Category: Comics in Context

Last week I began my commentary on Peter Coogan’s book Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre (MonkeyBrain Press, 2006), in which he attempts to define both the superhero as a literary character and the superhero genre. He identifies three basic elements of the superhero, which he abbreviates as MPI: the mission, which benefits society and will typically last the length of the hero’s career; the powers; and the heroic identity, which is signified by a codename and costume, and which is usually accompanied by an alternate, secret identity.

Coogan makes one important point almost in passing. Wondering what made the cover of Action Comics #1 (1938), featuring Superman lifting a car, so different from past pulp and comics covers, which featured “outlandish action,” he theorizes that “Most likely, it was Superman’s costume in conjunction with the display of superpowers in a contemporary setting. This setting did not distance the action as a more exotic setting, such as an African jungle or an alien world, would have done” (Superhero p. 36). Coogan’s emphasis here is on the costume as “marker” of the superhero genre. But the setting is important, too. A cover featuring a man without a superhero costume who was lifting a large object on an alien planet would indicate a science fiction adventure story, not a superhero tale.

Over at his blog recently, former Marvel and DC writer Peter B. Gillis wondered about the Marvel and DC Universes: “How is it possible, I’d say, that in a world with antigravity, FTL travel, time travel, conscious computers, an alien contact every 2 1/2 weeks, and teleportation, that people still run around in gasoline powered cars with rubber tires?” Indeed, instead of using his anti-gravity discs for crime, why doesn’t the Wizard, one of the Fantastic Four’s enemies, mass produce them for sale to the general public? He’d become as rich as Bill Gates, and honestly. The Wizard would have also transformed the lives of ordinary people on Marvel-Earth possibly even more than the personal computer transformed our lives in the real world.

Gillis propounds what he calls “the Fundamental Theorem of Superheroes: that A superhero strip is a story in which, whatever the science fiction or fantasy elements are in the main premise, the background is always everyday reality.” He then explains that if you “change the background too much, and the strip becomes science fiction or fantasy. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it stops being a superhero strip.” Moreover, superheroes “embody our myths and our self-images, or they fail. And therefore, for maximum effect, they should be us. And it gets harder to be us if you have a vastly different backdrop.” Gillis concludes that “you can play with the tensions all you want (and to good effect), but there’s no solving it. The superhero strip is basically like opera: there’s a contradiction built in to the form itself.”

Last week I referred to opera as an artform in which one must accept the non-naturalistic convention that people sing rather than speak. The superhero genre is similarly founded on nonrealistic conventions, including the idea that superheroes and supervillains possess technology that is unavailable to the common man.

For example, in Alan Moore’s recent series Albion, in which he resurrects characters from comics published by Britain’s IPC Media, the British government has locked up the various heroes and villains, as well as their advanced technology. It is explained that the government considered the technology too valuable to destroy, but too potentially dangerous to make publicly available. So here is Moore abiding by Gillis’s rule without even knowing about it, to ensure that the background of Albion remains an “everyday reality” like our own.

So here’s another defining rule of the superhero genre, and I’d take it even further: a superhero story is typically set in an urban environment on Earth in the 20th or 21st century. Time travel stories and “Elseworlds” sagas that place superheroes in past centuries are by their very nature exceptions to the rule; they are not the normal settings for ongoing superhero series.

One reason that Zorro is not a true superhero is that his stories are set in early 19th century California, and hence are historical romances. Zorro’s time is therefore not our own “everyday reality.” Zorro fits specifically into the tradition of the swashbuckler, a type of adventure hero associated with period settings, like Robin Hood and Captain Blood. There are even elements of Zorro stories which overlap with the Western (the California setting and pursuits by horseback, for example).

Neil Gaiman’s 1602 (see “Comics in Context” #13, 18, 21, 25, 28, 33, 35, 36) transplants familiar Marvel superheroes and supervillains into the early 17th century, and persuasively shows how they could fit into the culture of that period. This is indeed a superhero series, but 1602‘s premise is that 17th century superheroes are anachronisms: the superheroes don’t belong there, and time must be set aright. 1602 thus acknowledges that it is an exception to a rule that is otherwise strict.

The first two volumes of Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (see “Comics in Context” #22, 23) are set mainly in late Victorian London, another urban environment which serves as an effective counterpart to the New York (and such fictionalized analogues as Gotham City) in the modern superhero genre. The League has an overall mission (though some members–Mr. Hyde and Griffin, the Invisible Man–don’t have altruistic motives), some (Hyde and Griffin) have actual super-powers (while Captain Nemo has super-advanced technology), and some (Hyde and Griffin, and even Nemo) have codenames and dual identities. None of them wear unusual costumes, although Griffin’s bandages and Hyde’s bestial appearance are sufficiently iconic to count as substitutes. Significantly, Allan Quatermain and Mina Murray, the two core members, who will star in future installments, have neither codenames nor costumes nor superpowers (though they will acquire immortality). Moore intentionally portrays that the Victorian League as a precursor of modern superhero teams. But the League members are not true superheroes, though they are “extraordinary gentlemen” (and an extraordinary lady).

The prime example of a superhero series set in a future time is DC’s Legion of Super-Heroes. Coogan points out that Legion is actually a “cross-genre” series that “blends the superhero and science fiction genres. It is set in the thirtieth century and features futuristic technology, space travel, alien races, other worlds, and a variety of other SF elements. . . . But it is clearly a superhero book” inasmuch as “The characters all have superpowers, wear costumes, have codenames, and the group’s founders sought to emulate. . .Superboy and Supergirl” (p. 52). Coogan might have added that the Legionnaires have an ongoing altruistic mission, and that many of their primary adversaries (such as the Fatal Five and Time Trapper) clearly qualify as supervillains.

These various examples of series demonstrate that determining whether or not a certain character is a superhero may be a complex task. Coogan observes that “specific superheroes can exist who do not fully demonstrate these three elements [mission, powers, and identity], and heroes from other genres may exist who display all three elements to some degree but should not be regarded as superheroes” (pp. 39-40). It may be necessary to examine the context in which the character under examination exists. Coogan states that “If a character basically fits the mission-powers-identity definition, even with significant qualifications, and cannot easily be placed into another genre because of the preponderance of superhero-genre conventions, the character is a superhero” (p. 40). On the other hand, he asserts, “if a character largely fits the MPI qualifications of the definition, but can firmly and sensibly be placed within another genre, then the character is not a superhero. Typically, the identity convention (codename and costume) plays the greatest role of the three elements in helping to rule characters in or out” of the superhero genre (pp. 43-44).

Hence, the “preponderance of superhero genre conventions” makes the Legion a superhero series perhaps more than a science fiction series. But the weakness of the “identity” element in League means its first two volumes are a pastiche of Victorian science fiction, but not a true superhero series.

Since this column is titled “Comics in Context,” it should be no surprise that I quite like the idea of examining the context of a character in the story to determine whether or not he or she is a superhero. As I stated last week, this was the most eye-opening insight I got from Coogan’s book.

For example, Coogan asserts that the Hulk is a superhero without a mission. In the traditional portrayal of the Hulk, he has not dedicated himself to fighting criminals and protecting the innocent: he merely seeks solitude and survival. What happens is that supervillains attack the Hulk, or he inadvertently stumbles across them, so he ends up battling them. Of course, the Hulk qualifies under the Identity and Powers categories. Moreover, Coogan points out, Hulk stories “are suffused with the conventions of the superhero genre: supervillains. . .superhero physics–the transformative power of gamma rays;” a sidekick “—Rick Jones, superteams-the Avengers and the Defenders,” and more (p. 41).

But this poses the interesting dilemma of whether or not The Incredible Hulk live action television series of the 1970s was a true superhero show. There were no supervillains or superteams or sidekicks. Apart from the presence of the Hulk, the series seemed to be set in a thoroughly realistic world. What if we did not know that the Hulk was a lead character in Marvel’s line of superhero comics? Isn’t it possible that viewers of the show who did not read Marvel comics might have considered The Incredible Hulk to be a science fiction series, or even a horror series, since the Hulk is so obviously a variation on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? Arguably, it was not until the later Hulk TV movies that guest starred Daredevil and Thor that the live action TV Hulk more clearly became a superhero series.

Batman has no actual super-powers, but Coogan observes, he has the Mission and Identity, and “operates in a world brimming with the conventions of the superhero genre,” including supervillains, sidekicks, superteams, and the helpful authority figure, Commissioner Gordon. Here is where my own theory about non-superpowered superheroes comes into play. As I explained last time, Batman has adopted a persona and modus operandi that figuratively cast him as a superhuman being: he is metaphorically a bat in human form.

In the case of the Fantastic Four, they have mission and powers, but Coogan contends that “elements of the identity convention [are] absent or weak” (p. 41): although they have codenames, they do not have secret identities. Coogan concludes that “The secret identity is a typical, but not necessary, convention for the genre” (p. 42). I would say that in the FF’s case, what is important is that the characters have real names and code names that signify the two sides of their lives: they are superheroes as well as people who are members of a family and have to contend with everyday problems. This duality is what is more important than actual secret identities, although a secret identity is often a practical measure necessary to ensure that the superhero can lead an everyday life as “one of us.”

Coogan then provides an extended case study of Marvel’s Luke Cage, alias Power Man, who on first glance seems to be a 1970s-style blaxploitation hero with super-powers. Coogan notes that a superstrong character like Cage “could operate a detective/security agency within a science fiction or horror/SF milieu and not be considered a superhero” (p. 44). But Coogan then demonstrates in detail just why Cage is a true superhero.

Cage has super-powers, and he acquires a code name, “Power Man,” which, as Coogan points out, not only denotes his superpowers, but includes the “racial subtext” of “black power” (p. 47). Oddly, Coogan overlooks the fact that Cage does not have a purely altruistic mission as most superheroes do: as the original title of his series stated, he is a “hero for hire,” a mercenary. Still, by this point, Cage has demonstrated he will not accept unethical assignments, and that he will risk his life to combat evil even when he isn’t being paid to do so.

In Cage’s case Coogan makes an important point perhaps without fully realizing its significance. He observes that “The editors and writers at Marvel Comics took great care to place Luke Cage within the superhero genre by surrounding the character with superhero conventions and foregrounding these conventions” (p. 44). In the first story, a man who witnesses Cage stopping a criminal tells him that he “nailed him like a real super-hero!” Cage then goes to a costume shop where he acquires his familiar outfit. Although it does not look like a conventional superhero costume, Cage thinks of it that way, commenting, “It’s all part of the super-hero scene.” In a later issue Cage even adopts his codename “Power Man” explicitly in order to be taken as seriously as the more traditional superheroes.

All of this suggests to me that another factor in determining whether or not a character is a superhero could be called “declaration of intent.” What Coogan has demonstrated here is that not only the editors and writers of the Luke Cage series, but also Luke Cage the character explicitly stated their intent that Cage would be a superhero.

Reading Coogan’s book, I realized that there are other characters who do not strictly fit his three main criteria for superherodom, but who are unquestionably superheroes. Take Rogue of the X-Men. She has super-powers, and upon joining the X-Men, she accepted their mission (protecting “normal” humans from evil mutants, etc.) as her own. But her “identity” also seems weak. Not until her 2004 limited series, decades after her debut, was Rogue’s real name, Anna Marie, established, and her last name is still a mystery. According to Dictionary.com, her codename “Rogue” can mean “a dishonest, knavish person,” “a playfully mischievous person,” or “a tramp or vagabond.” The first and third definitions fit Rogue at earlier stages of her life, and the second only describes one aspect of her personality. So her codename doesn’t tell you much about her present personality and nothing about her powers.

Her colorful skintight costumes suggest she is in the superhero business, but do not indicate her powers or mission or persona. Often she does not even wear an “X” insignia to denote her membership in the X-Men. (And what kind of insignia could possibly indicate her absorption powers?: A sponge?) She has changed costumes so often that one cannot identify specific colors with her costume as one can with Superman. Rogue’s iconic visual trademark is instead the white streak through her brown hair, but that indicates nothing that makes her a superhero.

Not only does Rogue effectively lack a full “real name,” but she does not truly have a life apart from her role as a member of the X-Men. The personas of the victims of her absorption powers provided Rogue with a kind of alternate identities. Still, Rogue lacks the true sort of dual identity that conventionally characterizes the superhero.

Obviously Rogue, as a super-powered member of the X-Men, is a superhero. But perhaps these inadequacies in “identity” are part of the reason that Rogue remains a supporting character in X-Men, and not a star. Rogue can star in occasional limited series, but not in her own ongoing series as Wolverine does. She is simply not as iconic a character as he is.

In his book Coogan examines a number of characters, such as Adam Strange, the Punisher, and Shang-Chi, to determine whether or not they fall within the definition of superheroes. Inspired by his example, I decided to apply his approach to some other characters, in and out of comic books.

What about DC Comics’ Zatanna? She has a costume, but it’s not a superhero costume. Her top hat, tails, and net stockings comprise a leggy feminine counterpart to the traditional stage magician’s costume. But like a superhero costume, Zatanna’s outfit denotes her biography, powers, and personality: she’s the daughter of a magician, wields magic herself, she’s a performer, and she’s sexy. Over the years there have been attempts to give her a superhero costume, but they’ve failed, in part because they did not convey her identity as well as her magician’s outfit does.

Zatanna’s got powers, but she doesn’t have a codename or dual identity: Zatanna is her actual first name. As for mission, she is altruistic enough to fight alongside the Justice League, but she seems to spend most of her time as a stage performer; she doesn’t patrol cities looking for criminals as Batman and Spider-Man do. So just what makes her a superhero?

I’d say it’s context. Coogan makes the intriguing point that Shang-Chi, the the protagonist of Marvel’s Master of Kung Fu, is “a martial arts hero operating in an older pulp-style universe as the son and enemy of Dr. Fu Manchu” (p. 55). I would add that Master of Kung Fu writer Doug Moench and artist Paul Gulacy updated that “pulp-style universe” into a world resembling that of the James Bond novels. However, Coogan asserts, when Shang-Chi operates as part of the Marvel Knights superhero team, he becomes a superhero. I’m not sure that membership in a superhero team is necessarily sufficient to make Shang-Chi a superhero; he still lacks actual super-powers, a codename, or a superhero-style costume. (Shang-Chi’s outfit is supposed to be traditional Chinese clothing.) But certainly being a member of Marvel Knights puts him in the superhero genre in those stories.

Similarly, though the Punisher wears a costume, complete with chevron, and has a codename, Coogan believes that in his own stories he fits more into the subgenre of vengeful vigilantes that was founded by Don Pendleton’s The Executioner. And it’s true that even though the Punisher usually wears a costume, he has no super-powers and his solo stories usually are comparatively realistic crime stories, minus the exaggerations of the superhero genre. But when the Punisher appears in a superhero series like Daredevil or Spider-Man, Coogan contends that he too becomes a superhero (or, I’d say, a superantihero, or maybe a supervillain). Here I agree. When the Punisher interacts with superheroes, his own costume takes on more importance than it does in his solo stories, since it now marks him as one of the same kind as the likes of Spider-Man. Borrowing a metaphor from his colleague Randy Duncan, Coogan compares Shang-Chi and the Punisher to planetoids that can “get pulled by the gravity of writers and publishers into the superhero genre and out of their own genre systems” (p. 55).

Coogan’s law of gravity applies well to Zatanna. First, Zatanna is the daughter of Zatara, a crimefighting magician from comics’ Golden Age, and who is not a true superhero but a knockoff of the comic strip character Mandrake the Magician. She was created to be Zatara’s younger, female counterpart, so she wasn’t truly conceived as being a superhero. Editor Julius Schwartz and writer Gardner Fox introduced Zatanna as a featured character in various superhero series: Hawkman, The Atom, Green Lantern, Elongated Man, and finally Justice League. She even became a member of the Justice League. So, following Coogan’s rule, Zatanna is a superhero because of the company she keeps. But significantly, Zatanna also functions well in DC’s Vertigo line of titles, not only because her powers are supernatural, but also because her costume is a variation on conventional formal wear, and does not necessarily mark her as a superhero. Hence, Zatanna is a superhero when she’s in a superhero story, but isn’t when she’s in a Vertigo book.

How about the Spirit? His creator, Will Eisner, repeatedly contended that the Spirit was not a superhero. Interviewed in The Jack Kirby Collector #16 (1997), Eisner asserted that “They wanted an heroic character, a costumed character. They asked me if he’d have a costume. And I put a mask on him and said, “˜Yes, he has a costume!’ “ (Superman had debuted only two years before, in 1938, and was an enormous success.) So here is Eisner’s “declaration of intent” NOT to make the Spirit a superhero! But the author’s intent is not necessarily the decisive factor, as far as I’m concerned.

Just giving the Spirit a mask doesn’t necessarily make him a superhero, either; he could be a masked avenger from the pulps, like the Shadow, or radio drama, like the Green Hornet, or even the comics, like the Golden Age Sandman in his original hat, suit and gas mask.

How does Eisner’s Spirit fit Coogan’s three principal criteria? He has mission: the Spirit combats criminals purely for altruistic reasons. He’s not a member of the police force, and he makes no money off crimefighting. (Actually, I’m rather puzzled as to how he supports himself.)

