly optimistic Spider-Man trilogy.

So if Gwen dies in the movies, then the ending of The Amazing Spider-Man movie becomes morally ambiguous and ominous. Peter Parker has already brought about the death of Uncle Ben by failing to follow this father figure’s teachings about power and responsibility. Now he is about to break his promise to another deceased father figure, Captain Stacy. And the result will be the death of Gwen Stacy.

“Comics in Context” #246
Copyright 2012 Peter Sanderson

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]]> http://asitecalledfred.com/2012/07/27/spider-man-comics-in-context/feed/ 0 http://asitecalledfred.com/2012/05/28/dark-shadows-comics-in-context/ http://asitecalledfred.com/2012/05/28/dark-shadows-comics-in-context/#respond Mon, 28 May 2012 09:43:40 +0000 http://www.asitecalledfred.com/?p=16622 Comics historian extraordinaire Peter Sanderson begins his in-depth look at Tim Burton's DARK SHADOWS... ]]>

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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]]> http://asitecalledfred.com/2012/05/28/dark-shadows-comics-in-context/feed/ 0 http://asitecalledfred.com/2012/05/11/avengers-comics-in-context/ http://asitecalledfred.com/2012/05/11/avengers-comics-in-context/#comments Fri, 11 May 2012 07:24:44 +0000 http://www.asitecalledfred.com/?p=16609 Comics historian extraordinaire Peter Sanderson dives into the big screen take on Marvel's AVENGERS...]]>

AVENGERS ANNOTATIONS ASSEMBLE!

Here’s one of the advantages of living in New York City. On the last Saturday in April, shortly after my birthday, I attended the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art’s annual Art Fest, celebrating independent and small press comics. Then I headed down to the Tribeca Film Festival to watch the red carpet entrances for its closing night gala: a screening of Disney/Marvel’s new movie The Avengers, directed and scripted by Joss Whedon. Many times crowds in New York are so big that I have gotten shut out of events. Take this year’s Free Comic Book Day, for example. By the time I arrived in Manhattan in the afternoon, major comics stores were out of copies of most of the free comics, which had already been snapped up by fans who waited in line in the morning. But there were fewer people than I expected at the sight of The Avengers screening, and I arrived early enough to get a good place to stand, and sighted Tom Hiddleston (Loki), Chris Hemsworth (Thor), and even Robert Downey, Jr. (Iron Man).

This was far easier, less time consuming., and less stressful than waiting to see them in the dreaded Hall H at the Comic-Con in San Diego. The New York Comic Con is rapidly getting equally crowded; I couldn’t get into the packed auditorium for Hiddleston’s appearance with some other Avengers cast members at the con last fall. But, you see, I’ve found a way to see Avengers actors in person without the convention hassle!

Moreover, for the first time in my life I now live within only a short walk of a movie multiplex. It’s even better than that: I can walk in one direction to one multiplex, and in the opposite direction to another, each near a train station. Disembarking from a train at 11:30 PM the night of May 3, I was puzzled to see people walking to the multiplex next to the station; the theater isn’t open that late on weeknights. Investigating, I discovered that there was a midnight screening of The Avengers, the first of opening day. So of course I went. I had been fired up with anticipation for weeks after seeing the dynamic and exciting trailers for the film. Those trailers should serve as object lessons for the makers of the trailers for the new John Carter movie (which made the film look dull) and the upcoming Dark Shadows movie (which make it look like a farce, as we shall examine in a future column).

My eager anticipation for The Avengers movie was not misplaced. Although it began slowly and conventionally, it built in interest and momentum, and the final act was like nothing I have ever seen on screen before. That climactic battle between the Avengers and Loki’s invading forces, in the heart of New York City, captured the fantastic spectacle and visceral excitement that the superhero genre can create more fully than I had ever imagined seeing in a live action film. Longtime Marvel comics aficionado that he is, Joss Whedon did not let the rest of us Marvelites down. The Avengers movie has established itself as one of the peaks of the superhero genre on film.

There is so much to say about this movie that my discussion of it will extend over more than one edition of “Comics in Context,” and I will break it down into individual subtopics. And, as always, there will be spoilers, so consider yourselves warned: you should see the movie first.

THE BLACK WIDOW: I’ve always imagined the Black Widow speaking with a Russian accent, No, I didn’t want her to have an accent as thick as the one voice actress June Foray gave that more famous Natasha in The Bullwinkle Show, but still, being Russian seemed essential to the Widow’s personality. So I was surprised and disappointed when Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow turned up in Iron Man 2 minus a Russian accent. Oh, yes, if the Black Widow is a master spy, then she would have learned to speak English with an American accent. But still, though she is given her Russian name (with an Americanized ending) – Natasha Romanoff – in the film, moviegoers who were unacquainted with the comics would think she was American. They also wouldn’t know she was called the Black Widow, since, as we shall see elsewhere, Marvel Studios seems unduly skittish about using superhero names. (Look, Marvel, if Batman and Spider-Man are hugely popular in the movies, then the mass movie audience clearly has no problem with superhero names and costumes.)

But otherwise I have no problems with the onscreen Black Widow. Okay, I have imagined the Widow as being taller than Scarlett Johansson, but that’s not important; she looks the part and exudes a real life sexiness that her comic book counterpart cannot match. Iron Man 2 gave the Widow an astonishingly dynamic fight scene in which she quickly and singlehandedly overpowers a large number of male attackers, capping it off by incapacitating one adversary with what looks like a spray of Mace without even bothering to look at him. ” It couldn’t have been done better, I thought.

But then in The Avengers, Whedon and his collaborators manage to top it, with the Widow bound to a chair and still managing to overcome her captors with with incredible force, speed and seeming ease. Moreover, in this scene she gets to speak Russian, complete with a Russian accent. Here Whedon seems to be signaling the comics buffs that he is well aware of the Black Widow’s background in the comics. Reportedly Marvel Studios is planning a Black Widow movie that will be set in Russia and explore her origin.

The movie equips the Black Widow only with guns as weapons, not with her “widow’s sting” from the comics, though it seems to me that her “sting” is not unlike a real life taser. In the climactic battle against the alien invaders, she seems the least powerful of the Avengers, lacking either super-powers or special weaponry. But Whedon and company succeed in finding a way for her to hold her own, notably in her astonishing acrobatics in getting aboard one of the alien skycraft. Moreover, throughout Iron Man 2 and Avengers Scarlett Johansson succeeds in projecting the impression of being truly formidable, so much so that it seems credible that she could even confront Bruce Banner, who could transform into the far more powerful Hulk.

The movie Black Widow’s Russian accent may come and go, but I am content.

HAWKEYE: I wish that Marvel Studios had more faith in such tropes of the superhero genre as the characters’ superhero aliases. Unless I’m mistaken, Hawkeye is referred to in the movie once as “the Hawk,” and never as “Hawkeye”; instead he is usually called by his real name, Clint Barton, which is rather drab. What’s wrong with the name Hawkeye, which seems appropriate for an archer, as well as alluding to the original bearer of the name, the hero of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans?

Of the six superheroes in The Avengers movie, Hawkeye is by far the most disappointing,. Beyond being a highly capable professional in the use of the bow and arrow, the movie Hawkeye seems to have little personality. In the comics, of course, he is known for his irreverent humor and, in the early days, for his rebelliousness and resentment towards authority figures like Captain America. Maybe the problem is that the movie version of Tony Stark/Iron Man has taken over these personality traits. Still, Robert Downey Jr. plays Tony Stark as flippant and fast-talking, whereas Hawkeye has struck me as being either angrier with his jibes, or later, after he became more emotionally mature, more laid back and easygoing in his humor. At first in the Avengers comics Hawkeye seemed hostile to his leader, Captain America, but evolved into the Captain’s loyal friend and supporter. But in the movie Iron Man is resentful towards the Captain, whereas Agent Coulson takes over the role of his admirer. In the comics Hawkeye and the Black Widow were romantically involved for years; that might have given the movie Hawkeye more to play. But my impression is that the film versions of Hawkeye and the Widow were colleagues but not lovers. Even when he is under Loki’s mental control in the film, Hawkeye isn’t particularly sinister. I’m glad the character is in the movie, but he lacks a distinctive personality in it. If only the movie Hawkeye could have called the long-lived Captain America “Methuselah,” either mockingly (as in the mid-1960s) or affectionately, the way he used to in the comics!

NICK FURY: When Marvel introduced a version of Nick Fury who resembled actor Samuel L. Jackson into its Ultimates line of comics, I was surprised, but later came to think it might be a good idea. Since the Ultimates line depicts an alternate version of traditional Marvel Universe continuity, why not make changes? That’s why I applaud the recent introduction of Miles Morales, an African-American, as the Ultimate universe’s new Spider-Man. It makes more sense to me to have a different Spider-Man in this alternate reality than to have Marvel publishing the adventures of two different Peter Parkers.

It was the Ultimate universe version of Nick Fury who started turning up in the Marvel movies, played by the real Samuel L. Jackson, who is a comics fan and apparently approves of his lookalike in the comics. Once Jackson started appearing on film as Fury, perhaps it was inevitable that his version of Nick Fury would supplant Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s original Caucasian version, even in the “mainstream” Marvel Universe comics. And that is what has just happened: the original Fury is being revealed to have had an African-American son, who looks like Jackson in the movie, complete with eyepatch, who will go by the name of Nick Fury. Fortunately, Marvel is not killing off the original Nick, who will continue to appear, if not quite as much as his son. (Besides, as we should all now realize, such “deaths” almost never prove to be real or permanent anyway.) This is a clever solution that enables both versions of Fury to co-exist in the mainstream Marvel Universe.

Just what is the personality of Lee and Kirby’s Nick Fury? It seems to me that of all the classic Marvel heroes of the 1960s, Nick Fury may be the hardest for subsequent generations of writers to understand. When Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created the comics series Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD, they were obviously responding to the immense popularity of James Bond in the 1960s, which had spawned all sorts of imitations and variations, including television series like The Man from UNCLE and British TV’s The Avengers. Making Nick Fury the hero of their superspy series was a brilliant stroke by Lee and Kirby. Instead of the sophisticated figure of a James Bond, with his tuxedos and connoisseurship of drinks that were shaken, not stirred, Lee and Kirby substituted Fury, with his rough language, hot temper, cigars, and permanent five o’clock shadow. Fury was still very much the former army sergeant who had grown up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the Great Depression, who now found himself heading up this super-spy agency, SHIELD, with its futuristic technology. He seemed like the proverbial fish out of water. Yet he brought with him a streetwise common sense, a soldier’s dedication, and his personal incorruptibility that made him exactly the right man to head this vast organization in its war against adversaries like the high-tech terrorist army known as Hydra.

Moreover, I expect that Lee and Kirby may have particularly identified with Fury because he was, like them, a member of the “Greatest Generation” of the Great Depression and World War II who now found himself in the very different world of the 1960s, when the entire culture was going through radical changes. Fury’s situation both paralleled and diverged from that of his contemporary, Captain America. In Lee and Kirby’s stories, Captain America, like Rip Van Winkle, had awoken from years-long sleep to find a world that had changed tremendously, in which he felt an outsider. Fury had lived through the two decades since the war, but rather than feel lost, he took command of SHIELD, drawing upon his wartime experiences to lead agents both his own age and younger in combat against modern foes. Indeed, Hydra was really a high-tech costumed version of the Nazis, something that writer/artist Jim Steranko later made explicit by casting Fury’s wartime archenemy Baron Strucker as Supreme Hydra.

In the mid-1960s Nick Fury would only have been in his forties, like Lee and Kirby themselves; all three were middle-aged men who were proving themselves to be successful and effective in the changing world of the 1960s. Later, Howard Chaykin and Walter Simonson would introduce the “Infinity Formula” as a means of keeping Fury relatively young as the decades passed. By introducing the Samuel L. Jackson version of Fury, who was not around during World War II, the Ultimate line and the Marvel movies do not have to worry about explaining why their Fury does not look as if he is in his 80s or 90s.

The key to Lee and Kirby’s Nick Fury is that he is an outsider who became the ultimate insider in SHIELD; he is still that tough World War II sergeant, without a college education, but with a strong moral code, a Greatest Generation everyman who became the unlikely leader of this futuristic spy agency. He is not an establishment figure, does not share the values of the political and corporate elites, and does not abide strictly by the book. In the Lee and Kirby SHIELD stories Count Bornag Royale of A. I. M. (Advanced Idea Mechanics) even tries to turn the government and public against Fury before A. I. M. is exposed as a secretly subversive organization.

Following Lee and Kirby on the SHIELD in the late 1960s, writer/artist Jim Steranko spectacularly heightened the series’ resemblance to the James Bond movies while remaining faithful to Fury’s basic personality. Yet it seems to me that in subsequent decades writers have repeatedly lost track of what makes Fury work as a character. Since the 1960s Fury has only starred in short-lived series; he more often appears as a guest star. There has been a tendency for writers in popular culture to depict intelligence agencies like the C. I. A. as amoral or ruthless. As director of SHIELD, Fury has often been depicted as an authority figure who will hand down harsh decisions, manipulate people, or even violate individual rights, in the name of a higher justice. But in fact Lee and Kirby intended him to be a rebel himself, who holds firmly to his moral code even within the huge security bureaucracy he commands. This still comes across when Fury stars in his own series, such as Nick Fury vs. SHIELD and Secret Warriors, as the honest and moral spymaster who contends against corruption within SHIELD and the security establishment.

In The Avengers movie Whedon and Jackson play Fury both ways. The revelation that SHIELD is planning to use the Tesseract as a weapon against alien invaders is met with disapproval. But in the movie Fury seems mainly to be steering the moral course he thinks best. Whedon introduces into the movie the shadowy SHIELD governing council, which has appeared previously in the comics, and to which Fury reports. The council ends up representing the dark side of the intelligence establishment, while Jackson’s Fury follows his conscience and best judgment. He seems somber, perhaps somewhat world-weary, but nonetheless patient and persistent in pursuing what he believes to be the right path. The council disapproves of the superheroes; Fury acknowledges that they are “unstable” (which seems to me to be an unduly harsh description, except for the Hulk) but nonetheless believes they can be shaped into an effective team. At the end of the film the council warns that the Avengers are “dangerous” and objects to Thor taking the “war criminal” Loki off to Asgard for punishment. Fury, who trusts the Avengers, defends the decision to let Thor take Loki, and claims the Avengers have dispersed to places unknown., That doesn’t seem entirely believable: we know that Tony Stark is in Stark Tower, and the Black Widow and Hawkeye are SHIELD agents. But Fury clearly wants to keep the Avengers free from government control, while assuring his superiors that they will reunite if need be to combat new threats. In the movie Fury’s finest moment comes after the council orders a nuclear strike on New York City to stop the alien invasion. (Just who are the members of this council, and who gives them the authority to make such a decision?) Fury goes out and shoots down the plane taking off to attack New York! Now that is an action very much in the tradition of the Lee and Kirby version of Nick Fury. Bravo!

AGENT COULSON: I was puzzled by SHIELD Agent Phil Coulson when he first appeared in the first Iron Man movie. Why create a new SHIELD agent when there were so many from the comics to use? Jasper Sitwell, who had a long run as a supporting character in Iron Man’s comic, would have been my choice. He had a distinctive personality, which Coulson did not. That made it even more of a surprise to me when I realized that Coulson had an enthusiastic fan following. Why? The character seemed to me to be little more than a blank. Even actor Clark Gregg, who plays Coulson, says in interviews how surprised he has been that Coulson keeps coming back.

Finally, in the Avengers movie Joss Whedon gives Gregg and Coulson a significant role to play. Coulson turns out to be a devoted admirer of Captain America, and, indeed, a fan, who even has a set of Captain America trading cards. The movie could easily have mocked Coulson as a fanboy, but doesn’t. Whedon and Gregg are themselves comics aficionados, and through Coulson they seem to be saluting devotees of the superhero genre. When Coulson tells Captain America how much he admires him, Whedon and Gregg portray Coulson with dignity and seriousness. One can sense the character’s genuine dedication to Captain America, who may have served as a role model for Coulson in joining SHIELD.

Indeed, Coulson follows the example of Captain America and other superheroes by sacrificing his life in a courageous attempt to stop Loki in the battle aboard the helicarrier. Before his apparent death, Coulson predicts that his demise will give the superheroes someone to “avenge.” Indeed, Nick Fury uses Loki’s killing of Coulson as a means of motivating them into continuing to battle Loki and his forces. That justifies calling the team “the Avengers.” In Lee and Kirby’s Avengers #1, the Wasp comes up with the name, seemingly because it sounds cool to her; the team isn’t really avenging anyone or anything.

Presumably Coulson really is dead. If he isn’t, and turns up alive in a subsequent film, that will retroactively reduce the dramatic impact of his supposed death scene in Avengers. We know that they’re not going to kill off the superheroes in The Avengers movie; it’s dramatically necessary that someone significant die in the helicarrier battle to emphasize the impact of the Avengers’ defeat. Still, it seems odd that Coulson dies in the movie when he is regularly appearing in the new Ultimate Spider-Man animated TV series and has turned up in the comics. Maybe this is just another reminder of how meaningless death has become in the superhero genre at Marvel and DC these days.

THE TESSERACT: This is an example of the movies taking a strong concept from the comics and watering it down into something much less memorable. Longtime Marvel comics readers will recognize the Tesseract as the Cosmic Cube, created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in the Captain America series in the mid-1960s. Perhaps Marvel Studios thinks the name “Cosmic Cube” is too corny, but they should trust Lee and Kirby’s knack for names. The alliterative “Cosmic Cube” is much catchier, more memorable, and more evocative of great cosmic forces than the dull, mathematical name “Tesseract.” Nor does the scientific name “Tesseract” make this power object sound like it comes from the mythical realm of Asgard, where magic is dominant, as it does in the movies.

And that is another problem. The movies treat the Tesseract as a seemingly infinite power source, not as a magical device, so why establish that it comes from Asgard? And why would the Asgardians leave such a powerful object unguarded on Earth, as the Captain America movie established? In the comics the original Cosmic Cube was created by the criminal scientists of A. I. M. (Advanced Idea Mechanics) and was eventually established as a matrix that captured great cosmic energies; this makes more sense.

To Whedon’s credit, he has characters in The Avengers movie refer several times to the Tesseract as “the Cube.” Moreover, in the movie he describes the Cube as channeling great forces of the universe, as if it is science fictional rather than magical, even if he has Thor take it back to Asgard at the end.

But the biggest problem with the Tesseract is that it doesn’t do what the Cosmic Cube should.

It is treated as if it is a generator of energy without limit. But in the comics the Cosmic Cube is a device that transforms thoughts into reality: whatever its bearer wishes will come true. It is like a super-scientific version of Aladdin’s lamp. This is a much more powerfully mythic concept. In the comics Thanos is one of those who has wielded the Cosmic Cube. Perhaps if and when Thanos turns up as the main villain in a Marvel movie, he will get hold of the Cosmic Cube and use it according to its proper function.

NEW YORK CITY: From the Golden Age of the 1940s onward Marvel has set superhero stories in New York City rather than fictional metropolises; over the last half century Marvel stories have even included specific locations in New York, like Central Park, the Empire State Building, Times Square, and famously after the 9/11 attack. The site of the World Trade Center.

Just as the gods of ancient Greece lived atop Mount Olympus, it seems appropriate that superheroes should be found amidst the towering skyscrapers of Manhattan. New York City remains America’s greatest city; this is where the superheroes should be found.

New York City is practically a character in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man film trilogy. One can always tell when a movie set in New York City was actually shot on location in New York City and not in Vancouver or some other location. Up until The Avengers, the movies produced by Marvel Studios have not emphasized New York City as a setting. When Stan Lee wrote Iron Man, it was set in New York, but Denny O’Neil moved Iron Man out to Silicon Valley, and then David Micheline moved Tony Stark to Southern California; similarly, the first Iron Man movie is set in southern California. However, though Tony Stark himself is based in southern California in Iron Man 2, much of the movie is set in New York City at the Stark Exposition, which is clearly inspired by the New York World’s Fair of the early 1960s. The Unisphere, the symbol of that World’s Fair, still stands in Flushing Meadows, Queens, and is prominently seen in Iron Man 2.

The Thor movie was set in the Southwest, like J. Michael Straczynski’s recent run on the Thor comics; presumably this was a less expensive place for Marvel Studios to shoot the film. The Captain America movie starts out in New York City, with the young Steve Rogers established as a Brooklynite (In the comics he grew up on Manhattan’s Lower East Side but lived in Brooklyn as an adult), and memorably has Rogers, revived from suspended animation, finding himself in the center of 21st century Times Square. Most of the movie, however, is set in Europe during World War II, though at the climax Captain America has to save New York City from being blown up by the Red Skull.

Marvel Studios and Whedon did a week or so of location shooting for The Avengers in the real New York, and apparently used CGI to create Manhattan backgrounds for other scenes. The result is that this is the first Marvel Studios movie in which New York City takes center stage. The film’s primary Manhattan location is Stark Tower, a fictional skyscraper set in a real location. It looms behind Grand Central Terminal, which is on East 42nd Street; the nearby Chrysler Building is visible in numerous shots set at Stark Tower. Loki’s Tesseract-powered device atop Stark Tower opens a wormhole in the sky above Manhattan, enabling the alien invasion force to come through. On ground level the Avengers battle alien invaders on Park Avenue South in the low 40s, directly in front of Grand Central Terminal. This is a spot in Manhattan that is very familiar to me, and indeed is just a short walk from the old Marvel offices on Park Avenue South and East 27th Street, where I used to work. I expect that comics fans who visit New York City may want to visit this spot in front of Grand Central, the real life battleground from The Avengers movie.

Of course such superheroic battles royal in Manhattan have long been featured in Marvel stories. In staging the Avengers’ battle against the aliens so spectacularly, Whedon and his collaborators have thus powerfully captured this trope of Marvel superhero stories.

But in the post-9/11 period, such an extraordinary battle scene, on and above the streets of Manhattan, takes on an emotional resonance beyond the thrill of sheer spectacle. Whedon emphasizes shots of terrified New Yorkers fleeing from the warfare in the streets, horrified New Yorkers watching the attack from their skyscraper office windows, and Captain America and other Avengers rescuing people or guiding them to safety. Before the 9/11 attacks, the catastrophic attacks on New York in Marvel stories seemed to be pure fantasy, something that could never happen in real life. Now the alien attack in The Avengers movie comes across instead as a fantasy version of the sort of terrorist attacks that have taken place in real life and that we know can happen again. Loki and his alien allies thus seem more realistic, and the Avengers become the heroes we wish for, powerful enough to fight back against enemy attacks.

THANOS: Loki obtains his army of alien invaders through bargaining with a character identified as “the Other.” Viewers of Marvel movies now know to expect a post-credits sequence which sets up concepts for forthcoming Marvel movies. In The Avengers the first of these takes place after the initial part of the closing credits. The Other is reporting to his master about how formidable the Earthmen proved to be in repelling the invasion. In the cleverest line in Whedon’s screenplay, the Other advises his master that to battle the Earthmen “is to court death.” The master displays a sinister grin, and though he is not identified, Marvel readers will recognize him as Jim Starlin’s creation, the mad Titan Thanos. (When I saw the movie I heard a gasp from the audience; someone there besides myself recognized him.) Starlin’s Thanos was in love with Mistress Death, the personification of mortality, and was willing to obliterate all life in the universe to please her. No wonder that in the movie Thanos smiles at the double meaning of the phrase “to court death.”

Is this scene meant to set up Thanos as the villain in the next Avengers movie, which is at least three years away? He’s a good choice, but that’s a long time to wait. I’ve seen it suggested that Thanos might actually be intended to be the villain for the next Thor movie. After all, he is a sort of god, and if Mistress Death appears, she would fit better into a Thor movie, which deals with the supernatural.

If Thanos will indeed be the villain in Avengers 2, then I fear we have quite a long wait to see either of the two archvillains who are most associated with the Avengers in the comics: the robot Ultron, who could easily be done as a CGI animated figure, and Kang the Conqueror, who would provide a good role for a major actor.

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

When Chris Hemsworth recently appeared on the Late Show with David Letterman to promote The Avengers movie, Paul Shaffer and the band cleverly played the theme music to the other Avengers: the British adventure series about secret agent John Steed, played by Patrick Macnee, and his serries of partners, most famously Mrs. Emma Peel, a pioneering action heroine, as memorably portrayed by Diana Rigg. For those of us who grew up in the 1960s this series was a classic. It was continually in reruns on American television until about a decade ago, it is available on home video, and there was a bad movie version, starring Ralph Fiennes as Steed, Uma Thurman as Mrs. Peel, and Sean Connery (!) as the villain, in 1998.

But as far as I know, The Avengers has been off American television since its run on BBC America several years ago, even though it would seem a natural choice for the new retro TV networks like Me-TV and Antenna TV. Most articles and reviews I have read about the Marvel Avengers movie do not mention the other Avengers in popular culture, with A. O. Scott’s review in The New York Times being a prominent exception. (Scott, who hates the superhero genre, said he wished that the new Avengers movie was a new version of the British series instead!) It seems as if the British Avengers has quickly faded from popular consciousness in the United States.

But I suspect that it hasn’t in the United Kingdom, where the new film is titled Marvel Avengers Assemble, presumably to avoid confusion with the Steed and Mrs. Peel version. And maybe the series isn’t as forgotten as I fear in the United States, either, since the official title of the new movie is Marvel’s The Avengers.

I have long wondered whether the fact that the Marvel superhero team and the English adventure series share the same name is merely a coincidence. The Avengers did not come to television in the United States until 1966, years after Marvel’s Avengers comic debuted in 1963. However, the television series premiered in the United Kingdom in 1961. Stan Lee’s wife Joan is British, and though she moved to the United States long before The Avengers debuted on British television, is it possible that she could have heard about the show from friends or family in England?

After all, in the context of the first issue of Marvel’s Avengers comic, the title doesn’t make sense. Just what are they avenging? Marvel’s Avengers are usually battling to stop villains from committing crimes, not to take vengeance for their victims. So why did Stan Lee (or Jack Kirby?) name the team the Avengers? Just because it sounds cool?

The similar names are probably coincidental, yet the character of Mrs. Peel, a liberated woman, who often wore a black catsuit in combat, and used martial arts to subdue male opponents, seems to have had an influence on American superhero comics. Perhaps Mrs. Peel was the template for DC’s remodeling of Wonder Woman in the late 1960s into a woman without super-powers, who dressed in contemporary fashions and used martial arts instead. When the Black Widow debuted at Marvel in 1964 she had black hair and wore conventional clothing. Subsequently, she wore a mask and costume that resembled a combination of a black swimsuit and fishnets. Then in The Amazing Spider-Man #86 in 1970 her visual appearance was revamped into her familiar current look, with no mask, red hair, and a skin-tight black catsuit. In other words, she looked like the auburn-haired Mrs. Peel. Thus, paradoxically, Marvel’s The Avengers movie features a character who seems to have been visually modeled after the most celebrated heroine of the British Avengers television series.

THE MARVEL CINEMATIC UNIVERSE

Previous Marvel movies have included post-credits sequences that set up Marvel films to follow. The movies make allusions to other films in the series (For example, a character in Thor wonders aloud if the Destroyer is one of Tony Stark’s creations.), and Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury and Clark Gregg as SHIELD Agent Coulson keep turning up in Marvel movies. But it is The Avengers movie first fully establishes the concept of the Marvel Universe onscreen, and in more than one sense. Jaded comic book fans, who have long grown used to Marvel heroes crossing over into each other’s comics, may be less impressed than the far larger audience who know the Marvel characters primarily from the movies. The latter have never seen anything like this before. After all, DC’s Superman and Batman have yet to appear together in a live action movie; Warners’ attempts to do a Justice League movie have so far been in vain.

The idea of teaming up superheroes from disparate series did not originate at Marvel. DC Comics started the idea with the Justice Society of America in the 1940s, as well as with the regular team-ups of Superman and Batman in World’s Finest comics; editor Julius Schwartz revamped the Justice Society idea into the Justice League of America at the start of the 1960s. Marvel’s Avengers comic followed in the JLA‘s wake a few years later.

But what happened in Justice League in the Silver Age of the 1960s rarely had any connection to events in the individual members’ series. One of Stan Lee’s great achievements in the Marvel revolution of the 1960s was to integrate the various superhero titles more closely with one another. Heroes, villains, and supporting characters from each series continually made guest appearances in other series as well. For example, in the first issue of Amazing Spider-Man the title character tried to join the Fantastic Four. Soon Stan Lee created the impression that the Marvel roster of superhero titles were telling one multifaceted story that spread through all the books, and hence the truly committed Marvelite should read them all. The many Marvel superhero series were all set in the same fictional shared universe, the “Marvel Universe.”

In the past Marvel licensed the movie rights to different superhero series out to different movie studios, so now Sony/Columbia has the film rights to Spider-Man, while Fox controls the film rights to the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, and Daredevil. Marvel Studios, which is now owned by Disney, retained the movie rights to Captain America, Iron Man, and Thor, as well as to the Avengers concept, and regained the movie rights to the Hulk from Universal, thus making it possible to do an Avengers movie including all four of these original Avengers. For the foreseeable future, Disney/Marvel will not be able to use the heroes that were licensed to Sony and Fox, and hence will not be able to integrate them into the Marvel Cinematic Universe in live action films. But that is not that disappointing. Despite the long run of Marvel Team-Up and his current membership in the Avengers in the comics, Spider-Man still works best as a loner, as does Daredevil. The Fantastic Four are already a team, and a movie combining them and the Avengers would likely seem overcrowded. As for the X-Men, in the comics that series has spawned so many spinoffs in the comics to have created an “X-Men Universe” within the Marvel Universe. I expect that now that Disney owns Marvel, Disney will not allow rival studios to obtain the film rights to other Marvel heroes, so who knows who might turn up in his or her own Marvel movies in the future, or as guest stars in other characters’ films, or as team members in future Avengers movies? I see that in a recent interview Stan Lee has already suggested that Ant-Man and (more promisingly) Doctor Strange join the movie Avengers.