The Spirit also has a secret identity: his real name is Denny Colt. His codename, the Spirit, signifies his origin: seemingly killed by Dr. Cobra’s formula, Colt actually fell into suspended animation and then “returned” to life. One could say that the mysterious “Spirit” is haunting the criminals he pursues. The name “Spirit” might also suggest the character’s commitment to his ideals; he is not in crimefighting for material gain. (It occurs to me that the name “the Spirit” might even have been a knockoff of the name of the Saint, Leslie Charteris’s amateur sleuth who had been appearing in novels since 1928 and films since 1938, again only two years before the Spirit’s debut.)

The Spirit’s costume does not signify his biography, powers, or mission. It’s not a typical superhero costume, anyway: it’s a conventional hat and suit, along with a mask and gloves, all blue, except for his tie, which is usually red.

Ah, but here we can apply Coogan’s observation that a superhero’s costume typically has iconic colors, so that, for example, the combination of red, blue and yellow signify Superman. Isn’t the Spirit’s blue outfit similarly iconic?

The Spirit, of course, lacks super-powers. Moreover, whereas, say, Batman is clearly superior in athletic ability and combat skills to most ordinary people. In contrast, Eisner repeatedly showed the Spirit getting beaten up, as if he were not that much better at fighting than his adversaries.

Nevertheless, the Spirit’s origin story casts him as figuratively superhuman: as noted, he seemingly rises from the dead. Moreover, he continues the ghost motif by making his home underground in Wildwood Cemetery, as if he were an avenging spirit from the hereafter.

Sometimes Eisner even depicts the Spirit as if he somehow has superhuman qualities. In reviewing Eisner’s story “Ten Minutes” about a hapless criminal named Freddy (in “Comics in Context” #68) I wrote, “But then Freddy sees the Spirit approaching in a mirror; the Spirit even calls Freddy by name. How does he know?” How did the Spirit know his name, or where to find him? I concluded, “This is the Spirit as the spirit of nemesis, all-knowing, unrelenting, inescapable.”

Darwyn Cooke’s recent Batman/Spirit comic book surprised me by revealing so many similarities between the two heroes and their series: both have supervillains, secret underground lairs, fatherly authority figures in the police department, urban settings. In other words, Cooke emphasizes that the Spirit’s world has the same “preponderance of superhero-genre conventions” as Batman’s. Indeed (and here I issue a spoiler alert for the remainder of the paragraph), when the Spirit and Batman exchange masked identities towards the story’s end, Cooke makes his thesis plain.

Moreover, the fact that the Spirit does not seem out of place interacting with Batman and his supporting cast of friends and foes may be an example of the “gravitational force” of the superhero genre. Even if the Spirit is not a superhero in Eisner’s stories, perhaps he becomes one when he interacts with Batman.

If Eisner had lived long enough to see Cooke’s Batman/Spirit crossover, it would have been interesting to see how he would have reacted to it. Eisner did not always adamantly deny that the Spirit was a superhero. In the introduction to The Spirit Casebook, Eisner wrote that “The Spirit was for real; he was human, made of flesh and blood and therefore killable,” and yet also asserted that “He was simply a guy who had a perfectly acceptable trade–that of chasing and catching crooks. He was good at it. He got into the superhero business by accident; stumbled into it, you might say.” Just as Eisner perhaps stumbled into realizing that the Spirit is indeed a superhero.

How about the successful new NBC series Heroes, whose title characters all possess superhuman powers? As far as Declaration of Intent goes, the show’s creator, Tim Kring, believes that Heroes is in the superhero genre. But, he told The New York Times (October 30, 2006), he had little knowledge of superhero comics, the prime source of superhero stories. “‘I was not a comic book nerd,’ Mr. Kring said, sipping an iced tea with lemonade in a restaurant near the studio lot here where Heroes is shot. ‘But the truth is that nowadays that world is so pervasive, especially when you have kids, that you go to movies in the summertime and that’s what you see. I didn’t really feel like I had to come from that world.’” (And just why do some people gratuitously insult part of their core audience?)

So Kring taught himself about the superhero genre from film adaptations of comics series, rather than the primary sources themselves. Then it’s not surprising that his understanding of the genre is somewhat flawed. (Nonetheless, I’m amused to discover that the show’s official fan website, 9th Wonders, is done in the style of Stan Lee’s Marvel Bullpen Bulletins pages from the 1960s.)

According to the Times article, Kring believed that “the idea of heroes” was “missing” from today’s world, and “That’s where the notion of superheroes came in, though he had no interest in anybody “˜donning a costume.’ Instead, he said, he wanted to make ordinary people suddenly extraordinary. “ Well, of course, Peter Parker was an “ordinary” person who became “suddenly extraordinary” when he gained the powers of Spider-Man, so in this respect Heroes isn’t different from traditional superhero sagas.

How does Heroes fit Coogan’s three main criteria? Powers, yes. But identity, no. Although the super-powered characters keep their powers secret from the general public, they do not have secret identities, codenames, or costumes. More importantly, they don’t have heroic identities distinct from their everyday selves. Coogan mentions “the exaggeration inherent in the superhero genre” (p. 31). Part of that exaggeration lies in the concept that the adoption of alternate, heroic identities is a reasonable choice in the world of the superhero genre. In the world of Heroes, it seems, it isn’t.

And what about mission? In Heroes some of the title characters are famously out to “Save the cheerleader, save the world,” presumably meaning saving New York City from being blown up, as has been prophesied. But these are only immediate goals. Another example of the larger than life exaggeration in the superhero genre is that the heroes are dedicated to career-long tasks of protecting other people and combatting injustice, at great risk to themselves and without recompense; there aren’t many people in the real world who are this selfless. As far as I know from the episodes I’ve seen, the title characters in Heroes don’t have that sort of ongoing mission as yet.

To my mind, Heroes isn’t truly in the superhero genre; it’s actually a science fiction series. As far as superheroes are concerned, Heroes does not make the list.

Next week I will turn to a particularly controversial question about who’s a superhero and who’s not: what about Buffy? And, for that matter, who’s a supervillain and who’s not?

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF
Believe it or not, I have yet another book out. This is the Marvel Vault, from Becker and Mayer, and is a project similar to the Marvel Classic Super Heroes book I previously wrote for the company. Marvel Vault contains a history of Marvel Comics, written by Roy Thomas (who covered up to 1974) and myself (who did the rest), as well as reproductions of rare collectibles from the Golden Age onward. And the book is already in its second printing!

-Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

With the approach of the holiday season, I found appropriate entertainment by going to see the Walt Disney Company and producer Cameron Mackintosh’s new Mary Poppins stage musical, which opened in London in 2004, and which arrived on Broadway at the New Amsterdam Theatre this fall. Based on both P. L. Travers original Mary Poppins books and the 1964 Disney movie, the stage musical is another retelling of the tale of the proper but mysterious nanny with supernatural powers who takes charge of the children Jane and Michael Banks.

As I did with Disney’s Tarzan Broadway musical (see “Comics in Context” #133), I used the occasion of attending the Mary Poppins musical to finally read P. L. Travers’ first Mary Poppins book, originally published in 1934. I expect that by now far more people know Mary Poppins from the Disney movie, which I’ve seen several times, most recently the ABC Family Channel telecasts on December 11, than from Travers’ six books about the character.

But I have long been aware of the recurring complaint about the Disney film: that Walt Disney, actress Julie Andrews, and their collaborators, turned Travers’ severe and rather forbidding Mary Poppins cheerful and sugary sweet. Cultural critic Edward Rothstein reiterates the point in his article in The New York Times (Nov. 20, 2006), pointing out that Travers’ Mary Poppins “often had a look of “˜fury,’ who “˜snaps,’ and “˜sniffs’ and “˜retorts.’ That Mary Poppins “˜never wasted time being nice.’” In her article about Travers in the December 19, 2005 issue of The New Yorker, Caitlin Flanagan writes that Mary Poppins “is, in fact, very often “˜angry,’ “˜threatening,’ “˜scornful,’ and “˜frightening.’” On the other hand, Disney’s Mary Poppins announces early on on the film that she is “never cross.”

So I watched the Family Channel telecast with this in mind. For most of the film Andrews’ Poppins is haughty and strict, as the character is in the book. Disney’s Poppins does not behave quite as unpleasantly as Travers’ can. The book states that Mary Poppins is “frightening” (Odyssey Classics paperback, p. 12), and at one point Mary Poppins “regarded” her young charge Michael “with something like disgust” (p. 116). But, for example, consider the scene in the movie in which Mary Poppins visits her Uncle Albert, who levitates to the ceiling when he laughs. Mary Poppins’ friend Bert and the two children she is nannying, Jane and Michael Banks, find his laughter contagious, join in, and are soon levitating upwards as well, while a severe Mary Poppins seethes with disapproval at this supposedly improper behavior. This scene is adapted reasonably faithfully from the first book, and here Disney’s and Travers’ versions of Mary Poppins exactly coincide. (This scene, and its memorable song, “I Love to Laugh” are not in the Broadway musical, perhaps because it would require five people in flight harnesses at once, or perhaps because it would dilute the theatrical impact of Mary Poppins’ flying at the end of each act.)

The reputation of Disney’s kinder, gentler Mary Poppins seems to me to be founded on three key sequences, which are all so memorable that it’s not surprising that they eclipse the scenes in which Andrews performs more in Travers mode. First, there’s the song “A Spoonful of Sugar,” which, as the lyrics say, helps the medicine go down. This too turns out to be based on an incident in the first book, in which Mary Poppins administers medicine to Jane and Michael, which turns out to taste delicious. But whereas in the book Mary Poppins wears a “stern” expression and gives Jane “a warning, terrible glance” (p. 12), in the movie Andrews’ Poppins is smiling and beaming with happiness as she sings. Her manner fits the point of the song, and, actually, there seems to me to be a contradiction in the book between Travers’ sweet-tasting medicine and the sour temperament of her Mary Poppins. If medicine should have an appealing taste, then why shouldn’t a nanny have a pleasant disposition? By the same logic, wouldn’t that make the children more willing to obey her? Or is Travers making a more complicated point with the medicine? Is she saying that just as something necessary but unpleasant, like medicine, should paradoxically taste good, then Mary Poppins, who takes the children on wonderful adventures, should have an unpleasant manner in order to create a kind of balance?

Rothstein insightfully pointed out that Travers’ Mary Poppins “is a caricature of the most authoritarian form of adulthood” and that “In part this reveals how children perceive adulthood.” He explains that children must obey their parents, and yet the children recognize that with adulthood comes a “realm of magical freedom” they do not yet have. I compare this to the theme of maturation in the superhero genre: for example, the boy Peter Parker, who is dutiful to his aunt and must obey his tyrannical boss, becomes Spider-Man, with superhuman abilities that give him a freedom to rise above society’s restrictions.

Rothstein argues that “Discipline is required for the magical realms to be revealed; it is what makes freedom possible. Without the one, there is meaningless fantasy; without the other, there is heartless rigidity.” Here too there is a similarity to the superhero genre, in which, traditionally, the protagonist has both a “civilian identity,” in which he is a part of society and accepts its restrictions on his behavior, and a superheroic one, in which he has abilities and freedom exceeding those of ordinary people, but nonetheless devotes them to the service of society. The most famous of the superheroes is both Superman and Clark Kent. To be only Clark Kent would doom him to a life of “rigidity” he could not transcend; to be only Superman would mean leading a “meaningless fantasy” life without grounding in everyday humanity. Mary Poppins has extraordinary magical powers, and yet she works as a nanny, using them in caring for children. Similarly, her friend Bert, as we shall see, may have magical powers of his own, but instead devotes himself to art (in the book, movie and musical) or to serving society as a chimney sweep (in the movie and musical).

Although Cameron Mackintosh promised P. L. Travers before her death that his stage version of Mary Poppins would be truer to her character, if you have a singing, dancing Mary Poppins, then the battle to make her consistently stern and authoritarian has already been lost. The other two sequences in the movie that present a sunny, cheerful Mary Poppins are the adventure in the world within Bert’s sidewalk painting, full of singing and dancing (with the songs “It’s a Jolly Holiday with Mary” and “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”) and the “Step in Time” song and dance number with Bert and his fellow chimney sweeps on the rooftops of London.

The “Jolly Holiday” sequence is surprisingly faithful to a chapter of the book, in which Mary Poppins and Bert do indeed enter a world within his painting, find themselves dressed in fancy clothes, and are served tea in the woods by a waiter (but not by penguins, which Walt Disney contributed to the film). Moreover, in Travers’ book Bert is clearly Mary Poppins’ boyfriend, and their adventure in this alternate world is just as clearly a date. My biggest surprise is that in this chapter, which is only the second in the book, Travers has Mary Poppins’ stern persona entirely melt away. She speaks “softly” (p. 18) and “brightly” (p. 19); she is described as “pleased” (p. 23). Even the book’s insistence that Mary Poppins is rather plain (and therefore does not look like Julie Andrews) is undercut in this chapter by Bert’s awestruck reaction to her in her new finery: “Then he gulped and said: “˜Golly!’” (p. 22).

There has been some controversy in the New York City media about the end of Act I of the musical, in which toys come to life and menace Jane and Michael, who have been naughty. I don’t know how I would react to seeing this if I were a small child, but from my adult perspective it didn’t seem at all disturbing. What I found strange was the musical’s treatment of “Jolly Holiday.” Mary Poppins, Bert and the children do not enter Bert’s painting, presumably because that would be a hard thing to stage. Instead the park transforms into a more colorful setting, Mary Poppins and Bert reenter in handsome new costumes, and statues in the classical style, including one of the god Neleus, come to life and join in the dancing. (Neleus’s statue is from one of Travers’ later Poppins books.) The strange thing is that Neleus and the other statues are virtually nude. (They’re actually in skin-tight costumes and body paint, and naughty bits remain covered, but the effect is still that of semi-nudity.)

Perhaps this wouldn’t bother Travers. In the first Mary Poppins book a star named Maia appears on Earth as a human child, and Travers emphasizes that “the child had practically no clothes on, only a light wispy strip of blue stuff that looked as though she had torn it from the sky to wrap round her naked body” (p. 183). Mary Poppins is started by the sight, but Maia is unconcerned by her near-nudity, and perhaps Travers means us to be unconcerned as well.

It seems weird and perhaps a little disturbing to watch performers in Edwardian costumes cavorting with semi-nude figures in front of an audience full of families with small children. But, as I said, Mary Poppins and Bert are obviously on a date of sorts, so I suppose that Neleus and the semi-nude female statues provide a libidinous subtext.

My initial reaction to reading this chapter was that it gave Walt Disney all the justification he needed to presenting the merry, beautiful, singing and dancing Mary Poppins of the “Jolly Holiday” sequence. Since this is how she behaves around her boyfriend Bert, then it would also make sense that his presence would induce her to join in the merriment in “Step in Time.” Watching the movie again, I noticed that after engaging in dancing in “Step in Time,” Andrews’ Mary Poppins abruptly and amusingly reverts to her usual staid persona, holding up her hands and turning her face in exaggerated disdain when the other chimney sweeps offer to keep dancing with her.

My second reaction was to realize what the difference is between Travers’ and Disney’s versions of the “Jolly Holiday” sequence: in Travers’ version the kids aren’t there. Travers makes the point that this happens on Mary Poppins’ day off, so she has dropped the staid, stern persona she otherwise uses in her dealings with the Banks family and virtually everyone else.

So why did Travers do this as early as Chapter Two? Presumably it was to alert the reader that there was more to Mary Poppins’ personality than the strict disciplinarian in the rest of the book. To build upon Rothstein’s reasoning, this chapter speaks to children’s partial awareness that adults have a side to their lives apart from dealing with kids. To continue my analogies with the superhero genre, it shows that Mary Poppins has a “secret identity” of sorts. Actually, she has a multi-leveled identity. Mr. and Mrs. Banks, and the world at large, think of her as an ordinary woman, with a proud, severe manner. She allows the children to see that she has magical powers, but, in the book, does not allow them to see more than the strict authority figure side of her personality. Bert gets to see a softer side of her personality, and notice that Mary Poppins’ other self comes complete with a fancy costume. And then there are suggestions, as we shall see, that Mary Poppins is something other than human.

This reminds me of one of my favorite characters in Charles Dickens’ novels, though one who I think is generally overlooked: Mr. Wemmick from Great Expectations. At the office Mr. Wemmick has a grim, severe, emotionless manner, and characteristically keeps his jaw locked in an unpleasant expression. At one point Mr. Wemmick brings Pip, the protagonist, to his home, and Pip notices that with every step they take away from the office, Mr. Wemmick’s jaw loosens by another degree, and his demeanor and facial expression become more relaxed and sunnier: he transforms into a different, happier, more outgoing self. His home looks like a miniature castle, and it’s like a playhouse where he lives with his Aged Parent. Staying with the Wemmicks is like one big party, but when Pip and Mr. Wemmick head back to the office, Pip observes that with every step Mr. Wemmick’s face and demeanor settles back into the rigid persona he uses in the business world.

Rothstein asserts that Jane and Michael “learn that “˜Appearances are Deceptive.’ They learn, that is, that there is a split between the inner life and outward appearance, between the magic of Mary Poppins and her thoroughly adult facade.” As Rothstein points out, after they have one of their encounters with the supernatural, Mary Poppins continually insists to the children that no such thing happened. This happens in the book, the movie, and the musical. The children are puzzled by Mary Poppins’ denials, but perhaps the point that she is trying to make is that they should not tell the adults what happened. It’s like the way that in her Harry Potter books, J. K. Rowling’s wizards hide the existence of the supernatural from the ordinary people, the “muggles” (see “Comics in Context” #148).

Like the secret identity motif in the superhero genre, this “split,” as Rothstein calls it, reflects the truth that an individual can have a public side and a private side to his personality. Justifying such a split, as Rothstein does, can have negative effects. It could provide a rationale for people who belong to one ethnic minority to try to “pass” as members of the majority, or for gays to remain in the closet, or for anyone to refrain from challenging the opinions of the majority. When Stan Lee wrote The X-Men, being mutants was the title characters’ secret “inner life”; they posed as ordinary humans in their “outward appearance,” their everyday identities. When Grant Morrison took over X-Men, he “outed” Professor Xavier and the others as mutants; the new idea was that mutants should no longer hide what they were, but be proud of their “inner” selves. (See “Comics in Context” #28.)

I find Travers’ attitude towards the “split” somewhat disturbing. She seems to be not only defending the stereotypical British emotional reserve, but taking it to an extreme. Why shouldn’t Mary Poppins express affection for the children in her care, or even smile at them? It’s as if Travers was justifying adults’ emotional withdrawal from their children, as long as they can tell themselves that their “inner selves” actually care about them.

In her New Yorker article Caitlin Flanagan describes Travers’ “formidable maiden great-aunt, Helen Morehead. Aunt Ellie, as she was called, bossed everyone around, but her fierceness disguised a kindness she would have been embarrassed to admit.” Aunt Ellie is an obvious model for Mary Poppins, but the original book never suggests that Mary Poppins feels embarrassed about admitting kind feelings towards the children; only at the book’s end, when she leaves presents for them before flying off, does Travers imply that Mary Poppins feels any fondness for the children. Notice that Flanagan also notes about Travers’ story meetings for the film with songwriters Richard M. and Robert B. Sherman, “Travers, whose youthful self-confidence had gathered over the years into an oppressive self-righteousness, interrupted, corrected, bullied, and shamed them.” Sound like anyone we know?

On the other hand, there are other ways in which a “split” between one’s public and private personas is natural, harmless, and even good. A lawyer or a doctor might well be, say, an amateur rock musician or even a comics collector in his or her spare time. A husband and wife have to be proper and respectable when they are working in the office, but may well have a passionate sex life at home that is no one’s business but their own. So Mary Poppins insists that the children behave in a proper manner in their everyday life, but also enables them to experience an “extraordinary adventure,” as Travers calls it (p. 187) from time to time.

In various classic children’s stories there is a threshold that one must cross to travel from the real world from the fantasy world. Hence Alice tumbles down the rabbit hole or passes through the looking glass; Dorothy is swept up by a tornado that deposits her in Oz; Wendy joins Peter Pan in flying from London to Neverland; the Pevensie children enter the wardrobe and exit into Narnia. Some more recent examples of fantasy tales don’t draw such a sharp boundary between the real world and the fantasy world. Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere (see “Comics in Context” #18) exists within London; even so, most of it seems to be out of sight underground, notably in London Underground stations. In J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series wizards and witches are an unsuspected part of the general population, and the supernatural can manifest itself in the everyday world. (Take, for example, the magical night bus at the beginning of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.) Even so, Rowling also follows the convention of separating the real and fantasy worlds. Hence, in the first book (and film) Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Harry and Hagrid pass through a secret entrance into Diagon Alley, a shopping and banking area for wizards that the non-magical people, the “muggles,” know nothing about. Similarly, in a train station Harry has to run straight at–and into–a post to emerge on the platform for the train to the wizards’ school, Hogwarts, a platform that seems to lie in some other dimension. Of course, the Rowling books mostly take place at the isolated location of Hogwarts, and although there are various means by which wizards can get there (the train, a flying car, etc.), as yet there is no indication that it is accessible to any muggles. The teleportational “portkey” in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire serves as another means of transcending the boundary between the real and the fantastic.

Mary Poppins–the original book, the movie, and the musical–also makes use of the magical threshold device in the form of Bert’s sidewalk painting, through which Mary and Bert magically travel into the world it pictures. But this is an exception. Otherwise Poppins makes the point that there is no division between the real and the magical, and that most people are simply unaware of the marvels around them. Mary Poppins acts as the children’s guide to these wonders. She brings them to visit her Uncle Albert (in the book and movie), who levitates himself when he laughs, and (in the book and musical) to visit Mrs. Corry, who is apparently thousands of years old, both of whom live right in London. (In the book, however, Mrs. Corry’s shop disappears as soon as the children leave it, suggesting that they had crossed some sort of magical threshold without knowing it.) Statues in the park come to life (in a later book and in the musical). Animals, such as the dog Andrew (in the book and movie) speak their own language, which Mary Poppins understands; in the local zoo (in the book) the animals can even speak English (but don’t do so in front of people other than Miss Poppins and her charges). As noted, in Chapter 11 a star, Maia, one of the Pleiades, appears in the form of a human child and goes Christmas shopping in London. The title of a new song in the musical, “Anything Can Happen,” is entirely appropriate.

The world within Bert’s painting, in the book and movie, challenges conventional notions of reality. Here is a world imagined and portrayed by an artist, which Mary, Bert and, in the movie, Jane and Michael, can physically enter; it is literally an alternate reality. Presumably Bert’s other paintings are also portals into different fantasy worlds. The “real” world, therefore, is only one of many.

Moreover, an artist can create one of these alternative realities. Bert thus represents P. L. Travers, or for that matter Walt Disney, or any writer of fiction, or any artist. On the literal level of the Mary Poppins story, I wonder if Bert is meant to have magical powers, just as the title character does. In the movie Bert attempts to transport himself and the children into his painting but fails; exasperated, Mary Poppins then transports all four of them into the alternate world. This suggests that Mary Poppins is the only one with magical powers. At another point in the film, Mary Poppins magically manipulates things in the children’s room to tidy it up, and Jane finds herself similarly able to levitate objects by snapping her fingers. So it seems Mary Poppins can enable other people in her presence to perform magical feats. On the other hand, the movie’s Mary Poppins scolds Bert for failing to enter the painting, thereby implying that he could do so but somehow did it wrong. In the book Bert transports himself and Mary Poppins into the world of the painting, and she is repeatedly surprised by what she finds there. This makes Bert a magician too. The musical endows him with magical powers too, enabling him to dance up the wall of the proscenium and, upside down, along its top during “Step in Time,” thereby reenacting onstage what Fred Astaire did (thanks to a set within a turning wheel) in the movie musical Royal Wedding (1951).

Watching the Poppins movie recently set me wondering. Leaving the “Jolly Holiday” sequence within Bert’s painting aside, it all clearly takes place not in the real London, or even on a backlot area designed to look like London, but very clearly on studio sets. When I first saw the movie, I probably just accepted these sets as reality; nowadays the artificiality of Disney’s Poppins world is all too obvious to me. How do most people who see the movie react? Do they notice the difference between these stage settings and reality? Are we supposed to? Are the settings of the Mary Poppins movie meant to look so theatrical, thereby providing a postmodern reminder to the viewer that this story is an artificial construct, a kind of modern fairy tale? As with all musicals, the fact that characters will segue from ordinary speaking to singing and dancing reminds us of the artifice. Moreover, in the movie (and again in the play) Bert acts as narrator, directly addressing the viewers with variations on his “Chim Chim Cheree” song. So there’s not really so wide a gap between Mary Poppins the movie and Mary Poppins the stage musical.

Something that fascinated me on viewing the movie again was the “Jolly Holiday” sequence, in which Mary, Bert and the children interact with animated characters. It’s always clear who’s real and who’s animated. But look at the settings in this sequence. Often I was not certain what was part of the set where the actors were performing and what was part of a painted background that the animation department inserted into the footage. The melding of the real and the unreal is surprisingly seamless; in fact the painted backgrounds here look more real to me than the stage sets in the pure live action portions of the movie.

The week before I had watched the Turner Classic Movies interview with Stanley Donen, director and/or choreographer for many classic movie musicals (including Royal Wedding), who, among other things, talked about asking Walt Disney to help create a sequence for Anchors Aweigh (1945) in which Mickey Mouse danced with Gene Kelly; Disney refused, so MGM’s William Hanna and Joe Barbera did the sequence with Jerry (from the Tom and Jerry cartoons) instead. Famous as that sequence is, I thought Dick Van Dyke’s dance with the animated penguins in the Poppins film topped it, and I wondered if Disney had consciously intended to outdo the Anchors Aweigh sequence. Then I realized that in having real people interact with animated characters in a “cartoon” world in Poppins, Disney had returned to the premise of his pre-Mickey silent series Alice in Cartoonland. With the “Jolly Holiday” sequence, Disney had come full circle in his career in animation.

So the segment of the book and film that takes place within Bert’s painting provides an alternate, fantasy world that is equally as “real” as the everyday world. But the book goes far further than the movie or the musical by suggesting that not only is there no division between the real and the fantastic, but that reality, as most people perceive it, is an illusion. It is the fantasy world that is the real one.

Chapter 9 of the book is “John and Barbara’s Story,” about Jane and Michael’s infant siblings. As in Sheldon Mayer’s Sugar and Spike, babies can communicate with each other in their own language, which seems to be meaningless gurgling to adults. Travers went further than Mayer: the babies can also talk with a starling, with the wind, and even with sunlight. Travers’ world is an animist one, in which it seems that everything is alive and sentient. This chapter makes the point that infants quickly lose the ability to understand the language of animals, the wind and the light, and even each other. The youngest babies are still attuned to the voices of the natural world; adults are separate from it. Mary Poppins, of course, can still communicate with the non-human world; she is, as the book puts it, “the Great Exception.” This “fantasy” world, in which everything is alive and talks, is the real one in Travers’ book; it is simply that adults, with that one Exception, can no longer perceive it.

One might say that the book’s Mrs. Corry (who also turns up in the musical) is the world’s oldest woman, since she claims to remember when Columbus discovered America and to have encountered William the Conqueror. However, she claims to be “˜”quite a chicken compared to my Grandmother.” Even so, Mrs. Corry says, “I remember the time when they were making this world, anyway, and I was well out of my teens then” (p. 122). In Little Orphan Annie Harold Gray created a similarly long-lived character, Mr. Am, who with his long beard resembles Santa Claus and, perhaps, may actually be God. Maybe Mrs. Corry is divine, too. At her shop Jane and Michael obtain “slabs” of gingerbread, each with “a gilt paper star.” That night they watch as Mrs. Corry, her two daughters, and Mary Poppins glue gilt paper stars onto the sky. “What I want to know,” Jane wonders, “is this: are the stars gold paper or is the gold paper stars?”

Now this seems to contradict the Christmas chapter, in which Maia the star appears on Earth as a young girl. The idea of stars taking human form also turns up elsewhere. For example, in the 1980s Peter Gillis co-created Cloud, a now forgotten character for Marvel’s Defenders, who was actually a nebula who could take the form of either a teenage girl or a teenage boy. (As you can see, Cloud was a pioneering character for gender issues in mainstream comics.) So stars can be children as well as gold paper. But it seems that in the Mary Poppins book they are not what science tells us they are: massive balls of superheated gas many light years away. In our world science is real and magic is illusion; in the Poppins book it’s the other way around. The sky isn’t even that far above our heads: Mrs. Corry and Mary Poppins can reach the firmament by climbing a ladder!

And if Mrs. Corry and Mary Poppins can hang stars in the sky, does that make them goddesses? Does Mrs, Corry recall when “this world” was made because she helped make it? And her phrase “this world” implies that there are others. Perhaps Bert, who can create alternate realities, is a god of sorts. (In both the book and the movie, the world Bert creates is apparently destroyed when the rain washes away his painting. Is this like Noah’s Flood?) But goddess-like characters predominate in the book; Maia, Mrs. Corry, and especially Mary Poppins.

For those who know Mary Poppins from the movie, the strangest vision of her in the book comes in the chapter set at the zoo, when her birthday falls on the night of a full moon and the animals, who speak English, all leave their cages. (There’s a penguin in this chapter, although it seems from Neal Gabler’s biography that Walt Disney got the idea to put penguins in the movie because they reminded him of waiters.) Jane and Michael enter the “Snake House,” where “All the cages were open and the snakes were out–some curled lazily into great scaly knots, others slipping gently about the floor. And in the middle of the snakes, on a log that had evidently been brought from one of the cages, sat Mary Poppins” (p. 166). The largest of the snakes, a Hamadryad cobra, seems ancient, with a face “more wizened than anything they had ever seen,” is acknowledged as the king of the beasts (not the lion, significantly), and calls Mary Poppins his “cousin.” The Hamadryad slithers towards Mary Poppins, “And when he reached her, he raised the front half of his long, golden body, and thrusting upwards his scaly golden hood, daintily kissed her, first on one cheek and then the other” (p. 167). Now consider that snakes have a phallic shape, go back and reread that part about “thrusting,” and this scenario becomes even more bizarre.

The Disney movie may hint that Mary Poppins might be a kind of angel: she first appears seated on a cloud. But in the book’s zoo sequence, she seems more like a pagan nature goddess, surrounded by the beasts of the wild and consorting with serpents. The chapter is named after the full moon, suggesting a link between Mary Poppins and lunar goddesses like Diana or Hecate. Is the zoo after hours a latter-day Eden, with Mary Poppins as an Eve who chose the serpent as her companion? The Hamadryad’s references to her as his “cousin” may imply that she is somehow a serpent herself, or perhaps that she is a shapeshifter who can appear as a woman or as a serpent. In her New Yorker profile of Travers, Caitlin Flanagan pointed out that Mary Poppins first appears in the original book “as a shape hurled against the front door in the midst of a gale, [which] assumes the form of a woman.”

FOR MYSELF
As usual, “Comics in Context” takes a two week break for the holidays, and will return on the first Friday of January 2007. I will not only be writing more about Mary Poppins but also about “Cartoon America” at the Library of Congress. In the interim, if you want to read more about “Cartoon America,” check out my report for Publishers Weekly’s Comics Week (http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6399160.html?nid=2789).
–Copyright 2006 Peter Sanderson

From its founding right through the end of the twentieth century, The New York Times would not run comics and did not even employ an editorial cartoonist. Presumably the Times considered comics and cartoons too déclassé for a serious, proper newspaper like itself, in contrast to its tabloid competition. The flagrant exception to the Times‘ rule were Al Hirschfeld’s caricatures of Broadway and Hollywood performers in the Arts and Leisure Section, but Hirschfeld reportedly considered himself an “illustrator,” not a “cartoonist.” In the School of Visual Arts’ current Jules Feiffer retrospective, there is a comics page that Feiffer did for The New York Times Sunday Magazine in 1974 that is satirically presented as the kind of comics the Times would run if it ran comics: titled “Hodgkins of State,” it is an (intentionally) deadly dull policy discussion by two members of the foreign service.

But now look at this year’s annual Holiday Books issue of The New York Times Book Review (Dec. 3, 2006). On the list of the “100 Notable Books of the Year” is Alison Bechtel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, which the Times helpfully classifies as a “graphic memoir,” solving the problem of what to call a book in the graphic novel format that deals in nonfictional autobiography. Ivan Brunetti’s An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories, including work by Daniel Clowes, Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, and Chris Ware, receives a review that takes up two entire pages. (The “Speak: Nine Cartoonists” exhibition in New York City earlier this year served as a preview of this book. See “Comics in Context” #122.) The author of this review, David Hadju, writes that “If anyone really qualifies as the voice of the current literary generation, he or she could well be using the language of cartoons, captions and word balloons.” There is a “Holiday” roundup review headed “comics,” covering Will Eisner’s New York: Life in the Big City, Marjane Satrapi’s Chicken with Plums, and a new volume of George Herriman’s Krazy & Ignatz, among others, written by Douglas Wolk, one of my colleagues at Publishers Weekly’s Comics Week. (It is a pleasure to see the Times assign a comics review to someone who actually has a background in writing about the medium.) Another “Holiday” roundup, on “Drawings,” includes not only a collection of the work of Saul Steinberg, who long ago was welcomed into the precincts of high art, but also caricaturist Drew Friedman’s book Old Jewish Comedians, and a book called The Sweeter Side of R. Crumb, which, by Crumb’s own description, contains “adorable, heartwarming, and lovingly rendered drawings.” This makes me think of the “lovingly rendered” drawings of women I was surprised to find in the Crumb section of the “Masters of American Comics” exhibit (see last week’s column). Scott McCloud classifies Crumb as an Iconoclast, who strives to convey truth about life rather than artistic craft and beauty; perhaps this book shows not just the sweeter but the Classicist side of Crumb. This Holiday Books edition also includes reviews of Neil Gabler’s massive new biography of Walt Disney (about which I will have more to say next week) and Linda H. Davis’s biography of Charles Addams. There’s even a critique of a book called Presidential Doodles: Two Centuries of Scribbles, Scratches, Squiggles and Scrawls from the Oval Office. And meanwhile the Times continues to run a weekly comic by Seth in its Sunday magazine section.