Has there ever been anything comparable to The Avengers in movie history? The closest thing I ca think of are movies with “all-star” casts, in the tradition of Grand Hotel or Dinner at Eight in classic Hollywood, or even It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World with its army of celebrated comedians. Top stars get so much money these days that such “all-star” movies have become a rarity in contemporary cinema. But The Avengers movie is not so much about teaming stars as it is about teaming up the characters that starred in their own blockbuster action films. It’s as if, say, James Bond, Indiana Jones, Luke Skywalker, and Harry Potter teamed up in a movie!

Again, moviegoers who know these Marvel heroes principally from the movies, not the comics, must be astounded to see these characters appear together on film. Moreover, they are seeing how these characters’ disparate worlds – Captain America from World War II, Iron Man from the world of cutting edge high technology, and Thor from a mythical realm of magic – can all fit together into a single consistent fictional universe. We longtime comics readers may indeed be used to such crossovers and team-ups. But Whedon and his collaborators have done The Avengers movie so well that it should even give us something of the same sense of wonder, joy and excitement that the first readers of the Justice League and Avengers comics must have had at seeing their favorite superheroes team up for the first time.

The Avengers movie also establishes the Marvel Universe in another sense. Previous Marvel Studios movies were set in familiar locations: New York City, southern California, the American Southwest, Europe during World War II. The Thor movie went far beyond this by adding the otherdimensional mythical world of the Norse gods, Asgard, as well as Jotunheim, the dimension of the frost giants, and alluding to the rest of the “Nine Worlds” of Norse mythology. The Avengers movie goes still further, by bringing in an extraterrestrial race, the Chitauri. Then the first of the post-credits sequences is set amidst the vastness of outer space, introducing a menace from another world (the moon Titan in the comics), Thanos. With this stroke the Marvel Cinematic universe expands far beyond Earth into the universe itself. Once again, longtime comics fans may be too jaded to realize the effect this must have on people who know Marvel mostly from the movies: their jaws must be dropping as they realize that the term “Marvel Universe” is no exaggeration.

There’s a lot more to say about The Avengers movie; I haven’t even gotten to the Big Four characters yet. But they will have to wait for a “Comics in Context” column in the near future. The next “Comics in Context” will be my review of the next major summer release, Tim Burton’s take on Dark Shadows.

“Comics in Context” #243
Copyright 2012 Peter Sanderson

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]]> http://asitecalledfred.com/2012/05/11/avengers-comics-in-context/feed/ 1 http://asitecalledfred.com/2012/04/30/barnabas-collins-comics-in-context/ http://asitecalledfred.com/2012/04/30/barnabas-collins-comics-in-context/#comments Mon, 30 Apr 2012 06:51:59 +0000 http://www.asitecalledfred.com/?p=16519 Comics historian extraordinaire Peter Sanderson remembers DARK SHADOWS' own Barnabas Collins, actor Jonathan Frid...]]>

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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]]> http://asitecalledfred.com/2012/04/30/barnabas-collins-comics-in-context/feed/ 5 http://asitecalledfred.com/2012/04/22/cabin-in-the-woods-comics-in-context-241/ http://asitecalledfred.com/2012/04/22/cabin-in-the-woods-comics-in-context-241/#comments Mon, 23 Apr 2012 03:41:24 +0000 http://www.asitecalledfred.com/?p=16516 Comics historian extraordinaire Peter Sanderson returns with an in-depth look look at Joss Whedon & Drew Goddard's CABIN IN THE WOODS...]]>

CABIN (IN THE WOODS) FEVER

Here we are again, at long last. For those who came in late, as they say in The Phantom, I’m Peter Sanderson, and I’ve been writing about comics since I was a contributor to Silver Age DC Comics editor Julius Schwartz’s letter columns in the 1960s. After doing graduate studies at Columbia University, I planned to become a teacher, but got diverted into the comics business, where I researched and helped write the original DC Who’s Who and Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe. Since then I became Marvel’s first archivist, taught about comics at New York University, helped curate exhibits at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art in New York, worked on documentaries about comics, and write and co-wrote a lot of books about comics. There’s even a new one that is just coming out now. Years ago I reviewed the first edition of The Superhero Book, an encyclopedia of superheroes in comics, movies and television, edited by Gina Misiroglu. Years later, Gina invited me to help her revise and update the second edition, and I ended up writing lots of new entries and updating nearly all the rest. You can find the new edition on Amazon here: The Superhero Book.

In 2003 I started writing a weekly online column “Comics in Context” for my friend and editor Ken Plume, originally at IGN. I followed Ken to Kevin Smith’s Quick Stop Entertainment and then to Ken’s own A Site Called FRED and ended up writing two hundred and forty installments on comics, animation, movies based on comics, and anything else that I thought might relate to these subjects. Eventually, though, I suspended the column, due to various upheavals in my life, including my father’s final few years, the necessity of moving twice, and the Great Recession. I’m still dealing with the problems caused by the last, and, as you will see, looking for a job. But friends have persuaded me that I should start up the column again to increase my visibility and show people examples of my writing. So here I am, and writing the column again feels good. I already have a batch of subjects I want to write about, and I hope you stick around for the ride. And please spread the word!

WHAT THE OUTSIDE WORLD (STILL) THINKS

Those of you who read my first “Comics in Context” column a decade ago may recall that one of my motives for starting this column was anger. The current wave of movies based on comics, especially superhero comics, began in with the first X-Men movie, and I was appalled by the incomprehension and condescension with which some movie reviewers greeted them. Besides its alliterative catchiness, that was the reason I named the column “Comics in Context”: to criticize comics and related works in the media from an informed perspective, based on my years of studying the comics artform, the superhero genre, and other fields.

Lately, in need of paying work, I’ve joined two local support groups for job seekers. At the first meeting of the night group, each of us was asked to tell the group about his or her career. So I spoke about being a comics historian, writing books on the subject, teaching about comics at New York University, curating museum exhibitions on comics, writing reviews of graphic novels for Publishers Weekly, and so forth. The rest of the group was silent, and I got the impression that the founder of the group commented that comics had entertained him in the past. But I got the sense that no one really knew anything about my chosen field. After the meeting ended, my spirits were brightened a little when one of the other participants came up to me and said he had been a big Marvel fan when he was growing up. But he hasn’t come to any of the subsequent meetings.

At one of these later meetings, with only a small number of people present, we were all asked to do our “elevator pitch” about what we do and what kind of job we’re looking for. I again talked about being a writer about comics and graphic novels. Again most people said nothing, but one of them asked, “What’s a graphic novel? We know what comics are.” I explained, and talked about how over the last few decades comics and graphic novels had received serious attention in mainstream publications like The New York Times and in academia and in libraries (including the one where we were meeting). The man who didn’t know what a graphic novel was said, somewhat disbelievingly, that I was talking in “general” terms and wanted a specific example. So I talked about Art Spiegelman’s Maus, his graphic novel about the Holocaust, and how it had come out over a quarter century ago, had won the Pulitzer Prize, and was widely taught in schools. This came as news to everyone there. “How do you spell that?” the man asked about the title. (There was a copy in that same library!)

I was finding it hard to keep my temper, and apologized. It was dismaying. It seemed that nobody there had heard of the graphic novel revolution or really understood or appreciated what I did. I mentioned this on Facebook, and one of my Facebook friends asked, in effect, what did you expect?

I had naively expected more. For a dozen years there has been a wave of movies based on comic books and graphic novels, including blockbusters like Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies and Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy. But there have also been successful films based on indie comics, like American Splendor. Newspapers including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and USA Today regularly cover news in the comics industry, so frequently that it has ceased to be surprising. San Diego’s annual Comic Con has become an event covered by mass media throughout the country. The Sunday before this meeting The New York Times had run an article on the front page of its Sunday Arts & Leisure section about a museum retrospective of alternative cartoonist Daniel Clowes’ work; the Times subsequently ran an article about a retrospective of Robert Crumb’s career in Paris. Just last Sunday, as I write this, the Times did a long article about office politics at Archie Comics in its business section, and two pages of graphic novel reviews by Douglas Wolk in its Sunday Book Review. Only a few weekends before I attended “Comic New York,” a two-day academic symposium on comics at my alma mater Columbia University, marking the donation of longtime X-Men writer Chris Claremont’s archives (including my old fan letters to X-Men!) to the Columbia University library. There are graphic novel sections in public libraries now, as well as major bookstores. And how can anyone in America or various other countries avoid seeing the trailers and commercials and magazine covers for this summer’s movies, Joss Whedon’s The Avengers and Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises? When I was a student at Columbia, decades ago, that all of these things would happen seemed impossible and unimaginable. Indeed, even when I wrote my first “Comics in Context,” I would not have thought that comics would have this much impact on American culture only a decade hence.

And yet, in other ways, it seems as if nothing has changed at all, and as if I’m back at Columbia in my student days, trying unsuccessfully to persuade people (even some in the comics industry!) that, yes, comics is an artform and that superhero stories can be taken seriously. As astoundingly successful as various comics-based movies are commercially, and as enormous as the major comics conventions have grown, in other ways comics seem to be in a bad state. So many of my contemporaries have left the business. When comics were below the mainstream cultural radar, I got more paying work consistently than I do now.

Much of my dilemma is in trying to continue a career writing about comics history, and more importantly, doing comics criticism. Oh, yes, now there are academic conferences on comics, but my impression is that academics may get to include graphic novels in a course that is mainly about non-comics works, or may even be able to teach a course on comics, but that the latter are still rarities. Back when I was a graduate student, Columbia would never have let me do a dissertation on comics; I’d love to do one now, but have yet to find a way back into academia to do it.

I’ve proposed teaching courses on literary criticism of comics, or on the superhero genre, or on the bodies of work by major comics creators. But I’ve been told that people will not pay money to take such a course. There are plenty of courses about comics, but they’re mostly about how to write or draw comics. I keep seeking to write books about critically interpreting comics, but one editor has told me that no one wants to read books like this. Some academic presses may publish such books, but my former literary agents didn’t want me to deal with them. And, of course, it’s more likely to be alternative cartoonists who receive serious attention than comics writers and artists who work on genre material.

I am amazed by all of this. I earned three degrees in English literature at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, concentrating on the drama of Shakespeare’s time and the 20th century. None if my courses were about how to write plays or novels; if I wanted to do that, I would have gone to Columbia’s School of the Arts. No, these were courses in critically analyzing great works of literature, the sort of courses you will find in English departments at any college or university.

Similarly, I like to think that comics studies will pursue a route like film studies. In the early 1960s, I’m told, film courses at universities, when there were any, were only about how to make movies, more likely industrial training films that art films. This rapidly changed in the late 1960s. Now walk through the film section of a bookstore, and, yes, there will be some technical books about filmmaking, and certainly books on how to write screenplays. But the majority of the books will be studies of film genres, biographies of actors and directors, tomes on cinema history, guides to films on home video, and, of course, critical writings on the works of significant filmmakers.

Another important factor in the development of American film criticism is that it had to learn to take genre films seriously. It was the French critics who wrote for Cahiers du Cinema in the 1950s, many of whom became filmmakers in France’s “New Wave,” who pioneered the serious analysis of Hollywood studio films. “Auteurist” critics like Andrew Sarris (one of my teachers at Columbia) and Peter Bogdanovich carried on this work in the United States in the 1960s. And now it is generally accepted that Hollywood entertainments like John Ford’s Westerns and Alfred Hitchcock’s thrillers can be art.

I would like to think that comics studies will someday reach a similar point. But they haven’t yet. I’ve been working my whole life, from my letters to Silver Age letter columns – my first attempts at comics criticism – to the present, preparing for a kind of career that doesn’t seem to exist yet.

Well, I can’t wait. I am returning to doing “Comics in Context,” whenever I can find time, because those of us who can do this sort of writing about comics should, to lay the foundation for the golden age of comics studies that I hope will someday come. I’ve done 240 “Comics in Context” columns in the past, all of which you can find on the Internet by Googling. I wish they had a wider audience, but someday perhaps they will. The age of social networking is much more advanced now than when I left off doing “Comics in Context”; maybe some of my new columns will go viral.

THE CABINET OF DR. WHEDON

As longtime “Comics in Context” readers know, I use my blog to cover not just comics but all forms of cartoon art, including animation, and also live action movies based on cartoon art. So you can expect over the coming weeks to see me do critiques of Joss Whedon’s The Avengers, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Returns, the reboot of the Spider-Man movies in The Amazing Spider-Man and Pixar’s first heroine-centric film Brave. I’ll also cover museum exhibitions of cartoon art, and stage versions of comics properties: I expect to write down my memories of seeing the infamous Spider-Man musical sooner or later. Sometimes I will delve into subjects that don’t belong in a column on comics, strictly speaking, if I can find some excuse. I’ve dealt with the classic television series Dark Shadows in the past, with the excuse that it has served as source material for comic books and comic strips over the decades, and plan to review Tim Burton’s controversial forthcoming film version. And I will sometimes critique non-comics works by writers who are also known for their work in comics or animation. So Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and overseer and sometime writer of Dark Horse’s Buffy comics, has been a recurring past topic in “Comics in Context,” notably in my critique of the start of his run writing Marvel’s Astonishing X-Men comic.

And that brings me to this week’s topic. As a prelude to writing about Whedon’s Avengers movie, I want to examine his other film that recently came out: the metafictional horror film The Cabin in the Woods, directed by Whedon’s longtime collaborator Drew Goddard, produced by Whedon, and co-written by both of them.

Publicity for the movie and many reviewers have cautioned that they dare not reveal any of the plot, apart from the basic premise of teenagers going to stay in a cabin in the woods where Bad Things happen, lest they give away the many plot twists and surprises. As a result I ended up somewhat disappointed, since there were fewer twists and surprises than this secrecy had led me to expect. There is one big casting surprise towards the end though, that I never saw coming and really liked.

But longtime “Comics in Context” readers know that I can’t do a thorough analysis of a story unless I deal with the whole plot. So consider this your spoiler warning, and let us proceed.

The first big revelation, which some reviewers have given away, is that the five hapless teenagers are being watched and manipulated by some mysterious high-tech organization, whose principal figures are played by actors Bradley Whitford and Richard Jenkins. There are echoes here of past Whedon projects, such as the Initiative in Buffy, the secret government operation – located beneath a university full of teens instead of a cabin hideaway for only five teens – that held monsters captive, who eventually escape and wreak bloody havoc. Then there’s the Dollhouse, in the TV series of the same name, a secret corporate organization that manipulates young people as if they were slaves. The high-tech organization in Cabin even includes actress Amy Acker in a lab coat, visually echoing her roles in Whedon’s Angel and Dollhouse.

Who is running this high-tech organization that seems to be experimenting on these victimized teens without their knowledge? If that question was answered in the film, I missed it. Was it the Big Bad Government or the Big Bad Corporation, both of which seem like cliches, albeit effective ones. As a Boomer who recalls the 1960s, I used to think of the Big Bad Government Agency as a bogeyman for the anti-establishment left wing. Chris Carter’s The X-Files did a great deal with the Big Bad Government Conspiracy, headed by the Cigarette-Smoking Man; heroes Mulder and Scully and their boss and ally Skinner seemed to be among the very few truly trustworthy people in the federal government in this series. The limitations of government intelligence and power became clearer in the post-9/11 period. I think it is now harder to imagine an X-Files-style all-powerful government conspiracy that succeeds in remaining secret from the public. The government isn’t that omnicompetent, and the bigger the supposed conspiracy, the more likely people are to talk. In watching 24 I began to think that the Big Bad Government might really nowadays be a bogeyman for the right wing, and maybe, in retrospect, The X-Files had played on such fears from the right. So nowadays we have a left wing that wants to expand the services of government, like through universal health care, and a right wing that insists on shrinking government and that government cannot operate as well as an less regulated free market. In the first X-Files movie we were told that FEMA was the means by which the Big Bad Government would take control of the country; this was before FEMA so famously blundered during Hurricane Katrina. Now in real life there are Republicans who claim that Obamacare is an attack on freedom.

Since it’s hard for me to imagine a corporation tormenting Cabin‘s teen protagonists without any obvious financial benefit, then I presume that it’s the government running the Cabin experiment; indeed, we are shown that other countries, notably Japan, have their own versions. So I find the Big Bad Secret Government Project something of a cliché, although arguably Whedon and Goddard are counting on its very familiarity. Cabin is a movie that deals with archetypes and tropes of horror fiction, so why not include tropes from other forms of genre fiction as well, like the scientists who manipulate and victimize unwilling subjects as if they were lab rats?

What Whedon and Goddard have created in Cabin is a work of metafiction, in other words, a work of fiction about the creation of fiction. The five teen protagonists, isolated in a creepy house in the wilderness, beset by threats to their lives, are archetypal figures in an archetypal situation common to a large subgenre of contemporary horror films. Whedon and Goddard appear to be very much aware that they are bringing a different perspective to what have become contemporary horror film archetypes.

Hence, Whedon said in a recent interview for Salon: “‘Cabin in the Woods is, for me, a way of making the kind of movie that I love and at the same time making another kind of movie that I love. It’s a way of taking the cabin and – not blowing it up, but kind of exploding it. Not just enjoying it, but turning it over in your hand over and over and looking at it. I know that’s not a great sell, but that’s really what it is to me. If you take the premise, and then you take the idea that the premise is a premise – without losing the audience, without winking at them – how much can you do? How far can you take it?”

So the movie treats the “premise” as “a premise”: the scientists are creating a narrative, using their teen victims as their cast. The scientists put them into this horror movie scenario, watch how they react, and subject them to terrors that cause the teens to suffer and die. And it is indicated that the scientists do this over and over to different sets of young victims, thus staging this narrative, this drama, on a recurring basis.

The scientists, therefore, can be interpreted as stand-ins for the creators of horror films, who devise these fantasies in which young victims are subjected to suffering and death for the entertainment of the horror film audience. Take the analogy further, and the Whitford and Jenkins characters become stand-ins for Whedon and Goddard themselves, at least in part. In the Salon interview Whedon admits this: “Besides being lovely guys and great actors, Bradley and Richard represent a completely different kind of identification. We are them – and not just me and Drew, although specifically me and Drew – but they are the people who have chosen for what happens to happen.”

Moreover, the Whitford and Jenkins characters are not only the creators of the horrific story, but also its audience. They and the other members of their team watch what happens to the teens on large viewing screens, as if they were watching a horror movie in a theater or on television. One of the things that most struck me about the Whitford and Jenkins characters was how jaded and even bored they often look, watching these screens. They have apparently watched these horror scenarios they devise so many times that they are inured to the horror, and even the sexuality that they observe. Whitford’s character, for example, waits, seemingly bored, for one of the girls to perform that standard trope of such films, going topless, is disappointed when she doesn’t, and seems mildly relieved when she finally does but more as if he’s checking off a list than being actually aroused by the sight.

Portraying Whitford and Jenkins’ characters as audience implicates the film’s actual audience in their willingness to torment innocents for its supposed entertainment value. Whedon points this out to Salon as well: “And you, as the viewer, are the person who chooses that, if you have gone to see this movie. The act of walking into the movie makes you the one to see these people suffer. It does not happen if you do not watch.” The interviewer then compares the situation to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Agreeing, Whedon notes that “If you don’t go to the movie, maybe those kids have a really nice weekend.”

The real target of Cabin, it seems to me, is lack of empathy towards other people. Specifically, it is the lack of empathy by those in power towards those who are out of power, by establishment insiders towards outsiders, by the old towards the young. The scientists have no sympathy for their teenage victims, and no sense of identification with them; they make the kids suffer for the minimal entertainment it provides to their jaded psyches. They even take bets on the outcome. As far as they are concerned, the five teens are the Other, who exist merely to be destroyed in a demonstration of their power to manipulate events.

This too is an archetypal situation: human history is full of examples of one group in power tormenting a powerless group who serve as unwilling scapegoats. Take, for example, the Romans in the Colosseum taking enjoyment in seeing Christians thrown to the lions. Moreover, it strikes me that this theme of lack of empathy is particularly appropriate to the present day, with politicians campaigning to shred the social safety net, reduce the availability of medical care to the less prosperous, cut Social Security and Medicare for the elderly. Remember in one of the Republican presidential candidates’ debates when people cheered at the idea of letting someone without medical insurance die?

In Cabin Whedon and Goddard are questioning the motivations of horror film makers, and their audience, including themselves in both categories. Why do you take pleasure in seeing these young people suffer? Why do you enjoy seeing people killed off one by one?

Perhaps Whedon and Goddard point to a possible answer through the third act’s big twist. It turns out that the scientists are not just staging these horrific scenarios for their own perverse pleasure. Each of the five teens is revealed to be a representative of an archetypal figure: the Athlete, the Whore, Student, the Virgin, ad the Fool. Metafictionally speaking, these are character types in this horror subgenre. Moreover, the scientists’ repeated scenario of having menaces of different sorts attack and kill an isolated group of teenagers is revealed to be a ritual, that has presumably been enacted for millennia. Here Whedon and Goddard are indicating that they are not just dealing with the conventions of a certain type of horror film; they are showing that these conventions are actually modern versions of a mythic pattern involving similarly mythic archetypes. Thus this “cabin-in-the-woods” horror subgenre is a contemporary version of a mythic ritual of human sacrifice, in which the innocent young perish at the hands of dark forces.

According to Cabin, this ritual is conducted over and over in order to appease ancient H. P. Lovecraftian gods so they will refrain from destroying all of humanity. Does this have any figurative meaning with regard to Whedon and Goddard’s metafictional exploration of horror films? In this case I couldn’t find any clues in Whedon’s recent interviews. Perhaps, though, Whedon and Goddard are suggesting that horror films are the filmmakers’ and audience’s way of dealing with greater terrors than those the films evoke, such as the inevitability of mortality. We cope with our awareness and fears of death by watching inflicted on other people who are Not Us, while we remain safe, like Whitford and Jenkins’ characters watching on their screens.

At the end of Cabin, the two surviving protagonists decide to allow the Lovecraftian gods to exterminate humanity rather than keep playing the scientists’ game. Can the deaths of billions, the genocide of the human race, really be the preferable solution? The end of the film seems not a victory or restoration of order, but an expression of exhaustion: let the world die, give in to darkness.

As such, Cabin seems to me to be the most extreme step yet in the continuing darkening of Whedon’s work, ever since the latter seasons of Buffy. Whedon first won his devoted audience through the early seasons of Buffy, which succeeded in combining intense, operatic drama and genuine darkness with a compensating humor and optimism; Buffy was a tormented teen, doomed to be unhappy in love, and yet she was embarked on a heroine’s journey of empowerment, providing a source of hope. The Whedonverse has steadily grown darker and even more despairing at times. I followed Dollhouse but never truly found it appealing; Whedon’s trademark wit was absent or misfired, and the plight of the heroine, unaware of her true identity, manipulated as a slave and prostitute by her masters, seemed dismayingly unpleasant to watch, far removed from the heroism of past Whedon characters. In Cabin even though two protagonists defy the ritual and survive, hope and heroism are absent. (Anyway, the those two protagonists will only survive until the Lovecraftian monsters get around to killing them. too.)

I wonder if Whedon and Goddard’s revisionist take on horror films even loses its way in Cabin‘s third act. The movie ends with chaos, with monsters loosed from their cages, slaughtering everyone , including all but two of the principals. Blood is literally everywhere. If the filmmakers are questioning why the audience should enjoy watching people suffer and die, then why fill the end of the film with so much suffering and death? Whedon told Salon that he intends for the viewers to care about not only the teen protagonists but also even Whitford and Jenkins’ characters. But recall that he also noted that “Cabin in the Woods is, for me, a way of making the kind of movie that I love.” Maybe the love gets in the way of the critique at the end, since it ends in a universal bloodbath, and the film seems impassive towards the deaths of all the scientists. Just more bloody slaughter to entertain jaded moviegoers.

Telling The New York Times about his next project, a web series called Wastelanders,-created with Warren Ellis, Whedon said “”It’s very dark and very grown-up,” he said. “But it’s the next thing that I want to say, so I can’t worry about “˜Well, where’s the empowerment narrative that people love?’ “. So the journey into darkness continues. But will this affect the Avengers film, which I would like to think will ultimately be a celebration of the superhero genre?

Interestingly, Whedon told Salon about Cabin and Avengers, “There’s going to be the people trying to manipulate a situation and controlling it from above, and the people who are actually in the trenches. In that sense, Cabin in the Woods and The Avengers are oddly similar.” Later, he added, “I’m incredibly excited and proud of both of these movies and they have many similarities, but they really couldn’t be more different in so many ways It’s nice to be able to do that.” Well, after I get to see The Avengers movie, you may expect to see me compare and contrast it with Cabin here in “Comics in Context.”

Thinking about Cabin‘s critique of horror filmmakers;’ motives, I wonder if the same approach can be applied to superhero comics. Take the common contemporary trope of continually killing off long-running, beloved characters, sometimes horrifically (consider Supergirl’s demise in Crisis on Infinite Earths, for an early example). Usually the character is eventually resurrected, although readers may have to wait decades for this, as with the Silver Age Flash. Death and resurrection, real or symbolic, are part of the mythic hero’s journey, but how triumphant are many of these resurrections in contemporary comics? Indeed, more and more, these killings and resurrections seem to be devised as cynical ploys to appeal to the jaded palates of fans who have seen too many supposedly shocking scenarios in latter-day comics. Surely no one at Marvel really intended the recent demise of Captain America, whose body was then show decaying on panel, to be permanent, and yet readers fell for it, and even after Cap’s return, readers fell for the seeming demise of the Human Torch in yet another cynical scenario that inevitably resulted in his return. Sometimes I have found myself wondering about the mindset that devises these storylines. When did the superhero soap operatics that Stan Lee pioneered turn into this cold manipulation of heroic icons, dragging them through death and degradation for the entertainment of a generation of readers of “grim and gritty” comics? Are these iconic superheroes inspiring figures, or merely puppets manipulated into increasingly dark and despairing narratives by an industry desperate to keep sales from falling any further?

“Comics in Context” #241
Copyright 2012 Peter Sanderson

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]]> http://asitecalledfred.com/2012/04/22/cabin-in-the-woods-comics-in-context-241/feed/ 4 http://asitecalledfred.com/2010/04/10/popeye-wimpy-comics-in-context-240/ http://asitecalledfred.com/2010/04/10/popeye-wimpy-comics-in-context-240/#comments Sat, 10 Apr 2010 06:48:28 +0000 http://www.asitecalledfred.com/?p=13003 Comics historian extraordinaire Peter Sanderson returns with the penultimate chapter of his extended exploration of Popeye's sometime companion, the hamburger con man J. Wellington Wimpy...]]>

# 240 (VOL. 2 #12): WIMPY IN LOVE

In his introduction to one of Fantagraphics Books’ earlier set of volumes reprinting E. C. Segar’s Popeye comic strips, comics historian Rick Marschall argues that Popeye’s supporting player J. Wellington Wimpy is a “scoundrel” with a “lack of conscience” who can and does “betray” everyone. But in reviewing the Sunday strips in Volume 3 of Fantagraphics’ current series of Segar Popeye reprints, I’ve discovered that Wimpy is more complex than that. He does indeed have a conscience, though it is repeatedly overwhelmed by his animalistic appetite for hamburgers.

There are a month of 1933 Sunday strips about Popeye’s boxing match with the enormous Bullo Oxheart, in which Wimpy acts as referee, though he keeps being distracted from the fight by his efforts to mooch a meal off a friend, Eddie, who is sitting in the audience off-panel. But Popeye is the central character of this sequence of Sundays, each of which Segar uses to underline how “the well known weed called spinach” boosts his strength. Indeed, at this point Popeye’s strength has clearly reached superhuman levels. At the end of the June 18, 1933 strip Popeye, with apparent ease, lifts an entire house up from its foundation. “”˜Sa good thing I been eatin’ spinach lately,” Popeye comments, laughing. In the June 25, 1933 strip Popeye commends a boy who yells “I want spinach!” so Segar may be emphasizing spinach to induce his younger readers to follow their hero’s example. Popeye has become a role model, whereas Wimpy decidedly has not.

After winning the fight, Popeye tells Wimpy in the July 16, 1933 strip that he intends to donate half of the prize money “to a institution wich’ll buy spinach and cod liver oil for poor kids.” Wimpy asks him “Pardon me for being so personal, but how does it feel to give away money like that?” Note Wimpy’s unusual level of politeness here. He seems genuinely intrigued by Popeye’s generous nature, and has enough insight to recognize that this is a very personal matter to the sailor. Wimpy’s politeness may also be another sign that he genuinely regards Popeye as his friend.

When Popeye asks him, Wimpy implies that he has never given away anything himself. (For the purposes of this particular Sunday strip Segar has intentionally or not ignored the earlier sequence in which Wimpy selflessly gave his mother thousands of dollars.)

Though he isn’t articulate in a conventional manner, Popeye’s way with language has its own sort of vivid poetry. Popeye tells Wimpy that “Givin’ charity makes ya feel swell inside. . .It’s hard to explain, but right now I got tickles in me chest wich tells me I done sumpin wort’ while, see?”

Surprisingly, Wimpy decides to experiment: he says he has a dime (an unusual occurrence for him) and will use it to buy a hamburger for an impoverished man sitting at the counter in Rough-House’s diner. (Now there’s a sign of how much inflation there has been since 1933!) There is no reason to doubt Wimpy’s sincerity: he could easily buy a hamburger for himself instead. Moreover, Wimpy’s portly build is evidence of his continual success in feeding himself. In contrast, the thin stranger sitting at the counter has his tongue hanging out; Wimpy notes that this is a symptom of starvation. Indeed, the stranger seems genuinely to be in a sad state: “I have no money and no friends,” he tells Wimpy, and “I haven’t had a bite for days.” Keep in mind that this is 1933, so the stranger may very well be intended as a victim of the Great Depression.

Wimpy puts his hand on the stranger’s shoulder, tells him, “You may not have money, but you have a friend. J. Wellington Wimpy is your friend,” and orders a hamburger for him. Again, there is no reason to doubt Wimpy’s sincerity at this point.