A decade ago the Times would have run reviews of biographies of Disney and Addams. Regardless of whether or not one admires his work, Disney is recognized as a major figure in American popular culture. Moreover, back in the twentieth century some forms of comics and cartoon art had more cultural respectability than others. One of those categories was the cartoons in The New Yorker, including those by Addams, who donated his artwork to the New York Public Library, which for years has been displaying them in their own gallery (see “Comics in Context” #72). Even when I was a child my local library in a Boston suburb carried book collections of editorial cartoons (including those by Herblock), histories of newspaper comic strips, a 1940 coffee table book about the making of Disney’s Fantasia, and even some collections of comic strips, notably Walt Kelly’s Pogo, whose political satire won it cultural respectability, as Doonesbury would receive later.

Still, the considerable amount of space that this year’s Holiday Books issue of the Times Book Review devotes to comic and cartoon art is mightily impressive. In his review of Brunetti’s anthology, Hajdu writes that “Among the events that helped establish jazz as a serious art was the concert “˜From Spirituals to Swing,’ staged at Carnegie Hall in 1932,” which “brought together an eclectic array of African-American musicians. . . in the same hall famous for presenting Stokowski, Toscanini, and their high-toned like.” Hajdu believes that Brunetti’s book serve the same purpose for comics. To my mind, Yale University Press’s publication of the Brunetti book is merely one of a number of events in 2006 that mark the comics medium’s transition into cultural respectability. This issue of the Times Book Review is another, and “Masters of American Comics” may be the foremost.

It’s not just the museums and galleries of New York City that have been celebrating the comics medium this year. The Friday after Thanksgiving I made a day trip down to Washington D. C. to visit the Library of Congress to see its current exhibition “Cartoon America: Highlights from the Art Wood Collection of Cartoon and Caricature,” which runs through January 27, 2007. In connection with the show, Harry N. Abrams has published the book Cartoon America: Comic Art in the Library of Congress, edited by Harry Katz, the former head curator of the Library’s Prints and Photographs division, which includes original cartoon artwork. The Abrams book has a format similar to that of Yale University Press’s Masters of American Comics catalogue; there is a long essay about the history of comics, in this case by Katz, followed by an array of essays, mostly about individual artists, by an extraordinary lineup of contributors. Whereas the Masters book was a catalogue of the show of the same name, the Cartoon America book does not limit itself to examples of the Wood collection on display, but deals with the Library’s entire range of holdings in original cartoon and comics art.

The book jacket for Cartoon America features a knockout illustration by Richard Williams (not the animator of the same name), showing Mount Rushmore redone with the faces of Charlie Brown, Ignatz, Bill Griffith’s Zippy the Pinhead, and Popeye; the original art is included in the exhibition. It’s a gag kidding the elevation of American comics and cartoons into the realm of serious art, but that elevation is real. The introductory wall text for the exhibit, by its co-curators Sara W. Duke and Martha H. Kennedy, reprinted in its brochure, declares that “The Art Wood Collection of Cartoon and Caricature. . .is a jewel among the Library’s special collections. . . .”

But, enjoyable as Williams’ redesign of Mount Rushmore is, do Charlie Brown, Ignatz, Zippy and Popeye really convey the full range of American “comic art”? Something seems missing.

In the foreword to the Cartoon America book, James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress himself, writes that “Few people realize that the “Library of Congress is home to one of the world’s great collections of original cartoon art.” He explains that “The library began to collect and preserve cartoons and caricatures within decades of its founding in 1800, recognizing their value as vehicles of social and political commentary and as original works of art” (p. 7). This is highly prescient and admirable, although Billington’s description suggests that the Library’s primary interest was in editorial cartooning.

James Arthur “Art” Wood, Jr. is a longtime editorial cartoonist who was also a major collector of cartoon art, compiling what Billington calls “the most comprehensive private collection of original historical American cartoon art known to exist” (p. 7). In 1995 Wood opened the National Gallery of Caricature and Cartoon Art in Washington, D. C. to exhibit his collection to the public; however, due to lack of funding, it closed merely two years later. (Maybe one of the gallery’s problems was publicity: I had heard about it but was never able to find out where it was.) So, instead, Wood donated his collection to the Library of Congress in 2000, which, according to Katz, “more than doubled the Library’s already outstanding cartoon art holdings. . . “ (p. 13). Billington states that the Library has also recently acquired other “notable collections” in cartoon art besides Wood’s.

“Cartoon America” is very different from the “Masters of American Comics” exhibition. “Masters” is, as Times critic Holland Cotter put it, a “masterpiece show” (Fri., Nov. 24), dealing solely with fifteen artists whom it presents as the most accomplished practitioners of the medium; the selection of works, the wall texts and, even more so, the catalogue make strong analytic arguments for the visual greatness of the Masters’ works. Though virtually all the works in the “Cartoon America” show merit exhibition, they are not all on such a high level of achievement. For example, the section about comic strips includes an example of Cathy Guisewite’s Cathy, which would be no one’s choice as a miracle of graphic mastery and beauty; its virtues lie elsewhere, in its wit and perceptiveness. (Now here’s a prime example of McCloud’s Iconoclast school.) The curators included an example of Bil Keane’s The Family Circus, which is infamously banal as both writing and art; I could only justify that on historical and sentimental grounds.

Whereas “Masters” narrowed its focus to little more than a dozen cartoonists, “Cartoon America” seems to aim for a more encyclopedic approach to American cartoon art. Billington writes of Wood, “Over time he compiled an extraordinary collection encompassing virtually every aspect of the genre and every era of our nation’s history” (p. 7). (By “genre” Billington means presumably means “medium,” though his choice of words may be revealing.) In the brochure Duke and Kennedy write that the 102 original artworks in their show reveal “the vitality of an innovative and evolving art form that includes political illustrations, gag cartoons, comic strips, illustrations, animation, and caricature.” Something big still seems to be missing from this encyclopedic survey, though, as we shall see.

Not having been to Washington D. C. since the last century (i. e., 1999), I was looking out for changes, but found few. Well, there was that colossal new building across the Mall from the East Building of the National Gallery of Art; that turned out to be the new National Museum of the American Indian. Just as surprising were the new traffic lights. When the “walk” signal goes on, a lower screen displays numbers that steadily count down towards zero; then the flashing red signal turns on, and another countdown begins, indicating how many seconds are left till the light turns solidly red and the traffic recommences. This had the effect of making crossing the street seem like an episode of 24: if I didn’t make it across in time, would the street blow up? And the countdowns, in turn, reminded me that this was my first visit to Washington D. C. after the 9/11 attacks. Another reminder was the long, slow security line at the public entrance to the Library of Congress’s Thomas Jefferson Building, complete with metal detector and X-ray machine. So, once I got through security, should I fasten my seat belt and wait for the Jefferson Building to take off? Do they still serve beverages?

The Jefferson Building is actually a monumental and magnificent Beaux-Arts edifice, whose Great Hall is an astonishing, almost overwhelmingly elaborate visual extravaganza of grand staircases, sculpture, murals of mythological and allegorical figures, and inscriptions about the value of wisdom. The “Cartoon America” show has been given a place of honor, along two opposite sides of the Great Hall.

I started with the “Animation” section, which not only displays artwork from classic animated films, but also features a video monitor showing corresponding sequences from the actual films.

Here was a drawing of Winsor McCay’s Gertie the Dinosaur backing away in surprise from a woolly mammoth; Gertie was the first great example of character animation that conveyed personality. This drawing was actually a tracing, made circa 1980, of McCay’s 1914 original.

Here too was a model sheet for Max and Dave Fleischer’s Betty Boop (see “Comics in Context” #116 and 117), labeled as being from 1932-1934. This looked to me like Betty after the movie industry’s Production Code started being enforced in 1934: her dress, with its high neckline, looked considerably more proper and her trademark garters were gone. Nevertheless, she was still in a minidress: in terms of fashion she was thirty years ahead of her time. Oddly, the video monitor showed the scantily clad pre-code Betty from Boop Oop a Doop (1932), fending off the advances of an obese circus ringmaster.

A highlight of this section was a “preparatory drawing” from the Fleischers’ Popeye cartoon Females Is Fickle (1940), showing Popeye, like a more combative Jonah, trapped inside a gigantic, semi-transparent jellyfish and punching his way out: this single drawing captured the dynamism of the full animated sequence, shown on the video monitor.

Here too were cels and watercolors for Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) (pgs. 15, 25), The Sorcerer’s Apprentice from Fantasia (1940) (p. 194), and Dumbo (1940). The most impressive Disney piece was a remarkable pastel for Bambi (1942) done by Tyrus Wong as a concept sketch, showing Bambi’s father, the godlike stag known as the Great Prince, standing between barren trees, atop a rocky crag (p. 191). The trees are in silhouette, the sky is gray, and the enormous rock is cast into deep shadow, but the godlike stag is lit by an aura of light, and seems almost to blend into it, and to glow.

The only other animation studio represented is MGM’s, through 1940 model sheets for William Hanna and Joseph Barbera’s Tom and Jerry (p. 197). But what about Tex Avery’s great MGM animated shorts, and, for that matter, Warner Brothers’ Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies? Mickey Mouse is in this show, but not Bugs Bunny; Hanna and Barbera made it in, but not Chuck Jones. And what about UPA and the whole history of American animation since the 1940s? (If you want to pick up where “Cartoon America” leaves off, go to New York City to see “Saturday Morning,” the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art’s comprehensive current exhibit on television animation.) Wood’s tastes in animation seem to have frozen in 1942, so the Library has a great deal of work to do to catch up in collecting animation art. But no, this isn’t what I mean when I say that something big is missing from the “Cartoon America” show.

Next came the section designated “Gag & Single Panel Cartoons,” and the examples on display ranged considerably in quality. Particularly interesting was a cartoon by Peter Arno (1904-1968), a “close variant” of which appeared in the September 19, 1936 issue of The New Yorker. It shows a group of apparently prosperous people, one of whom, according to the caption, is saying, “Let’s go to the Trans-Lux and hiss Roosevelt.” So these would be wealthy conservatives, probably Republicans, of the time, who were opposed to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal programs to aid the masses who were impoverished by the great Depression. They’re heading to the Trans-Lux, a movie theater in Manhattan, to hiss at FDR when he appears onscreen in a newsreel. I suppose the contemporary equivalent would be cheering Rush Limbaugh or Bill O’Reilly on as they lash into liberals on talk radio or Fox News. The people in this cartoon are obsessed: they’re going to the movies, not to watch the feature film, but to sneer at FDR, who isn’t actually even there. Moreover, weirdly, Arno has placed these middle-aged and elderly characters in costumes, as if they’re going to a masquerade; what’s especially noticeable is that their legs are in tights, which is not particularly age-appropriate. Is the cartoon’s point that these reactionaries are letting go of their inhibitions, both about exposing their physiques and expressing their hatred for FDR? Or that they’re playing at politics like overage children playing dress-up? Is the cartoon even hinting that there’s something decadent about indulging in this petty political meanness?

Perhaps the ultimate extreme in what Scott McCloud calls the Iconoclast “tribe” of cartoonists is represented by the cartoons of the legendary New Yorker prose humorist James Thurber. In the Cartoon America book another celebrated New Yorker contributor, novelist John Updike, writes an amusing essay titled “Technically Challenged Carefree Ineptitude: James Thurber.” Updike points out that a childhood accident cost Thurber one of his eyes and damaged the other, causing his vision to continue to deteriorate in his adult life. Hence, Updike asserts, Thurber’s “development as a picture maker was arrested at a lively primitivism” (p. 216). Thurber’s limited sight provides a reasonable excuse, although I suppose he may simply have had limited talent as a draftsman regardless of the condition of his eyes. Updike further contends that “some of his best-known cartoons. . .were the product of a carefree ineptitude” (p. 216). He reports that Thurber himself confessed that when he tried to draw a seal astride a rock, the drawing came out looking like a seal inexplicably peering over the headboard of a bed, which proved to be one of his most memorable images (reproduced on pgs. 217 and 221). In other words, Thurber, through his lack of graphic skill, created happy accidents, and his far superior writing ability transformed these graphic lemons into lemonade.

Even so, Thurber’s ability to visually delineate the emotions of his characters can be no accident. In both the show and the book (p. 220), there is a cartoon, circa 1934, that Thurber drew on lined paper, like that of a schoolboy’s note pad. A bald man, his eyebrows furrowed angrily, his upper teeth bared, stretched menacingly over a nude woman, lying prone in the traditional position of an odalisque in art. The man’s left arm curves, as if it has no elbows, and ends in two visible fingers: it resembles not a human arm, but a serpent with mouth agape. His right arm and hand look more like a wing as if he were a bird of prey hovering over his victim. Nonetheless, Thurber’s childlike drawing style, and the man’s baldness, somehow deprive him of a sense of the menace: it’s something like Elmer Fudd posing as Don Juan. As for the odalisque, her face is rather plain, and she seems not frightened by the stalker but casual and nonchalant. “Oh, Mr. Benholding,” she says, “I never saw that look in your eyes before,” a romantic cliché made laughable by the absurdity of the picture. Updike contends that Thurber’s cartoons “were libidinous to an extent that pushed The New Yorker‘s youthful prudery to its limit” (p. 216). This cartoon is indeed about sex, but the joke lies in the contrast between the intense passion being evoked and the comical, sexless ordinariness of the potential lovers.

Though Updike refers to Thurber’s “technically challenged style,” he also points out that Thurber was able to use his graphic limitations to genuinely artistic ends: “His more crudely amateurish successors in minimalism demonstrate by contrast how dynamic and expressive, how oddly tender, Thurber’s art was” (p. 220). If Thurber is indeed an Iconoclast cartoonist, he’s an Iconoclast whose style I like, and this, along with Thurber’s comedic vision, is why. Remember that the “Masters” show called Charles Schulz a “minimalist.” Looking at Thurber’s simple figures and the strong, effective facial expressions and body language he gives them, it’s easy to see a connection between Thurber’s cartooning and Schulz’s.

Next I arrived at the “Comic Strips” section of “Cartoon America,” where several of the Masters reappeared. My favorite piece in the entire exhibition is E. C. Segar’s Sunday, May 12, 1935 page of Thimble Theatre Starring Popeye (which, alas, was not reprinted in the Cartoon America book). Popeye only has a cameo role in this Sunday page, whose strengths are actually more verbal than visual. This Sunday page’s central figure is instead trickster and hamburger obsessive J. Wellington Wimpy. The Popeye animated cartoons, which play down the importance of dialogue, have never done justice to Wimpy; this Sunday page demonstrates what makes him a great character in his own right.

At the outset Olive remarks to Popeye that “I’ll bet you Wimpy has desert madness–probably raving around saying poetry.” Indeed he is, addressing a desert flower sprouting from a cow’s skull out of a Georgia O’Keeffe painting. Maybe the proper comparison is to Hamlet with Yorick’s skull, for this Sunday page primarily consists of Wimpy’s rhyming soliloquy on his own mortality. “Oh, flower of death. . .so frail, so red/Growing from a thing so dead/Even as I will be quite soon/Merely bones “˜neath sun and moon.” Wimpy’s flowery doggerel is amusing, but he is nonetheless talking about a serious matter that one does not expect to find in a comedy strip like Popeye’s. And Wimpy goes on: “Ah, well/’Tis not for me to break the spell/ That links all things in a mighty plan/That cannot be changed by laws of man.” Now he’s talking not only about the inevitability of death, but about man’s helplessness against fate, and the “mighty plan,” presumably conceived by God, that governs the universe! Yet not even these cosmic concerns can ultimately overrule the dominant passion of Wimpy’s life. He tells the flower that “we both crave meat”; the skull out of which it grows is from the animal that is the source of hamburger meat. The subject of Wimpy’s soliloquy shifts from man’s role in the universe to the hamburger’s role in his diet, and reaching the climax, he finally collapses out of what seems a combination of his frustrated carnivorous passions and his own longwindedness. This is one great strip.

There was also a brilliant Peanuts Sunday from January 20, 1963 (p. 213). It too takes the form of a soliloquy, but in this case Charles Schulz devises a facial expression for Charlie Brown that reflects each psychological turn he takes in this extended monologue. After the introductory top tier of panels, the strip begins like a musical composition, sounding the theme: “Oh, how I hate these lunch hours!” says Charlie Brown, sitting alone, looking unhappily into his lunch bag. Shunned by the other kids, lunch hours just remind him of how much he is disliked; “During class it doesn’t matter,” he will tell us, presumably because then he is surrounded by other kids and can pretend he’s part of the community. He seems trapped in an endless cycle of unchanging, dreary lunch hours. Even the lunch in the bag offers no surprises that would break the monotony: “Peanut butter again.” Charlie Brown fantasizes about his unattainable ideal, the nameless little red-haired girl he loves from afar, and a moony expression comes over his face. But it abruptly vanished, as Charlie Brown’s own insecurities overwhelm him. He finally succumbs to despair: “Rats! Nobody is ever going to like me.” And he finally walks off, his lunch uneaten, as the composition closes by repeating the initial theme: “Lunch hour is the loneliest hour of the day.” The cartooniness of Schulz’s art style and the small, mundane scale of some of Charlie Brown’s concerns (e. g., peanut butter for lunch) render the sequence humorous, but as my recounting minus pictures should show, this soliloquy is simultaneously quite sad. It’s this balance between the humorous and the heart-rending that characterizes Schulz’s work at its best, as it is here.

In his essay on Schulz in the Cartoon America book, comics historian Robert C. Harvey makes a point about another balance that Schulz created in Peanuts, which I had noted in a previous column (see “Comics in Context” #66): the opposition between Charlie Brown’s melancholy and Snoopy’s joie de vivre. Harvey puts it particularly well: “against this. . .assessment of the human condition, Schulz balanced the fantasy life of Snoopy, a blithe beagle whose seeming brilliant success at every endeavor reassures us that life is not only about disappointment and endurance. It is also about dreams and the sustaining power of the imagination” (p. 214) Does Charlie Brown represent Schulz as the everyman who endures the mundane sufferings of everyday life, while Snoopy represents Schulz as artist, who finds joy in his own imaginative creations?

There’s a good example of Winsor McCay’s Dream of the Rarebit Fiend from 1906 in the show, but again, unfortunately, not in the book. A cranky man seated at the end of a trolley informs us that “I always like to sit in the corner of a car; then I don’t have people tramping all over me.” But as one passenger after another enters and sits down, the curmudgeon finds himself wedged into a corner. Then the trolley somehow turns ninety degrees, and the crank finds himself at the bottom of the trolley, being crushed by the weight of the other commuters, whereupon he wakes from his rarebit-induced nightmare.

The “Cartoon America” McCay work that I most liked, however, is not in the Library of Congress show but in the book. Co-curator Martha Kennedy wrote a brief essay for the Abrams book called “Winsor McCay’s Political Cartoons.” There is a long tradition in editorial cartoons of using symbolic figures, like the Democratic donkey and the Republican elephant which Thomas Nast popularized. McCay went much further with this, creating what Kennedy calls “allegories or parables set in otherworldly, fantastical settings” (p. 148). In my view McCay elevates political and social situations of his time to the level of myth.

For example, in the first cartoon accompanying her essay, from the 1920s, a man labeled as “Mental and Moral Courage,” who appears to be a giant, looks into the stormy heavens at lightning bolts labeled as “War,” “Depression,” “Calamity,” and “Discouragement” (p. 149). Notice that these menaces include not only external perils (“War”) but also threats to psychological well-being (“Discouragement”). Below this picture is a remarkable tier of five small panels, each showing living creatures violently battling one another: first two scorpions, then two sloths, then two roosters, next two dogs, and finally two human boxers. Kennedy interprets this series as “emphasizing man’s ability to overcome physical, animal passions.” I disagree: I interpret the sequence as contending that humanity is prey to the same aggressive behavior as these vicious lower animals. I suspect McCay means to contrast the battling boxers with his giant of “Mental and Moral Courage,” who he shows quietly observing the lightning bolts, presumably deciding on the best course of action to take, rather than simply charging in with unthinking violence.

The next cartoon, “Wheels of Industry,” also from the 1920s (p. 150), shows four giants, who dwarf Uncle Sam, the embodiment of America; these titans wear short skirt-like costumes and sandals, making them look like figures out of ancient Greece or Rome. These giants are labeled “Steel,” “Electric Power,” “Ford,” and “General Motors,” and they are pulling some sort of enormous mechanism with a huge wheel labeled “Industry.” Thus the great economic power of early twentieth century America takes on mythic proportions.

So does its crime. In the architectural fantasy of “City Crime Skyline,” circa 1930 (p. 150), a skyline of skyscrapers includes a brobdingnagian bottle marked “Bootleg Whiskey,” a colossal gun, labeled “Crime,” and a tower that might also be an immense syringe, marked “Dope.”

In the last cartoon, “Fame, Fortune, Wealth” (p. 151), circa 1928 (significantly, just before the great stock market crash), a veritable ocean of people surrounds a dinosaur-sized pig, who is draped with jewelry, and labeled “Fortune Wealth.” Kennedy correctly observes that “the pig alludes to the sin of gluttony and biblical admonitions against the worship of idols and false gods.” The gargantuan hog reminds me of the gigantic beasts of sword-and-sorcery tales. It’s also like Richard Wagner’s dragon Fafnir and other such creatures that obsessively guard treasures, literal monsters embodying greed. But McCay pointedly makes his beast no awe-inspiring dragon, a fit adversary for heroes. Instead McCay casts the monster of greed as a repulsive swine, rendering the people who swarm around it pathetic and deluded. The true heroes are the relatively few in the background who are scaling a difficult, rocky incline to reach a Parthenon-like edifice marked “Fame,” by which McCay surely means the reward for honorable achievement, and not mere celebrity.

I will continue my report on “Cartoon America” in a few weeks; next week is my annual Christmas column, followed by the annual holiday break. As for the mystery of what’s missing from the “Cartoon America” exhibit, if it’s not already obvious, here’s a clue. I recommend you read fellow Quick Stop columnist Fred Hembeck’s November 24, 2006 tribute to the recently deceased pioneering comic book historian Dr. Jerry Bails over at his blog. As Fred said, “Every single one of us who, over the last forty odd years, made the effort to sit down and write something serious (or even not-so-serious) about the once neglected funny book genre–whether in a crudely printed fanzine, a mass produced coffee table volume, or simply on our very own blogs–owes a deep debt of thanks to Dr. Jerry Bails.”
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On my first visit to the half of the “Masters of American Comics” exhibition that is at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan, I was accompanied by Ken Wong, the president of the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art. At one point while we were there we encountered a lecturer giving a group a guided tour of the exhibit. Listening in, it soon became evident to Ken and myself that this woman was in over her head: she may have been knowledgeable about the usual sorts of drawing and painting that one finds in a museum, but not about the sequential art of comics. As they entered the section devoted to Robert Crumb’s work, she told her group. “I haven’t read up on Crumb.” Well, why not? Isn’t that the proper preparation for lecturing about him?

But more importantly, she was describing the artwork on display as single images, missing the point that the essence of comics is visual storytelling through a succession of images. (Of course, Ken and I were animatedly discussing the works on display, and afterwards Ken told me that he noticed that some of the other visitors to the exhibition were listening to us! Well, after all, we know what we’re talking about with regard to comics.)

“Masters of American Comics” undertakes the formidable task of persuading the world of art museum professionals and visitors that comics should be taken seriously as art. This exhibition therefore is meant to teach people a new way to see, to open their eyes to understanding and moire deeply appreciating an artform which they may well have previously underestimated. But the show offers little guidance to visitors, who run the risk of missing the point just as that tour guide did.

There is no audio guide tour for “Masters” at either the Jewish Museum or at the Newark Museum, where the first half of the exhibit is currently housed. At each museum there is a lengthy introductory wall text to the show as a whole, and wall texts that introduce each artist. Labels for the individual works restrict themselves to listing the artist, the means by which the work was created (pencil, or pen and ink, and the like), the source (where the work was originally printed), and the name of the lender. The labels do not identify the characters portrayed, not do they explain the storyline, of which the individual page or strip is an excerpt. More importantly, the labels do not direct the viewer’s attention to any particular aspect of the works; hence, the labels do not inform the viewer why the curators chose to include these particular examples of the artists’ work. And sometimes, as we shall see, the labels are wrong about what they do say.

Picking up where I left off last time in my travel through the Newark Museum’s half of “Masters,” proceeding chronologically through the history of the comic strip, I now come to the first of the Masters whom I have seen in person, the late Milton Caniff (1907-1988), creator of Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon. His introductory wall text correctly declares Caniff to be “one of the greatest storytellers ever to work in the comics medium.”

The wall text continues, “Caniff’s characters, in contrast to the predictable behavior of most adventure heroes, had multifaceted personalities. . . .” (This line comes from page 84 of co-curator John Carlin’s text for the Masters of American Comics catalogue, published by Yale University Press.) I think it was comics writer Don McGregor who once observed that Stan Lee did for superhero comic books what Caniff had done three decades earlier for the adventure comic strip. Each man wreaked a revolution through endowing the cardboard character types of adventure melodrama with multidimensional characterization.

But who are Caniff’s characters? Caniff did Terry and the Pirates from 1934 to 1946, and Steve Canyon‘s prime was in the late 1940s and 1950s. How many visitors to “Masters” who are under the age of sixty will know what the premise of Terry and the Pirates is, or will even know who Caniff’s most famous creation, the Dragon Lady, who appears in this show, is? Surely museum visitors could better appreciate the Terry and Canyon strips on display if they were given some background information about the series and their characters. There is a reason for the title of my column: comics should be placed in context. But the wall text provides no help in this regard, and Carlin’s text in the catalogue does little better.

On the other hand, journalist Pete Hamill’s essay about Caniff in the catalogue not only clearly explains who Canyon and Terry‘s main characters are, but also vividly conjures up the atmosphere of Terry at its height, with mystery, exoticism, danger, and romance. Hamill points to Caniff’s own comparison of his comic strips to the picaresque novels of past centuries: a series of adventures in which supporting characters appear, disappear, and then return, just as people we know may do in our own lives. (Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones are classic examples.) I especially like Hamill’s observation that Caniff’s “women were his finest creations, each distinct, all with sophisticated emotional lives, all exuding erotic possibilities” (p. 232). This is a matter that Carlin himself does not even address.

One of the Terry Sunday strips in the show (November 27, 1940, on pages 82 and 83 in the book), depicts Terry and another character, Dude Hennick, just after they have buried the latter’s girlfriend. This is an impressive work even if one does not know anything about the characters except what this particular Sunday reveals. Later in the book (p. 114) Carlin asserts that “Caniff’s art is compromised by his sentimental themes.” This is unfair. Similarly to the Dick Tracy funeral sequence I described last week, Caniff uses subtlety, indirection, and understatement to evade the traps of superficial, sentimental excess and to simultaneously convey deeper, dramatic emotion. Caniff distances the reader from potential bathos by repeatedly portraying Terry and Dude in long shot, and once even from far overhead. Caniff also repeatedly casts them into deep shadow. This particular Sunday strip is a prime example of what Hamill calls the “dense, impressionistic brushstrokes” (p. 232) to create what Carlin terms the use of “chiaroscuro” (p. 78), meaning the contrast between light and deep shadow. (Though this style, which Caniff’s friend Noel Sickles devised and Caniff perfected, is often called impressionistic, I prefer Carlin’s term, since Impressionism in painting signifies a bright color palette, and not the ominous black areas of Caniff’s artwork.) Even when Dude and Terry are depicted in closeup, Dude shows a stone-faced stoicism, while the younger Terry only subtly betrays his sorrow in his eyes and mouth. Significantly, Dude is in long shot when he looks at the grave for the last time, his emotions unreadable from the panel’s foreground.

In the catalogue Hamill explains that when Dude’s girlfriend, Raven Sherman, was “suddenly, brutally killed,” “her death was unprecedented in comic strips and set off an outbreak of grief among millions of readers.” To continue the analogy with Marvel, Raven’s death was comparable in dramatic impact to the death of Gwen Stacy in Amazing Spider-Man in 1973. Each woman’s death marked a revolution in adventure melodrama in its particular comics format. Readers expected that the romantic heroine, however much she was endangered, would always be rescued; the deaths of Raven in an adventure comic strip and of Gwen in a superhero comic book dashed those expectations. These stories put readers on notice that happy endings were no longer mandatory. They thus signaled a new level of realism and even demonstrated that adventure comics melodrama could achieve the level of tragedy. But someone previously unfamiliar with Caniff’s Terry would learn none of this from the “Masters” show.

Carlin called his section of his catalogue text about Caniff, “Milton Caniff–Master of Suspense,” giving the cartoonist the same title associated with Alfred Hitchcock. Indeed, in both a wall text in the show and in the catalogue (pgs. 84-85), Carlin writes that “Similar to filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock, Caniff took an already established medium and broadened its palette in a manner that significantly changed the way subsequent artists have worked. They both introduced depth of field, atmospheric lighting, and novel perspectives or camera angles to suggest dramatic points of view.” The second sentence overstates the case for Hitchcock: it’s true about Hitchcock’s camera angles, but he borrowed his “atmospheric lighting” from the German Expressionist films of the 1920s and 1930s, and the true cinematic innovators regarding depth of field were Orson Welles and Gregg Toland in Citizen Kane (1941). But Carlin’s basic point is correct: as he wrote earlier in the book (p. 78), Caniff “developed the vocabulary of realistic suspense to its classic form.”

Carlin also asserts that, like Hitchcock’s films in their influence on the French New Wave directors of the late 1950s and 1960s, Caniff’s work had a “delayed impact” on what Carlin calls “new wave” comics artists of the 1960s. Carlin claims that “Caniff inspired Harvey Kurtzman and Jack Kirby to create the comic books produced by EC and Marvel, which highlighted the new wave of comics art” (p. 85). This is misleading in numerous ways.

First, Carlin is linking Kurtzman and Kirby to the 1960s. But Kirby started in comics in the late 1930s, and co-created Captain America in 1941, when Caniff’s Terry was in its heyday, and Kurtzman did his innovative EC work in the 1950s, when Steve Canyon was still surging along. I agree that Kurtzman’s war comics and Kirby’s adventure comics show the influence of Caniff’s visual storytelling. Indeed, two daily Canyon strips in the show (August 21 and September 9, 1947, Masters p. 237) feature dynamically staged fight scenes that put me in mind of Kirby action scenes. But was Kurtzman consciously motivated to write his anti-war EC stories in response to Caniff’s gung-ho war sagas? How could Caniff’s work possibly bring about Kurtzman’s creation of MAD? Just how did the comparatively realistic Terry and Canyon inspire Kirby to create Marvel superhero comics? And didn’t Stan Lee have something to do with creating the Marvel superhero comics of the 1960s? In fact, didn’t Lee hire Kirby to collaborate with him on these books?

Another example in the show of the need for context is Caniff’s great Sunday Terry strip for December 29, 1946 (Masters p. 85), which The New York Times ran in its online “slideshow” accompanying art critic Michael Kimmelman’s rave review of “Masters”. Here Terry, the boy hero of the 1930s who has grown up into a military pilot, bids farewell to a woman named Jane, who is leaving for Australia. Except for its first panel, the last two tiers of the strip are free from dialogue. Jane walks away from Terry through the snows of winter (the season of endings), stops, rushes towards him, they embrace and kiss, and then, overwhelmed by emotion, she leaves once more. Caniff’s simple but powerful staging provides a superb lesson in visual storytelling that any viewer, whatever the extent of his or her background in comics, can easily comprehend. The sequence also demonstrates Caniff’s masterful dramatization of emotion. When Jane runs towards Terry, it is in an overhead long shot, distancing the viewer from the characters’ feelings. This makes the impact of the panel showing their passionate embrace, in medium close-up, more powerful. Then Caniff pulls back to a long shot: we can see that Jane has her hand to her face in a gesture of anguish, but we are too far away to see her facial expression. Thus Caniff dramatically evokes emotion, but lets it subside before he runs the risk of falling into sentimental excess. Terry is even further away in the long shot, so his emotions are unreadable. Though literally speaking the reader’s viewpoint is in front of Jane, and Terry is behind her, Caniff has figuratively placed us in Terry’s psychological position: she is leaving both Terry and the reader behind. Jane’s plane takes off, and Terry trudges off through the snow towards the sunset (or sunrise?), in a variation on a standard final shot for ending a film (notably in Chaplin’s work), as he passes a poster for a New Year’s Eve party reading “Ring Out the Old, Ring In the New.” But the mood cast by the farewell scene and by the shadows in the final panel is one of melancholy.

An example of Peanuts in the show (Sunday, October 13, 1968), the catalogue (p. 245) and the online slideshow may even be Schulz’s joke about people who dislike a minimalist approach to art, including his comics. Linus is drawing a simple picture of a row of trees, but his sister Lucy declares, “That’s not art.” She insists on his adding more and more–a lake, a waterfall, a deer, and a multicolored sunset, making it sound like a vast Hudson River School canvas of the mid-19th century–and then shouts, “That’s art!” with such force that it literally turns Linus the Artist upside down.

In the book Carlin states that Schulz’s “visual minimalism was perfectly in keeping with the style of its times–shoebox skyscrapers, color-field painting, black-and-white TV, early rock “˜n’ roll, and frozen dinners” (p. 88). This seems to me a one-sided view of the 1950s and 1960s, when Peanuts originated and rose to its creative peak. These were also the time of Cinemascope movie epics and unprecedented postwar prosperity for the middle class, permitting them to buy big houses and cars in the suburbs: how does this relate to minimalism? In animation the 1950s were the heyday of the UPA Studio, which pioneered limited animation and preferred strong, stylized, often minimal visual design to attempts at detailed naturalism. In both regards UPA was reacting against the Disney studio. Wouldn’t it make more sense to compare Schulz’s minimalism (in both visual design and characters’ “movement”) to UPA’s? In his essay O’Donnell points out the influence that Segar and Herriman had on Schulz. Is it more likely that Schulz was part of a generational rebellion against the illustrative realism of comic strips by Hal Foster and Alex Raymond (who aren’t in the “Masters” show) and was attempting to recapture the “cartooniness” and simplicity of Krazy Kat and Popeye?