But matters change when the hamburger arrives. Holding the burger, Wimpy begins snapping his teeth furiously, like a wild animal. Yet he simultaneously speaks in a calm tone, as if he were dispassionately observing his own behavior: “Isn’t it odd how my teeth snap at it? I have to hold it with both hands to keep it from going into my mouth.” He speaks as if the hamburger would force itself into his mouth if he didn’t stop it.

It’s also as if Wimpy’s appetite, his animal nature, is at odds with his conscious mind and better nature, as if he has a kind of split personality. Since Wimpy is a variation on the archetype of the glutton, it should be no surprise which side of his personality wins. The surprise lies in how quickly and completely that battle is won. Distraught, his tongue hanging out once more in hunger, the stranger asks his newfound friend, “Didn’t you buy that hamburger for me?”

Expressionless as usual, Wimpy replies, “I beg pardon? What’s the name, please?” It sees that Wimpy is pretending not to know his new supposed friend in order to keep the burger for himself. But is it possible that the gluttonous side of Wimpy’s personality has submerged his weaker, charitable side, and that Wimpy has to some extent actually forgotten about his promise to feed his starving acquaintance? Wimpy’s conscience had briefly awakened, but once he is exposed to the presence of a hamburger, his hunger proves dominant. Wimpy’s id overrules his superego.

Then Wimpy begins licking the hamburger with his tongue. In part this may be to partially satisfy his hunger, but it may also be that the trickster aspect of Wimpy is surfacing. Now he has an excuse for not giving the hamburger to the stranger, but the starving stranger says he still wants it. “What kind of fellow are you, anyway?” Wimpy asks, acting shocked at what he clearly considers the starving man’s loose attitude towards hygiene.

Once again putting his hand on the stranger’s shoulder, as if reverting to his former attitude of friendliness, Wimpy says he will just take one bite of the burger and then give it to him. Perhaps Wimpy still means to be generous, by his own standards, but then he opens his mouth wide, devours virtually the whole burger in a single bite, and hands the stranger what amounts to a mere scrap.

This wouldn’t be funny if the stranger were left to starve, but the genuinely generous Popeye gives him some money. Popeye scowls disapprovingly at Wimpy, who says, as if nothing had gone wrong, “I don’t know whether it was the bite of the hamburger or the charity–but I feel very lovely inside.”

I like Wimpy’s use of the word “lovely.” Popeye says two Sundays later about Wimpy that “No use gettin’ mad at him–he jus’ don’t know no better.”

When his mother came to visit, Wimpy’s conscience and sense of shame did overrule his usual greed for food. But ordinarily Wimpy doesn’t have an ordinary kind of conscience; he sees nothing wrong in mooching food from his friends, or starving strangers, or anyone else. He idealizes food, especially hamburgers, so satisfying his hunger is to him “lovely.” Perhaps Wimpy also finds it “lovely” to exercise his trickster skills in procuring food; mooching is his talent, his vocation, and perhaps even his artform.

In the July 23, 1933 strip Wimpy goes to the aquarium “for some relaxation,” and Popeye comes along. While Wimpy distracts a guard with chitchat, he surreptitiously hooks a fish in a tank behind his back; Wimpy then smuggles the fish out of the aquarium in the back of his pants. Was Wimpy lying to Popeye when he said his goal at the aquarium was “relaxation”? Maybe Wimpy does find employing his trickster skills in this way relaxing, just as other people do fishing where it’s legal to do so. It’s notable, too, that Wimpy ends this strip by inviting Popeye to dine on the fish with him. After all, Wimpy does indeed seem to regard Popeye as his friend, although he also wants Popeye to supply the tartar sauce for dinner himself.

So far Popeye feels both disgust and amusement at Wimpy’s mooching ways. But now Wimpy, surprisingly, becomes an antagonist to Popeye. Just as Wimpy does not allow friendship to get in the way of his quest for burgers, it is no barrier to his sex drive, either. You might have thought that Wimpy had sublimated his libido into his lust for hamburgers, but no. In the July 30, 1933 strip Rough-House has hired a pretty new waitress, who, we learn the following Sunday, is named Lucy Brown. Popeye immediately starts flirting with her, whereupon Wimpy literally comes between them and starts chatting with her himself.

In my research on tricksters, I’ve learned that the trickster is typically himself susceptible to being tricked. That may seem unlikely, since tricksters are so clever, but it appears to be true. For example, Superman traditionally thwarts his own trickster nemesis, Mr. Mxyzptlk, by tricking him into saying his name backwards. Perhaps the point is that the trickster can be so confident of his own cleverness that he underestimates his target’s ability to best him at his own game. So here Popeye tells Wimpy he’s wanted on the phone, and Wimpy not only believes him, but says hello into the phone over and over again before finally giving up. Apparently it never occurred to Wimpy that he hadn’t heard the phone ring.

So Wimpy returns to Popeye and Lucy the waitress. Popeye in effect tells Wimpy to go away, Wimpy turns his back, as if in defeat, and then Popeye proposes marriage to this woman he just met!

In the Fleischer and Famous Studios Popeye animated cartoons, it is Olive Oyl who often comes off as fickle, switching her affections between Popeye and Bluto. So it is quite a surprise to see from the original Segar comic strips that, early on, at least, it is Popeye who is the fickle one.

Hearing Popeye propose, Wimpy immediately sees his opportunity, turns around, and simply asks, “How’s Olive Oyl?”, shocking Popeye. Wimpy may not be able to fight the super-strong Popeye physically, but Wimpy can fight effectively with words. Wimpy quickly moves in, bending over the startled Lucy, as if enacting a love scene out of a movie, although Wimpy’s idea of romantic dialogue is distorted by his usual preoccupation: he invites her to duck dinner, adding “You bring the ducks.”

Then Popeye plays trickster again, advising Wimpy that he has forgotten to put on his pants, and wrapping a tablecloth around Wimpy’s waist. The trusting Wimpy believes Popeye, feels too embarrassed even to look down to see if Popeye is right, and rushes out of the diner. Once again, Popeye’s amusement supplants any anger he may have felt at Wimpy: laughing, he tells Lucy, “I was go’ner ast ya to marry me, but I kin not get serious on account of laughin’ at ol’ Wimpy.” It would seem that Popeye’s attraction to Lucy wasn’t that serious since his amusement at Wimpy proves the stronger emotion.

At the beginning of the following Sunday strip, August 6, 1933, Wimpy asks Popeye why he won’t let him talk with Lucy Brown. “Is this not a free country?” By Wimpy’s lights, it seems he thinks he merely wants a fair chance to compete for Lucy’s attentions. Alpha male Popeye declares “she’s gon’er be my sweety” and tells Wimpy to “beat it.” (Since this is 1933, neither man considers Lucy’s opinion about this.)

So Wimpy seeks out Olive Oyl and tells her that Popeye has a “new sweetheart,” Lucy Brown. You might think that Wimpy intends to get Lucy for himself. But no: sticking his nose literally in Olive’s face, Wimpy declares, “If he don’t want you, I want you.” Having decided “it is time I should take unto myself a wife,” Wimpy is determined to get one, and it doesn’t seem to matter whom. (It does appear as if Wimpy is only going after women whom Popeye has already picked out, as if he considers Popeye a guide in such matters.) But the comics Olive is considerably less fickle than her animated counterpart, and far from being as passive as Lucy: she knocks Wimpy down (So that’s why she’s such a good match for Popeye!) and declares, “I want Popeye and nobody but.”

Olive races to the diner and angrily confronts Popeye, who, shaken, resorts to the Wimpyesque tactic of denial: “What girl?” Popeye asks, though Lucy is standing right there. Seemingly guilt-ridden, Popeye pleads the Fifth Amendment, but Wimpy urges Olive, “Let’s you and her fight”: maybe Wimpy considers two women fighting to be a turn-on. He soon gets his wish, and Popeye, seemingly forgetting his rivalry with Wimpy, asks him to help break the fight up but each taking hold of one of the women. Perhaps showing his true loyalty, Popeye grabs Olive, and advises her not to start fights; Olive looks bewildered and distraught, now that she’s coming out of her fit of rage. And then both Popeye and Olive discover that Wimpy not only took hold of Lucy but now has clasped her in his loving embrace, as he radiates cartoon hearts. He’s back to fixating on Lucy as his sweetheart. (Lucy looks somewhat annoyed.)

But on the following Sunday, August 13, 1933, we learn that Popeye is now conducting a clandestine romance with Lucy. Back to treating Wimpy as his friend, Popeye asks him to act as if Lucy is Wimpy’s girlfriend if Olive Oyl turns up. This is a big mistake. Olive does indeed turn up at the home of Lucy and her father, whereupon Wimpy, radiating more cartoon hearts, begins cuddling Lucy. But whenever Olive attempts to leave, Wimpy persuades her to stay. So Wimpy gets to cuddle Lucy for hours, until Olive finally leaves at midnight. “Popeye, you are, indeed, a fine fellow,” says Wimpy. “There aren’t any men who’d allow me to pet their sweeties.” Possibly Wimpy is just trying to placate Popeye. But it also seems quite possible that Wimpy sees nothing wrong with manipulating the situation with Lucy and Olive and that he genuinely considers Popeye to have shown generosity in letting him hug Lucy for hours. (Again, Lucy’s own opinions are not consulted.) But this time Popeye erupts in rage, punches Wimpy in the jaw, and throws him out the window. And thus begins a series of Sundays in which Segar physically punishes Wimpy for his trickery.

But in the following Sunday strip, for August 20, 1933, Wimpy is back to mooching food from Popeye. Wimpy keeps calling him. “Old pal of mine,” but Popeye, perhaps reacting to the last few Sunday strips, angrily refuses to give him any food. But then Popeye holds up a potato, which appears to have two eyes and a nose, and Wimpy claims it is the image of his late Uncle Hymie. Breaking down in tears, Wimpy goes on and on about what a wonderful man Uncle Hymie was. “Surely you would not eat that potato,” Wimpy says. Popeye, now in tears himself, agrees to give Wimpy the potato as a memento of his uncle. The final panel finds Wimpy sitting under a tree, eating the potato: “‘Tis a pity that I have no gravy to put upon Uncle Hymie.”

The simplest interpretation of this episode is that Wimpy was simply conning Popeye out of the potato and made up the whole Uncle Hymie story. But I’ve come to think of Wimpy as a complex, ambiguous figure. I think it is entirely possible that Wimpy did have a beloved Uncle Hymie and was genuinely moved to tears by his memory, but that still would not stop Wimpy from devouring a potato that looked like his dead uncle. As usual, Wimpy’s appetite overrules his emotions.

Wimpy referees Popeye’s next prize fight in the Sunday strips, which is noteworthy for the way that Popeye’s opponent literally twists Popeye’s body out of shape, but without causing him any real harm, in a further display of Popeye’s superhuman power.

In the September 17, 1933 Sunday strip, Wimpy returns to the aquarium, having accepted Rough-House’s bet that he can’t catch another fish there. This time Wimpy has overreached, perhaps because he is trying to win a wager. He hooks an eel, which slithers in and out of his pants, in a weirdly phallic gag (which is shown on the cover of Popeye Vol. 3). The guards see this, and they start kicking Wimpy. It’s as if Segar now feels that Wimpy can’t always get away with his trickery, even though these punishments don’t deter Wimpy at all.

Just how far will Wimpy go in the service of his appetite? In the September 24, 1933 strip Wimpy tries his usual mooching tricks on Popeye, Rough-House, Geezil and other diner customers, who all furiously refuse. Unperturbed, Wimpy starts reading the paper and then, uncharacteristically, his eyes go wide. Then, even more uncharacteristically, he punches Geezil in the face. As a policeman arrives, Geezil reacts with his usual angry bluster (“Could he smush me in the schnozzle? Could he? Could he? COULD HE?). But after Wimpy hits the policeman too, Wimpy is taken to jail. And then Rough-House, Popeye and Geezil see what Wimpy read in the newspaper: hamburgers are now on the jailhouse menu. Wimpy has exchanged his own freedom for a steady supply of burgers!

By the following Sunday, October 1, 1933, Wimpy has regained his freedom. So how can his appetite drive him still further? Wimpy has just inherited a cow, and attempts to trade it to Popeye, who is substituting for Rough-House at running the diner for a day, for hamburgers. But Popeye keeps saying no, even as Wimpy whittles down his request from ten burgers down to one, and keeps calling Popeye, with increasing emphasis, “old pal of mine.” Nothing works, and for once Wimpy, despite his deadpan demeanor, seems desperate. Finally Popeye agrees to lend Wimpy some bread, an axe and some kitchen utensils. After Wimpy leaves Popeye says, “I kin not help feelin’ sorry for ol’ Wimpy” and leaves to invite him to have a hamburger. But it is too late. In the final panel Popeye is so surprised, perhaps shocked, that he levitates off the ground. Wimpy has killed and butchered the cow, whose head lies grotesquely on the ground, and turned its body into a tall mound of hamburgers! Of course we all know that hamburgers are made from dead cattle, but it’s still startling, and even macabre, that Wimpy would kill the cow himself and grind it up into food.

Segar must have liked the idea of Popeye running Rough-House’s diner in this Sunday strip, because on the following Sunday strip he and Olive open their own cafe. But after the first month of this new storyline, Wimpy reclaims center stage. When Olive gets sick, Popeye hires Wimpy to fill in for her as a waiter. Initially, Wimpy resolves to do the right thing, even when serving a hamburger steak to a customer: “Get behind me, Satan. . . it is my duty to deliver this bit of beef to our patron.” But once again, the id of Wimpy’s appetite overwhelms the superego of his conscience. He talks the customer into thinking the hamburger is infected with bugs, and after the shaken patron leaves, Popeye lets Wimpy eat the steak. “He is, no doubt, a peculiar person,” Wimpy tells Popeye about their lost customer. In this case Wimpy is clearly, consciously deceiving his “old pal of mine.”

Popeye’s charitable feelings towards Wimpy have resurfaced, and the following Sunday, November 12, 1933, Popeye gives Wimpy a tryout for a job as a waiter, but this time carefully keeps an eye on him. Wimpy again tries to do the right thing, repeating his “Get thee behind me, Satan” mantra while bringing a hamburger to a customer. But once again, when one side of Wimpy consciously resists his hunger, his unconscious forcefully emerges, and he finds himself instinctively snapping his teeth at the burger and then devouring it, seemingly in one gulp. “Sorry, sir, I’m indeed sorry this had to happen,” Wimpy says, and he may indeed mean it. Wimpy tries to bring him another burger, but says, “Heavens! I feel that great desire again–the urge to gobble it down!” Is Wimpy putting on an act, or is he in the grip of a comedic but real addiction to food? He gobbles this burger, too. Finally, the disgruntled customer fetches his own burger, whereupon Wimpy hurls a pot at him, knocking him out. “A hundred percent,” says Wimpy, holding the burger; “Not a single one got away from me.” Watching all of this, Popeye confesses, “I kin not bawl “˜im out on account of laughin’.”

But by the following Sunday, Popeye has grown so angry at Wimpy’s mooching that he pays a policeman to put him in jail. “It isn’t right to treat poor old Wimpy that way,” says Olive. “Shame on you, Popeye.” But Popeye goes down to the prison to literally laugh in Wimpy’s face.

Then Wimpy begins weeping: “You laugh at my sorrow. You hurt me.” As Wimpy goes on, talking about his mother, and about how “life hasn’t been very kind to me,” Popeye finds himself weeping in sympathy, and finally bails Wimpy out of jail. Wimpy expresses his gratitude to “my friend” and then resumes trying to mooch a hamburger from him. Once again the reader may wonder to what extent Wimpy is consciously manipulating Popeye’s emotions and to what extent Wimpy’s sadness at being “hurt” by a friend is real. My hypothesis is that both possibilities are true and that they coexist. I suspect that Wimpy’s stoic, expressionless demeanor covers real pain over his poverty and loneliness. Popeye may be Wimpy’s dupe, but he also really is Wimpy’s only friend.

Segar’s exploration of Wimpy’s character reaches a climax with the November 26, 1933 Sunday strip, the last in this volume. Popeye’s friend Bill Squid bets Popeye that Wimpy would “choke his grandmother for a hamburger.” Despite Popeye’s disgust and even cruelty towards Wimpy in past strips, Popeye seems more naturally to look on the bright side, and contends that Wimpy has “good qualities, too.” Popeye even tells Wimpy, “ever’body seems to be down on ya an’ tha’s why I got sympthity for ya–I yam always for the underdog.”

Popeye goes so far as to dress up as an old lady and pose as Wimpy’s grandmother, whom Wimpy hasn’t seen in thirty years. Bill is amazed that Wimpy cannot see through Popeye’s obvious disguise (“Is he dumb?”), but Wimpy is a trickster who is easily susceptible to being tricked.

As Wimpy’s grandma, Popeye sits down to eat a hamburger. Wimpy flatters her and asks for a “bite” of the burger but “she” says no. Then Wimpy begins snapping his teeth at the burger, and “Grandmother” is outraged that Wimpy has “absolukely no self-control.” Thwarted again, Wimpy goes further than we’ve seen before in this book and, yes, actually begins choking his “grandmother.” His id is in full control: Dark Wimpy is unleashed. “Grandmother” rebukes Wimpy, who begins weeping with shame: “I’m sorry! Heavens! What did I almost do?” But his dark side overwhelms Wimpy again: he snaps at the burger, jumps on “grandmother,” demanding the burger: “Curse you, grandmother!” The disguised and disgusted Popeye finally stops Wimpy by hitting him.

However rough and violent in his manners, Popeye is an idealist and a true hero who adheres to and enforces his code of morality. Wimpy is neither hero nor idealist, but a flawed man driven by his natural drives, notably his appetite. Yet somehow they belong together as a team, like the similar pairings of Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, or Tamino and Papageno in Mozart’s The Magic Flute.

And in the grand finale to my Wimpython, I will turn to the renowned “Plunder Island” storyline in Fantagraphics’ Popeye Vol. 4, in which the team of Popeye and Wimpy faces its ultimate test when both confront the strip’s archvillainess, the Sea Hag.

Warning to my faithful readers: I am in the process of moving from New York City back to my home town near Boston. So there may be a week or two when I won’t be posting a new “Comics in Context.” But rest assured that once I have Internet access set up at my new home, “Comics in Context” will be back!

–Copyright 2010 Peter Sanderson

Follow me on Twitter (@PeterJSanderson) and at Facebook Comic Con.

]]> http://asitecalledfred.com/2010/04/10/popeye-wimpy-comics-in-context-240/feed/ 1 http://asitecalledfred.com/2010/04/01/scrooge-mcduck-comics-in-context-239/ http://asitecalledfred.com/2010/04/01/scrooge-mcduck-comics-in-context-239/#respond Fri, 02 Apr 2010 01:42:37 +0000 http://www.asitecalledfred.com/?p=12923 Comics historian extraordinaire Peter Sanderson takes a journey with Uncle Scrooge to the not-so-mythical land of Tralla La, crafted by Carl Barks...]]>

#239 (Vol. 2 #11): SCROOGE’S LOST HORIZON

In their Toon Treasury of Classic Children’s Comics, editors Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly of course included the pinnacle of the form, writer/artist Carl Barks’ Uncle Scrooge, but they chose a rather unusual example of the series. “Tralla La,” from Walt Disney’s Uncle Scrooge #6 (1954), is a typical Scrooge story in that Scrooge McDuck leads his nephew Donald and grandnephews Huey, Dewey and Louie on an adventure to a distant land. But it is highly atypical in that for once the miserly Scrooge, who famously loves his money so much that he swims around in his sea of cash, has become disillusioned with his vast wealth. For once, instead of taking his relatives on a treasure hunt, Scrooge takes them on a quest for a place where material treasures do not exist.

The story opens with Barks showing the demands that Scrooge faces due to his great wealth: dealing with foreign leaders, taxes, requests from charities, being investigated by the government, being beset by a radical agitator. Visibly, comically shaking, Scrooge believes he needs to take his “nerve medicine” or else he will “crack up.” looking exhausted, drinking his nerve medicine right out of the bottle, Scrooge looks not unlike someone taking a very different kind of drink. Scrooge thinks “Oh, how I envy that carefree squirrel” he sees sleeping on a tree branch.

Bu the next page Scrooge has indeed cracked up, shouting “I’m mad! Mad! Mad!” As if turning into the Bizarro version of himself, Scrooge declares, “I hate my money! It’s brought me nothing but work, labor, toil, and jeers!. . .Get out of my sight, you ugly stuff!” as he kicks coins out of his path. Then Scrooge seems to go over the brink into insanity: he scampers about, chattering like the squirrel he earlier admired.

One of Scrooge’s employees summons his nephew Donald Duck, who finds the frazzled-looking Scrooge wearily sticking his head out of a hole in a tree. “You’re not a squirrel,” Donald tells him. “I know it! But I can want to be one, can’t I”?” replies Scrooge. Barks seems to be making the point that Scrooge hasn’t really gone insane (or if he had, he’s crossed back over the brink to sanity) perhaps because though Barks portrayed Scrooge’s “squirrely” behavior for laughs, true insanity wouldn’t be funny.

Donald diagnoses Scrooge as suffering from overwork. Agreeing, Scrooge asserts that “˜I want to go someplace where there is no money, and wealth means nothing!” Yes, this is certainly different from the Scrooge McDuck with whom we are familiar, whose identity is expressed through his pride in his lifelong career accumulating his seemingly limitless fortune. This story is from only the fifth issue of Scrooge’s own comic book, so perhaps Barks was still experimenting with the character.

Scrooge consults a doctor, who tells him about “a strange valley in the Himalaya mountains” that is “called Tralla La, and nobody has ever seen it, but it is said to be a place without money!” Thrilled by the idea, Scrooge immediately seems revitalized, leaps from his sickbed (in a symbolic resurrection) and declares he is heading for Tralla La.

Tralla La is an obvious reference to Shangri-La, the idyllic realm introduced in James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon, which was adapted into the 1937 film version directed by Frank Capra.

Hilton’s Shangri-La appears to be the template for hidden Asian paradises in popular fiction. One prominent example is K’un-L’un, the mystical realm in Marvel Comics’ Iron Fist series, which is named after the real Kunlun mountain range in which Shangri-La was supposedly located. Even Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s origin of Doctor Strange seems to owe a large debt to Lost Horizon: the hidden Himalayan land of Kamar-Taj parallels Shangri-La, the Ancient One is reminiscent of Lost Horizon‘s High Lama, and Stephen Strange, with his trademark mustache, looks like Ronald Colman, the star of Capra’s film adaptation. (It’s amusing to imagine Doctor Strange uttering his spells in Colman’s distinctive voice.) The television series Lost may also owe a debt to Lost Horizon. In both Lost and Lost Horizon a collection of travelers end up in a hidden, seemingly mystical realm after their plane goes astray from its proper route. Certain denizens of the island in Lost have greatly extended life spans, like characters in Lost Horizon‘s Shangri-La. Moreover (spoiler for those who haven’t started watching the final season), Jacob’s search for a “candidate” to replace him as the island’s protector in Lost echoes the High Lama’s attempt to recruit Robert Conway, the character Colman plays in the movie, as his successor. Conway leaves Shangri-La, recognizes his mistake, and attempts to return; similarly Jack and other castaways in Lost succeeded in escaping the island only to go back.

The last time that I saw the Capra film of Lost Horizon on TCM, it struck me that it was a benign isolationist fantasy. In a world that, in the story and in real life, was moving towards World War II, Shangri-La was a peaceful paradise to which one could escape, where the highest achievements of civilization (represented by Shangri-La’s extensive library and art collection) would endure as the outside world fell into chaos. Shangri-La was a place where greed and lust for power–the motives for conflict–simply did not exist. Human nature seemed to have been purified of such vices in Shangri-La’s culture. Significantly for Barks’ purposes, there is no money there.

In the film, initially the passengers on the plane that is hijacked to Shangri-La want to get back to Western civilization. But most of them come to love Shangri-La, even Henry Barnard, an American criminal, who reforms and starts his life anew there. The good influence of the community and culture of Shangri-La makes the passengers into better people. Only Conway’s brother George resists and remains intent on leaving. When Robert Conway mistakenly becomes disillusioned with Shangri-La, he joins his brother in leaving. But, significantly, George ends up dying in an avalanche, and Robert, on returning to Western civilization, realizes how gravely he erred in leaving Shangri-La and, through nearly superhuman efforts, succeeds in returning there.

Arriving at the base of the Himalayas, Scrooge questions a native who tells him he knows of no one who knows how to get to Tralla La. Here’s another curiosity in this story. Barks’s duck tales seem to take place on an alternate Earth populated by anthropomorphic dogs, birds and pigs, but he draws this tall native in a turban as a human being. In the Donald Duck story “Bee Bumble” earlier in this collection, there is a large panel showing numerous residents of Duckburg, some of whom are drawn as anthropomorphic dogs (who have black canine noses) and others as humans (who do not).

Donald and his nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie have accompanied Scrooge on his expedition. Aided by their Junior Woodchucks’ Guidebook, Huey, Dewey and Louie figure out the way to get to Tralla La that apparently no one else has figured out for centuries. Typically, Barks portrays Huey, Dewey and Louie as being smarter in finding solutions for various problems than the adults. Surely this is part of the appeal of Barks’s stories for children, showing them that they can perceive answers that adults cannot, and resolve problems and conflicts that the older generation cannot, as we shall see again at the end of this story.

Barks fans are familiar with the Junior Woodchucks’ Guidebook, a thin tome that nonetheless apparently contains all the knowledge in the world. It strikes me that nowadays kids might carry around a laptop computer with wi-fi, with which they could Google any information they sought. Barks’ recurring gag from my childhood has become a reality! I wonder what he would have thought of this.

Barks’ narrator apparently notices how much Scrooge is acting out of his usual miserly character: “Uncle Scrooge unfreezes his purse and hires a plane! He’s that anxious to find Tralla La!” Scrooge even pays the pilot two million dollars!

Barks then provides a splash-size panel, covering half a page, for an aerial shot of the mountains and waterfalls towering over the valley of Tralla La far below. For the last two decades comic book artists have devalued the full-page and half-page panel, using them as poster shots for characters without any real storytelling purpose. But in this Barks tale, the sudden shift to a panel four times as big as one of the typical panels in the story, with this superbly drawn mountain vista, still carries dramatic force, lending an epic scope to this adventure tale.

Descending by parachute, Scrooge and his relatives first meet the people of Tralla La, whom Barks draws as ducks, most of them taller than Scrooge. The colorist for this anthology, and, I presume, for the original story, colors the ducks of Tralla La yellow: had Barks drawn these Tralla Lallians as humans, that would certainly be a politically incorrect color choice, to put it mildly.

We soon see Scrooge talking with a Tralla Lallian who is seated on a chair like a throne; he does not look ancient, but perhaps he is intended to be a counterpart of Shangri-La’s High Lama. This Tralla Lallian says that “We Tralla Lallians have never known greed!” Several pages ago Donald was greedily offering to take Scrooge’s fortune if Scrooge no longer wanted it. But, like the Western visitors to Shangri-La, Donald seems changed by the good example set by the community he sees around him. Impressed, Donald tells his nephews, “It is wonderful here! Nobody wants anything that belongs to anybody else!” A few panels later Scrooge adds, “Yessir! All we have to do is bear our share of the work. . . .” Why, it’s even beginning to sound like an idealized communist society! But don’t worry: such a society doesn’t exist in real life, and it doesn’t in this story, either. Come to think of it, you should worry about that latter point!

A Tralla Lallian farmer named Hop Sing finds something he has never seen before: a bottle cap from a bottle of Scrooge’s nerve medicine. Honest like everyone else in Tralla La, Hop Sing returns it to Scrooge, who tells him to keep it.

And now two familiar themes from Barks stories resurface: greed and temptation. Other Tralla Lallians become fascinated with Hop Sing’s bottle cap, the first one ever seen in Tralla La. Two Tralla Lallians each offer to “buy” the bottle cap, giving Hop Sing sheep in return. Hop Sing’s wife, with an evil look worthy of a Barksian version of Lady Macbeth, advises Hop Sing to hold out for even more sheep, and he then sells the bottle cap for ten sheep. Its new owner then resells the bottle cap for twenty sheep.

Barks’ narrator then informs us that “By noon the next day the bottle cap has changed hands many times. And its price has become fantastic!” I find myself suddenly thinking of the recent news report about a copy of Action Comics #1 selling for a million dollars. More ominously, I also think of the tech stocks bubble of the 1990s and the housing bubble of the 2000s, and the resulting Great Recession. Perhaps Barks was thinking of the stock market crash of 1929 and the resulting Great Depression.

“The pride of owning the only bottle cap in Tralla La is worth more to me than food!” says its most recent owner, cradling the cap in his hand like the old money-loving Scrooge with his lucky “number one” dime. But this counterpart of Scrooge is fanatical enough to prize wealth over his own life. And that reminds me of the famous gag in which a holdup man tells Jack Benny, “Your money or your life,” and the miserly Benny pauses before exclaiming “I’m thinking about it!”

Soon afterwards some Tralla Lallians discover Scrooge with a crate of nerve medicine bottles and realize he has five bottle caps, making him “the richest duck in all Tralla La!” Scrooge looks shocked. It is as if he cannot escape the identity–the world’s richest duck–that he had tried to leave behind him in the outside world.

Tralla Lallians start making extravagant offers to buy the bottle caps. One Tralla Lallian even offers to “be your servant for forty years!”; wealth is more important to him than his own freedom. When Scrooge does not immediately sell the bottle caps, the gathering crowd turns angry and potentially threatening. One of them demands that Scrooge’s taxes be raised. But presumably there weren’t any taxes in Tralla La before this! Look at how fast this once idyllic society is changing!

Scrooge had found peace of mind in Tralla La, but now the stress returns, and he finds himself his nerves are “going to pieces” again. He shoots a bottle cap at the crowd of Tralla Lallians, who begin fighting each other over it.

So thus Barks turns Hilton and Capra’s Shangri-La upside down. In Lost Horizon most of the people from the Western outside world are converted to the peaceful ways of Shangri-La, giving up greed and other vices. But in Barks’ story the ways of the West corrupt the people of Tralla La. Scrooge and his relatives inadvertently became the serpent in Tralla La’s Garden of Eden, with the bottle cap serving as the forbidden fruit, the temptation to sin, the means by which a whole society loses its innocence. Hilton and Capra’s Shangri-La was a refuge from war in the outside world. But Barks shows us the people of Tralla La fighting over bottle caps: violence, battle and hatred have come to their formerly peaceful valley.