Carlin explains that “the minimalism that defines Peanuts forces its readers to focus on subtle nuances rather than broad actions or sharp transitions. . . . Everything is kept in the same minor key so that the simplest turn of a line can transform a character’s expression. . . “ (p. 88). O’Donnell compares Schulz’s work to Japanese poetry; through the use of the term “minor key,” Carlin likens it to music. Carlin goes on to observe that “by 1960 Schulz went even further by routinely drawing strips that repeated the same image in every panel, with subtle variations. . . .By maintaining the image from frame to frame, Schulz shifts our focus from action to the subtle inner psychology of his characters” (p. 88). (I wish that Carlin did not sometimes substitute the word “frame” for the correct term of “panel.”)

A Sunday strip from August 14, 1960, illustrates Carlin’s points. It presents Lucy, Charlie Brown, and Linus lying atop a small hill, looking upward at the clouds. (It’s a classic triangular composition.) As Linus describes how some clouds “look to me like the map of the British Honduras,” Charlie Brown raises his head with a deadpan expression, with two dots representing his eyes, that nonetheless subtly indicates his surprise and perhaps puzzlement at what Linus said. (This also may represent a subtle breaking of the fourth wall, since Charlie Brown is effectively looking out at the viewer, perhaps inviting our sympathy for his reaction, as Oliver Hardy used to do after Stan Laurel instigated yet another fine mess.) Charlie Brown puts his head back down in the succeeding panel, But in the next panel, when Linus claims he sees clouds resembling the stoning of St. Stephen and the Apostle Paul, Charlie Brown raises his head again, and this time Schulz drew curved lines next to his eyes, indicating that his surprise and bewilderment have sharply increased. But as Carlin said, this is “inner psychology”: Charlie Brown does not manifest these emotions in action or in dialogue. He turns his head when Lucy asks him what he sees in the clouds. Then, in the last panel, as if returning to the dominant key, Charlie Brown again places his head down, as he calmly delivers the punch line: “Well, I was going to say I saw a ducky and a horsie, but I changed my mind.”

This Sunday strip makes an interesting pairing with the previous Sunday strip I described, in which Lucy rejects the simplicity of Linus’s original drawing. But in the second Sunday I don’t get the sense that Schulz is ridiculing Linus’s imaginative interpretation of what he sees in the clouds. Rather, Schulz seems to me to be acknowledging that there can be more to something than a surface interpretation might indicate. Here Linus is again portrayed as an imaginative artist, who sees more and further than the everyman Charlie Brown.

Carlin states that Schulz’s repetition of the same image, with slight variations, “shifts our focus from action” to the characters; “inner psychology.” But one could see how, in less talented hands than Schulz’s, this stratagem could shift the readers’ attention from the visual aspect of the strip to the dialogue, and hence a strip could become a visually inert sequence of talking heads. It seems to me that in this Sunday strip about clouds, Schulz skillfully choreographs the “slight variations” in the image so that the reader focuses on them–on Charlie Brown’s changing head movements and subtly changing facial expression, and the psychological reactions they express–equally as much as on the dialogue. Looking around the room with Peanuts art at the Newark Museum, I was struck by how much Schulz actually has his characters move from panel to panel, in contrast with the conventional wisdom that he basically repeats the same image over and over.

I take issue with the book’s contention that Peanuts always remains in the same “minor key.” Look again at the Sunday in which Lucy critiques Linus’s drawing, in which Schulz quietly builds to the next to last panel, in which Lucy shouts “That’s art!” and Linus suddenly flips head over heels, as if hit by the force of an explosion. Now there’s an abrupt shift into a major key, before Schulz returns in the final panel to calm, as Lucy quietly delivers the anticlimactic punch line: “Sometimes it takes a layman to set these people straight.” Now that I’m writing this, it also reminds me of Caniff’s minimalist treatment of Terry and Jane’s intense emotions in the panels on either side of the panel in which their passions “explode” in their tight embrace.

Then there is a sequence in the Masters book from June 9-13, 1958 (p. 90), set during a baseball game, in which Charlie Brown ends up standing immobile, panel after panel, looking upward, waiting to catch a fly ball. Schulz moves to a close-up as Charlie Brown, with only a dot for an eye and no visible mouth, thinks to himself that if he catches the ball, his team will “win the championship, and I’ll be a hero!” Then in the next panel, he thinks, “If I miss it, I’ll be the goat!” and that curved line appears around his eye, indicating inner stress. In the following panel Charlie Brown tells himself, “I can hear it now. . . “˜Charlie, the goat, Brown!’” Here Schulz moves back to the medium close-up with which he began the daily, showing Violet and Lucy, the two women most likely to call Charlie Brown “the Goat,” and Schulz adds a line to Charlie Brown’s face that indicates a tightly clenched mouth, indicating his growing inner sense of impending disaster.

After this long build-up, the explosion has to take place: the emotions must be released. Inevitably, Charlie Brown, in keeping with his role as the archetypal loser, drops the ball. Lucy immediately bursts into wailing, Schroeder and a visibly upset Patty shout their dismay (in large, bold letters), and in panel three the entire team, their mouths wide open, joins Lucy in a chorus of wailing. There’s nothing minimal about this. Even when Schulz returns to relative calm in the last panel, in which he typically had team manager Charlie Brown understate his reaction in dialogue (“It depresses a manager to see his team cry. . . .”), Schulz drew Charlie Brown looking far more emotional than he did previously in this four strip sequence.

Speaking of E. C. Segar’s influence on Schulz in his essay, O’Donnell says that “Knowing that Popeye could meet Eugene the Jeep and Alice the Goon gave Schulz the freedom to make Snoopy a WWI flying ace” (p. 243). Looking at the Sunday, Feb. 13, 1966 strip in the catalogue (p. 241), in which World War I aerial ace Snoopy makes his way through the French countryside, I thought instead of two other Masters in the show: Winsor McCay and Frank King.

Supposedly, on a literal level, Snoopy is merely fantasizing his adventures as a World War I pilot. But his imagined world is visualized as real: Schulz shows us one of the abandoned trenches, complete with barbed wire, and a sign to Pont-a-Mousson. At one point Schulz shows us Snoopy’s familiar doghouse, which Snoopy, in the midst of his fantasy, calls “a small French farm house.” But once Snoopy goes inside, it really does seem to be a French farm house, with a table, lighted candle, and even a window! In other words, like Nemo entering Slumberland, or Skeezix entering the world of his daydreams, Snoopy is depicted as entering a fantasy world. This obviously is the forerunner of Calvin’s fantasy worlds in Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes. And the final panel of this Peanuts Sunday shows Snoopy asleep in bed, as if to make the connection with Little Nemo clear.

An even more explicit representative of the artist than Linus in Peanuts is Schroeder, Schulz’s boy virtuoso pianist. Schroeder might even be Schulz’s metaphor, conscious or unconscious, for the cartoonist as artist: Schroeder plays a child’s toy piano, but somehow he can get it to produce Beethoven’s masterworks.

Two strips that pair Schroeder and Snoopy, one from April 27, 1990 in the Newark Museum, and another from September 14, 1986 in the book (p. 93), show Schulz venturing into metacomics territory. In the 1990 strip Schroeder plays his piano, and, as usual, Schulz represents the music by means of upper and lower musical staffs bearing notes. We see the staffs again at Snoopy’s doghouse, where bones replace the notes. Just what is going on here? Does Schulz mean to suggest that Snoopy is imagining his own musical staffs, but that Snoopy is interested not in music but in his own appetite? Hence, Snoopy’s “art” is all about food. Or have the musical staffs somehow become physical objects, on which Snoopy can hang bones as if they were ornaments on a Christmas tree?

In the 1986 strip Snoopy is asleep atop Schroeder’s piano, as Schroeder plays his music, which again is represented by notes on musical staffs. Snoopy awakens and inadvertently places his head between the upper and lower staffs as he yawns. Snoopy then walks off, taking the staffs with him. Schroeder grabs the upper staff, and the lines connecting it to the lower staff stretch like rubber bands. Then Schroeder lets go, and the upper staff snaps back, knocking Snoopy down as the notes fly into the air. Snoopy hangs the notes (some of which are now bent) back on the staffs, which are now quite crooked, places it above the piano, and falls asleep once more, as Schroeder looks at it with a minimalist expression. perhaps denoting a placid sort of wonderment.

In this case the staffs and the notes seem not only to have become solid objects, but have also seemingly lost their original purpose of denoting music. (What would the severely dented notes and staff sound like? Yet Schroeder has stopped playing the piano, so presumably these “signs” have ceased denoting musical sounds.) Schroeder and Snoopy inhabit a world in which one of the visual signs of comics language–musical notes and staffs–are as “real” as they are. Presumably, then, at least in strip installments like these, Snoopy ands Schroeder know they themselves exist in a comic strip. This is a gag that could only be done in the comics medium. It’s as if the word balloons over their heads had physical reality for the comic strip characters, as, actually, sometimes happened in Walt Kelly’s Pogo. (Once Kelly’s turtle, Churchy La Femme, even went around shooting the balloons.)

With Peanuts the Newark Museum’s portion of “Masters” and the show’s history of comic strips come to an end. (Will Eisner’s Sunday Spirit sections not only started before the 1950 debut of Peanuts, but are really more like comic books than newspaper strips.) The implication is that Schulz was the last true “Master of American Comics” who worked in newspaper comic strips. “Masters” co-curator Brian Walker is aware of this implication and expressed his concern in an interview: “I think one of the biggest differences I have from the Spiegelman/Carlin canon is that I don’t really believe that newspaper comics died at some point or that they were completely eclipsed by what is going on now, beginning with underground comics. I still think there are cartoonists doing incredibly creative work in newspapers these days.”

But has there been anyone who started in newspaper comics after Schulz who matched him and many of the other Masters as an innovator in visual storytelling and design? I don’t know that there has been. Still, is it right to give museumgoers the impression that comic strips stopped being a creatively vital artform after the creation of Peanuts?

So, as you shall see next week, the Masters show moves on to the Jewish Museum, the history of American comic books, and even more questionable assumptions about the evolution of the comics medium.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF

Becker and Mayer has recently published Marvel Classic Heroes, a book written by myself, recounting the history of Captain America, the Hulk, Spider-Man, and Wolverine, which comes in a box including statuettes of the aforementioned heroes. Looks to me like the sort of thing that would make a good Christmas present!

My lecture series “1986: The Year That Changed Comics,” finally reaches the high point of that fateful year on Monday, November 13. That’s when I tackle the first six issues of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen, starting at 6:30 PM at New York City’s Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art.

–Copyright 2006 Peter Sanderson

That redoubtable comics news blogger, the Beat, regularly refers to “the comics-loving New York Times,” and that description is largely apt. Last year The New York Times Sunday Magazine inaugurated its new section “The Funny Pages,” including a weekly comic strip by a prominent alternative cartoonist, each of whom does a story that runs for several months: the first contributor was Chris Ware, who was followed by Jaime Hernandez, and currently by Seth. Though it would have seemed highly improbable even two years ago, Times readers are now accustomed to regularly seeing writer George Gene Gustines’ news reports on the superhero genre, in comics and other media.

But then on October 30, 2006, the Times ran an article by television reporter Bill Carter with the headline “It Doesn’t Take a “˜Comic Book Nerd’ to Create a Superheroes Hit.”

I write my own titles for this column, but I have learned that generally in the world of magazines and newspapers, editors rather than writers devise the titles for articles. So perhaps, you might think, Carter and his subject, Tim Kring, the creator of the new NBC series Heroes, did not thus disparage the audience for comics. But you would be wrong. “”˜I was not a comic book nerd,’ Mr. Kring said,” according to Carter’s article. It’s just amazing that it has not occurred to Mr. Kring that it is not good public relations to disparage much of your core audience.

I suspect that I see a trend emerging. As the mainstream becomes more interested in comics and graphic novels, some of these newcomers to the medium will feel obligated to distance themselves from those of us who have known and appreciated comics as an artform all along. The newcomers will position themselves to appear as discerning observers with good taste; we will still be stereotyped as nerds and geeks.

Mr. Carter seems not to think highly of the comics audience, either. He writes that “With an audience of 14.3 million on Oct. 23, more than the comic-obsessed are watching now.” Would these be the television-obsessed, then? Or does Carter only consider aficionados of art forms he thinks are outside the mainstream to be obsessives?

Carter also asserts that “The world Mr. Kring comes from seems almost antithetical to the comic traditions. He was a religious-studies major who somehow turned that interest into a master’s degree in filmmaking.” So Kring has a background in mythology and in visual storytelling. That seems to me to be a proper foundation for writing superhero stories.

Of course there remain that large contingent of comics buffs who glory in being stereotyped as nerds and geeks. For example, on November 1, 2006, the venerable TV soap opera Guiding Light, with cooperation from Marvel, ran an episode in which one of the characters gained super-powers and became a costumed heroine called, of course, the Guiding Light. Marvel did a tie-in comics story, written by Jim McCann, who told the Times’ Gustines (October 31, 2006) about “writing the sound effects for Wolverine’s unleashing his claws and Spider-Man’s shooting his webs. He said, “˜I geeked out typing SNIKT and THWIP.’” This isn’t the most felicitously phrased statement to be immortalized in cyberspace, either.

The Guiding Light episode and the success of Heroes both demonstrate that a taste for the superhero fiction that originated in comics is not confined to some supposed subculture of social misfits. Carter quotes Kevin Reilly, the president of NBC Entertainment, as stating that in Heroes, “We have the only real hit of the fall, and it’s growing.” In the same article Kring says about comics that “the truth is that nowadays that world is so pervasive, especially when you have kids, that you go to movies in the summertime and that’s what you see.” This is becoming part of the mainstream in American entertainment.

How far does this cultural shift extend? The last time that I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I stumbled across a new temporary exhibition titled “Series and Sequence: Modern Photographs from the Collection.” Each display in this exhibit consisted of a series of photographs that were taken by the same photographer and that were meant to be shown in a specific sequence. As the introductory wall text stated, these were “groupings that highlight serial progression and narrative sequence and thus go against the traditional authority and autonomy of the single image.” These “groupings” may not have been cartoon art. Only one of these series, a set of photos by Chris Burden, recording his encounter with a woman, actually told a story. Each photo in another series was accompanied by a sheet of paper with a typed description. Hence, this sequence combined words and pictures. But all of the series in this exhibition were indeed “sequential art,” to use Will Eisner’s term for describing comics.

I quite like the Metropolitan’s assertion that in these examples of sequential art “go against the traditional authority and autonomy of the single image,” by which the Museum presumably means the conventional paintings, drawings and photographs exhibited in museums. That is an intriguing approach to looking at comics.

Upstairs the Metropolitan’s galleries for drawings, the Museum was temporarily exhibiting illustrations from children’s books of the late 19th and early 20th centuries by artists including Maxfield Parrish, Howard Pyle, Arthur Rackham, and an artist whose work I hadn’t known, Peter Newell, the illustrator of a 1902 edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Perhaps this was a response to the Dahesh Museum’s show of classic American illustration earlier this year (see “Comics in Context” #132). It may also be further evidence that the best of popular culture, given sufficient passage of time, becomes incorporated into the canon of high art.

The works by Newell, Pyle and Rackham were efforts at conveying a story through pictures. Looking over these displays, I found myself reflecting that the first great Master of American Comics, Winsor McCay was a contemporary of Newell and Pyle. Why shouldn’t McCay be exhibited at the Met, too? (Actually, I recall seeing a McCay collection in the Met’s book shop over a decade and a half ago.)

On this same visit to the Metropolitan, I looked through another new temporary exhibit, “Coaxing the Spirits to Dance: Art of the Papuan Gulf.”
One label stated regarding Papuan ritual dances that “During these performances, spirits entered the masks and possessed the dancers, allowing them to do remarkable things.” This is why I like museum exhibits of tribal masks and costumes. They serve as reminders that the masks and costumes of superheroes are modern counterparts to the masks and costumes of ancient tribal religions.

Sequential art. Illustrations for children’s books. Masks. Thirteen years ago the Met did a retrospective of drawings by Honore Daumier, the 19th century French illustrator and caricaturist. Three years ago the Met did a retrospective about Philip Guston, whose later paintings were quite cartoonlike, noted in its wall texts that Guston was influenced by George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, but failed to show any examples of Herriman’s work (see “Comics in Context” #20). I wonder how long it will take the Metropolitan to put together the puzzle pieces and do an exhibition about comics.

The bad old days are not so long ago. Take the case of Roy Lichtenstein, the late Pop artist who is best known for creating variations on comics panels. Back in “Comics in Context” #4, I recalled the Solomon R. Guggenheim’s 1993 Lichtenstein retrospective, whose introductory wall text commended him for appropriating images from sources that, it claimed, had no artistic value, including comics, and converting them into art.