The saga of Tralla La could be interpreted as a parable about the spread of Western civilization–perhaps specifically American capitalism–around the globe and its destructive effects on other cultures. Nowadays we could consider it a cautionary tale about the negative effects of globalization.

Huey, Dewey and Louie suggest that Donald return to the outside world to fetch enough bottle caps to satisfy everyone in Tralla La. Scrooge embraces the idea but overreaches, deciding that Donald will send back a billion bottle caps. By doing so, Scrooge thinks “This place will be perfect again!” But he has committed that American fault of meddling in a culture without fully thinking through the consequences. You could also say that Scrooge is committing an act of hubris, and that any effort to make a society “perfect” is doomed to fail.

The Tralla Lallians give up working, waiting for riches–in the form of the promised bottle caps–to “rain” down from the heavens. Keep in mind that Scrooge, in other stories, works hard to maintain and increase his wealth. But the promise of easily achieved riches warps the values of the Tralla Lallians, turning them indolent. Their idyllic society has become decadent.

A plane drops a million bottle caps into Tralla La, and the Tralla Lallians are initially overjoyed. But then they discover that now that there are so many bottle caps, they have become worthless. Barks has here cleverly satirized inflation, perhaps thinking of the incredible inflation in Europe during the 1930s in which, for example, Germany’s currency became virtually worthless.

But, without thinking it through carefully, Scrooge had ordered a billion bottle caps dropped into Tralla La by planes (and clearly Tralla La is now no longer isolated from then outside world), damaging the crops and threatening to block a whirlpool, flooding the valley. Yes, this story has become a cautionary tale about environmental damage, as well. The unceasing rain of bottle caps seems like a parody of manna from heaven, or a variation on the army of animate brooms from The Sorcerer’s Apprentice in Disney’s Fantasia (1940).

Whereas pages earlier a Tralla Lallian asserted that his people prized “friendship” above all things, now the Tralla Lallians turn into an angry “mob” hunting Scrooge and his relatives. Before the story is finished, one Tralla Lallian will demand that Scrooge be thrown into the whirlpool. In other words, this Tralla Lallian has demanded Scrooge’s death. The earthly paradise of Tralla La thus completes its transformation into an earthly hell.

In the end Huey, Dewey and Louie come up with a solution for the problem that their elders, Scrooge and Donald, created. But it is only a partial solution. They find a way to save themselves, Scrooge and Donald, from punishment–and perhaps death–at the hands of the Tralla Lallians, and safely escape from Tralla La. Huey, Dewey and Louie also find the means to save Tralla La from the ultimate “calamity” if the flooding of the valley.

As in this anthology’s Donald Duck stories, Barks thus provides us with what is technically a happy ending. What he calls the “scare” of his experience in Tralla La has caused Scrooge to re-embrace his life as the world’s wealthiest duck. But when Huey, Dewey and Louie ask to be paid their miniscule wages (thirty cents an hour), Scrooge begins shaking with nerves again. You could say that this reaction is simply a manifestation of his usual miserly personality, unwilling to part with even tiny sums. But it also indicates that Scrooge’s quest in this story–to find peace of mind–has proven futile. This is a truly ironic ending: rather than finding resolution, Scrooge is caught in a loop. As he himself says in the story’s closing line, “Here I go again!”

The ultimate theme of this story is a surprising one for a story aimed at children, but a valuable one for them to learn. The adults who read or watch Lost Horizon dream of utopia; they want to believe that the perfect human community is possible, and that human beings can aspire to perfection. But Carl Barks tells their children this is wrong. The fable of “Tralla La” tells us that human nature is fallible and cannot be improved, and that vices like greed are inescapable in society. Utopias cannot exist. Through his fantasy of talking ducks and a faraway hidden valley, Carl Barks shows his readership what reality is like.

–Copyright 2010 Peter Sanderson

Follow me on Twitter (@PeterJSanderson) and at Facebook Comic Con.

]]> http://asitecalledfred.com/2010/04/01/scrooge-mcduck-comics-in-context-239/feed/ 0 http://asitecalledfred.com/2010/03/26/popeye-wimpy-comics-in-context-238/ http://asitecalledfred.com/2010/03/26/popeye-wimpy-comics-in-context-238/#respond Fri, 26 Mar 2010 05:10:07 +0000 http://www.asitecalledfred.com/?p=12792 Comics historian extraordinaire Peter Sanderson returns with his extended exploration of Popeye's sometime companion, the hamburger con man J. Wellington Wimpy...]]>

# 238 (VOL. 2 #10): POPEYE VS. WIMPY

In his newspaper strip Thimble Theatre, which starred his creation Popeye, E.C. Segar realized that the comedy would work better if his own trickster, J. Wellington Wimpy, had formidable opponents to overcome. As I mentioned weeks ago, one of my problems with Hanna-Barbera’s Top Cat as a trickster is that his schemes often seem too transparent, and his targets too gullible, to be convincing.

Lately I have been exploring the Sunday strips in Fantagraphics Books’ Popeye Volume 3 collection, most of which center on Wimpy and his continuing efforts to mooch hamburgers from his friends and neighbors.

Typically Wimpy uses his trademark lines in mooching food, like “I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today,” or inviting someone to a duck dinner, adding “you bring the ducks.” Moreover, Wimpy repeatedly goes after the same targets–Popeye, Rough-House, George W. Geezil–who are to different degrees exasperated with his mooching, and determined to resist it. But Wimpy nevertheless succeeds in eating every day. Segar indicates that Wimpy actually has an inexhaustible bag of tricks.

In the Sunday March 19, 1933 strip cafe owner Rough-House convinces Popeye that “you’re wasting your time trying to reform Wimpy.” As they complain about Wimpy, in comes a stranger with glasses and a thick black mustache, as well as a familiar build and outfit, who orders a porterhouse steak. He agrees with Popeye and Rough-House about Wimpy (“”˜Tis a pity they did not drown him when a pup.”). Rough-House is delighted with his new customer and boasts, “Here’s one guy he [Wimpy] can’t work.” Popeye likewise overreaches, becoming egotistical: “It’s the bad eggs which makes us real folks shine.” But when the new customer says he forgot his wallet and will pay Rough-House Tuesday, Popeye and Rough-House finally see through Wimpy’s disguise, and Popeye has to restrain Rough-House, who seems to be in a berserker rage, from severing Wimpy’s head with a cleaver!

But on the following Sunday, March 26, 1933, Rough-House’s customers are laughing at how Wimpy fooled Rough-House and Popeye with his disguise. Rough-House says if Wimpy tries that stunt again, “I’ll half-murder him.” The angered Popeye, who says he hates “gettin’ hoomiliated,” says he’ll help Rough-House. In comes a man with glasses, a long white beard, and a build and outfit like Wimpy’s, and Popeye and Rough-House grab him. Again losing control of his temper, Rough-House even tries to use the cleaver on him. Then in walks Wimpy, who asks, simply, “My friend, why are you pulling the old man’s whiskers?” To his credit, Popeye erupts into laughter and says, “Aw, forget it, Rough-House. Ain’t ya got no sense o’hoomer?” But today Rough-House doesn’t, and he grimaces in fury. Wimpy meanwhile maintains his usual deadpan calm. Wimpy’s control of his emotions and usual calm contrast favorably with Rough-House’s inability to keep his cool and murderous but infantile rages. It is a point in Popeye’s favor that his resentment of Wimpy and self-centered sense of humiliation are outweighed by his appreciation of the humorous side of life. He simply can’t stay angry at Wimpy.

So in the Sunday, April 2, 1933 strip Popeye takes his revenge on Wimpy in a humorous way, giving Wimpy a fake hamburger made of rubber. Popeye, Rough-House, and other cafe customers burst into laughter. But Wimpy remains dignified and serious throughout. When Popeye gives him the “burger,” Wimpy says, “I am very. very hungry. You have saved my life.” Surely Wimpy wasn’t literally on the point of death, but he has just reminded Popeye and us that he does need to eat to live. Oddly, Wimpy does not notice that he is eating rubber, not meat: “Again, I have lived. . .again, I have tasted of heaven.” It’s not just that Wimpy needs to eat hamburgers to survive; he is a kind of connoisseur of hamburgers, who likens them to “tasting” of “heaven.” It’s as if his idea of hamburgers–his idealization of them–is more important than the reality. Rough-House, Geezil, and the other customers are disgusted that the prank failed and that Wimpy “didn’t even know the difference” between a real burger and the fake. “Where’s the joke?” asks one customer, and he has a point. The strip ends with Wimpy profusely praising Popeye, telling him that out of millions of people, “you are the only one who buys for me hamburgers,” and that is true. Popeye looks angry and uncomfortable, and perhaps feels guilty over playing this misfired prank on someone who actually does regard him as his only friend.

This Sunday strip also suggests that Wimpy has a certain degree of obliviousness to the bad side of life. As I’ve noted before, Wimpy is very much an optimist, living in hope, and seemingly it does not occur to him that Popeye, whom he considers a friend, would play a prank on him. It is tradition that a trickster is himself capable of being tricked. But Wimpy’s obliviousness serves him as a shield. Even when he is fed the rubber burger, he seemingly doesn’t realize he has been tricked.

Arguably, Rough-House is a much bigger problem than Wimpy. The April 9, 1933 Sunday strip opens with a close-up of Rough-House, his teeth bared, perspiring, growling in rage as if he were a wild animal. Popeye’s concern over Rough-House (“he’s almost crazy”) again shifts his sympathies against Wimpy. Rough-House really needs psychiatric help at this point, but Popeye lets himself be persuaded by Wimpy’s foremost nemesis, George W. Geezil, that “What he [Wimpy] needs should be chasing from town.” And so, amazingly, Popeye leas a mob, with Rough-House and Geezil in front, that literally chases Wimpy out of town. Significantly, Wimpy cannot believe that this is happening to him: “They must think I’m somebody else!” One of the mob gloats, “We scared him plenty.” But Wimpy, with his usual deadpan dignity, simply follows them back to town, unobserved until they get back to Rough-House’s cafe and he orders a burger. He’s like a loyal dog that returns to its master even after being mistreated. This is Wimpy’s way of not giving up: he simply refuses to acknowledge defeat, or even that people dislike him.

By the following Sunday, April 16, 1933, Rough-House has suffered a nervous breakdown. So obsessed is he with Wimpy, that Rough-House furiously repeats Wimpy’s catchphrases. Popeye and others visit the hospital and bring Rough-House flowers. “When a man gets sick,” Rough-House observes, “he soon learns who his real friends are.” But then Wimpy comes in, offering a wild flower, “with all good wishes.” Rough-House faints, and, perhaps shockingly, Popeye and Rough-House’s other visitors beat Wimpy up off-panel. Wimpy, needing to recuperate, commands Rough-House to “move over” but then becomes is concerned for his antagonist (“Why, the poor man has fainted.”) and lies next to him in bed, comforting him. It is very revealing that Wimpy cares more about Rough-House’s state than his own pain. Perhaps this is partly another side of his characteristic obliviousness to misfortune: he is ignoring his own pain. But Wimpy is genuinely concerned for Rough-House. This can’t be an attempt to con Rough-House, because Rough-House is unconscious. It seems that Wimpy regards even Rough-House as a friend, or at least as a potential friend, and is consciously or unconsciously ignoring the fact that Rough-House hates him. There’s a sort of innocence to Wimpy, as if he can’t believe that the victims of his mooching resent him.

The following Sunday strip, April 23, 1933, addresses the question of just how unconscious Wimpy is of opposition towards him. Still in the hospital and still seething, Rough-House complains that Wimpy “ain’t got sense enough to know that he’s the cause of my nervous breakdown.” So Popeye confronts Wimpy, who is bringing another flower to the man Wimpy calls “my old friend Rough-House.” Popeye threatens to hit Wimpy if he doesn’t stop, and then turns his back on Wimpy, not expecting what happens next. Neither, probably, do the readers. Wimpy hits Popeye from behind with a boulder, actually knocking the superhuman sailor down. Then, though Wimpy retains his calm, deadpan look, he points his finger, as if instructing Popeye, and speaks words that are lettered larger and darker than usual, suggesting that he is speaking with more emphasis, and more loudly, than usual. “And now, my friend,” Wimpy states, “I am going to the hospital.” Wimpy is clearly aware that Popeye is opposing him, and has proved he will take violent measures to get his way. Wimpy is insistent on carrying out his mission of charity. It’s also important that Wimpy, though speaking emphatically, remains civil in what he tells Popeye, and even calls him “my friend.” I believe that Wimpy is indicating that although he had to employ violence, he would prefer that he and Popeye stay at peace, and that he even continues to regard Popeye as a friend. Indeed, Wimpy even seems to be trying to will Popeye to remain his friend, despite their dispute. It doesn’t work, and Popeye beats Wimpy, on panel, so badly that Wimpy is hospitalized. But Wimpy nonetheless triumphs; he is put in the bed next to Rough-House’s and offers the flower to Rough-House, who growls in frustrated anger. Again, Wimpy simply does not give up. He will treat Popeye and Rough-House as his friends despite their resentment of him–and despite the fact that he continually mooches from them. Wimpy doesn’t have contempt for the people he tricks into feeding him, but seems to like them–at least Popeye and Rough-House. It’s a little like the way that Bugs Bunny kisses Elmer Fudd: Bugs is another trickster who is fond of the person he tricks. But arguably Bugs is also mocking Elmer with the kiss; Wimpy, in contrast, seems sincere in bringing Rough-House flowers.

Popeye seems the embodiment of the virtue of charity when he gives away his money to the needy. But even though Wimpy usually takes rather than gives, he is arguably even more purely a figure of charity since Wimpy will treat an adversary like Rough-House with such kindness.

It seems shocking that the April 30, 1933 strip opens with Popeye, Geezil and others planning to beat up Wimpy so badly as to hospitalize him “for a week.” Rough-House, out of the hospital, urges them on. Wimpy may not be so oblivious to enmity that he comes unprepared. Popeye and the others are charmed by hearing beautiful violin music. When Wimpy walks in, playing the violin, Geezil erupts in rage. But Popeye prefers the music to his own resentment of Wimpy, and beats up Rough-House and the others to keep them from laying a finger on Wimpy. Not only does Wimpy seemingly lack the rages that overcome Popeye, Rough-House, Geezil and the others, but Wimpy is even capable of creating beauty through music.

In responding to beautiful music, Popeye shows what separates him from other cafe regulars, even though Popeye can be just as violent as they. As Olive Oyl observes in the April 30, 1933 strip, “If music affects you, it shows you have fine sensibilities.”

In a previous strip Popeye said Rough-House, who so quickly flies into rages at Wimpy, was “too sensitive.” Popeye may be too sensitive in his own way. In the April 30 strip Wimpy is able to change Popeye’s moods and behavior by playing different kinds of music. When Wimpy plays love music, Popeye kisses Olive repeatedly, saying “I kin not help it”; when Wimpy plays dance music, Popeye “got to do that dance.” It’s as if Popeye has become Wimpy’s puppet. But when Wimpy plays “Song of War,” Popeye starts growling, hits Olive, and chases Wimpy to the edge of a cliff. Wimpy turns and saves himself by playing “Hearts and Flowers,” which makes Popeye weep, and then a lullaby to put him to sleep.

This could be seen as a metaphor for Wimpy’s trickster ability to manipulate other people. But it also demonstrates Wimpy’s command of his own emotions. Rough-House has anger management problems so severe that they risk his sanity. Geezil goes into angry tirades against Wimpy if he merely thinks of him. Popeye proves so susceptible to his emotions that he cannot resist the effects music has on them. But Wimpy remains calm and deadpan, even as he plays the music that affects Popeye so strongly. Again, I’m reminded of Chuck Jones’ cartoons like Rabbit Fire, in which Bugs Bunny, maintaining his cool and calm, easily manipulates not only the violent but stupid Elmer Fudd but also the angry, egotistical Daffy Duck, who so quickly falls prey to his own emotions.

In the May 14, 1933 strip Segar has Popeye revert to his previous appreciation of Wimpy as a comedic figure. Rough-House has taken a business partner, Mr. Soppy, and goes on vacation, leaving him in charge of the cafe. In fact, this time Popeye even helped Wimpy out by telling Mr. Soppy that Wimpy was “Prince Wellington of Nazilia.” Wimpy was surprised when Mr. Soppy addressed him as “Prince,” but took full advantage of it, conning Mr. Soppy out of a free meal, while Popeye and other customers go into gales of laughter. Popeye is now siding with Wimpy so much that he aids in Wimpy’s con without even being asked! But, as we shall see, Popeye seems more interested in staging comedic situations than in helping Wimpy.

Wimpy is not only a trickster but a variation on another traditional comedy archetype, the glutton. In the May 21, 1933 strip Wimpy has proved so easily able to con meals out of Mr. Soppy that Wimpy has grown too fat to be able to walk unassisted, so Popeye equips him with a wheelbarrow for supporting his enormous tummy!

In the May 28, 1933 strip Rough-House returns from vacation, and Popeye encourages him in thinking that the cafe has a prince as a new customer: again, Popeye seems interested in setting up situations for comedy and watching what results, and he laughs in expectation. His face buried in a menu, Wimpy overreaches by not taking a look at who is serving at the counter. When Wimpy finally sees that it’s the angry Rough-House, Wimpy’s eyes widen in surprise and perhaps disbelief. As Rough-House readies to punch him, Wimpy realizes this time he’s caught and puts his hands together in prayer: “Now I lay me down to sleep.” Wimpy tries to talk his way out of the fix, denying his identity, but taken by surprise and flustered, the trickster fails this time, and Rough-House beats him up off-panel, as Popeye seems amused.

Segar has already shown us that there are limits to Wimpy’s usual psychological and emotional balance. In the June 4, 1933 Sunday strip Rough-House needs to drum up more customers, and Popeye suggests hiring a scientist to devise a formula to increase someone’s appetite so much “a man’ll steal the spinach off’n his own kid’s plate.” Just from that description Popeye and Rough-House should have noticed they were overreaching. Not knowing what it is, Popeye drinks the formula, which pushes Wimpy’s constant hunger beyond his ability to manage it. Wimpy becomes a more frenetic version of himself, shouting, “I’m starving!” With no hamburger available, Wimpy eats fish out of a fish bowl; when Wimpy is on the brink of devouring a cat, Rough-House gives up and gives him food instead. This soothes Wimpy’s inner demons, though eating gets in the way of his ability to talk, as Segar suggests by dropping letters from his dialogue. Wimpy invites Rough-House to a duck dinner, adding, “You ing e ucks,” which looks suspiciously like Wimpy getting something past the censors.

In the June 11, 1933 strip a man named Rex Bicker arrives to try to get Popeye to fight the boxer he manages, Bullo Oxheart. Spotting a new target, Wimpy introduces himself to Bicker and proceeds to deluge him with a nonstop flood of words. Significantly, one of Wimpy’s tactics is to keep getting Bicker’s name wrong, until finally, Bicker is so dazed and confused by Wimpy’s verbal assault that he forgets his own name, and calls himself “Mr. Jones.” Popeye and Rough-House recognize that Wimpy is setting Bicker up to mooch a hamburger off him and burst into laughter when Wimpy delivers the coup de grace (“Come have a hamburger WITH ME on you.”). Since this time they’re not Wimpy’s targets, Popeye and, surprisingly, Rough-House can laugh at Wimpy’s con artistry, betraying a certain appreciation of his trickster abilities.

–Copyright 2010 Peter Sanderson

Follow me on Twitter (@PeterJSanderson) and at Facebook Comic Con.

]]> http://asitecalledfred.com/2010/03/26/popeye-wimpy-comics-in-context-238/feed/ 0 http://asitecalledfred.com/2010/03/19/donald-duck-comics-in-context-237/ http://asitecalledfred.com/2010/03/19/donald-duck-comics-in-context-237/#respond Fri, 19 Mar 2010 05:40:37 +0000 http://www.asitecalledfred.com/?p=12755 Comics historian extraordinaire Peter Sanderson dips into the comics adventures of Donald Duck and his Uncle Scrooge, crafted by Carl Barks...]]>

#237 (Vol. 2 #9): DONALD THE DAD

This week I return to the book with which I launched this revival of “Comics in Context,” The Toon Treasury of Classic Children’s Comics, edited by Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly. As you might expect, many of the stories inside, like John Stanley’s Little Lulu tales, have children as their central characters and reflect their perspectives. Sheldon Mayer’s Sugar and Spike stories in this anthology go so far as to postulate that infants have their own language that adults cannot comprehend.

But look at this book’s stories by the contributor who may be the greatest creator of “children’s comics”: Carl Barks, longtime writer and artist of Donald Duck comic book tales and creator of Donald’s Uncle Scrooge. In Barks’ three stories in this collection, children appear in the persons of Donald’s nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie, but they are supporting characters. In two of the stories the nephews prove to be wiser than Donald and Scrooge, but in the third, surprisingly, they first appear wailing in tears like babies. Although these three stories were aimed at an audience of children, their real concerns are the foibles and misadventures of the adult characters, Donald and Scrooge. (As usual, when I do a detailed analysis of comics stories, I issue a spoiler alert. I will deal with the Uncle Scrooge story in a future column.)

The first Barks story in this anthology is “Hypno-Gun” from Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories #145, and first published in 1952. Donald sees his nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie aiming a strange gun at each other, each time claiming to hypnotize one of them into thinking he is a dog or a cat. Angered, Donald takes the gun away from them, declaring that hypnotizing people is dangerous. “You might do it to somebody with a gullible mind sometime, and that person would never recover!” Refusing to listen to the nephews’ protests, Donald stalks off. One of the nephews laments, “He’ll never believe that we were only pretending.” The gun is merely a toy, and the kids were playing, exercising their imaginations.

Now consider the logic of Donald, who seems to be claiming to be an authority on the dangers of gullibility. If you saw kids pretending to hypnotize each other with a weird-looking gun, you’d assume they were just playing. Why would you assume, as Donald does, that their hypnosis gun was real–or that there even is such a thing as a hypnosis gun? But it seems that Donald doesn’t look beyond surface appearances. Since the nephews claimed this was a hypnosis gun, Donald simply accepts what they say, without questioning it, or stopping to consider how absurd it is.

Since this story was originally published in the early 1950s, I wonder if Barks had a specific satirical purpose in mind. This was the period when comic books came under attack, even by a congressional committee, for allegedly corrupting the impressionable minds of children. As you can read in the recent book The Ten Cent Plague, the comics industry was in dire trouble then, and hundreds of people lost their jobs in comic books, never to return to the business. Similar arguments have been made that other media influence children in negative ways: movies, television, rock music, rap music, video games. This sort of controversy continues right into the present, with the recent accusations that James Cameron’s Avatar encourages young viewers to smoke because Sigourney Weaver’s character in the film smokes. (Really, however hot we Baby Boomers may still consider Ms. Weaver, are impressionable teenagers really going to start smoking because a woman pushing sixty when she made the film smokes on screen?) Some of these accusers would like to see “R” ratings put on any movie in which a character smokes. (What, even Casablanca and A Night at the Opera?)

Seeing his nephews using their supposed hypnosis gun, Donald never stops to consider that, as they say, they are only “pretending.” The kids are playing; they wouldn’t actually hypnotize a victim into thinking he was a dog. Similarly, just because a kid reads about a murderer in EC’s Tales from the Crypt comic book doesn’t mean he will become a murderer himself, Huey, Dewey and Louie are using their imaginations for play. They can tell the difference between fantasy and reality. Donald obviously can’t. Moreover, he is so lacking in imagination (in his conscious mind, as we shall see) that it doesn’t occur to him that what seems to be a hypnosis gun is only a harmless toy. Barks may be arguing in this story that it is the adults who claim that children are corrupted by such things as toys who have the actual problems in distinguishing between fantasy and reality.

Indeed, as Donald prepares to throw the supposedly dangerous hypnosis gun off a bridge, he thinks that the gun might also affect impressionable adults. And then Barks introduces two of his recurring themes: temptation and greed. Donald gets the idea of using the gun to hypnotize his wealthy Uncle Scrooge.

It now looks as if Donald was warning his nephews against causing harm with the hypnosis gun because he subconsciously realized that’s what he’d do with the gun. Donald’s greed makes him a hypocrite: he won’t let the nephews misuse the gun, but he has no qualms about using the gun himself to rob a rich relative! And again, Donald demonstrates his own lack of imagination and the limits of his own intelligence. Since when would Scrooge McDuck, who was clever enough to amass the world’s greatest fortune, be impressionable enough to fall under the spell of a hypnosis gun–if such a thing even existed?

One of the indications of Barks’ skill as a storyteller comes when Donald barges into Scrooge’s office. Although neither Donald nor Scrooge nor the narrator mentions it, Scrooge has a black eye and bandages on his head. But why? Patience, readers: this will be explained in due course. But note that Barks is not dealing in entirely linear storytelling here, and trusts that his young readers won’t be confused. (Barks has considerably more faith in kids’ imaginations than Donald has.)

Donald aims the gun at Scrooge and declares he has hypnotized him. Scrooge just looks at Donald quietly, while Barks lets us look into Scrooge’s mind with thought balloons. (Thought balloons have fallen from favor among today’s comics professionals, but a master like Barks demonstrates how to use this tool effectively.) We see in Scrooge’s thoughts that he is not disturbed by Donald’s nonsense, but simply wonders what he’s up to, and decides to play along in order to find out.

When Donald orders Scrooge to give him a sack full of money, Scrooge looks over his shoulder at us, the readers, and thinks, “I could have guessed it.” At that point Scrooge is “breaking the fourth wall,” acknowledging not only the presence of the readers, but also acknowledging that we can read his thoughts. Thus Scrooge forges a bond with the readers. This makes Scrooge even more superior to the unimaginative Donald, who shows no sign of knowing he is being observed by us readers.

Scrooge pretends to be hypnotized, and it never occurs to Donald that Scrooge is faking–playing, in his own way, like the nephews. Scrooge gives Donald a sack of money, whereupon Donald, not truly a bad guy, uses the gun to “unhypnotize” him. Then Scrooge, acting as if he has no memory of what just happened, asks Donald if he could take a look at that odd gun. Donald, utterly gullible, hands him the gun, whereupon Scrooge aims it at him and cries, “Bing! You’re hypnotized!”

Now Scrooge thinks that this will teach Donald a lesson when Donald realizes that the gun has no effect. Scrooge even commands Donald to turn into a woodpecker. (Could this be a sly joke about a competing cartoon character, Woody Woodpecker?) Then Scrooge is shocked when Donald starts pecking at his desk. It is the adult Donald, not the kids, who proved to be so easily impressionable. Donald actually has been hypnotized! Actually, Donald has in effect hypnotized himself.

Now greed and temptation rear their heads once more, as Scrooge’s shock gives way to his considering how he can exploit his own nephew’s sad state for his financial gain. Inserting a caption, the omniscient narrator introduces a flashback to show how Scrooge got his black eye and bandages earlier that day. (Captions and narrators are also out of favor in today’s comics, but look how sparingly but skillfully Barks uses them.) Scrooge had spent time earlier that day collecting bills. Being a comic miser on the order of Jack Benny, Scrooge is too cheap to hire someone to collect bills (even as little as a dollar!) for him, although presumably Scrooge also gets pleasure out of dunning debtors for money. A bully named Rockjaw Bumrisk owes Scrooge the aforementioned dollar, and not only refused to pay this piddling sum, but threw Scrooge (a senior citizen, albeit a feisty one!) into briars and then hit him with a book, hence Scrooge’s injuries.

Back in the present, Scrooge hypnotizes Donald to become a bill collector, intending him to collect the debt from Bumrisk. If course this means that Scrooge is exposing his own nephew to the danger of being roughed up by Bumrisk. Not only does Donald accept this “hypnotic” command, but he gets a wild look in his eyes and seemingly levitates into the air, declaring, “I’m the toughest bill collector that ever lived!” It’s as if Scrooge has unleashed Donald’s inner Hulk. Although Scrooge is pleased with this result, note that he did not tell Donald to become the “toughest” bill collector alive. It appears that the hypnosis has unleashed Donald’s imagination from his subconscious, and Donald has imagined himself as being “the toughest bill collector that ever lived.”

The hypnosis has also unleashed Donald’s dark side. An evil look coming over his face, Donald boasts, “I’ll kick widows out in the cold! I’ll snatch toys from weeping children!” Scrooge approves; Donald has effectively become like Scrooge himself at his worst. Scrooge gives Donald the hypnosis gun and sends him after Bumrisk. In condoning this evil version of Donald, Scrooge has crossed a moral line. Like Donald and, as we shall see, Bumrisk, Scrooge has overreached and will pay for it.

Donald tries over and over to hypnotize Bumrisk, to no avail, and Bumrisk subjects him to all sorts of comedic violence, like sticking Donald in a trash can and rolling it downhill. This kind of slapstick in film depends on timing for its comedic impact. This sequence demonstrates Barks’ skill at staging slapstick effectively in the static medium of comics, conveying a sense of action over a succession of unmoving panels.

Exasperated at Donald’s persistence, Bumrisk uses the supposed hypnosis gun to make Donald think he is a gopher, and to his astonishment, it works.

But ultimately Bumrisk overreaches, hypnotizing Donald into thinking he is a gorilla. “At last!” thinks Donald, whereupon he overpowers Bumrisk.

Then Donald, still acting like a gorilla, menacingly advances into Scrooge’s office and slams the collected dollar down on his desk. Scrooge is frightened (“I don’t know what he thinks he is, but he looks dangerous!”) and uses the gun to release Donald from his hypnotic state. The measure of how scared Scrooge must have been lies in the fact that he gives Donald a sack of money–far more than the dollar collected from Bumrisk, and just what Donald wanted from Scrooge–as a reward. Perhaps Donald deserves it, too, not for trying to hypnotize Scrooge into giving him money, but for surviving his mental transformations and physical perils in this story.

But if Scrooge and Bumrisk recognize they have overreached, Donald does not gain an iota of self-knowledge from this story. It concludes with Donald throwing the gun off the bridge (so at least he isn’t planning to use it again), finally completing the action with which the story began, boasting of his supposed victory over Scrooge, oblivious to what actually happened, and self-righteously telling his nephews it “just goes to show what this thing will do to somebody with a gullible mind.” Indeed.

These two Donald Duck stories remind me of the Seinfeld TV series, in that the initial, minor event leads to steadily escalating consequences, and in the way that disparate storylines (Donald trying to hypnotize Scrooge, Scrooge trying to collect a debt from Bumrisk) join together in unexpected ways.

The second Donald Duck story is “Bee Bumble” from Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories # 158 from 1953. This one begins with Donald being stung by a single bee. Then two more bees show up, and then four, as if to illustrate this principle of escalating complications. In an unusual effect for Barks, Donald elongates his head, first vertically and then horizontally, as if he were Jack Cole’s Plastic Man, in his attempt to keep out of the way of the bees flying near his head. Donald ends up fleeing outside, only to collide with an artificial hive full of bees, that he had no idea was out there!

So Donald rather cleverly improvises creating a protective outfit for himself. It’s called a “sheet” in the story, but it looks more like old-fashioned long red flannel underwear that completely covers Donald’s head and body. Thus protected, Donald picks up the hive and carries it off his property.

Wearing this red protective garment, Donald is unrecognizable: he could be any duck in the city of Duckburg. In effect he has taken on a costumed secret identity. Moreover, rather than being the victim of the bees, Donald has now in effect merged with the bees as a potential threat to the people of Duckburg. In his costumed role, all of Donald’s previous fear of the bees has vanished.

In a splash-sized panel Barks shows chaos ensuing in Duckburg as people flee or climb up street lights or a wall to get away from the bees as the disguised Donald nonchalantly totes the hive along a city street. Donald seems utterly oblivious to the menace he has become. It does not even seem to occur to him that perhaps taking the bees down a main street in the midst of the city is not an appropriate course of action. Barks gets comedy out of a nervous rookie policeman’s attempts to stop Donald, who politely complies, comically unaware of his distress, but only makes the situation just as bad or worse.

After discarding the hive in the city dump, Donald realizes that “Half the people in town are mad at me! Its best that I don’t let “˜em know who I am!” and hides the red costume in the dump.

Returning home, Donald finds nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie wailing, because the hive was theirs: it was part of a project for the Junior Woodchucks, Barks’ parody of the Boy Scouts. Furious, Donald chases the nephews, wielding a stick with which he intends to spank them. Spanking was more widely accepted as a disciplinary measure back then, but it still seems to me startling to see Donald threatening violence against his nephews. It’s also a link to the Donald Duck animated cartoons, which often pit Donald against his nephews in a kind of battle. And, of course, Donald’s best known personality trait in the animated cartoons is his explosive temper.

The nephews save themselves by leading Donald to the Junior Woodchucks’ Supreme Instructor, who proves too formidable an authority figure for him to oppose. The Supreme Instructor lectures Donald that “Parents worthy of being parents want their children to learn about nature!” This does seem to strike a nerve in Donald.

The Disney Studio had actually designated Donald as Huey, Dewey and Louie’s uncle. This kept Donald single, enabling him to continue to court Daisy. But it also somewhat disguised the Oedipal essence of the conflicts between Donald and the nephews in the animated cartoons, in which the kids were trying to defeat their hot-tempered, potentially violent father figure. So it’s interesting that in this story Barks drops the Freudian fig leaf and explicitly acknowledges that Donald is, in effect, the “parent” of Huey, Dewey and Louie.

Perhaps subconsciously Huey, Dewey and Louie’s bees represent what Donald finds annoying about his nephews. Giving in to the Supreme Instructor, Donald decides he has to retrieve the bees “and learn to love them!” Donning his red long johns disguise again, Donald carries the hive back through the city. But this time the townspeople are prepared for the costumed menace, and Donald is hit from four sides by blasts of water from fire hoses.

I’m disappointed that Barks did not do more with the promising concept of Donald’s masked identity in this story, but instead Barks discards it, while telling us that it was days before Donald could return home after hiding in “the hills.”

In the meantime the nephews somehow got hold of the hive and set it up in their yard, but the bees gave continued to cause trouble (including some weird examples of genetic engineering via pollinating one plant species with pollen from another!). Angry again, Donald orders the nephews to put a screen around the hive so the bees can’t get out. It’s as if he is trying to repress the powerful id that the bees might represent, and that trick never works. And then Donald overreaches: preparing for a date with Daisy, Donald sprays himself with “attar of tiger lilies” to drown out the stench of the bees. (Popeye tried a similar trick with perfume in a Thimble Theatre strip I described in a previous column, and it backfired on him, too.) Donald passes by the hive, whereupon the bees, drawn by the tiger lily scent, lift the hive up, screen and all, and attack Donald. The story opened with Donald being stung by one bee, continued through his efforts to stave off being stung, and has built this catastrophe in which he is stung buy an entire hive.

At the start of this story Barks’ narrator said it began in summer; now, the narrator says, it is fall. The nephews have won first prize for their beehive, and go visit Donald, who is covered almost completely by bandages, lying in a hospital bed, where he has presumably been for months! But Donald is genuinely pleased that his nephews won the prize, and they offer him bread with honey from the hive, and he happily munches on it. “Ah, we parents!” Donald says, “What rich rewards we reap!”

Perhaps Donald is pleased that he has indeed proved “worthy” of being a parent, as the Supreme Instructor instructed him to be. As in the previous story, perhaps Barks is rewarding Donald for surviving all the trouble heaped upon him, even by his own doing. But Barks is also wryly commenting on the efforts that Donald makes on behalf of his nephews–and perhaps by extension on the sacrifices that parents make for their children. Huey, Dewey and Louie have succeeded, but considering all the pain that Donald must have suffered, this one slice of bread with honey seems a pitiful reward.

Both of these Donald Duck stories have supposedly happy endings, with Donald receiving a reward, whether it is the bag of money or the bread with honey. But in each case Barks has subverted Donald’s triumph, by showing how self-deluded he is, or by turning him into a living mummy, wrapped in bandages, in a hospital bed. Through his children’s stories Carl Barks was introducing his young readers to the adult perspective of irony.

–Copyright 2010 Peter Sanderson

Follow me on Twitter (@PeterJSanderson) and at Facebook Comic Con.

]]> http://asitecalledfred.com/2010/03/19/donald-duck-comics-in-context-237/feed/ 0 http://asitecalledfred.com/2010/03/11/popeye-wimpy-comics-in-context-236/ http://asitecalledfred.com/2010/03/11/popeye-wimpy-comics-in-context-236/#respond Thu, 11 Mar 2010 21:24:53 +0000 http://www.asitecalledfred.com/?p=12694 Comics historian extraordinaire Peter Sanderson returns with an additional look at Popeye's sometime companion, the hamburger con man J. Wellington Wimpy...]]>

# 236 (VOL. 2 #8): WIMPY REDEEMED

Next to Popeye himself, J. Wellington Wimpy is the greatest character that cartoonist E. C. Segar created for his Thimble Theatre comic strip. That may surprise those of you who know Popeye and Wimpy basically from animated cartoons. But Wimpy is a character who expresses himself not through action like Popeye–indeed, Wimpy usually remains still and seemingly expressionless–but through dialogue. Aficionados of the Max Fleischer Popeye cartoons of the 1930s and 1940s love the comments that Jack Mercer, the voice of Popeye, seemingly ad libbed in recording the dialogue. (By the way, 2010 is the centennial of Mercer’s birth.) Nevertheless, dialogue is not a strong point of Fleischer cartoons, so it shouldn’t be surprising that they reduced the very verbal Wimpy to a mere moocher of hamburgers. But to read Segar’s comic strips about the character is to continually discover new and surprising layers to Wimpy’s personality.

A few weeks ago I began critiquing the Sunday strips featuring Wimpy in Fantagraphics Books’ Popeye Vol. 3, which reprints Segar’s Thimble Theatre from the 1930s. One of Wimpy’s catchphrases in the strip is inviting someone to a duck dinner, adding “You bring the ducks.” In the January 15, 1933 strip Popeye is again amused when Wimpy pulls this on Rough-House for the umpteenth time. Enraged, Rough-House challenges Wimpy to a fight. “It’s men like you who start wars and cause the downfall of nations,” replies Wimpy. That seems a rather grandiose claim, but this strip first ran in the 1930s, when World War I was a recent memory and Europe was moving towards World War II, and wimpy may have a point. Befitting his name, Rough-House does want to settle disputes with violence, and he has difficulty controlling his intense rages. Wimpy, in contrast, not only usually avoids violence, although, as we shall soon see, Segar will experiment with Wimpy as a fighter, but will even treat his adversaries as friends: when Rough-House ends up in the hospital in later strips, Wimpy brings him flowers.

Popeye suggests that Wimpy and Rough-House settle their dispute through a prize fight for charity; presumably Popeye thinks that this will set rules for the fight, and do some good as well.

Trying to train for the fight, Wimpy proves unable to lift a barbell. Popeye persuades Rough-House to give Wimpy some hamburgers and spinach to eat. “Ya wouldn’t fight a man which is weak from hunger,” says Popeye, providing another indication of the real suffering at the basis of Wimpy’s comedy.

I keep reading that Segar rarely mentioned spinach as the source of Popeye’s strength in the comic strip. Certainly spinach turns up less frequently than in the animated cartoons, in which part of the formula is having Popeye boost his strength at a crucial point by eating spinach. But I see spinach being mentioned repeatedly in Popeye Vol. 3: even the profits from the Wimpy-Rough-House prize fight are to “go for buyin’ spinach for poor kids.”

Upon eating the burgers and spinach, Wimpy becomes superhumanly strong, and bounces the barbell off his bicep: tonnage is nothing to me now.” Does spinach make even Wimpy strong like Popeye? (If it works like that on everyone in Popeye’s world, why don’t his enemies eat any?) Or is Segar suggesting that hamburgers are to Wimpy what spinach is to Popeye? Whatever the case, Segar obviously decided this was a mistake and immediately dropped the notion of a super-strong Wimpy.

So when the prize fight begins in the November 2, 1934 Sunday strip, Wimpy relies not on super-strength but on iron concealed in his boxing gloves. Rough-House has iron in his gloves, too: “You’re just as crooked as I am,” Wimpy observes. Popeye gets rid of their iron, but then Wimpy punches Rough-House from behind. It’s certainly in character for Wimpy to cheat, but it seems odd to see Wimpy acting so violently. Perhaps Segar had once again gone down the wrong road.

So in the following Sunday strip, January 29, 1933, as the prize fight continues, Wimpy instead leans against a post, faking being hurt. This seems more true to Wimpy’s generally peaceful personality. In fact, by the end of this Sunday strip, we learn that Wimpy has even bet on Rough-House to win the fight.

Exasperated, Popeye demands that Wimpy fight, and points out that the fight is being broadcast on radio, and that Wimpy’s mother might be listening: “What’ll she think of her boy?” Perhaps unexpectedly, Wimpy begins weeping: again, Segar is showing the pain beneath Wimpy’s clownish facade. “Popeye, I am broken-hearted! I have disgraced the name of Wimpy–do you really think Mother is listening in?” Certainly we have seen that Wimpy is fully capable of lying, but this seems sincere. This Wimpy is not a violent person at all, but “for mother’s sake” he takes a swing at Rough-House, and, to his surprise, knocks him out.

After the fight, in the February 5, 1933 strip, Wimpy is back at Rough-House’s cafe and, ever persistent, pulls his usual trick of inviting him to a duck dinner, “you bring the ducks.” Furious, Rough-House punches Wimpy, and Popeye, who comments later in the strip that Wimpy is “a frien’ of mine,” retaliates by hitting Rough-House hard. “The trouble with you is yer too blasted sensitiff,” says Popeye. That suggests that Rough-House’s hot temper is due to being overly sensitive, having too little control of his emotions, and that the usually deadpan Wimpy and Popeye are rather stoical in comparison. While Wimpy may not be a violent person himself, he’s something of a voyeur of violence. When Rough-House’s friends object to Popeye hitting him, Wimpy comments, “Let’s you and them fight,” and so they do, as Wimpy settles in for a big burger dinner, served by a woozy Rough-House.

In that strip Popeye declared that “Rough-House can’t hit Wimpy. . .cause he’s a frien’ of mine.” But by the following Sunday, Feb. 12, 1933, Segar seems to have changed his mind about Popeye’s attitude towards Wimpy. Now Popeye decides, “I guess Rough-House was right.” Popeye criticizes Wimpy to his face for having “no blasted self-respeck.” He continues, “Ever’ man on Eart’ is susposed to do sumpin’ important” but “Yer a hooman flop–ya ain’t got absolukely no egocism. How kin ya have self-respeck without ya got some egocism,” by which, I expect, Popeye means that Wimpy has no ambitions: “Ya wants to be jus’ mediocum,” which means “mediocre” in Popeye-speak. “I ain’t got no sympathy for a loafer–yer lower’n a worm, tha’s what,” Popeye concludes.

Wimpy characteristically seems immune to insults, whether he consciously ignores them or is oblivious to them. In later strips, no matter how much his nemesis George W. Geezil thunders insults and threats at him, Wimpy remains unmoved. But Geezil deals in empty bluster; Popeye is giving Wimpy a piercing critique of his personality. As a result, Wimpy again begins to weep: “You hurt my feelings,” he says simply. Popeye immediately feels guilty and sorry: “Yer okay. Why, yer a swell guy.” Then Popeye returns to his original attitude to Wimpy at the start of this series of Sunday strips: “When they ride ya, jus’ say “I yam what I yam an’ that’s all I yam.” Of course, that is Popeye’s catchphrase about himself. Not only is Popeye accepting Wimpy, faults and all, but he even seems to be suggesting that Wimpy is like himself, that they are each true to their nature. Popeye and Wimpy end up at Rough-House’s cafe, where Popeye apparently buys him a big dinner, complete with spinach. Wimpy lavishes “my friend” Popeye with praise, inviting him to a duck dinner. “You bring the ducks, Popeye,” Rough-House comments cynically. And yes, Wimpy has once again succeeded in getting someone–Popeye–to feed him. But does that mean that Wimpy was faking when he broke down in tears? He could have been, but I suspect that Wimpy really does regard Popeye as his friend, and was genuinely hurt by his criticism. Remember, Wimpy claims to have no other friends, and, as we saw in the prize fight, Wimpy does seem to have a sense of guilt over being such a passive failure in life.

In the following Sundays Segar demonstrates that this second interpretation is correct. At the start of the February 19, 1933 strip, Popeye is again sharply criticizing Wimpy, but this time not out of disgust but a kind of tough love: “I ain’t tryin’ to hurt your feelin’s–I’m bawlin’ ya out on account of I wants ya to change yer ways an’ be a man.” Wimpy replies, “But you say such awful things about me.” When Wimpy is conning someone, he uses grandiose, flowery language. The fact that his reply to Popeye is so simply phrased indicates that Wimpy is not pretending here: he really is hurt, and perhaps realizes what Popeye is telling him is largely true.

Then, surprisingly, Wimpy’s mother, whom he hasn’t seen in fifteen years, arrives. Segar could have drawn her as a caricature, looking like Wimpy in drag, but no, he draws her as realistically as he can, and treats her seriously. She has recently lost the cottage where they lived; this may be an allusion to the Great Depression. Wimpy embraces his mother, and they clearly love each other. To his credit, Popeye will not let Wimpy’s mother know what a failure her son is. “He’s the finest man I knows!” Popeye declares, saying, rather over the top, “He should been a presidink like Georgia Washenting.” But in between those statements Popeye adds what he may truly believe: “I knows they’s good stuff in him.”

But maybe Popeye doesn’t fully realize how true that is. In the February 26, 1933 a narrator in a caption, presumably voicing Segar’s own beliefs, calls Wimpy “the most complete loafer who ever lived.” But now Wimpy confronts his own guilty conscience over his life: “What will poor Mother think when she learns I’ve amounted to nothing?” Still covering for him, Popeye tells Mrs. Wimpy that he would “trust Wimpy with anything I got,” whereupon Wimpy seizes the opportunity to borrow five dollars from him. Out of Mrs. Wimpy’s presence, Popeye, enraged at Wimpy’s mooching (“I’ll make a man out of him for his mother’s sake or bust his blasted head.”) hits him. But then Rough-House reveals that Wimpy spent only ten cents on a burger and spent the other $4.90 on flowers for his mother. This surprises Popeye, and probably surprises the readers as well.

It is unusual for Wimpy to give gifts. In the February 12, 1933 strip Popeye had complained to Wimpy that “Yer jus’ like a octopipuss–ya takes what ya kin reach but ya don’t never give nothin’.” Despite his violence, Popeye is the opposite: a highly generous man. In the March 5, 1933 strip Popeye buys a hamburger stand for Wimpy as a means to make enough money to support his impoverished mother. “I don’t do good deeds to get credick,” Popeye explains, “I does “˜em on account of they oughter get done.” Perhaps surprisingly, Popeye then reveals that he is religious, but that’s not his motive for charity. “An’ if ya does good deeds jus’ to get yerself a swell seat in heaven, yer selfish. The only reward ya should expeck for doin’ right is the sort of cumfertable feelin’ which ya gets from doin’ it.”

Running a hamburger stand, though, is the wrong job for a comedy glutton like Wimpy, because he can’t stop himself from devouring all the burgers. Although Wimpy usually has a placid, gentlemanly, even erudite manner, when his hunger overpowers him, he starts acting like an animal. He explains to Popeye that a customer ordered a burger, “but when I tried to hand it to the customer, my teeth would snap at it–snap at it, sir, like a dog.” Segar is thus comically exposing the animal passions that may lie beneath a person’s civilized surface. I wonder if he may also be satirizing addiction in Wimpy’s uncontrollable lust for burgers.

Popeye, the embodiment of selfless charity, gives Wimpy nearly all the money he has, five thousand dollars, so she can buy back her house. Popeye is not simply helping out Mrs. Wimpy but Wimpy as well: “If she stays here she’ll find out what a arful thing ya are.” Typically, Wimpy reacts by pretending he doesn’t need charity: “I’ll not accept it as a gift–I’ll pay you back Tuesday.”

But hasn’t Popeye made a colossal mistake by giving Wimpy the parasite five thousand dollars? Actually, no: Popeye may think that Wimpy is an “arful thing,” but Wimpy does indeed give his mother the full five thousand dollars, enough for her to buy back her home “and have plenty to live on.” (Five thousand dollars was worth far more in 1933 than it is today.) Typically, Wimpy does borrow two nickels from her “for telephoning purposes” and then uses it instead to buy a burger. But mooching ten cents out of five thousand dollars is easily excusable.

Perhaps Wimpy, who lacks “egocism,” simply has no desire to be rich, and is content just surviving from burger to burger. Similarly, though Popeye repeatedly earns or finds fortunes in Segar’s strips, he typically gives the money away as charity. Again, I remind myself that these strips first appeared in the depths of the Great Depression. By not caring about money, Popeye and Wimpy, each in his own way, triumph over the Depression. They not only survive in this time of hardship, but they do not fall victim to depression in the Depression. Part of Popeye’s heroism lies in his willingness to give away large sums of money to help the less fortunate. Popeye’s own “egocism” does not involve becoming wealthy. And Wimpy, in selflessly turning all that money over to his mother, proves surprisingly heroic as well. However much Popeye feels “disgusk” at Wimpy, one can see why Popeye nonetheless regards Wimpy as his friend.

But friendship, oddly, does not stop Wimpy from becoming Popeye’s rival in love, surprising as that may seem. In the Sunday, March 13, 1933 strip, Wimpy declares to Olive Oyl that he has fallen in love with her. Reading her personality correctly, Wimpy tells her that he has a million dollars worth of gold, something that indeed interests her. But as Wimpy embroiders his story of how he lost the million in gold in the Arctic snows, Olive refuses to believe it, and turns to Popeye when he arrives. But then out walks Wimpy, telling Olive, “I thank you for a pleasant evening,” as Popeye reacts in shock, reading who knows how much into Wimpy’s simple statement. But this is only the beginning of Popeye and Wimpy’s competition in romance, as we shall see when I return to this Wimpython in coming weeks.

–Copyright 2010 Peter Sanderson

Follow me on Twitter (@PeterJSanderson) and at Facebook Comic Con.

]]> http://asitecalledfred.com/2010/03/11/popeye-wimpy-comics-in-context-236/feed/ 0 http://asitecalledfred.com/2010/03/04/top-cat-comics-in-context-235/ http://asitecalledfred.com/2010/03/04/top-cat-comics-in-context-235/#comments Thu, 04 Mar 2010 21:44:25 +0000 http://www.asitecalledfred.com/?p=12675 Comics historian extraordinaire Peter Sanderson returns with a look at Hanna-Barbera's king of the streets, Top Cat...]]>

#235 (Vol. 2 #7): THE CHIEF AND THE KING

When I was a child I enjoyed all sorts of animated cartoon series I saw on television, perhaps more or less equally. But as an adult, watching these cartoons again, I discovered that some, notably Warner Bros.’ Looney Tunes grew in my estimation, while others, notably the Hanna-Barbera television cartoons of the late 50s through the 1960s, dropped considerably. I still find the early Hanna-Barbera characters–Yogi Bear, et al.–appealing, thanks to their visual design, primarily by the late animator Ed Benedict, and especially the great voice acting by Daws Butler and his colleagues. But while I can name numerous Warners cartoons whose direction and writing make them great and classic–What’s Opera, Doc?, One Froggy Evening, and on and on–are there individual Hanna-Barbera TV cartoons from the 50s and 60s that are anywhere near that league?

That’s why I was surprised watching the Hanna-Barbera Hokey Wolf cartoons I wrote about a few weeks ago. Usually nowadays when I catch a Hanna-Barbera cartoon of that vintage on Boomerang, I’m disappointed by what now seems to me the weak stories and dialogue. The Hokey Wolf cartoons proved to be surprisingly inventive, leading me to wonder if there is some other Hanna-Barbera series of that period that deserves critical reevaluation. (Someday I’ll get around to writing about The Perils of Penelope Pitstop, Hanna-Barbera’s combined parody of silent movie serials and Disney’s Snow White, for example.)

This brings me back to a long-promised topic, Hanna-Barbera’s Top Cat, which debuted on ABC back in 1961, and starred the voice of character actor Arnold Stang, who had earlier voiced Herman, the tough little New Yorker mouse in the Herman and Katnip cartoons of the 1950s. (Watch animation writer Earl Kress interview Stang about Top Cat here:

Following the success of Hanna-Barbera’s The Flintstones in prime time, Top Cat was also made for evening viewing and aimed at an adult audience that included adults. It lasted only one season, for a total of thirty episodes (TV seasons were longer back then), but has been rerun ever since, first on Saturday mornings and nowadays on the cable network Boomerang.

Top Cat and Herman were part of the Baby Boomers’ childhoods, and today their cartoons can be found on DVD collections and online. They are further proof of my Eternal Present theory of cartoon art in the 21st century: so much classic material is now easily accessible that the significant work of the past has once more part of the present, for those who care to look.

As I mentioned in a previous installment, both Hokey Wolf and Top Cat were inspired by Phil Silvers’ performance as comedic con man supreme Sgt. Bilko on the classic 1950s television series You’ll Never Get Rich a. k. a. The Phil Silvers Show a. k. a. Sgt. Bilko. The dead giveaway that Top Cat was inspired by Bilko was the casting of Maurice Gosfield, who played Private Doberman on Bilko, as a similar character on Top Cat, Benny the Ball.

It’s also been observed that Top Cat, a. k. a. T.C., with his gang of alley dwellers is reminiscent of the team of young actors who started out on film as the Dead End Kids and were later known by various names, most famously as the Bowery Boys. Although Top Cat and his gang are all adults, they are all considerably shorter than their friendly nemesis, Officer Dibble, who comes across as a surrogate father figure trying to keep a bunch of mischievous kids in line. (It strikes me that Dibble, Top Cat and gang are like fun house mirror reflections of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby’s Guardian and the Newsboy Legion, another cartoon variant on the street gang idea.)

Beyond this, I think that the names of some of Top Cat’s gang–Benny the ball, Fancy Fancy–signal that yet another source for the series was the work of Damon Runyon, who is today best known as the author of the stories that were adapted into the musical Guys and Dolls, about likable small-time gamblers and crooks in New York City. It’s notable that Top Cat is the only classic early Hanna-Barbera series that is explicitly located in a real place: New York City. Hoyt Curtin’s score for the series even at moments evokes the music of George Gershwin.

Apparently Top Cat, which was originally shown in prime time, was meant to be written with more adult sophistication than Hanna-Barbera cartoons like Yogi Bear and Quick Draw McGraw. But as a child I watched Top Cat avidly, and the series did have a long afterlife on Saturday morning TV. It’s not written above the heads of smart kids.

Producer-director Joseph Barbera repeatedly said that he believed the reason why Top Cat, unlike The Flintstones, lasted only one season in prime time was the adult prime time audience would not accept talking animals in a cartoon series. This seems right. A generation later, The Simpsons, which just celebrated its 20th anniversary, proved that a prime time animated series could be a tremendous success, and significantly, it excludes talking animals.

But The Simpsons is also sharp and satirical enough to amuse sophisticated adults. But it seems to me that, despite its origin as a series supposedly for adults, Top Cat really is a kids’ show. Unlike The Simpsons, Top Cat doesn’t delve into politics or social satire or adult relationships like marriage, and certainly not sex. Looking at Yogi Bear cartoons on Boomerang, it now seems obvious to me that Yogi is like a clever and mischievous but goodhearted boy trying to get away with his pranks, notably stealing picnic baskets, under the nose of Ranger Smith, a stand-in for a father as authority figure. Top Cat is wilier and acts more mature than Yogi, and Officer Dibble more gullible than the often formidable Ranger Smith, but essentially T. C. and his gang are still like kids trying to outwit their father figure. So the appeal this show would have for kids is clear.

What surprises me in re-watching Top Cat episodes now are subtexts that I ignored as a child because this was indeed a show about “funny animals.” In discussing Hokey Wolf and Fantastic Mr. Fox weeks ago, I pointed out that both had protagonists who are anthropomorphic talking animals, essentially humans disguised as animals. But what if you think of them–or of Top Cat–as actual humans? It seems to me that if Hanna and Barbera had done Top Cat as a series about a gang of humans, not cats, it would have had to be radically different or it wouldn’t have worked. Watching episodes of Top Cat recently, I was struck by how grim the premise of the series would be if Top Cat and his friends humans and not funny talking alley cats. (I will be discussing specific episodes, so I issue spoiler alerts.)

Top Cat not only lives in an alley but in a trash can (years before Oscar the Grouch did the same). He uses Officer Dibble’s police phone, presumably because he can’t afford one of his own. He has no job or source of income apart from his various schemes. Early in one episode, “Rafeefleas,” Top Cat collects what money the gang has. T. C. himself has none, the other five have only a little over sixty cents among them. In short, beneath their comic banter, they are desperately poor. If Top Cat were human, nowadays we’d call him one of the homeless.

But I don’t recall the term “homeless” being commonly used back then: the homeless poor were still referred to as tramps and hobos and bums. Moreover, the hobo was then often a comedic figure rather than a sad one, perhaps following the tradition of Chaplin’s Little Tramp. When Top Cat was first on television, for example, one of comedian Red Skelton’s signature characters was Freddy the Freeloader, a charming clown-like tramp who seemed happy and satisfied with his life. Similarly, although they would love to make a fortune, Top Cat and company do not seem unhappy about their lifestyles.

But imagine if Top Cat and his gang had been depicted as humans rather than cats. Wouldn’t it seem pathetic rather than amusing to have them living in an alley and even in trash cans? If Top Cat and company were truly homeless humans, they would surely be dressed in rags. As cats, following the conventions of cartoons, they instead wear minimal clothing which somehow proves suitable in most places they go. Sgt. Bilko aimed for and lost fortunes, but he had the safety net of his low but secure income as an army sergeant. In contrast, Top Cat and company have absolutely nothing. If he were human, Top Cat’s sunny confidence in his own talents, despite the squalor of his surroundings, would make him seem to be deep in denial of reality. In another episode, “A Visit from Mother,” Benny is distraught because he has told his mother he is not only successful but has become mayor of New York, but now she is coming to visit him and he fears she will learn the truth. For a moment the viewers may stop to consider just how far from successful Top Cat and company are. (And again, a story about a son playing pretend, in effect, to please his mother seems more like a subject for a children’s show.)

I wonder if Top Cat reflects memories of the Great Depression, which its creators had lived through, transformed into a comedy about a heroic conniver whose wit, self-confidence and persistence enables him to rise above, and indeed, ignore the poverty around him. As in the show’s celebrated opening credit sequence, with the title character pretending to ride in a limousine and dining at a fancy restaurant (by stealing a sewer worker’s lunch), Top Cat acts as if he is rich and successful. Penniless he may be, but as the title song goes, he is nonetheless the chief and the king of his world, its top cat.

Like Sgt. Bilko, Top Cat and his accomplices manage to scale the heights before returning to their status quo as alley dwellers. In “A Visit from Mother”, Top Cat succeeds in convincing Benny’s mother, aided by her naivete and nearsightedness, that her son is indeed mayor, and even succeeds in faking a ticker tape parade:

In “˜The Maharajah of Pookajee”, Top Cat ends up impersonating the wealthy maharajah and getting to stay in a palatial hotel suite–until the real maharajah inevitably turns up, of course:

In “The $1,000,00 Derby”, Top Cat not only comes close to winning a million dollars but manages to fool not only the news media but even the city and federal government into thinking he is “the richest man in the world,” oil-rich sheik Ali Khat:

Now there is a premise with the potential for a real satire on the media and politics, but the episode really only scratches the surface. That’s typical of Top Cat: hinting at greater satiric implications without delving into them. Even back then, Jay Ward’s Bullwinkle and Bob Clampett’s Beany and Cecil would have gone further! If only someone would someday revive Top Cat and explore its potential!