Thanks to Colleen Doran’s blog (for Oct. 18, 2006) and an article in The Boston Globe, I learned about art teacher David Barsalou’s “Deconstructing Roy Lichtenstein” website. (It’s here, but I warn you, if you’re on dial-up, it’ll take a long, long time to load.) Barsalou has been tracking down the comic book and comic strip panels that Lichtenstein used for source material, and posts them next to reproductions of Lichtenstein’s work on his website. The results are eye-opening.

The Globe quotes Jack Cowart, the executive director of the Lichtenstein Foundation, as saying, “Barsalou is boring to us.” Here is yet another example of a person who does not comprehend how to talk to the news media. He comes off sounding like a stuffed shirt caricature of an academic who finds people outside his elite circle tedious. But Cowart does deign to respond: “Barsalou’s thesis notwithstanding, the panels were changed in scale, color, treatment, and in their implications. There is no exact copy.” That’s true, but to look at the Lichtensteins side by side with the original source material is to realize that Lichtenstein unmistakably copied the essential figure drawing and all or much of the composition of these works from the original comics. Much of the artistic vitality and power of Lichtenstein’s pictures comes directly from their sources in comics (including work by such important figures as Carl Barks, Joe Kubert and Russ Heath; I’ve even spotted a Lichtenstein that seems adapted from Jack Kirby). The Globe article points out that in the music world this would be called “sampling,” which, an intellectual property attorney quoted in the piece says, “is considered stealing.” I would add that in the comics world it’s called “swiping.” Cowart protests that “Nobody seemed to raise this issue way back when.” Ah, but now mainstream culture has started taking the comics medium seriously, and Lichtenstein is being found out. (Indeed, to my taste, certain Lichtensteins on Barsalou’s website are inferior to the original comics sources as artwork.)

Cowart also declares that “We are all in favor of having the drawers and writers receive as much credit as humanly possible.” The “drawers”? What, are they furniture or underwear? Can’t Cowart bring himself to call the people who drew and inked the original comics “artists”? And if the Lichtenstein Foundation is so concerned with crediting the “drawers” of the source material, why didn’t they already do what Barsalou is doing now?

Right now, the Whitney Museum of American Art is holding an exhibition called “Picasso and American Art,” demonstrating how Picasso’s work influenced many major American artists of the 20th century. There are Lichtenstein works in this show, hanging alongside the Picassos that inspired them. Hence viewers can see for themselves exactly what Lichtenstein took from Picasso and how he changed it to suit his own purposes. So here’s an idea for a retrospective: “Lichtenstein and American Comics.” Why not hang Lichtenstein paintings alongside reproductions of the comics he used as sources? The Museum of Modern Art’s “High and Low” show in the early 1990s paired some examples of Lichtensteins with comics, but I’m proposing using this compare-and-contrast scenario for an all-Lichtenstein show. Such an exhibition would ideally set viewers thinking about the artistic merits of the original comics as well.

Even as museums and galleries grow more interested in comics as the new century progresses, I wonder how much 21st century comics artwork will be available for eventual exhibition? In an October 22 entry on her blog, Colleen Doran reflects on how lettering, coloring, and even, increasingly, inking is done on computers now, and how publishers increasingly prefer artwork to be delivered via discs. “Since so many artists aren’t even really doing inks anymore – they are sketching their work and tweaking it in Photoshop – I wonder about the values of comic art,” she writes. “I’ve heard some collectors say they have trouble finding hand lettered art directly on the page, and classic comic art with lettering and inking, is becoming very attractive.” This echoes the warnings sounded on the “Brush Masters” panel I moderated at one of the Big Apple Conventions last year (see “Comics in Context” #132).

You can see original comics art. complete with inking and lettering, at the “Masters of American Comics” show that I have been covering for the last two weeks. Another of the virtues of this exhibition is that it never condescends to the comics medium, to the individual artists whose work is displayed, or to comics aficionados. (The sole exception is an essay by a contributing writer to the Masters of American Comics catalogue, as you shall see.)

The show is currently divided between the Jewish Museum in Manhattan and the Newark Museum in New Jersey. When I left off last week I was still making my way through the Newark Museum’s galleries, where work by classic comic strip artists is displayed.

The next Master in the show is Frank King (1883-1969), the creator of Gasoline Alley, which has been going through a critical rediscovery and reappraisal. In books about comics that I read decades ago, Gasoline Alley seemed most notable for defying the convention that comics characters never aged, or did so extremely slowly: King’s strip presented a community whose members aged in real time.

One claim that the “Masters” show makes for Gasoline Alley in a wall text is well over the top: “Gasoline Alley is the Our Town of the comics pages, and the family history that has unfolded in its panels for more than 80 years reads like the Great American Novel.” Most of the Gasoline Alley I’ve read was done after King’s death, and I only know King’s own work from individual Sundays and daily strips, not from entire story arcs. Nevertheless, I find the idea that King’s Gasoline Alley reads “like the Great American Novel” hard to swallow. Is it really on a level with the novels of, say, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, or William Faulkner? Certainly none of the individual strips in the exhibit’s King section show any trace of that level of literary quality. Even the comparison to Thornton Wilder’s Our Town goes only so far, since the last act of Wilder’s drama, set in a graveyard among the spirits of the deceased, reveals the play’s deep and dark foundation of pessimism about the brevity of existence. From the examples on display, King’s Gasoline Alley seems genuinely sunny in comparison. (Similarly, Krazy Kat‘s desert setting reminds New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman of Samuel Beckett in his October 13, 2006 “Masters” review, but Herriman’s work is free from Beckett’s underlying despair.)

“Masters” co-curator John Carlin more persuasively contends in the wall text and the catalogue that King “was one of the last newspaper artists to follow his [Winsor McCay’s] lead” (Masters p. 61). This is demonstrated by King’s early strip Bobby Make-Believe, which was obviously inspired by Little Nemo. In a 1918 Sunday page in “Masters” Bobby imagines himself ascending through the clouds, becoming gigantic and walking on the moon and Saturn’s rings, and even riding the tail of a comet, before returning to reality (p. 210).

I notice two major differences between this particular Sunday strip and Nemo. Nemo falls asleep and has dreams which are beyond his conscious control. In contrast, Bobby is daydreaming: he is consciously imagining what he sees. Nemo is repeatedly awed by the wonders he witnesses in Slumberland, and often terrified by them, causing him to awaken. In this installment, at least, Bobby, who seems to have a short attention span, is quickly bored by the marvels he conjures up for himself, as if he were a creative artist who did not value his own talents.

Although on weekdays Gasoline Alley dealt with homey realities of everyday life, “King’s Sunday pages,” Carlin states, are “filled with unexpected fantasy and visual inventiveness” (p. 61).

Some of the show’s Gasoline Alley Sundays follow the Nemo/Bobby pattern. In the Sunday, August 19, 1934 strip (p. 62) Skeezix, then a boy, observes the reflection of the sky in a lake, and then imagines himself entering this “upside-down world” and flying/swimming about among the clouds and birds flying upside down. In the Sunday, June 28, 1931 page (p. 219), Skeezix actually does dive into the lake, whereupon he imagines seeing fish as big as he is: has he shrunk or have the fish grown gigantic?

I am less impressed than the curators by two pages in which Skeezix’s adoptive “uncle,” Walt, takes him for “our annual walk among the autumn colors” (Sunday, November 4, 1928 and Sunday, October 20, 1929, pgs. 216-217). The colors on these two newspaper pages on display have faded with time, but studying the reproductions in the catalogue, I doubt that even when the pages were new, I would have found these pale yellows and dull oranges for autumn leaves appealing; I’ve seen far more vivid coloring done in comics even within the limitations of four-color printing.

More interesting to me is the return of the show’s “metafiction” theme. In the 1928 strip Skeezix, here not yet a teenager, talks about his hobby of painting, and Walt uses the example of the autumn leaves to teach Skeezix about color. “Nature is the best teacher of color,” he tells Skeezix; “See there–she uses the contrast of orange and blue for a startling picture.” But of course Walt and Skeezix are actually part of a picture themselves, drawn by King, and presumably colored by him as well. King is explaining his ideas about color and line to the reader through Walt’s lecture to Skeezix. In one panel, King even breaks the illusion of reality. Walt and Skeezix seem to be standing in a void, looking at islands floating in an orange sky. Look more carefully and you may detect that King intends that the islands are rising from a lake, and the sky (with a setting sun, as the final panel makes clear) and its reflection in the water both have an orange hue. But King did not draw a line dividing the water from the sky, so it looks as if Walt and Skeezix have entered some orange void, as if they were Doctor Strange traveling through one of Steve Ditko’s surreal dimensions.

Throughout this 1928 strip Walt speaks of Nature as the creator of the effects of color around them, as if Nature were a sentient being. Perhaps in referring to Nature, Walt and King actually mean God. King is the artist who created the world of Gasoline Alley and the natural vistas in this sunday strip, and God is the artist who created the real world, which King here presents as the highest work of art. Speaking of Nature (or God), Skeezix says in the last panel, “She paints better than I can,” presumably speaking on behalf of King.

In the 1929 Sunday, Walt looks about at the autumn colors and exclaims, with surprisingly stylized language for an everyday man, “Oh, that I were a poet and could put into words the thrill of these toasted avenues!” (Well, the word “toasted” doesn’t work.) He continues in the next panel, “I wish I was an artist so I could fix this fleeting splendor on a canvas!” But of course King is an artist and a writer (if not a poet) as well. But the point of this Sunday strip seems to be King’s confession, through Walt, of his inability–and perhaps that of any human–to fully capture the beauty of nature. Walt says, “If I could paint it, people would never believe it.”

In a November 30, 1930 Sunday page (p. 66) the leaves have almost all fallen from the trees, and Walt and Skeezix wander through a dark, ominous landscape that suggests the darkening days of late fall. Carlin asserts that the heavy dark lines King uses for the trees and ground in this Sunday “mimic woodcuts” (p 64). But he doesn’t mention that Walt actually says so at the start of the strip: “Here we are, Skeezix, in the style of the old woodcut pictures.” In other words, Walt and Skeezix are aware that they are cartoon characters, drawn into a comic strip! To my mind, the deep blacks and stylized drawing style of this sequence reminds me of Expressionism. I am particularly struck by the dark, overhanging clouds in one panel, which King represents as masses of disconnected black dots, surrounded by a white halo of light, against a dark sky consisting of black horizontal lines.

Two other Sunday strips in the show combine the Bobby Make-Believe daydream motif with this concept of Walt and Skeezix walking through a picture. In the May 10, 1931 Sunday (p. 60), Walt and Skeezix use a compass to draw circles, and King fills the backgrounds of the panels with complex patterns of concentric circles. Skeezix decides to “make an outdoor picture with a compass,” whereupon Walt and Skeezix walk into a version of the outside world with strong curved and circular shapes: round trees, a rainbow, undulating ground, enormous oval leaves, and finally a huge setting (or rising?) sun. The strip ends with Skeezix claiming, “I draw better circles than Nature does.” Skeezix can’t outdo Nature/God at color, but here King is pointing out that the perfect circle does not exist in nature, and hence is man’s creation.

In the November 2, 1930 Sunday (p. 67), Walt and Skeezix are looking at a modern painting when Skeezix decides they should enter the world of the picture. And so they do, wandering amidst an expressionistically distorted landscape, and finally encountering a monkey with a Cubist face. Walt dislikes what he calls “modernism” from the start, and Skeezix ends up agreeing, but presumably King is actually paying homage to modern painting by doing the day’s strip in this style. In the final panel Skeezix says, “That was an awful dream, Uncle Walt! Or was it a dream?” So is this a strip in the style of Bobby Make-Believe, in which Walt and Skeezix imagine this expressionistic world? Is this distorted world a modernist version of one of Nemo’s nightmares? Or is this another example of Walt and Skeezix knowing they are in a comic strip and traveling into drawings done in a different style?

What most seems to impress King’s latter-day admirers are the Sunday strips which consist of a single large background, like a beach, which King then divides up through a grid of panels. One or more characters might then wander from panel to panel across this otherwise static landscape. One example of this, a Sunday page from August 19, 1934, is not in the book, but is part of the online “slideshow” that accompanies Michael Kimmelman’s “Masters” review in The New York Times. Carlin observes in the book that “These pages are shown from an aerial perspective, similar to that found in many Japanese paintings and prints” (p. 64). So it seems that some American comics were influenced by Japanese art long before the current infatuation with manga. These King pages, with the panel grid superimposed over a single background, strike me as cinematic: it’s as if the “camera” pans from panel to panel, often following an “actor” as he makes his way through a setting.

The next Master is Chester Gould (1900-1985), creator of Dick Tracy, whose
title character Carlin calls “perhaps the best known and most iconographically potent comic character aside from Mickey Mouse” (p. 74). Even leaving aside the objection that Mickey began in animation, what about Superman? And do contemporary readers really know Tracy, whose strip’s glory days were over a half century ago, more than Charlie Brown?

But Carlin is correct in focusing on Gould’s skill in visual iconography: Dick Tracy is the literally square-jawed detective, a visual symbol of relentless righteousness and avenging justice, who is pitted against evil that takes the form of what Carlin calls “the best collection of grotesque villains ever assembled” (p. 74). (That last quotation could use a little tweaking: it’s definitely the best collection of grotesque villains created for a newspaper comic strip. Carlin does not mention Dick Tracy‘s obvious influence on Batman, whose hero was also square-jawed in the 1940s and 1950s, and whose rogues’ gallery may have been partly inspired by Tracy’s.) I admire Robert Storr’s observation in his essay in the catalogue that “in a fallen world such as the one Gould posited, primal abominations constantly reasserted their hold in ever viler forms” (p. 226). It is as if evil in Tracy’s world is like the mythical Hydra, with many heads–Flattop, Pruneface, and the rest of these monsters in bizarre human forms. Storr refers to Gould’s “urban eschatology” (p. 226), implying that Tracy is an avenging angel doing battle with these demonic figures who threaten to transform the city he protects into hell on Earth.

Carlin also correctly states that Gould’s “way with the contrast between black and white. . .closely paralleled film noir” (p. 74), whose heyday coincided with that of the Tracy strip. The look of American film noir was influenced by the German Expressionist films of the 1920s and 1930s, and in his review Michael Kimmelman quotes Art Spiegelman as calling Gould’s style “blueprint Expressionism.”

Gould could create astonishing effects: in a July 17, 1943 daily (p. 223) he places the menacing figure of Mrs. Pruneface in silhouette, streaked by slanted white lines representing the driving rain of the literal storm that has broken out about her.

The Times slideshow presents a Sunday page from August 4, 1957 (p. 71), which creates a mood of foreboding by casting a mountainside into deep shadow and a young woman with a gun into ominous silhouette. In the final panel Tracy is shot directly in the forehead (shown in enlarged version on pgs. 72-73). Gould walks the edge here: there is no blood or gore shown, but the bluntness and explicitness of the violence is still shocking. (And how Tracy survived this, I have no idea.)

These examples suit the reputation of Gould’s Dick Tracy. But the example of Gould’s work in the show (but, alas, not in the book) that most impressed me was a daily strip from March 27, 1952 that was set at a funeral. The first panel shows a cemetery behind a fence. In the second panel Tracy, a woman and another man, who are partly concealed (perhaps Tracy’s wife Tess and detective partner Sam) stand together on the left, facing off-panel, while a large tree dominates the right side. The third panel has a black silhouette (a tombstone?) to the left (paralleling the tree in the previous panel), and a tombstone, clearly shown, to the right, with figures of mourners in the background. The concluding panel shows the back of someone’s head–Tracy’s adopted son Junior, I think–with a word balloon, “I’ll always love you.”

This sequence makes such a sharp contrast with that panel of Tracy getting shot in the head. In that Sunday page Gould confronted us with the violence head on (so to speak). But in this funeral sequence Gould works through subtlety and indirection, focusing on objects–the tombstones, a tree, a fence–rather than on people. Whereas he could have shown us Junior Tracy’s face wracked by sorrow, perhaps even weeping, instead Gould shows us the back of his head. Instead of going in for the open show of emotion that we might expect, Gould avoids the traps of sentimentality and cliche, and mutes the emotional tone of the scene. In doing so, Gould instead captures the somber, even numb mood that so many mourners actually do experience at funerals, which, after all, take place after the initial shock of the loved one’s death. This is a brilliantly done sequence, and gave me new insight into Gould’s work, which is just what a museum retrospective for a familiar artist should accomplish.

Considering that Art Spiegelman pulled out of the show, we are now seven Masters down with eight more to go. To be continued next week.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF

On Monday, November 6 at 7:00 PM, contributing writers Tom De Falco, Dan Wallace and I will be doing a signing of DK’s new Marvel Encyclopedia at Barnes & Noble’s store in the Chelsea section of Manhattan (675 Sixth Avenue at 22nd Street). The Beat informs me that the Encyclopedia is on BookScan’s graphic novels best seller list (and it’s not even a graphic novel). Come one, come all!

You can find my report on the United Nations’ “Cartooning for Peace” seminar in the October 31, 2006 edition of Publishers Weekly‘s Comics Week.

–Copyright 2006 Peter Sanderson

According to a writer named Brian Braiker in Newsweek (Oct. 30, 2006), “There was nothing new in… exhibiting cartoons even back in 1974, when Mort Walker, the creator of Beetle Bailey, founded the Museum of Cartoon Art…. But to “˜establish a canon of… the most influential artists working in the medium’? That’s the mission of “˜Masters of American Comics,’” the landmark exhibition which I began reviewing last week.