My favorite episode, in my childhood and now, is “All That Jazz”, which had that title before either the Kander and Ebb song from Chicago and Bob Fosse’s semi-autobiographical film. The title is the full name of another trickster cat, A. T. Jazz, who is voiced by Daws Butler, possibly performing the voice he would have given Top Cat. (I recalled Butler using his Hokey Wolf voice for Jazz, but that’s not quite right: he gives Jazz a somewhat different voice, much like Hokey’s but also with traces of another Hanna-Barbera character, the hipster cat Mr. Jinks.) Having come all the way from Syracuse (a reference to another city in New York State I hadn’t noticed as a child), Jazz sets about to supplant T. C. as head of his gang, ladies’ man, master con artist, and, in short, “the top cat” of the area. (According to this episode, “top cat” is a title, suggesting that T. C. has an unrevealed real name.) Thus begins a war of the tricksters:

I think one factor that keeps Top Cat from being a truly adult series is that Top Cat’s cunning schemes are so often so transparently obvious to adult viewers. That is true in “All That Jazz.” For example, T. C. tricks Jazz into thinking diamonds have been discovered in a distant country, but he invents a name for the locale that Jazz is easily able to discover is phony. Retaliating, Jazz fakes a radio broadcast declaring that the diamond discovery is real, but watching as an adult, I found it hard to believe that Top Cat didn’t recognize Jazz’s undisguised voice.

In researching tricksters, I learned that one aspect of this character archetype is that he often ends up being tricked himself. That’s one of the pleasures of “All That Jazz,” as Jazz and Top Cat take turns manipulating the other and then proving gullible to his rival’s tricks. In the last act of the story, Jazz and Top Cat each even succeeds in tricking himself. A Hollywood producer and his lackey arrive, looking for a new discovery to cast in their movie The Thing from the Alley. On separate occasions they invite Top Cat and Jazz to be their new star. But Top Cat thinks this is one of Jazz’s tricks, and Jazz thinks this is one of Top Cat’s tricks, with the result that each turns down this offer of potential fame and fortune. This is a recurring pattern on Top Cat. When T. C. masquerades as the Maharajah of Pookajee, he hands out “rubies” that are really cheap costume jewelry. Not once but twice in the episode, Top Cat is offered real rubies, but he assumes they are more costumed jewelry, outsmarting himself. Jazz outsmarted himself in another way as well: having successfully gotten Top Cat’s gang to switch their loyalties to him, he then thoughtlessly proceeded to alienate them, one by one, while investigating T. C.’s diamond scam.

At the end of “All That Jazz” the childlike, trusting Benny the Ball accepts the producer’s offer, and Top Cat and Jazz both realize that the producer was just what he claimed to be. Now Top Cat finally triumphs over his rival by proving to have quicker trickster reflexes. On learning of Benny’s deal, Top Cat immediately tells the producer he is Benny’s agent, and recruits the rest of the gang as Benny’s entourage. Top Cat and company then drive off in the producer’s limousine, literally leaving Jazz in the dust of the alley, which Dibble demands he clean up.

Even as a child I recognized and enjoyed the fact that the rivals were played by two stars of cartoon voice acting. Both in my boyhood and now, my principal pleasure in watching the classic Hanna-Barbera cartoons of the late 1950s and 1960s–the pre-Scooby-Doo era, if you will–is not so much watching as listening to them. Chuck Jones famously called TV cartoon shows of this period “illustrated radio,” because of their severely limited animation. The phrase is apt in another respect, too: like classic radio comedies, the Hanna-Barbera cartoons of this period remain showcases for wonderful cartoon voice acting.

–Copyright 2010 Peter Sanderson

Follow me on Twitter (@PeterJSanderson) and at Facebook Comic Con.

]]> http://asitecalledfred.com/2010/03/04/top-cat-comics-in-context-235/feed/ 3 http://asitecalledfred.com/2010/02/25/popeye-wimpy-comics-in-context-234/ http://asitecalledfred.com/2010/02/25/popeye-wimpy-comics-in-context-234/#respond Fri, 26 Feb 2010 03:19:00 +0000 http://www.asitecalledfred.com/?p=12594 Comics historian extraordinaire Peter Sanderson returns with a look at Popeye's sometime companion, the hamburger con man J. Wellington Wimpy...]]>

#234 (VOL. 2 #6): DIARY OF A WIMPY CON MAN

Most of us probably first saw Popeye in one of his hundreds of animated cartoons., but he originated in Elzie (E. C.) Segar’s newspaper comic strip Thimble Theatre in 1928. Although Thimble Theatre had been running for ten years when he made his debut, seemingly as a minor player for a single story arc, Popeye quickly became the lead in Segar’s large and colorful cast of characters. But only a handful of those characters made it to the screen in the animated cartoons produced by the Max Fleischer Studio in the 1930s and early 1940s, and by Paramount’s Famous Studios (the Fleischer Studio minus the Fleischers) in the 1940s and 1950s. Most of these cartoons followed a formula in which Popeye competed for Thimble Theatre leading lady Olive Oyl against his rival Bluto, who appeared relatively briefly in only a single storyline during Segar’s run on the strip. Popeye’s adopted baby Swee’pea, Poopdeck Pappy, Eugene the Jeep, and even, in one cartoon, the monstrous Goons also made it into some of the Fleischer cartoons.

But apart from the central Popeye-Olive-Bluto triangle, the Segar character who appeared most frequently onscreen was hamburger aficionado J. Wellington Wimpy. He even plays prominent roles in two of the Fleischers’ animated Popeye featurettes, Popeye Meets Sindbad the Sailor (1936) and Popeye the Sailor Meets Ali Baba’s Forty Thieves (1937). This surely testifies to Wimpy’s popularity in the Popeye newspaper strip.

But Wimpy in the animated cartoons is only a superficial shadow of Segar’s great creation in the comic strip. Wimpy certainly acts in character in the Fleischer cartoons: he devours hamburgers when he has them, tries to mooch them when he doesn’t, using his trademark line “I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today,” and will even trail after a small bird in the hope of turning it into a meal. Basically the cartoons reduce Wimpy to the familiar stock comedy character of the glutton.

Recently Fantagraphics Books has been reprinting Segar’s Thimble Theatre from the storyline introducing Popeye in a handsome series of hardcover books, at the rate of one volume per year: they are now up to Volume Four. The cover of Volume Three features Wimpy himself, and I was surprised to discover that Wimpy dominates virtually all the Sunday strips included in this volume. Although Popeye is the lead character in the daily strips in this volume, he is more often than not Wimpy’s straight man in the Sunday strips in this collection. Indeed, it is clear that while Wimpy may be a minor supporting character in the animated cartoons. he is the second most important character in the Thimble Theatre newspaper strip, playing far more of a role than even Olive Oyl.

Wimpy is a variation on a character archetype that goes back to the ancient Roman comedies of Plautus and Terence: the parasite. This character type can be fixated on food and on trying to get food. But he does not turn to work to get his meal; rather, he lives off the charity of others, often deluging them with empty flattery to get what he wants.

One can see this aspect of Wimpy in the first Sunday in Fantagraphics’ Popeye Volume 3, from October 9, 1932. (As usual in these analytical essays, I issue a spoiler alert.) Popeye has been invited to Olive’s party, but realizes that he carries the odor from all the onions he has been eating. So Popeye sprays himself with perfume to compensate, but goes too far. At the party Olive and the guests are repelled by the overdose of perfume. Popeye leaves the party and retreats to his hangout, Rough-House’s restaurant, afflicted by melancholy: “I yam a misfit. I tries to do the right thing, but I yam always wrong.” This is an important part of Popeye’s appeal as a character. He may be the super-strong hero of the strip, but he is an outsider in society, ugly, uneducated, and maladroit at various social proprieties, with whom we can empathize. As a combination of proto-superhero and social misfit, Segar’s Popeye foreshadows the later Marvel superheroes.

In this moment of Popeye’s vulnerability, Wimpy showers him with praise. “My friend, you are heavenly,” Wimpy tells him, loudly sniffing his scent. “Your fragrance takes me back to childhood when I lay among the geraniums in my mother’s garden.” As Wimpy pours on the flowery flattery, he seemingly cannot help but reveal what is really on his mind, and what his true icon of beauty is: “Your most delightful perfume reminds me of blooming pastures wherein dwell cows, of which are made ground beef sandwiches.” And then Wimpy makes his pitch: “My friend, will you buy for me a hamburger?”

Popeye doesn’t fall for it: “No!” So Wimpy moves away from Popeye, takes a clothespin, affixes it on his nose to block the smell of Popeye’s perfume, and then looks over at Popeye with a deadpan expression on his face. Since Wimpy’s strategy didn’t work, he drops the flatterer’s mask. Popeye reacts in shock while Wimpy remains cool and quiet: if he can’t get a free hamburger out of Popeye he will take his revenge by letting Popeye know what he really thinks of his “heavenly” fragrance. And thus we see that Wimpy is no ordinary version of the comedy parasite.

Wimpy is also a variation on another comedy archetype that often turns up here in “Comics in Context,” and in the August 27, 1933 Sunday strip in this collection, he seems well aware of it. The strip opens with Popeye and Rough-House discussing how they are both fed up with Wimpy’s continual mooching. But soon they are instead puzzled as to why Wimpy hasn’t tried to mooch any burgers today. Wimpy explains that he injured his jaw and therefore can’t open his mouth wide enough to eat. Rather than feel sorry for him, Rough-House decides to take this opportunity to play “a mean trick” on Wimpy, and Popeye, Wimpy’s nemesis George W. Geezil (more about him later), and other patrons of Rough-House’s establishment gather to watch. Rough-House then presents Wimpy with “the finest hamburger I ever made,” a large burger indeed, for free. The other customers look on in amusement at the idea that Wimpy can see this burger but can’t eat it. With his usual deadpan expression, seemingly unwounded by this “mean trick,” Wimpy says he expected this from “my tricky friend.” Then he adds, “But as you can see, I too am quite tricky,” and he opens his mouth enormously wide, as if in a great, triumphant grin, and shoves the giant hamburger right in. J. Wellington Wimpy is, after all, one of the greatest trickster figures in comic and cartoon art.

In these early Sunday strips from 1932 and 1933 we can see Segar experimenting with Wimpy, developing the character, sometimes changing his mind about him, and experimenting with Popeye as well. Popeye has an ambivalent attitude towards Wimpy in these early strips, shifting back and forth, perhaps reflecting an ambivalence in Segar’s own attitude towards Wimpy.

In the October 20, 1932 strip Rough-House has grown so infuriated with Wimpy’s mooching that he pulls out a gun. But Popeye stops him, saying, “I sez ya ain’t gon’er shoot “˜im! He’s okay–it takes all kinds of people to make a world.” Nevertheless, there are already limits to Popeye’s tolerance. Rough-House’s restaurant is infested with flies as well as Wimpy (another kind of pest?). Popeye sprays Wimpy with sugar syrup, so the flies will swarm around him, lures Wimpy outside with a hamburger, but then puts the burger on the branch of a tree, out of Wimpy’s grasp. Back at Rough-House’s Popeye laughs at having rid Rough-House of both his problems.

But in the following Sunday, Nov. 6, 1932, Wimpy returns, with the flies still following him. One of Wimpy’s admirable qualities is his persistence; like Popeye, he (usually) doesn’t give up. Rough-House puts a hamburger in a basket attached to a dog, which then runs out of the restaurant, with Wimpy in pursuit. Popeye is displeased, apparently feeling that Rough-House has gone too far. But Popeye is amused when Wimpy returns with both the dog and the burger. “As a rule, gentlemen,” Wimpy declares, “I am an inactive man, but when there’s a sandwich at stake, I am both limber of leg and fleet of foot.”

Popeye seems to admire Wimpy’s triumph here. For one thing, Popeye tends to sympathize with underdogs, and for another, Popeye has much more of a sense of humor than Wimpy’s adversaries Rough-House and Geezil. Moreover, Wimpy has pulled off a feat of sorts here by catching up with the dog. In these strips Wimpy is repeatedly called a “loafer,” but as he himself observes, he is very willing to exert himself in pursuit of his goal, the hamburger. Wimpy has no regular job, but perhaps his true vocation is trickery: he certainly works to persuade people to feed him.

Something else notable about Wimpy is his sense of dignity. Notice his elegant use of language in that previous quotation. He is an unemployed man who is continually, in effect, begging for food. But there does not come off as an aggressive beggar who might repel the readers, nor does he seem pathetic. Even as he does undignified things he has a certain dignity in his manner and his speech, as if what he is doing is utterly respectable, as if his attempts to con people out of hamburgers is a job like any other. There are exceptions, as we shall see, when his hunger gets the better of him.

Significantly, in the January 15, 1933 strip, when, urged by Popeye, Rough-House offers Wimpy hamburgers and spinach for free, Wimpy protests, “I cannot accept charity, my friend. Charge this to my account.” Rough-House points out, “You ain’t got no account.” Wimpy proudly replies, “Then take it away,” before his hunger gets the better of him, and he ads, “Leave it here.” This suggests that Wimpy’s sense of dignity prevents him from admitting to being a beggar or a charity case. Hence, when Wimpy promises to pay somebody Tuesday for a hamburger today, he isn’t just conning someone: Wimpy is trying to maintain the fiction that he is not the desperately impoverished man he actually is. (As Rough-House notes at one point, Wimpy never shows up on Tuesdays.)

Though Wimpy does not actively seek out work, he is not opposed to employment. He regularly serves as the referee in Popeye’s boxing matches, and in these strips when someone offers Wimpy a job, he accepts. For example, in the Nov 27, 1932 strip Popeye suggests that Rough-House give Wimpy a job shooting the mice infesting the restaurant. (Rough-House’s diner is clearly not of the highest caliber.) Wimpy accepts but then keeps missing the mice when he shoots and fears he will never succeed. But then Wimpy finds a mouse caught in a mousetrap, shoots it, and turns it in to Rough-House in exchange for a hamburger. Wimpy continues to show Rough-House the sane mouse over and over, pretending it is a different one each time, and getting a burger each time. Popeye is about to tell Rough-House that Wimpy is cheating when Wimpy looks fixedly at Popeye and says emphatically, “My good friend–I am hungry–very hungry.” Popeye shuts up.

Reading this strip, I felt as if the comedian, Wimpy, had suddenly revealed the pain behind his comedy. Segar created Wimpy during the Great Depression; these strips were published in the early 1930s, when many people were indeed jobless and going hungry. Maybe this fact helps explain Wimpy’s popularity with newspaper strip readers of the 1930s: here is a penniless man who is a survivor, who lives by his wits, persists and retains his dignity, even though he is reduced to living on the charity of others. Wimpy’s mooching may make us smile, but it is something he must do to survive.

So in the next Sunday strip, December 4, 1932, when Rough-House complains that Wimpy is just a “loafer,” Popeye retorts, “Rough-House, ya got to take people for what they are–Wimpy is what he is–the same as I yam what I yam.” Wimpy may not pursue getting work, but Popeye, at this point, is not about to penalize Wimpy for that. Popeye recognizes that Wimpy is simply behaving according to his essential character, and wants Rough-House to be more tolerant of that, perhaps implying that Rough-House should indeed help feed him.

This strip too raises the curtain on the sadder aspect of Wimpy’s existence. Wimpy notes that he has “no friends, no pals.” Perhaps, then, when he elsewhere calls Popeye “my friend,” Wimpy isn’t just flattering him: he seems to long for friends to help him, indeed, for companionship. In this Sunday strip Wimpy even declares, perhaps alluding to the Depression, “It’s a cruel world. Better I should be dead–no longer can I stand my hunger.” Seeing Wimpy head for a pier, Popeye even fears that Wimpy will commit suicide. But instead he finds Wimpy simply fishing for food. Once again, this is a a source of Wimpy’s appeal: he doesn’t let this “cruel world” destroy him but keeps trying to survive in it, hoping for the best. Maybe he will catch a fish.

In the January 1, 1933 Sunday strip Rough-House complains that if he shoots Wimpy, he’ll be hanged. Again Popeye counsels tolerance, and perhaps having a sense of humor, telling Rough-House that he “takes life too serious.”

In this Sunday installment Wimpy discovers he has just inherited $25 from an uncle, a tiny sum that nonetheless seems huge in the context of this strip. Nos that Wimpy can actually afford to pay him, Rough-House plies him with food. But while Wimpy is eating, he is besieged by bill collectors, who claim all of his inheritance. And so when it comes time to pay for his dinner, Wimpy once again resorts to his trademark pledge of paying you next Tuesday. Rough-House seethes with angry frustration but Popeye is amused by the absurdity of it all. Wimpy, seemingly sincere, tries to comfort Rough-House by saying, “Cheer up, my friend–I have another uncle.” Again, Wimpy is characteristically optimistic: maybe someday he will get another inheritance.

In the October 30, 1932 strip, not only was Wimpy not bothered by the flies in Rough-House’s cafe, but he said that flies liked him: “That’s because I’m sympathetic to all dumb animals.” At the start of the January 8, 1933 Sunday strip, Popeye too feels sympathy for an animal when he sees a man kick a dog. “Poor little swab,” Popeye says, comforting the dog; then, outraged, he calls to the dog’s tormentor, addressing him as if he were the real animal–“Ahoy, ya beask!”–and then beating him up. Popeye then takes the dog to Rough-House’s to feed him hamburgers. Wimpy begins barking at the dog, who then brings the burgers to Wimpy. “Lissen, Wimpy, the first time was funny,” says Popeye in annoyance, “but now yer tryin’ to take advantage of a dumb animal.” Popeye has sympathy towards “dumb animals,” but it appears that Wimpy actually speaks the dog’s language. That implies that Wimpy is somehow closer to the world of nature than even Popeye is, though each is an outsider in his own way in the world of human society.

So there is a lot more to Wimpy’s character than first meets the eye, and we shall see still more in weeks to come.

–Copyright 2010 Peter Sanderson

Follow me on Twitter (@PeterJSanderson) and at Facebook Comic Con.

]]> http://asitecalledfred.com/2010/02/25/popeye-wimpy-comics-in-context-234/feed/ 0 http://asitecalledfred.com/2010/02/18/fantastic-mr-fox-comics-in-context-233/ http://asitecalledfred.com/2010/02/18/fantastic-mr-fox-comics-in-context-233/#respond Fri, 19 Feb 2010 03:50:19 +0000 http://www.asitecalledfred.com/?p=12529 Comics historian extraordinaire Peter Sanderson returns with a look at Wes Anderson's adaptation of Roald Dahl's FANTASTIC MR. FOX and his animated predecessor, Hanna Barbera's Hokey Wolf...]]>

#233 (Vol. 2 #5): CUNNING CANINES

One of the animated films nominated for an Academy Award this year is live action director Wes Anderson’s venture into stop-motion animation, Fantastic Mr. Fox. This is based on Roald Dahl’s children’s book, which draws upon the traditional characterization of the fox as a trickster, which goes back to Aesop’s fables and the European tales of Reynard the Fox. Other wild members of the dog family likewise have appeared as tricksters, notably the coyote in Native American mythology, and sometimes the wolf.

Thinking about Hanna-Barbera’s 1960s animated trickster Top Cat for a forthcoming installment of this column led me to consider another example of the canine trickster: Top Cat’s predecessor at Hanna-Barbera, Hokey Wolf. Baby Boomers may find this chilling, but 2010 marks Hokey Wolf’s 50th anniversary. Yogi Bear (another trickster) had originally appeared in cartoons in The Huckleberry Hound Show; when Yogi got his own show, Hokey Wolf was created to take over his spot on Huckleberry Hound, from 1960 into 1962.

Hanna-Barbera’s TV cartoons and characters often seemed to be inspired (to be kind about it) by other characters, actors or series. But in Hanna-Barbera’s better work, they reworked the concept in such a way as to make it uniquely theirs. Hence, for example, The Flintstones is essentially Jackie Gleason’s The Honeymooners transplanted to a Stone Age suburbia.

I think that even as a child I recognized that Top Cat was inspired by the TV series that was originally called You’ll Never Get Rich but was retitled The Phil Silvers Show, and familiarly known as Sgt. Bilko. When I first saw Top Cat, Phil SIlvers was still a prominent figure on television, and Bilko was in syndication. Bilko was Silvers’ signature role: a fast-talking sergeant in a motor pool on an army base who endlessly devised money-making schemes. Aided by his crew of corporals and privates, Bilko continually bamboozled authority figure Colonel Hall and numerous other dupes, and his plans often became elaborately successful before usually collapsing due to some twist of fate. (After all, the title was You’ll Never Get Rich.) Bilko was a classic example in pop culture of the comedic con man; W. C. Fields and Groucho Marx played variations on this sort of character in most of their films. Probably a major reason for Bilko’s success was his role as an army sergeant in a time when most of the adult men watching TV were veterans of either World War II or the Korean War: Bilko was their hero, defying the frustrations and limitations of military life they well remembered.

Beyond that, Bilko was a mid-20th century version of an archetypal figure in comedy, the trickster. Top Cat is so appealing and memorable a character because he is such a well realized version of this perennial comic figure. (I have previously written extensively about tricksters in my “Comics in Context” columns about Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys, his novel on the subject.)

Hanna and Barbera had already introduced a Bilko-like character, Hokey Wolf, on The Huckleberry Hound played by Daws Butler in a voice that did not duplicate the sound of Phil Silvers’ voice, but caught his rapid-fire delivery, his self-confidence, and his outward friendliness while moving in for the kill with his sales pitch. Indeed, animation historian Mark Evanier notes that Hanna and Barbera initially intended Butler to play Top Cat, presumably using the Hokey Wolf voice.

Whether legally or not, the Internet has proved to be a vast library of the history of animated cartoons, and enabled me to watch some Hokey Wolf cartoons for the first time since my childhood. I was impressed by Hokey at his best, concocting schemes that reflect the adult world more than I had expected in cartoons that were aimed primarily at small children. (As usual, I issue spoiler warnings.) For example, in Tricks and Treats the hungry Hokey pretends to have his foot injured in a steel trap set by a mild-mannered farmer.

Hokey has his hero-worshiping sidekick Ding-a-Ling (voiced by Doug Young) take photographs, and threatens to use them as evidence when he sues the farmer. Taken aback, the farmer agrees to let Hokey recuperate in a bed in his house, if Hokey will drop the lawsuit. So, as Hokey had planned, he and Ding-a-Ling get to freeload at the farm. Eventually the farmer discovers that Hokey is faking and gets out his shotgun, but Hokey had the foresight to devise a backup plan. Representatives of the Humane Society show up, taking more photographs, to praise the farmer for taking such good care of the injured wolf.

But seeing these cartoons again as an adult, I was struck by the darker implications of the cartoons that I had completely missed as a child. These are comedies dealing with “funny animals.” But in this cartoon Hokey is really pretending to be a cripple. Do children stop and think of how much the “teeth” of that trap on his foot could hurt? And when the angered farmer gets out his shotgun, isn’t he intent on killing Hokey? There is a grimness here underlying the comedy.

Consider the ambiguous status of “funny animal” characters in animated cartoon series. At one end of the spectrum are characters like Disney’s Pluto, who are meant to be more or less real animals, lacking human-level intelligence or the ability to speak. On the other hand, Pluto’s owner, Mickey Mouse, not only can talk and think like a human being, but is accepted in society as if he were human: he owns a house, he holds jobs, and so forth. And then there are characters who are somewhere between these poles. For example, Yogi Bear is “smarter than the average bear”: he has a human intellect and can talk. Yet Ranger Smith treats him as an animal who is supposed to obey the rules set down by humans in Jellystone Park, or else he’ll get shipped to captivity in the St. Louis Zoo.

Many of these characters are essentially humans in animal form. The tension between the “human” and “animal” sides of the characters is often essential to the cartoons. Since Bugs Bunny is an animal, Elmer Fudd has license to shoot him when it’s “wabbit season,” yet since Bugs is essentially human, it would seem like murder if Elmer succeeded in killing him. (Indeed, typically when Elmer is tricked into thinking he has killed Bugs, he is overcome with guilt.) And so we in the audience root for Bugs to outwit Elmer.

In the cartoon Who’s Zoo Hokey Wolf and Ding-a-Ling declare themselves to be “hungry” and looking for food.

Though outwardly animals, they act like humans, talking, wearing clothes, walking on their hind legs. Hokey may be jauntily dressed in straw hat and bow tie, but he and Ding-a-Ling have no visible means of support. If they were humans, they would be tramps. Though Daws Butler endows Hokey with a lighthearted manner, when Hokey admits to being hungry in this cartoon, Butler makes him sound serious indeed.

Hokey and Ding-a-Ling arrive at a city zoo and realize that the “dumb animals” living there are well fed (“We should be so dumb,” notes Hokey, in a somewhat bitter tone). So most of the cartoon consists of Hokey trying unsuccessfully to get a huge steak away from a captive lion. Finally, Hokey shifts strategy: since he and Ding-a-Ling are wolves, they simply take up residence in the wolves’ cage at the zoo. The cartoon ends with Hokey rattling a cup against the bars of the cage, as he explains to Ding-a-Ling that in “prison movies” doing this always gets the guards to bring the inmates food. It’s a rather ironic end to the cartoon. Sure, we may be used to thinking of wolves kept captive at the zoo. But Hokey and Ding-a-Ling are also like people in animal guises, and they have chosen to sacrifice their freedom and become prisoners behind bars in exchange for being fed.

I was taken aback by another Hokey Wolf cartoon, Hokey Dokey, in which Hokey encounters the Three Little Pigs.

Like Frank Tashlin’s The Fox and the Grapes (1941), this is another cartoon exercise in metafiction. In Hokey Dokey Hokey knows the story of the Three Little Pigs and decides to create his own sequel to the tale; at the cartoon’s end, Hokey even consults a book to reread the original fable.

This is hardly the only animated cartoon that deals in revisionist versions of well known fairy tales. At this time Jay Ward had already been doing Fractured Fairy Tales and Aesop and Son on the Rocky and His Friends and The Bullwinkle Show for years. Moreover, there was already a long history if cartoons that not only parodied the classic Three Little Pigs story but also Disney’s landmark Three Little Pigs cartoon (1933). In Hokey Dokey the bricklaying pig wears virtually the same outfit as his Disney counterpart. Among the previous cartoons that created variations on Disney’s Three Little Pigs were Tex Avery’s Blitz Wolf (1942) and Three Little Pups (1953) for MGM and Friz Freleng’s Pigs in a Polka (1943) and the jazz-scored Three Little Bops (1957) for Warners.

Presumably because they are protagonists of cartoons for kids, Hokey and Ding-a-Ling are not predators. Early in Hokey Dokey, Hokey declares that his goal is not to eat the pigs but to con them into giving him the brick house, since he and Ding-a-Ling need a place to live in the winter months.

Hokey’s strategy is startling for what is purportedly a kiddie cartoon. He poses as an insurance company agent, investigating the mysterious disappearance of the Big Bad Wolf, and making it clear to the pigs that he suspects foul play. The three pigs deny everything, but are clearly shaken. In the traditional end of the Three Little Pigs’ story, the Big Bad Wolf slides down the chimney into a cauldron of boiling water and perishes. Disney let the Wolf escape, but it is clear in Hokey Dokey that the pigs believe that they killed the Big Bad Wolf. Now Hokey is treating them as murder suspects. Interestingly, Hokey refers to this as a “double indemnity” case, suggesting that the cartoon’s writer (Michael Maltese, perhaps?) was thinking of Double Indemnity–James M. Cain’s 1935 novella and Billy Wilder’s 1944 film.

After intimidating the Three Pigs by playing insurance investigator, Hokey dons a sheet and impersonates the ghost of the Big Bad Wolf. This is a rather macabre stunt, and it works. Guilt-ridden and frightened of retribution, the Three Pigs pack up and leave, telling Hokey that he can have the brick house if he wants it.

In the end, like Disney, Hanna and Barbera can’t kill off the Big Bad Wolf: he turns up, alive and reformed, and turns the tables on Hokey.

So here is an early Hanna-Barbera TV cartoon that works on two levels, for children and for any adults who might be watching. Apart from the Three Little Pigs dealing with their guilt over seemingly committing with murder, there is also Hokey and Ding-a-Ling’s motive for trying to trick the Three Little Pigs out of their house. Hokey and Ding-a-Ling are homeless. For an instant even a child watching this cartoon might visualize Hokey and Ding-a-Ling shivering in the snow if they cannot somehow find shelter. Hokey may be amusing, but the motives for his actions in these two cartoons–hunger and homelessness–are not funny at all.

Fifty years after Hokey Wolf’s debut, writer/director Wes Anderson went much further in applying an adult perspective to the trope of the talking trickster animal in his recent stop-motion animated film Fantastic Mr. Fox.

This is an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s children’s book of the same name, which treats its talking animals in a relatively conventional manner: the animals have human intelligence and can talk among themselves (although humans apparently don’t understand their language), but they still roughly follow the lives of animals.

Anderson’s movie, however, seems very much a reinterpretation of Dahl’s material for an adult audience. In the film, the animals not only talk but wear full sets of clothing. The lead character, Mr. Fox, voiced by George Clooney, works as a newspaper columnist. The character Badger, voiced by Bill Murray, is a lawyer. Anderson himself voices a weasel who works as a real estate agent. (Supply your own joke here.) It becomes apparent that the animals comprise a community that parallels human society. In Dahl’s book Mr. Fox steals chickens from the local human farmers, Boggis, Bunce and Bean, because that is what foxes do. In Anderson’s film Mr. Fox reverts to stealing chickens as a result of what New York Times critic A. O. Scott aptly terms “something of a vulpine midlife crisis.”

As in Dahl’s book, the human farmers retaliate by trying to hunt down, starve and exterminate the foxes and the other animals. But if the animals are just like humans, then the farmers are effectively attempting to commit murder. One could easily interpret the clash between the hunters and the animals as a metaphor for class warfare, with the rich attempting to eliminate the poor–or, actually, the middle class, since Anderson’s animals have respectable bourgeois professions. Perhaps one could even interpret the farmers’ war on the animals as a metaphor for racism, with the farmers attempting to commit genocide by wiping out those beings whom they consider to be their inferiors. (Watching the film, it struck me that the chickens are not presented as having human intelligence; if they did, then arguably the foxes who eat them would be guilty of genocide as well!)

Although it is intended for an audience of children, Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox in effect justifies theft: the readers’ sympathies will clearly be with Mr. Fox and his friends and family, not with the farmers who are out to destroy them. Dahl portrays the farmers as particularly nasty, so they seem to deserve to have the foxes steal chickens from them. But moreover Dahl seems to be saying that the foxes are justified in stealing from the wealthy farmers, who have far more than they need. Hence, Mr. Fox is something of a Robin Hood figure, especially when he provides stolen food for the community of animals.

In Anderson’s version, Mr. Fox reverts to stealing chickens apparently as away of recapturing his youth, when he did that all the time. This may serve as Anderson’s metaphor for youth’s rebellion against the system, and the film seems to argue that middle-aged members of the middle class are likewise justified in rebelling against a system controlled by the rich and repressive. Beneath the trappings of a children’s fable, complete with talking animals, Anderson has disguised a rather radical point of view.

Casting George Clooney as the voice of Mr. Fox works well in this interpretation of Dahl’s story for adults. Following the example of Phil Silvers, Daws Butler’s Hokey Wolf deals in the fast talking hard sell. Arnold Stang’s Top Cat isn’t as hyperactive, but he, like Hokey, overpowers his target with a barrage of verbiage. Clooney has a smooth way of speaking that also proves suitable for trickster characters, as the Coen brothers recognized in their film O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000). Clooney’s more laid-back screen persona suits a more mature version of the trickster, one that is also capable of emotional vulnerability, which is what Anderson’s Mr. Fox becomes. Moreover, Clooney conveys the calm and cool that separates the trickster from many of his hot-tempered, violent opponents, like the farmers in this film.

I will have much more to say about classic tricksters in cartoon art in near future installments of “Comics in Context,” including Top Cat and one of the greatest characters of this sort in comics, Popeye’s pal J. Wellington Wimpy.

–Copyright 2010 Peter Sanderson

Follow me on Twitter (@PeterJSanderson) and at Facebook Comic Con.

]]> http://asitecalledfred.com/2010/02/18/fantastic-mr-fox-comics-in-context-233/feed/ 0 http://asitecalledfred.com/2010/02/11/david-levine-comics-in-context/ http://asitecalledfred.com/2010/02/11/david-levine-comics-in-context/#respond Thu, 11 Feb 2010 16:53:43 +0000 http://www.asitecalledfred.com/?p=12472 Comics historian extraordinaire Peter Sanderson returns with an exploration of the work of master caricaturist David Levine...]]>

#232 (Vol. 2 #4): DAVID LEVINE ON STAGE

The great caricaturist David Levine, who passed away at the close of 2009, was the subject of a sad profile article, “Levine in Winter“, written by David Margolick in Vanity Fair in November of the previous year. It was yet another variation on what has become an all too familiar theme: the troubles of the comics or cartoon art professional when, for whatever reason, his career goes into decline. Levine’s brilliant caricatures of politicians, authors, and other notables had regularly appeared in The New York Review of Books for over forty years. His work appeared in other publications as well, but the Review published half his work over the years. But, in his eighties, Levine suffered from macular degeneration, which greatly dimmed his vision, hence handicapping his ability to draw. This led to an awkward situation: though Levine believed he could adapt and continue working, the Review no longer gave him assignments.

But was Levine’s later work really that bad or beyond improving? In 2008 Fantagraphics Books published American Presidents, a book of Levine’s caricatures. which closed with a recent portrait of Barack Obama that, while not in Levine’s classic style, was nonetheless good.

But Levine was cast adrift, and believed he had been fired. In his article Margolick asserted that “Without his work, he [Levine] has lost the structure of his life – sometimes, it’s hard for him to remember the day of the week – and his chief means of self-expression.”

He remained under contract to the Review, which accordingly continued to pay him a four figure salary per month, for reprinting his older work, enough to make some people happy, but a comedown from the over $12,000 per month he used to get. He did not get health insurance or a pension from the Review, though it seems that longtime writers for the review didn’t, either. Moreover, although original art for Levine’s caricatures is owned by museums, Levine was having trouble selling his original artwork for his caricatures, even though many have been acquired by art museums in the past. According to the article, “”˜Nobody’s been asking,’ says Levine. “Maybe I have to die first.'”

The Presidents book had reawakened my interest in Levine’s work, and following his death, I explored parts of the virtual gallery of his caricatures on The New York Review of Books web site. I spent most of my time looking through sections devoted to figures from the performing arts, which proved particularly enlightening to me. These drawings demonstrated just how insightful Levine was in using the art of caricature to portray the complexities of a man or woman’s personality within a single image.

I began with a section on literary characters, in which I found only Levine’s picture of Shakespeare’s King Lear, from June 25, 1964, and demonstrated Levine’s ability to provide insights through depicting contrast and paradox. The conventional strategy for depicting Lear would be to show him as a grand, tragic monarch. Instead, Levine shows him as the head of an old man, warily peering out from a trash can. It’s an image that might perhaps remind readers of comedy characters who similarly live in trash cans: Hanna-Barbera’s Top Cat, who will be the subject of a future column, and Sesame Street’s Oscar the Grouch, who debuted years after this caricature was first published. But Levine more likely has in mind the character of Hamm, who lives in a trash can in Samuel Beckett’s play Endgame. I would not be surprised if Levine’s caricature was a reference to director Peter Brook’s production of King Lear, starring Paul Scofield in the title role, which was greatly influenced by Beckett’s works. (Brook and Scofield later made a film version of King Lear in 1971, which TCM will telecast in March.) Levine has made Lear look something like a clown, hiding in a trash can, presumably because, like Brook, he sees Beckett and the theater of the absurd as a modern means of interpreting the grim absurdity of Lear’s fate, the king who is reduced to a madman wandering the heath. That trash can not only emphasizes how far Lear has fallen, from monarch to tramp, but also suggests that fate, and his ungrateful daughters, are treating Lear as if he were trash. Levine could have portrayed Lear in his famous scenes in which he rages at his daughters or even at the elements during the storm on the heath. But instead he shows Lear’s vulnerability: the old man fearfully hiding from his abusers.

The picture of Lear also shows two of his young tormentors on either side of the trash can, berating him. These figures and their costumes remind me of characters that Sir John Tenniel might have drawn into his illustrations for the original editions of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. As one of the great political caricaturists of the 19th century, Tenniel was an artistic forebear of Levine, and this portrait of Lear and two of his tormentors thus becomes Levine’s homage to Tenniel, making the stylistic influence of Tenniel on Levine clear. Most noticeably, Levine, like Tenniel, gives his subjects enormous, caricatured heads and tiny bodies.

I then turned to a section called “Actors, Film and Theatre Personalities“. The first picture that caught my eye here was of another tramp: Charlie Chaplin in his most famous screen persona, from October 22, 1964. Here Levine goes in the opposite direction than he did with Lear. The conventional choice would have been to present Chaplin’s tramp as a joyous figure of comedy, waddling with his cane or performing some slapstick gag. Or perhaps Levine could have shown the Tramp as rebel, fighting back against some bully or authority figure, or the familiar image of the Tramp as a figure of pathos, walking off alone towards the horizon. But instead Levine makes the Tramp look like, well, a real tramp, sitting on the ground, looking up with wariness and perhaps frustration at a policeman, a literally faceless figure of authority (his head is out of the frame) towering over him, while nudging him with a nightstick. Here Levine is pointing to the underlying source of the Tramp’s comedy and appeal: the genuine poverty and suffering which Chaplin’s Tramp fights and sometimes defeats through his humor and courage.

Charles Laughton, in a portrait published February 15, 1990, seems to be depicted in his costume and persona as the wily but benevolent Senator Gracchus of ancient Rome in Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960), with a toga, laurel wreath, and big, beaming smile. Of the many performances I’ve seen Laughton give in films, this is my favorite–perhaps it was Levine’s as well–with his U. S. Senator in Otto Preminger’s Advise and Consent (1962), a very similar part, as runner-up. Perhaps Levine chose to portray Laughton thus also as a tribute to his professional stature, as if he were a member of a pantheon of great actors in a classic tradition. Levine shows Laughton leaning on one arm, at ease, a pose that suits both Gracchus and one’s image of Laughton: so masterful at what he does that he made it look easy, and he can relax and enjoy himself.

In his portrait of Humphrey Bogart (May 18, 1972), Levine makes the gun he holds look tiny, but his bow tie look enormous. Bogart often wears bow ties in his later films, which, by today’s fashions, look rather peculiar. One might expect to see a tweedy academic wear a bow tie (yes, I used to, decades ago), but not the movies’ preeminent tough guy. But Levine chooses to emphasize another aspect of Bogart than the tough guy image. He draws Bogart with a particularly immense head, emphasizing his sad eyes, with slated eyebrows reinforcing this sense of sorrow. Levine emphasizes the crinkles beneath Bogart’s eyes, showing his age and perhaps weariness. Bogart’s lips, rather than tightly curling in a characteristic scowl, look loose and uneven, again like those of an aging man. Rather than show us Bogart’s familiar aggressiveness, Levine instead chooses to show us the vulnerability in Bogart’s screen character, the melancholy that is just as much a part of his familiar persona. Levine also thus reminds us that Bogart was not a young man when he became a true star, that, from High Sierra (1941) on, he played heroes in mid-life who were grappling with the choices they had made in life and aware of their mortality.

Levine’s picture of film director Ingmar Bergman from March 8, 1973, turns him into a deeply unhappy man the size of a child, cradled in the lap of a monumental woman. This is a satiric variation on a memorable image from Bergman’s then-new film Cries and Whispers (1973), in which the dying woman played by Harriet Andersson lies in the lap of the large woman who is her devoted nurse. That, in turn, seems to be an obvious allusion to Michelangelo’s Pieta, the statue of the dead Christ lying in the lap of his mother. Levine seems to be cleverly and cuttingly commenting on the way that Bergman poured out his emotional turmoil in his films and often, as in Cries and Whispers, made women his leading characters. Here Levine seems to be caricaturing Bergman as someone who hasn’t truly grown up, who is an emotional wreck who seeks solace from women he views as idealized mother figures.

Levine’s portrait of Jerry Seinfeld, from August 14, 1997, at first looks wholly positive. Seinfeld looks directly at us, confidence in his eyes and grin, and he seems to be standing in a relaxed position, one leg crossed over the other. But his arms are folded in front of his chest, a classic defensive gesture. Does this mean that the crossing of his legs is likewise defensive? Is Levine signaling that Seinfeld’s public image as extroverted comedian is a public facade, and that he is hiding the true self from us?

Levine presents Richard Burton in an April 27, 1989 drawing playing one of his most famous stage roles, as Hamlet. But Burton is posed standing precariously with one foot atop a skull–presumably that of the jester Yorick–while holding a bottle, signifying Burton’s notorious alcoholism. So Levine presents Burton as trying to strike a similarly precarious balance between his artistic achievements and his flaws. Did Burton succeed? Or did he reduce his career as an arguably great classical actor to something akin to a jester doing a balancing act? He gives Burton a wistful, yearning look, like that of a young man searching for his artistic goal, or like Hamlet himself, but gives Burton oddly empty-looking eyes, with mere dots for pupils, as if Burton’s artistic vision is clouded by an alcoholic haze. Yorick’s skull is one of the most memorable images of mortality in literature. By having Burton stand atop Yorick’s skull, Levine likens him to Yorick as well as Hamlet, while reminding the viewer of Burton’s own early demise.

Levine’s portrait of Fred Astaire from Nov. 29, 1993, is a prime example of his technique of drawing contradictions. Astaire looks old, but he has a big, happy smile, and extends one arm gracefully outward; the top half of his body is still. Beneath the waist Levine shows multiple images of legs, as if Astaire is moving in a frenzy. And there is the paradox: serenity coexisting with speed. Astaire is dancing with a female partner, whose face is concealed, but has lots of what seems blonde hair, and who wears a long gown. She has many, many feet, so she too is moving at great speed, though, significantly, she does not raise them as high as Astaire. Her hair and costume and speed suggest Ginger Rogers, but by hiding her face Levine makes her into every dance partner Astaire ever had, while making clear that Astaire is the dominant figure in the partnership and the portrait.

Levine’s method of portraying contradiction and contrast is very apparent in his October 21, 1982 caricature of Louise Brooks, a star of silent films an early talkies, most famously in G. W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box (1929), whose acting career plunged into oblivion, but who resurfaced late in life as a talented memoirist. Levine pictures her as virtually naked, but crossing her arms over her bust, an exhibitionist but vulnerable, part of her still modest. Levine gives her her trademark hairdo but huge, sad eyes, as if she is distressed at her typecasting as sex symbol.

Levine clearly likes Preston Sturges, the writer and director of such great and classic comedies as The Lady Eve (1941), Sullivan’s Travels (1941), The Palm Beach Story (1942), and The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944). Levine gives Sturges an impish look through his eyes and smile, indicating the wit and high comedic spirits of his films, puts him in a suit with wide lapels, and puts what may be a traveler’s scarf or a well-dressed man’s ascot around his neck, and has him carrying a bag at the end of a stick, a classic prop for a hobo. This probably refers to the film often considered Sturges’ best, the seriocomic Sullivan’s Travels, whose film director protagonist spends time living as a homeless tramp to study the dark side of life and ends up discovering the importance of comedy to lift people’s spirits in hard times. so Levine thus casts Sturges as Sullivan. Perhaps Levine was also hinting at the collapse of Sturges’ short, brilliant filmmaking career, and suggesting that the wit of his comedies nonetheless lives on. This image certainly casts Sturges as the artist/comedian as outsider, able to take a comic perspective from being an outsider. Levine’s Sturges as tramp is thus more typically Chaplinesque than Levine’s own aforementioned portrait of Chaplin.

But then there are the people whom Levine clearly did not like. Levine’s his March 6, 1997 portrait of John Wayne casting him in his iconic cinematic image as western gunfighter, but disturbingly alters that image. Under grim eyes; Wayne smiles, but that smile hardly seems benevolent. Instead Wayne’s expression looks disconcerting and ominous, and his face seems distorted in some way that is hard to define. Was Levine portraying the John Wayne of The Searchers (1956), in which he played a dangerous, obsessed figure? Or was this the leftist Levine’s comment on Wayne’s real life right wing politics?

The most devastating of these portraits is that of Leni Riefenstahl, director of the infamous Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will (1934), who lived to be 101 years old, spending the last half of her life downplaying her allegiance to the Third Reich. In his Feb. 6, 1975 picture of her, drawn while she was still very much alive, Levine portrays her with a fanatical look, a disconcertingly fixed smile, and snakelike locks of hair, as if she were a modern Medusa, holding a camera, garbed in a Nazi uniform, sitting atop a pile of skulls.

This is reminiscent of Levine’s most biting caricatures of presidents, which you can find in another section of this online gallery, as well as in Fantagraphics’ book. Here too is Levine’s use of contrast: the smiling face of Harry Truman emerging in dark irony from the mushroom cloud of Hiroshima (July 9, 1964). Levine has his heroes: Thomas Jefferson is shown in heroic profile (Aug. 13, 1981), and though Levine portrays George Washington (Aug. 12, 1982) and Abraham Lincoln (Oct. 25, 1979) in their ugliness, they nonetheless have a certain directness and nobility about them. Franklin Roosevelt was Levine’s hero, and he generally conveys Roosevelt’s jauntiness and joy in his various portraits of him (as in an October 25, 1979 picture). He can be devastating in portraying those he dislikes: Richard Nixon becomes an enormous rat (Nov. 29, 1973).

And then there is perhaps Levine’s most famous caricature, from May 12, 1966, inspired by the incident when Lyndon Johnson revealed his operation scar to reporters: Levine turned the scar into the shape of Vietnam. This is an indictment of Johnson’s role in the war, which had metaphorically become part of him, but it also shows a certain sympathy for him: the Vietnam war had become his self-inflicted wound. Caricature is usually thought to work by reducing a figure to a comedic figure, but Levine’s work at its best portrayed his subjects in their complexity, mixing comedy with pathos and even tragedy.

–Copyright 2010 Peter Sanderson

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]]> http://asitecalledfred.com/2010/02/11/david-levine-comics-in-context/feed/ 0 http://asitecalledfred.com/2010/02/05/comics-in-context-231-killing-katnip/ http://asitecalledfred.com/2010/02/05/comics-in-context-231-killing-katnip/#respond Fri, 05 Feb 2010 04:33:53 +0000 http://www.asitecalledfred.com/?p=12427 Comics historian extraordinaire Peter Sanderson looks back on the animation voiceover career of the late Arnold Stang - voice of Top Cat and Herman - focusing on the HERMAN & KATNIP cartoons...]]>

#231 (Vol. 2 #3): KILLING KATNIP

During my lengthy leave of absence from writing “Comics in Context,” the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art in New York City and the Cartoon Art Museum of San Francisco jointly held a traveling exhibition on the art of Harvey Comics, many of whose most celebrated characters, such as Casper the Friendly Ghost, originated in animated cartoons produced by Paramount’s Famous Studios. I’m not that interested in Casper or Richie Rich, but the exhibit did reawaken my interest in some of the less famous animated stars of the Famous cartoons.

Towards the end of 2009, character actor Arnold Stang passed away, and I decided to write columns about two of the most memorable characters he voiced in animated cartoons. The first, starting in 1944, was Famous Studios’ Herman the mouse, who was eventually teamed with perennial antagonist Katnip the cat, voiced by the late Sid Raymond, for a series of theatrical cartoons that ran till 1959. (Owned by the Paramount studio, Famous was later reorganized and renamed Paramount Cartoon Studios.)

Only two years later, in 1961, Stang starred as Top Cat in the Hanna-Barbera animated television series of the same name. Following the success of Hanna-Barbera’s The Flintstones in prime time, Top Cat was also made for evening viewing and aimed at an adult audience that included adults. It lasted only one season, for a total of thirty episodes (TV seasons were longer back then), but has been rerun ever since, first on Saturday mornings and nowadays on the cable network Boomerang. Similarly, Paramount sold Herman and Katnip and the other characters Famous originated, and their animated shorts, to Harvey Comics, which put its logo on the cartoons when they turned up on television.

So Top Cat and Herman were part of the Baby Boomers’ childhoods, and today their cartoons can be found on DVD collections and online. They are further proof of my Eternal Present theory of cartoon art in the 21st century: so much classic material is now easily accessible that the significant work of the past has once more part of the present, for those who care to look.

In one of his blog entries following Stang’s passing, cartoon/comics historian Mark Evanier notes that Stang was producer/director Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera’s third choice to play Top Cat, and comments that “Arnold Stang was an odd choice, as he was usually associated with milquetoast, whiny characters and Top Cat was a cool, confident fellow”. Short, scrawny, and bespectacled, Arnold Stang onscreen indeed usually played what would now be called nerds. Maybe today his best known role onscreen is as one of the two hapless gas station attendants who are literally thrown about by Jonathan Winters as he demolishes their station in It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963). (Marvin Kaplan, the voice of Choo Choo on Top Cat, played the other attendant.)

Surely in casting Top Cat Hanna and Barbera were aware that Stang had long been voicing a similar character, Herman. In various onscreen “milquetoast” roles, Stang used a high-pitched voice. But as Herman and Top Cat, Stang spoke at a lower pitch. Ironically, as a cartoon mouse or cat, he could project the personality of a tough guy: self-confidence, keen intelligence, a formidable will, and sheer cool. Herman and Top Cat sound basically alike, although Top Cat’s voice tends to be smoother and warmer.

I observe that sources disagree as to whether the first Herman and Katnip cartoon was Naughty but Mice (1947), which establishes the series formula by pitting Herman against a cat:

Or Mice Meeting You (1950):

The earlier cartoon establishes the series formula by pitting Herman against a cat, but this black cat doesn’t quite look like the familiar Katnip of the 1950s, with his red fur. (All of the cartoons with Herman that I mention in this week’s column are credited to Seymour Kneitel as director.)

The Herman and Katnip series appears to be Famous’s response to Hanna and Barbera’s highly successful Tom and Jerry cartoons for MGM. The major difference between these two cat-and-mouse series is that Tom and Jerry (usually) don’t talk, whereas Herman and Katnip do. Stang gives Herman an old-style New York City accent. I noticed among the comments on a Herman and Katnip cartoon posted on YouTube that one person pointed out that Herman pronounces “furnace” as “foinace,” and asked, “Who talks like this any more?” But that was a stereotypical Brooklynese accent in the mid-20th century, familiar in so many movies and television shows of the period.

Maybe Famous was attempting to have Herman mimic Bugs Bunny: Mel Blanc, who originated Bugs’s voice, claimed it was a combination of Brooklyn and Bronx accents. So Bugs Bunny is a wisecracking, feisty, sharp-witted New Yorker, transplanted by director Tex Avery in the first true Bugs Bunny cartoon, A Wild Hare (1940), into the woods. Only occasionally do the Warners cartoons make it explicit that Bugs is a New Yorker, as in Friz Freleng’s A Hare Grows in Manhattan (1947), which recounts his growing upon the Lower East Side. Herman has an even stronger New York accent. Famous Studios originated as the legendary Max Fleischer animation studios, which Paramount took over. Apart from a relatively brief sojourn in Florida, the Fleischer and Famous Studios were based in New York City, so it makes sense that Famous would develop a character who was clearly a New Yorker.

In Naughty but Mice Herman is explicitly referred to as a “cousin” from the “city” who is visiting mice living on a farm in the country. Maybe this is an allusion to Aesop’s fable about the town mouse and the country mouse who visit each other’s homes, which had served as the basis for Walt Disney’s Oscar-winning “Silly Symphony” cartoon The Country Cousin (1936) in which the title character visits his relation in the city. Herman proceeds to save his country cousins from the proto-Katnip cat who persecutes them by outwitting him. In another cartoon I saw on YouTube, Mice Capades (1952), which pits Herman against a fully evolved Katnip, Herman is again presented as a visitor who liberates mice from their oppressor, Katnip. In the series Herman is even drawn as something of a leading man mouse, handsomer than the goofier-looking mice in the supporting cast.

So it seems to me that Herman is Famous Studios’ salute to New Yorkers. Whereas other filmmakers, like, say, Frank Capra, might extol the virtues of the country man against the cynicism and corruption of the city, Herman embodies the smartness and persistence of the native New Yorker.

I had long assumed that “Itchy and Scratchy,” the cartoon-series-within-a-cartoon-series in The Simpsons, with its over the top violence, was intended as a parody of Tom and Jerry. After all, the Tom and Jerry cartoons are also known for their violence. I recall reading Warner Bros. cartoon director Chuck Jones saying that when Wile E. Coyote’s Roadrunner-catching schemes backfired on him, and he fell off a cliff or was caught in an explosion, he suffered more humiliation than pain. That is a principle that generally seems to apply to the Warners cartoons. When Elmer Fudd shoots Daffy Duck in the face, his beak might spin around, but Daffy seems more disgruntled than hurt. There’s something abstract about the violence in the Warners cartoons. In contrast, Hanna and Barbera often stage the violence in their Tom and Jerry cartoons to emphasize the pain Tom feels, and to thereby give the audience some sense of what that pain must be like.

But I recently read that the true inspiration for “Itchy and Scratchy” is the Herman and Katnip series, and that, as Katnip would say, seems logical. Longtime Simpsons producer David Silverman says, “People say it’s like an insane Tom and Jerry, but it’s really more of an insane Herman and Katnip. Herman and Katnip is hilarious because it’s just bad. It’s painfully bad.” Oh, I disagree that they’re bad cartoons, but painful, yes. These cartoons push the envelope on violence still further, with results that can be downright macabre. (And as usual, I issue a spoiler warning for those who do not want to know the details of these cartoons.)

When Herman arrives in Naughty but Mice, he learns that several of the country mice–presumably his relatives–are dead, and “the new cat” is a “killer.” Now, obviously, in many funny animal animated cartoons, one animal is attempting to catch, kill and devour the other, but normally the predator never succeeds, and so death remains an abstraction in these cartoons. It is therefore startling to see these clearly distraught country mice in Naughty but Mice talk about actual killings, and how the surviving mice are “starving” because the cat keeps them from finding food Of course, in the context of animated cartoons in which animals have human intelligence and can talk, the death of a mouse can be as shocking as the death of a human being.

So Herman takes action against the cat, including giving him whiffs from a bottle of “quick-acting catnip” marked “100 proof.” Is this how Katnip got his name? The cat immediately gets high, moving around in a daze, following Herman, who holds a rose doused with catnip. “Love in Bloom” is played on the sound track, and the pupils in the cat’s eyes turn to hearts. I suppose that many viewers might have interpreted the cat’s behavior as a kind of drunkenness. But I wonder if, by using catnip as a substitute, Famous Studios thus managed to get drug humor past the censors. Is there even an implication that Herman has turned the cat gay, as he wanders after the mouse and his rose, seemingly in love?

The seduction is followed by destruction. The cat falls down a well, Herman grows in a huge stick of dynamite, and startlingly, actually kills the cat: Chopin’s Funeral March even turns up briefly on the sound track. Since the cat was established as a killer, this does balance the dramatic scales, but it still seems shocking in the context of a cartoon directed at children. It would be worse if the cat had ceased to be, but, following another convention in cartoons of that period, nine ghosts rise from his body, one for each of the cat’s traditional nine lives. This trope is most amusingly presented in director Friz Freleng and writer Michael Maltese’s Back Alley Oproar (1948) in which when singing cat Sylvester dies, his nine ghosts rise towards heaven singing the sextet from the opera Lucia di Lammermorr. But Naughty but Mice closes with the nine angry ghosts of the murdered cat pursuing Herman, who waves the catnip-doused rose at them without effect. He seemingly has no way to fight them off. That is a downright weird and very dark ending.

In Mice Meeting You Katnip has acquired his familiar red-furred visual design, but not yet his name: in the cartoon proper (as opposed to the logo later added by Harvey) he is called Kitty. This is an example of what I call counter-Christmas viewing: though the mice sing happily over Christmas dinner at the end, the overall tone of this holiday cartoon, with its war between Herman and Katnip, hardly seems Christmas-like. Once again Herman is introduced as a visitor, though this time the other mice live in a big, impressive expensive-looking house rather than a barn. Usually in cat and mouse cartoons, the cat is guardian of the house, keeping the mice from stealing food. This cartoon, though, reverses the situation: the mice are presented as if they are the rightful residents of the house, and the cat is an invading outsider who gains entrance by pretending to be Santa Claus. (Herman later impersonates Santa as well in this short.) As usual Herman heroically does battle with the cat on behalf of the other mice.

At one point during their war, Herman points to mistletoe, and Katnip puckers up for a kiss. Is the not-too-bright Katnip simply responding to the mistletoe tradition without stopping to realize that (A) he hates Herman and (B) Herman is male? Bugs Bunny famously and repeatedly masqueraded in drag to allure and trick Elmer Fudd, but the premise of those gags seemed to be that Elmer was attracted to women. But Herman doesn’t pretend to be female and still gets a sexual response from Katnip. So, again, is Katnip gay? In any case, Katnip gets “kissed” by the suction cup of a plumber’s helper that Herman thrusts at his face.

At the finale the defeated Katnip has been reduced to immobility. Ornaments have been hung on his body, and Herman plugs Katnip’s tail into an electric socket, causing them to light up. Katnip, though presumably he’s been electrocuted, still does not move. Is Katnip dead? I suppose at least symbolically he is: he’s been turned from a cat into a Christmas tree.

In Mice Capades Herman tricks Katnip into thinking that a bottle of vinegar he drank is actually poison. Katnip is persuaded that he has died, lies in a coffin-like box, and Herman, dressed as an angel, and the other mice, stage an elaborate charade to convince Katnip that he has awakened in heaven. But then Herman, as the angel, decrees that Katnip has been condemned to go to the “other place,” represented by that aforementioned “foinace.” Terrified, Katnip promises to reform and no longer chase mice. But then Katnip discovers that the bottle labeled poison was actually vinegar, sees through the trickery, and goes after Herman with a shotgun. Herman manages to bend the gun barrels so that Katnip shoots himself–dead! Katnip’s ghost (only one this time) rises from his body, bent on revenge. But Herman warns him about hell again, Katnip panics, and the cartoon closes, rather eerily if one thinks about it, with Katnip’s ghost acting as a servant waiting on Herman and the other mice. Of course Katnip will be back alive in his next cartoon, but this ending still seems a little disturbing.

Katnip is neither killed nor immobilized in Mouseum (1956), but its ending is both macabre and in dubious taste:

In a museum, Herman hides in a mounted elephant’s head. Katnip sticks his gun barrels up the elephant’s trunk; Herman (who seems unusually strong) bends the barrels, and when Katnip fires, the elephant’s glass eyes shoot out from its head. Seeing the glass eyes on the floor, Katnip leaps to the illogical conclusion that these are his own eyes, picks them up, and screws them into his own eye sockets, with the result that Katnip really can’t see, and he runs out of the museum, continually smashing into things, thinking he’s gone blind.

So the Herman and Katnip cartoons are much edgier than I recalled from my childhood. It is often said that theatrical cartoons from the 1930s through the 1950s were shown with feature films, and hence were intended for audiences of all ages. I suspect that adults at that time often considered the cartoons on the bill as something specifically for the children in the audience. But, as with much of the material in the Classic Children’s Comics collection I’ve been writing about, it looks as if Hollywood animated cartoons at the time traveled under the adults’ radar. The Herman and Katnip cartoons get away with having the protagonist murder the antagonist and go unpunished, drug humor and hints of homosexuality. None of that would be allowed in live action movies aimed at adults at the time. But because Herman and Katnip are funny animals in kiddie cartoons, they get away with it. The Max Fleischer studio may have been turned into Paramount’s Famous Studio, with its outwardly blander output, but perhaps the characteristic Fleischer subversiveness survived and kept cropping up in Famous cartoons like these.

In one of my upcoming columns, I will turn to Mr. Stang’s other celebrated character, Top Cat, and return to a longtime theme in “Comics in Context,” the tradition of the trickster.

–Copyright 2010 Peter Sanderson

]]> http://asitecalledfred.com/2010/02/05/comics-in-context-231-killing-katnip/feed/ 0 http://asitecalledfred.com/2010/01/28/little-lulu-comics-in-context-230/ http://asitecalledfred.com/2010/01/28/little-lulu-comics-in-context-230/#respond Thu, 28 Jan 2010 18:44:17 +0000 http://www.asitecalledfred.com/?p=12356 Comics historian extraordinaire Peter Sanderson makes his triumphant return to FRED with an article delving into the history of kiddie comics as featured in ComicArts' THE TOON TREASURY OF CLASSIC CHILDREN'S COMICS, this week looking John Stanley's comic book tales of Marge Henderson Buell's LITTLE LULU...]]>

#230 (Vol. 2 #2): THE DARK LULU SAGA

In my childhood I ignored Little Lulu comics: since a little girl was the title character, I probably assumed they were for little girls, and not me. But as a middle-aged adult I became increasingly aware that Little Lulu comic book stories by the the late writer/artist John Stanley (1914-1993) were considered classics.

I am starting out my relaunch of “Comics in Context” by reviewing some of the stories in The Toon Treasury of Classic Children’s Comics, selected and edited by Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly, and published by Harry N. Abrams’ ComicArts imprint. In their introduction, Spiegelman and Mouly praise Stanley as “one of [Uncle Scrooge’s creator Carl] Barks’ few equals as a comics storyteller.” Since I greatly admire Barks’ work (I’ll get to him in the near future), it’s long past time I paid attention to Stanley, so let’s start with his work in this collection.

Little Lulu was created by cartoonist Marge Henderson Buell for a series of gag cartoons in The Saturday Evening Post from 1935 to 1944. An enormous success, Lulu starred in animated cartoons produced by Paramount’s Famous Studios from 1943 to 1948. When Little Lulu got her own comic book series in 1945, Stanley wrote and drew the stories, creating most of the supporting cast. Several years later, he began collaborating with artist Irving Tripp (who just passed away in December 2009 at the age of 88). Stanley continued to write the stories and did sketches of the panels, and then Tripp did the final artwork. (Mark Evanier explains in his Tripp obituary that it is unclear how closely Tripp followed Stanley’s layouts. Stanley continued working on Little Lulu until 1961.

I must say I was startled by the Stanley stories in Classic Children’s Comics. Take the first one in the collection, “Five Little Babies,” by Stanley and Tripp from Marge’s Little Lulu #38 (1951). (As usual, I hereby issue a spoiler warning, since my critical essays discuss stories in detail.) Snotty rich kid Wilbur Van Snobbe is boasting to Tubby and other boys about his supposed irresistible appeal to girls. He claims that he could even get the feisty Lulu (who, as the other boys point out, hates him) “to do anything I wanted,” and, getting carried away, declares that he could make her follow him around on her hands and knees as if she were a dog. Wilbur makes a bargain with the boys that if he can actually get Lulu to do this, they will admit him to their club. Stanley leaves it to his young readers to note his subtle ironies. Although Wilbur started out in this story by playing a trick on Tubby and the other boys, and boasts how all girls are attracted to him, he is probably actually rather lonely, since he really wants to be a part of Tubby’s club. Moreover, although Tubby and his pals do not believe Lulu will do what Wilbur wants, none of these boys seems to think there is anything wrong in Wilbur getting girls to humiliate themselves; in fact, they are all quite amused by the idea. (When we are shown their clubhouse a few pages later, it bears the graffiti “No Girls Allowed.”) So much for Wilbur’s self-proclaimed image as a ladies’ man: he really doesn’t seem to think of girls as more than status symbols he can manipulate.

Tricksters, successful or otherwise, abound in this collection. Wilbur tricks Lulu by playing on her sympathies, pretending to be upset because his dog is lost. When Lulu kindly overlooks her dislike of Wilbur and offers to help, he persuades her to pretend to be another dog on his lash, in the hope that his real dog will get jealous and return. (Wilbur’s scenario may indicate further how distorted his view of affection between people-or between a person and pet–is, seeing it in terms of angry jealousy.) So, somewhat reluctantly, Lulu ends up crawling on her hands and knees, wearing a dog collar, being led on a leash by a boy, and even holding a ball in her teeth, interfering with her ability to talk.

This is staged as comedy in a supposedly innocent children’s comic. But you can tell from my description that this is also a rather disturbing image, if you bother to look past the light, comedic outward tone of the dialogue and art. If Lulu and Wilbur were adults, the sexual implications would be plain.

Tubby and his pals watch, initially with deadpan expressions, and then explode in disbelief. The boys seem angry when Wilbur shows up at their clubhouse to demand they honor their promise to make him a member. But, significantly, they don’t condemn him for humiliating Lulu, either. what seems more important to Tubby and company is their own power struggle with Wilbur: they resist acknowledging that he was able to back up his boast. “Lulu’s just crazy, period,” says Tubby: he prefers demeaning Lulu’s sanity. Ultimately, they admit Wilbur to their club.

Then Lulu’s friend Annie berates her for letting “them” humiliate her–pointedly, she blames all the boys, not just Wilbur–and reveals how she was tricked. So Lulu, infuriated, concocts a scheme to get even, making Annie her accomplice. Significantly, after her initial burst of anger, Lulu smiles while she carries out her plot, telling Annie, “we’re going to have some fun.” She can balance the scales without succumbing to hatred.

At first her scheme seems rather conventional: while Tubby, Wilbur and the other boys go skinny-dipping, Lulu and Annie steal their clothes. But then Lulu’s plan is revealed as more elaborate: claiming not to know who the thief was, Lulu brings the boys something to wear–diapers–and tells them to hide in a toy wagon under a blanket and she will pull them wagon to their homes. The boys naively comply, but Lulu instead pulls the wagon into the center of town, and then shoves it down a hill.

At the bottom of the hill, other kids pull up one end of the blanket, see the boys’ bare feet, and leap to the conclusion that it’s “a whole wagon load of feet!” That’s a rather macabre image–a wagon full of severed feet–and an enormous crowd–possibly everyone in town–gathers around the wagon for the grand unveiling by a policeman: he pulls off the blanket, revealing the five boys, naked except for diapers, in a sort of human pyramid.

So Lulu has just humiliated her humiliators, and topped them by exposing them in front of a far wider group of spectators. The diapers infantilize Tubby and company, symbolically reducing them to babies (hence the story’s title). But again, beneath the comedy, there’s an element of sexual humiliation here, due to the near-nudity; if the boys were adults, drawn in a less cartoony style, that would be more evident. Indeed, in the post-9/11 era, a human pyramid of (nearly) naked males might remind readers of a rather infamous image.

Pointedly, Stanley shows that this humiliation does not open the boys; eyes to their own misogyny. In fact, they are bewildered as to why she would pull such a prank on them, as if they still see nothing wrong with what they did to her: “She’s just mean, that’s all!” says Tubby.

Now, I’m not complaining about the subtexts in this story; rather, I think they are what make it so strong. Stanley puts potentially disturbing things in this story, but by using children as his characters, presenting it in a “cartoony” visual style, and keeping the overall tone of the storytelling light, he makes the misogyny and humiliations funny and palatable.

It strikes me that what Stanley is doing is not that different from the tellers of classic fairy tales, which may contain potential and actual violence, and the threat of death, and yet, because moral balance is achieved at the end, are regarded as proper fare for young children. that even teaches them important lessons. So Stanley’s “Five Little Babies” becomes a pop fable warning against misogyny, pride, overreaching, and even the dangers of naive trust.

I am also struck by Stanley’s pacing. For example, he could have easily cut from Wilbur’s first encounter with the boys to his conversation with Lulu, without taking the time and space to show him going home to fetch the collar and leash in between these two events. The action in this story is continuous, without any editing, as if this were a film sequence done all in one take. It’s decompressed storytelling done right, since Stanley keeps the action going throughout. Nor is there a narrator, interposing himself between the readers and the characters. It’s as if the readers is watching it all happen for real, without a break or pause, right in front of them; this must be part of the appeal of Stanley’s stories for children.

Note that after Lulu and Annie steal the boys’ clothes, they lie back and wait for the boys to discover their clothes are gone and to react. Lulu makes a point of cautioning, we’ll wait just a little while longer, Annie!”: Lulu wants the boys’ panic to reach a particular level before she intervenes. Now she is the master trickster in the story, who knows that timing is everything, just as a master comedian does–or a master storyteller like Stanley.

The next Lulu story in the collection is “Two Foots Is Feet!” by Stanley and Tripp from Marge’s Little Lulu #94 (1956). In it a loudly complaining little boy named Alvin Jones forces his company on Lulu. But they soon bond over their mutual recognition that any word, if one thinks long enough about it, seems like a nonsensical jumble of letters. Soon they are repeating the words “foot” and “feet” over and over in uncontrollable fits of laughter.

What is particularly interesting here is the adults’ reaction. They don’t get the joke, and Lulu’s father complains that they are making too much “noise.” Unable to quiet them, Lulu’s father picks them up and dumps them inside the house of Mr. Jones, Alvin’s father. Mr. Jones doesn’t like all this laughing either, picks the kids up, and brings them back to Lulu’s father’s house. For a page and a half the two fathers go back and forth, each trying to hand over the two kids–including his own child–to the other. The emotions between the two fathers grow so great that Mr. Jones tackles Lulu’s father, who has to warn him, “Look out, Jones! You’ll hurt the kids!” But soon the two fathers are locked in physical combat, while the two kids obliviously and merrily keep on laughing away.

So here we have a story about two fathers who are trying to get rid of their own children, an ominous subject. But Lulu and Alvin’s constant laughter makes it a comedy: they are too happy to have their feelings hurt by their fathers’ insensitivity.

Tubby is the star of the next Stanley story in this book, “The Guest in the Ghost-House” from Marge’s Tubby #7 (1954), written and entirely drawn by Stanley. (Despite the comic’s title, it was Stanley who created Tubby.) Heading to a swamp to catch frogs, Tubby says, “Anybody who’d step in that quicksand should have his head examined!” Tubby proceeds to violate his own rule, leading to disaster: he begins sinking into the quicksand. He yells for help over and over, night falls, and by midnight, he is nearly wholly submerged: “It’s… almost up to my nose!” In other words, he is on the brink of death!

But at midnight instead of going down into the quicksand, Tubby finds himself going up, as if he were on an elevator. He discovers he is standing atop a house rising out of the quicksand at the witching hour. Going inside through a window, Tubby says the air inside is cold and damp “l-like a tomb!” It appears that he is making a metaphorical descent into the underworld, and indeed, the house proves to be a hotel populated by ghosts.

Here Stanley strikes a balance between humor and terror. The ghosts, which he draws with even more cartoonish stylization than Tubby and other human characters, look funny rather than ghastly. They behave like ordinary staffers and guests at an ordinary hotel, who just happen to be dead. They act more friendly than frightening, but they nonetheless say things in their matter-of-fact way that terrify Tubby. The desk clerk asks Tubby to sign the register, noting that “Once you sign the register, you will become a ghost. And Mr. Frite has ways of making you sign the register.” When Tubby tells Mr. Frite, who is apparently the hotel manager, that he refuses to sign, Mr., Frite calmly introduces Tubby to Feer, a living furnace with a face, who chews a piece of coal in his mouth. Mr. Frite repeatedly hints that he will feed Tubby to Feer if Tubby persists in refusing to sign the register. Faced with the prospect of being devoured. Tubby gives in, and, wailing, signs the register. Like a kindly parent, Mr. Frite assures him that the process of turning into a ghost is “painless,” and the desk clerk observes, “Getting vaccinated is much worse.”

None of this reassures Tubby. Though Stanley draws him to look funny as he bawls with his tongue hanging out of his mouth, Tubby’s terror and anguish are clear. This is a haunted house comedy that forces Tubby–and the reader–to confront his own mortality. The house has again sunk beneath the quicksand, as if Tubby has been buried alive. As Tubby sits alone in his hotel room, the narration in a caption tells us, “By the light of the flickering candle, Tub waits in terror for the change to overcome him,” his transition from life to death. That doesn’t seem funny at all, does it? Death here may mean transformation into a ghost rather than oblivion, but it still seems surprisingly real for a comic for children.

Tubby falls asleep and awakens in utter darkness, in which only his eyes are visible, as if his body had ceased to exist. But then the moon illuminates his face. Miraculously, he has been saved: the house has risen, and as it begins sinking yet again, Tubby escapes. Once again he is up to his neck in quicksand, but this time he is found and rescued.

I wonder how I would have reacted to this story had I read it as a young boy. As an adult I can distance myself from the story and concentrate on its humorous aspects. But for a child, would it have seemed disturbing, even frightening, like a nightmare set down on paper? I suspect that Stanley’s humor would have appealed to my younger self. But I think that I would have also found the darkness in this tale intriguingly eerie. Readers would identify with Tubby, and he escapes and survives at the end, but I think that the story’s evocations of real fears of isolation, helplessness and death would have stayed with me. If you ever wondered what a horror story appropriate for young children would be like, this is it. Once again, Stanley constructs comedy around a core of darkness.

So is this a standard modus operandi for Stanley, or do Spiegelman and Mouly just prefer Lulu and Tubby stories that have these dark subtexts?

The Classic Children’s Comics collection also includes a story written and drawn by Stanley that has nothing to do with the Luluverse: “Mice Business” from Melvin Monster #3 (1965). I’d never heard of this character, Stanley’s own creation, before. From the date I’d make a guess that this series might have been inspired by The Munsters and The Addams Family on television: two shows about spooky families, one of which–The Munsters–was made up of characters who resembled classic movie monsters. But whereas their two father figures–Herman Munster, who looked like Frankenstein’s Monster, and Gomez Addams–were both quite affable, young Melvin Monster’s enormous, monstrous father clearly has anger management issues. Melvin calls his daddy “Baddy,” and Baddy is continually angry, shouting at everyone, clearly intimidating his son in this story. Baddy roars with rage; at one point his fury is so great that it literally raises the roof of their house. Baddy is a caricature of the fearsome parent.

In the collection’s introduction, Spiegelman and Mouly write that in this tale Stanley “manages to build sympathetic comedy around something as genuinely horrific as child abuse.” That may be something of an overstatement, since Baddy does not physically harm young Melvin. But it is easy to imagine that Baddy is just a few steps away from lashing out at his son. At one point in this story he angrily rips apart a wall of the house. Melvin reports in the story that Baddy used him to plug up a mouse hole.

On the other hand, Melvin’s Mummy looks like an ordinary 1960s housewife whose face happens to be wrapped in bandages–like a mummy. So in effect she is faceless, and that seems symbolically appropriate for this quiet mother in a household dominated by this aggressive, raging father.

In the story Melvin says he is afraid to go into the mouse hole after the mice. Baddy roars at him, insisting he go in: “Are you a mouse or a monster?” frightening the boy further. Baddy is a caricature of raging machismo, insisting that his son live up to his insane standard of behavior.

Ultimately, Baddy, ripping apart that wall, goes in after the mouse himself, only to discover the mouse is bigger than he is (and he is also a French chef, as if in anticipation of Pixar’s Ratatouille). Like a typical bully, Baddy is thus cowed into submission.

Thus this story seems founded on a child’s wish fulfillment fantasy of finding someone big and strong enough to stand up to an oppressive parent. Maybe the fact that it’s a mouse, a small creature that has grown to great size, means it’s subconsciously a metaphor for a child growing into an adult strong enough to stand up to his patents.

This story seems to confirm that it is a recurring motif in John Stanley’s comics work: to shine a light of comedy to dispel the very real fears among the children who made up his audience.

–Copyright 2010 Peter Sanderson

]]> http://asitecalledfred.com/2010/01/28/little-lulu-comics-in-context-230/feed/ 0 http://asitecalledfred.com/2010/01/19/comics-in-context-outfoxed/ http://asitecalledfred.com/2010/01/19/comics-in-context-outfoxed/#respond Tue, 19 Jan 2010 09:02:16 +0000 http://www.asitecalledfred.com/?p=12320 Comics historian extraordinaire Peter Sanderson makes his triumphant return to FRED with an article delving into the history of kiddie comics as featured in ComicArts' THE TOON TREASURY OF CLASSIC CHILDREN'S COMICS, starting with THE FOX AND THE CROW's treatment in comics & animation...]]>

#229 (Vol. 2 #1): OUTFOXED

As far back in my life as I can remember, I was reading comics. Of course my tastes have evolved over the course of my life, but sometimes I wonder, what would I think today of the comics I loved when I was in early grade school or even kindergarten?

The new collection, The Toon Treasury of Classic Children’s Comics, selected and edited by Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly, and published by Harry N. Abrams’ ComicArts imprint, provides me with an opportunity to find out. It is a superb anthology of stories aimed at small children from comic books published in the period from the 1940s into the mid-1960s, including comics that Baby Boomers like myself grew up with. I intend to devote a number of “Comics in Context” columns to the work of various comics creators that appear in this book.

The first stories I turned to in this collection starred were from a series that was one of my earliest favorites: The Fox and the Crow. These constant antagonists had a long run in comics, from 1945 to 1968, first in Real Screen Comics and then in their own title. The Fox and the Crow comic was probably the first DC Comic I ever read, long before I had any interest in super heroes. Back then there were rarely any credits on comic books, so I had no idea until reading Classic Children’s Comics that the principal artist on the handsomely drawn Fox and the Crow comics was named Jim Davis, who is not to be confused with the Jim Davis who created the comic strip cat Garfield.

But as a child I had no idea that not only did DC not own the Fox and the Crow, but that they had originated in animated cartoons. In the 1980s I finally saw the Fox and the Crow in The Magic Fluke (1949), a UPA cartoon directed by John Hubley, in which the Crow inadvertently gives the Fox, a conductor, a magic wand instead of a baton, leading to chaos; it appears to be the inspiration for a far greater cartoon, Tex Avery’s Magical Maestro (1952). But in The Magic Fluke, the Fox and Crow did not seem much like the versions I recalled from the comics.

It was not until a few years ago that I finally saw the first Fox and Crow cartoon, The Fox and the Grapes (1941), a theatrical cartoon directed by Frank Tashlin for Columbia:

As the title suggests, it was inspired by one of Aesop’s fables, which had been sources for cartoons at Disney and other studios, notably at Terrytoons, since the silent era. Tashlin had worked on Warner Brothers animated cartoons at various points in the 1930s and the World War II years, becoming a director. In 1941 he briefly left Warners for Columbia’s animation department. He even hired Mel Blanc, creator of so many voices for Warners cartoon characters, to create the voices for the Fox and the Crow. Eventually, Tashlin became a live action film director, working on comedies starring Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis, among others, which sometimes seem like live action cartoons in staging gags.

There is no crow in Aesop’s “The Fox and the Grapes,” which recounts a fox’s vain efforts to get hold of grapes high on a tree. (Spoiler warning: as usual I will discuss stories, including their endings, in detail.) Tashlin introduced the Crow, who tries to steal food from the Fox’s picnic spread. The Fox angrily retaliates by giving the Crow a hotfoot. The Crow then finds the fable of the Fox and the Grapes in a book and decides to restage it. He hangs a bunch of grapes on a tree branch high above the ground, and offers to trade them for some of the Fox’s picnic food. Though immediately obsessed with the grapes, the Fox refuses. So the Crow then watches placidly as the Fox makes repeated and ever more elaborate attempts to reach them, all of which backfire on him. Chuck Jones is said to have cited Tashlin’s The Fox and the Grapes as an influence on his Roadrunner-Coyote series.

The Fox and the Crow as portrayed in this cartoon were closer to the versions I recalled from the comics, though I remembered their conflicts as more personal and verbal. Tashlin only directed this first Fox and Crow cartoon before returning to Warners, but Columbia made a whole series, mostly directed by Bob Wickersham. Mel Blanc did not continue performing the Fox and Crow, but the voices he gave them were imitated in subsequent cartoons. Wickersham’s Woodman, Spare That Tree (1942) isn’t as good as Tashlin’s cartoon, but the Fox goes to even greater extremes, using an elephant and a train to try to knock down the Crow’s tree:

By Mr. Moocher (1944) the Fox lives in a handsome suburban house, and the Crow is his lower class next door neighbor, living in a shack:

Mr. Moocher
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This brings the characters close to the setting in the comics, in which the Fox’s house is next door to the Crow’s tree from the first cartoon. (UPA produced the last three Fox and Crow cartoons before Columbia ended the series.)

I was startled to see the Fox make his entrance in the Tashlin cartoon, prancing, skipping and singing along through the woods, acting as if he might have been meant to be a coded gay stereotype. In the comics the only traces of this seem to be the Fox’s first name, Fauntleroy, and possibly elements of his costume, like his big, floppy bow tie. I certainly didn’t see the implications when I read the comics as a child, and I doubt if many other readers my age did, either.

As for the Crow, in the comics his first name was Crawford, he wore a derby and smoked cigars, and spoke with a “dese” and “dose” dialect. As a child I had no idea at the time that crows could represent African-Americans in cartoons. One of the best known examples are the crows in Disney’s Dumbo (1941). Similarly, when I was a child, my favorite character in the Famous Studios (later Harvey) animated cartoons was Buzzy the Crow. Not until I saw some Buzzy cartoons recently did I realize that actor Jackson Beck (the longtime voice of Bluto in the Famous Studios Popeye cartoons), was attempting to give Buzzy a black Southern accent.

The crows in Dumbo remain controversial for being caricatured black stereotypes, but I suspect they were intended by the Disney studio as positive characters. Dumbo, the baby elephant with the enormous ears, is a misfit in the circus community. The crows also initially mock Dumbo, but after Dumbo’s friend Timothy the mouse explains how Dumbo has suffered, the crows become the elephant’s friends and supporters. In short, Dumbo has become an outcast from what is, for him, mainstream society, and is instead embraced by the alternative, more tolerant community of the crows, who are themselves outsiders.

As for Buzzy, he strikes me as being a surprisingly positive “black” character, considering his cartoons were made over a half century ago. He is a brilliant trickster figure, like a Bugs Bunny or Woody Woodpecker, who continually outsmarts his nemesis Katnip the cat, who sounds like a dumb white guy. See, for example, their tussle in Cat-Choo (1951):

Was Tashlin’s Crow–and the version in the comics–also meant to be a coded African-American? Probably not: in Tashlin’s original cartoon Mel Blanc gives the Crow what might be a lower class New York accent, maybe from Brooklyn, which the comics render by having the Crow say things like “dese” and “dose.” In one of the stories in this collection, the Crow exclaims, “What a revoltin’ development this is!”, a catchphrase used by William Bendix as the blue-collar white protagonist of the radio series The Life of Riley, and later appropriated by the Fantastic Four’s Ben Grimm.

So the clashes between the Fox and Crow have a subtext of class warfare. In the comics the Fox is an effete, prosperous bourgeois, perhaps WASP-ish, living in a nice house with a refrigerator well stocked with food; the Crow is his neighbor, who is clearly not prosperous and lives in a tree with various holes in the trunk that serve as a window and door, and seems of uncertain ethnicity. The Crow is continually attempting to con the Fox out of food or money, and, although Don Markstein’s Toonopedia advises that the Fox can be triumphant, it would appear from the evidence in Classic Children’s Comics that the Crow is more often than not the victor.

Classic Children’s Comics starts out its “Fox and the Crow” section with three short gag strips, two of which consist of only a half page each. These establish the basic pattern, in which the Crow cleverly outfoxes the Fox, who can be formidable in his anger. But though a fox is a more typical trickster figure in stories, Fauntleroy can’t quite keep up with Crawford Crow. For instance, in one of these short strips, the Fox discovers the Crow has gotten into his refrigerator and threatens to lock him inside. But the Crow is a step ahead of him and has bought an “Eskimo suit” and so will be perfectly comfortable staying inside the refrigerator indefinitely.

These three short strips set up the collection’s eight-page-long story “The Great Chiseler” from Real Screen Comics #42 (1951), which is a little masterpiece, surprising in its sophistication. The Crow starts out by soliloquizing about his own brilliance, saying “If dey gave da Nobel Prize for bein’ a great chiseler, I’d win every year!” This is hubris, as we soon see.

The Crow tries to con the Fox by asserting the Fox owes him money for breathing his air. While the Fox loses his temper over this, the Crow remains cool and calm. This is a pattern you should recognize from Bugs Bunny cartoons: Bugs keeps his cool and thus easily manipulates adversaries like Daffy Duck or Yosemite Sam, who are blinded by their own emotions. In this instance the Crow points out the fact that the wind carries air from his tree over to the Fox’s house, and then demands that the Fox pay up or stop breathing. The Fox’s panic at the idea that his air supply will be cut off keeps him from punching a hole in the Crow’s logic. The Fox looks literally dazed, and it looks as if he is about to pay the Crow for his air.

But tales of tricksters often work better when the trickster’s target can be clever as well. The Fox suddenly has a brainstorm, heads into his house, and reemerges holding what the Crow identifies as “an issue a da comic youse an’ me are in.” The Fox angrily says that the Crow pulled the same trick on him in this issue, and he won’t fall for it again.

And thus this kiddie comic has abruptly shifted into what we would now call metafiction. The Fox and the Crow are aware that they are characters in comic book stories, although neither seems at all perturbed by the notion. Whatever they do will appear in a comic book, and they know it. This even echoes Tashlin’s original cartoon, in which the Crow reads about the fable of the Fox and the Grapes and then decides to stage his own version. In Woodman not only does the Crow consult an “encycrowpedia” for ideas, but the book comments on what happens in the cartoon.

Moreover, when the Crow heads off to prepare another trick, he runs into the Fox, holding a towering stack of comic books. “I have every issue of Real Screen Comics,” the Fox tells him, so he has reference on every trick the Crow has ever pulled on him. “The Great Chiseler” was first published in 1951. Can this be one of the first references in comics to comic book collecting, or to keeping track of comic book continuity?

Now the Crow, who usually keeps his cool and control of the situation, becomes flustered and angry. On page 1 he was complimenting himself on how quickly and easily he comes up with new ideas; now he realizes that he has just been recycling old ones. The Crow is suffering from something similar to writer’s block: after all, his schemes are what usually drive the comics stories he and the Fox appear in. He quickly concocts a new trick, and it nearly works, but the Fox sees through it. Now the Crow worries that he is in effect over the hill in his chosen profession of con artist: “If I fail now, I’m t’rough! Washed up! Finished!” He’s like a creative figure going through a midlife crisis.

Finally, the Crow has the Fox calculate how much he has cheated him out of on various occasions, and then announces that since “me chiselin’ career is over,” he is moving away. The Fox realizes that if the Crow leaves, he will never be able to get any of his money back from him. The Fox goes into hysterics while the Crow remains calm and cool: they are back to their usual relationship. The Fox then offers the Crow more money to get him to stay. To put it in contemporary economic terms, it seems that the Crow owes the Fox so much money that he’s become “too big to fail” and has to be bailed out!

The Crow, ah, crows in triumph, not so much over getting ten bucks from the Fox, but from successfully devising a brand new trick, thereby proving his creativity is still at its peak. The Fox balances the scales somewhat by beating the Crow up between panels, but the Crow is still triumphant. Notice that he even uses a metaphor characterizing himself as an author to describe his victory: “I added another great chapter in da history of chiselin’!”

The 1950s are infamous in comics history for the charges that comic books influenced juvenile delinquency by supposedly promoting violence and immorality. I expect that The Fox and the Crow flew under the radar of the censors of that time. But here are stories in which the Crow continually tricks the Fox out of food and money, and gets away with it. But that doesn’t bother me: through his arrogant anger and his refusal to share, the Fox seems to deserve to be conned by the Crow. The stories are based on the surefire appeal of seeing the little guy who doesn’t have much outsmart the smugly self-satisfied big guy who has more than he needs. The appeal that the Fox and the Crow had for kids is clear: the Crow is the kids’ surrogate, using his wits to get the better of the taller–read “adult”–Fox on whom he is dependent.

When I was a small child, I thought that The Fox and the Crow was one of the best comics I read, and it’s a pleasure, reading the Fox and Crow stories in Classic Children’s Comics, to discover that they really were as clever, as well constricted, and as handsomely drawn as I thought they were in my childhood. Not only that, but I see that they had a level of sophistication that makes them appeal to me as an adult, as well. In this and some of the other impressive comics in this collection, I get the feeling that the creators felt they had great creative freedom because no one was really paying attention to little kids’ comics at the time–except the kids themselves. It’s rewarding to discover that my taste in comics from early childhood was so good!

–Copyright 2010 Peter Sanderson

]]> http://asitecalledfred.com/2010/01/19/comics-in-context-outfoxed/feed/ 0 http://asitecalledfred.com/2008/07/31/comics-in-context-228-the-bat-who-shot-liberty-valance/ http://asitecalledfred.com/2008/07/31/comics-in-context-228-the-bat-who-shot-liberty-valance/#comments Thu, 31 Jul 2008 09:06:20 +0000 http://www.quickstopentertainment.com/?p=7300 Peter returns with an in-depth look at Christopher Nolan's second big screen take on Batman, THE DARK KNIGHT...]]>

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

]]> http://asitecalledfred.com/2008/07/31/comics-in-context-228-the-bat-who-shot-liberty-valance/feed/ 6 http://asitecalledfred.com/2008/07/18/comics-in-context-227-sunday-morning-at-the-met/ http://asitecalledfred.com/2008/07/18/comics-in-context-227-sunday-morning-at-the-met/#comments Fri, 18 Jul 2008 07:34:10 +0000 http://www.quickstopentertainment.com/?p=7214 Peter sanderson recounts Peter Coogan's presentation of the sartorial choices of superheroes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art - plus some talk of Stephen Colbert, to boot...]]>

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

]]> http://asitecalledfred.com/2008/07/18/comics-in-context-227-sunday-morning-at-the-met/feed/ 2 http://asitecalledfred.com/2008/06/26/comics-in-context-226-half-a-decade-with-the-hulk/ http://asitecalledfred.com/2008/06/26/comics-in-context-226-half-a-decade-with-the-hulk/#comments Thu, 26 Jun 2008 08:55:26 +0000 http://www.quickstopentertainment.com/?p=7075 Peter's back with an in-depth look at the cinematic do-over featuring everyone's favorite gamma-monster, THE INCREDIBLE HULK...]]>

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

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