Perhaps Braiker never visited the Museum of Cartoon Art (whose founder, Mort, not incidentally is the father of Brian Walker, co-curator of “Masters”) when it was still in Port Chester, but it had a “hall of fame” gallery which, in effect, was an attempt to establish a pantheon of the greatest artists in the cartoon art medium, including many of those honored by the “Masters” show.

One major difference is that the Museum of Cartoon Art (which is currently homeless), the Words and Pictures Museum (permanently closed) in Northampton, Massachusetts, San Francisco’s Cartoon Art Museum, and New York City’s Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (both institutions still alive and kicking) all operated outside the mainstream establishment of art museums and art scholarship.

According to one of the Masters, Art Spiegelman, the show originated in his reaction to what he considered the condescending attitude towards comics that was taken by the Museum of Modern Art in its notorious 1980s exhibition “High and Low.” In 1992 he invited curators from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Library of Congress and other institutions to his studio to show them slides of the work of over twenty cartoonists and propose a museum exhibition that would treat comics seriously as an artform. Two years later, one of the attendees, Ann Philbin, on becoming head of the Hammer Museum in California, started work on what became the “Masters” show. The unspoken subtext of Spiegelman’s story is that obviously the representatives of the other museums were not sufficiently persuaded that comics were art. “I have all sorts of issues with the idea that a [Roy] Lichtenstein painting of a comic-book panel is art, but the original comic panel it draws on is not considered art,” Spiegelman said in the Nov. 28, 2005 issue of Time. (However, thanks to a recent donation of cartoon art, the Library of Congress is mounting its own show this fall.

So “Masters” is indeed groundbreaking. Spiegelman also said in that same issue of Time, “What comics are going through is like a civil rights movement,” says Spiegelman. “This museum show will help.” Braiker claims that “the idea of ivory-tower cred seems anathema to this most outré of outsider arts.” But comics are simply following the same path to cultural and scholarly respectability that other forms of popular culture have over the centuries. As critic Richard Corliss observed in his review of “Masters” for Time (Nov. 28, 2005), “Like Hitchcock thrillers and rock ‘n’ roll, comics are obeying the tidal pull of pop culture. What was once forbidden is now mainstream; what was once junk is now classic.”

But at the panel about the “Masters” show at this year’s San Diego Comic Con (see “Comics in Context” #145), the question was raised whether people might assume that the fifteen cartoonists saluted by the exhibition were the only ones who were worthy of being placed in this canon of great comics art. Brian Walker said, “I hope this group of fifteen isn’t set in stone.”

The “Masters” canon has already come under sharp criticism for excluding female cartoonists. That charge seems to me to derive more from political correctness than serious artistic considerations. What worries me is that I believe the selection of this canon of Masters implies a viewpoint on the evolution of the comics medium that unjustly eliminates the work of numerous comics professionals, male and female, from consideration, as I hope to show in future installments.

During its East Coast engagement, the first half of the “Masters” show is being held at the Newark Museum, and when I left off last week, I had begun a discussion of the work of the second Master in the show, Lyonel Feininger, creator of the early 20th century strips The Kin-der-Kids and Wee Willie Winkie’s World.

The introductory wall text for the Feininger section of the show states that “The flat color schemes and open spaces of his pages were inspired by his fascination with Japanese prints. . . .” Perhaps this is so, since many Western artists have been inspired by Japanese prints since Japan began trading with the West in the mid-19th century. But aren’t the “flat color schemes” also a necessity imposed by the four-color printing methods used by newspapers and formerly by comic books? As for the “open spaces,” they are present in certain panels of the Feininger comics on display, such as the broad triangular forms representing rooftops in a Kin-der-Kids from September 9, 1906 (page 188 in the Masters of American Comics book). But in other cases Feininger’s panels look crowded, or even a whole page, like “The Triumphant Departure of the Kids in the Family Bathtub” (The Kin-der-Kids, May 6, 1906, Masters p. 36). That’s not necessarily a bad thing, either: that page bursts with energy, as the Kids’ bathtub, a fleet of tugboats and an ocean liner all set sail, as an animate Statue of Liberty waves goodbye.

The Feininger page in the show that has the most “open space” is part of the
the online “slide show” accompanying New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman’s review of “Masters”. On this April 29, 1906 Kin-der-Kids page (p. 186 in the catalogue) Feininger’s self-caricature stands on a slate-grey floor against a white void. He portrayed himself as a puppeteer, with the cast members of Kin-der-Kids dangling from strings. Here is another example of a theatrical metaphor in early comics, with the comic strip likened to a puppet show, controlled by an unseen figure behind the stage, and the further implication that the cartoonist is a performer, who acts through his “puppets,” the characters in the strip. Each of the puppets bears a tag identifying him, and so does the puppeteer himself, whose tag reads, “Your Uncle Feininger.” This might even imply that Feininger’s self-caricature is yet another puppet, a public image as a fatherly storyteller, created by the unseen artist.

I prefer the rambunctiousness of the Kin-der-Kids pages to the fairy tale milieu of Wee Willie Winkie’s World. As “Masters” co-curator John Carlin points out in the show’s catalogue, everything in Wee Willie Winkie’s World is alive and anthropomorphized. In a September 23, 2006 page (p. 38) enormous storm clouds with faces loom over a house, whose windows become terrified eyes. Here I am reminded of the “Pastoral Symphony” sequence in Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940), which also has clouds with faces that blow gale-force winds, and in which Night is a goddess spreading her vast cloak across the sky. For my taste, though, Feininger’s stylized fantasy world in Wee Willie Winkie runs a poor second to Winsor McCay’s dream worlds in Little Nemo, which he presents in such persuasively detailed, concrete reality. I agree with Kimmelman in finding Feininger’s comics “a little lusterless sandwiched between Nemo and George Herriman’s great Krazy Kat.”

As usual, Carlin’s interest is in the cartoonist’s visual design for a page, emphasizing lines and shapes that can be regarded both as representational and as abstract elements. In the Sunday, September 16, 1906 Kin-der-Kids (p. 39), he contends that the waterspouts in the panels on the left side of the page form a “serpentine” line running from the bottom to the top of the page. I am more impressed with the waterspouts in the panels on the right side of the page, which seem to me to form a single funnel growing in size from the top of the page until it nearly fills the final panel.

In the Masters book Carlin asserts that “the run of Willie Winkie can be read as a prototypical graphic novel” (p. 40). Is it stretching the definition of “graphic novel” too far to refer to a series of Sunday comics pages this way? Later in the book, in his essay on Milton Caniff, journalist Pete Hamill reveals that “Caniff told me that he thought of the strip [Terry and the Pirates]–and his later creation, Steve Canyon–as a kind of picaresque novel, a form as old as Don Quixote“ (p. 232). Is a graphic novel necessarily a work of comics that is created specifically to be published in book form? It seems fair to me to consider Watchmen and V for Vendetta to be graphic novels, even though they were originally published in serialized “pamphlet” format. Moreover, following their original publication, new readers have experienced them as books, not as monthly comic magazines. So could Caniff’s Terry be considered a graphic novel, or each months-long story arc as an individual graphic novel?

Carlin justly praises the design of the show’s Krazy Kat Sunday page from Sept. 12, 1937 (p. 51). In the top left corner is a small panel featuring Ignatz Mouse, on his eternal quest to hurl bricks at Krazy Kat, determined that he will not be thwarted again by his nemesis Offissa Pupp: “He’ll not foil me, that Kop.” In the top right corner is a panel of the same size, with Offissa Pupp vowing “He’ll not fool me, that mouse.” But Ignatz, hiding in the base of a cactus plant in that same panel, already has. The rest of the page consists of a gigantic panel, stretching from the top middle to the bottom, and, as Carlin notes, dominated by the vertical column of the cactus, shown at its full height. It looks like an obelisk, or Washington’s Monument, in contrast with the flat ground below. Ignatz is triumphantly at the top, dropping the brick, as if he were Galileo experimenting with gravity, as the oblivious Krazy, who considers these bricks as love tokens, leans nonchalantly against the bottom of the tree, saying, “He’ll not fail me, that dollink.” In the catalogue (Kat-alogue?) Carlin states that the play of words with “foil,” “fool,” and “fail” is a pun; I see the parallelism in the three characters’ lines of dialogue as a kind of poetry.

And there along the bottom of the page is a row of footlights, as if this were taking place onstage. Carlin compares it to a “theatrical presentation.” I’d go farther: it’s as if Krazy, Ignatz, and Pupp were a team of comedians performing their vaudeville act for the audience: their inexhaustible variations on the gag in which Krazy gets clobbered. Standing center stage, with his/her (Krazy’s gender is uncertain) name at the top, Krazy is the star of the show. The towering cactus and the simple setting are like a stage set, with the night sky like a black backdrop.

Krazy, Ignatz and Pupp are therefore presented as actors playing roles in the comic strip. The same conceit underlies Friz Freleng’s 1940 animated short You Oughta Be in Pictures, in which Daffy Duck manipulates Porky Pig into confronting Looney Tunes producer Leon Schlesinger (shown in live action) and quitting, or, in more recent decades, Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) and Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003), which purport that animated characters are actors working at Hollywood studios. The same basic idea recurred in comics when Li’l Abner would visit Al Capp, or Pogo characters would refer to their creator Walt Kelly, or the She-Hulk would complain to her unseen writer/artist John Byrne.

Hence, a further implication of this Krazy Kat Sunday is that the unseen Herriman is the writer/director, putting on a show for the audience reading their newspapers at home in the 1930s–or perusing a museum exhibit in 2006.

In reading comics, we ordinarily suspend our disbelief and pretend that static lines on paper are actually living, moving characters; hence, the panels become windows into their world. Herriman’s footlights subvert this convention: we’re no longer looking at characters in a real world but at actors on a stage. Herriman has reminded us that Krazy Kat is an artificial construction, and, of course, if we take a step further, we remind ourselves that Krazy Kat is really a drawing in a newspaper.

To continue the theatrical analogy, Carlin’s approach in the Masters book is Brechtian: he stands back from the story the comics tell, and even from their attempts to visually represent reality, and insists on regarding them as if they were abstract works comprised of line, shapes and (often) colors.

Kimmelman asserts that Krazy Kat’s desert setting anticipates the work of Samuel Beckett, presumably meaning the play Waiting for Godot. As Godot demonstrates, Beckett also loved slapstick humor and vaudeville-style comedy routines, and I suppose that Ignatz’s brick throwing is the way by which he, Krazy and Pupp pass the time in the strip’s desolate landscape. But there’s no sense of comedy staving off despair and emptiness in Krazy Kat as there is in Godot.

In his essay on Herriman in the catalogue, cultural critic Stanley Crouch points out that Krazy Kat‘s desert milieu was inspired by Monument Valley, the site where John Ford shot so many of his Westerns, and asserts that the desert is “especially American” because it is “the harsh landscape” for “brutal conflicts,” presumably meaning the wars with Indians (p. 197). That may be true for Ford, but I can’t swallow the idea that Krazy Kat alludes to violence worse than being hit by a brick which is as harmless in this strip as a custard pie. Monument Valley might also be the inspiration for the terrain in Chuck Jones’s Roadrunner cartoons. Maybe Jones and Herriman (whose Krazy Kat cast also includes a coyote) simply regarded the desert as the simplest of naturalistic settings. Despite the way that Herriman’s backgrounds shapeshift from panel to panel, their simplicity does not distract from the performances of his lead characters. Hence Herriman is practicing a sort of graphic minimalism, making him a forebear of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts.

What most interests me about the Krazy Kat strips in the “Masters” show is the “metacomics” theme that runs throughout the exhibition. In the Sunday page for June 11, 1939 (p. 48), Ignatz finds a brush and a bottle of ink, and sets about drawing a cartoon of himself. As Carlin notes, Ignatz is repeatedly depicted in Krazy Kat as an artist. So Herriman may be signaling his identification with this trickster character: he draws himself, or an aspect of himself, into the strip as Ignatz, just as Ignatz draws himself. Ignatz starts out by drawing a cartoon panel, but it seems that he is also drawing a canvas in thin air, thereby creating it. Moreover, as I said before, a comics panel is like a window into another world. So Ignatz, as artist, creates another reality, just as Herriman is the creator of the world of Krazy Kat. The characters and things that Ignatz draws onto this canvas appear in red ink, whereas the “real” world of Krazy Kat appears in conventional black outlines. This contrast further suggests that the world of Ignatz’s drawings is a distinctly separate level of reality.

Offissa Pupp stops by and acts as audience (and, in his role as law enforcer, potential censor?) for Ignatz’s art. The “cartoon” Ignatz that “real” Ignatz draws changes position from one of Herriman’s panels to the next. (It’s getting complicated here.) Is “real” Ignatz drawing a comic strip, and each new panel replaces the previous one? Or is Herriman suggesting that “real” Ignatz is creating an animated cartoon, whose characters move once they are drawn, as in Max and Dave Fleischer’s Out of the Inkwell series, to which “real” Ignatz’s ink bottle could be an allusion? Or are the Ignatz and Krazy that “real” Ignatz draws existing in an alternate reality?

“Real” Ignatz completes his cartoon, which shows “cartoon” Ignatz throwing a brick at Krazy. This seems to be “real” Ignatz’s foremost goal and pleasure in life, so perhaps Herriman is suggesting that artists draw what they desire, what makes them happy. As if feeling satisfied and fulfilled, “real” Ignatz starts walking away, while Offissa Pupp remains rooted to the spot, staring at the cartoon-within-a-cartoon.

In the next panel, as if he were Matisse responding to seeing a Picasso, Offissa Pupp reacts to Ignatz’s cartoon by drawing his own, titled “JAIL,” portraying Ignatz behind bars. This, of course, represents Pupp’s own foremost goal in life. But he is oblivious to what is happening behind him: “real” Ignatz is throwing a brick at Krazy, just as his counterpart did in the cartoon-within-a-cartoon. Thus life, in the Krazy Kat universe, mimics art.

So “real” Ignatz’s cartoon was actually a declaration of his intentions, which he then accomplished in “real” life. You could also read “real” Ignatz’s cartoon as a prophesy of the future, which comes to pass in the next panel. Likewise, Offissa Pupp is drawing what he intends to accomplish. This too is a look into the future, because what Krazy Kat reader doubts that “real” Ignatz will soon end up back in jail for this latest brick-throwing incident?

But you could also read this particularly Sunday strip as trickster Ignatz pulling a new con on Offissa Pupp. It’s like that standard Bugs Bunny gag in which Bugs tricks an adversary into mechanically repeating the same action over and over. Offissa Pupp becomes so fixated on “real” Ignatz’s drawing of himself clobbering Krazy that the hapless policeman preoccupies himself with punishing “cartoon” Ignatz by drawing “cartoon” Ignatz in jail. Having thus distracted Offissa Pupp, “real” Ignatz is free to clobber the “real” Krazy.

The con artist is a particularly American form of the trickster archetype, which reappears in the “Masters” show as E. C. Segar’s J. Wellington Wimpy, and also as Charles Schulz’s Lucy. In his essay in the catalogue, Mutts creator Patrick McDonnell points to Krazy Kat’s influence on Schulz (p. 243). Isn’t Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown year after year Schulz’s possibly intentional version of Herriman’s endless variations on Ignatz’s brick tossing?

Along the bottom of this Sunday Krazy page runs a narrow panel that serves as an afterword to the main story. Krazy, Pupp, and Ignatz all watch a bird who is staring at a painting of a tree, as a big drop of saliva drops from his beak. “But he’s an “˜ott krittik,’ ain’t he?” asks Krazy. “Yes,” replies Pupp, “but he’s also a woodpecker.” Granted this epiphany, Ignatz responds, “ah-h.” Herriman may be making the point that an art critic’s personal psychology influences his response to a work of art. Or maybe this can even be seen as a reproach (over sixty years in advance) to Carlin’s approach to comics as “abstract” works: Herriman may be reminding readers not to ignore the representationalist aspect of the work.,

Next in the “Masters” show comes E. C. Segar, creator of Thimble Theatre Starring Popeye, whose very title continues the analogy between comics and theater.

Carlin’s discussion of Segar in the Masters book has its problems. Take for example his description of what he calls a “brilliant sight gag” in the genuinely great “Plunder Island” story arc in Thimble Theater‘s Sunday pages in 1934. In one installment Popeye hides in a barrel because his enemy, the Sea Hag, has ordered Wimpy to behead him. “Several weeks later,” in another Sunday page (July 1, 1934), Popeye plays dice with the Sea Hag to determine ownership of the treasure of Plunder Island; the Hag desperately wagers everything she has, even her clothes, and ends up wearing “the same-style wooden barrel that Popeye hid in weeks earlier” (p. 58). Well, Segar may have intended the irony, but I doubt that he expected it to get laughs from readers. A comedian doesn’t deliver a punch line several weeks after the set-up, which by then the audience has forgotten.

Likewise, Carlin claims that “Segar’s humor came straight out of Mark Twain, who also balanced exaggerated tall tales and a perfect ear for everyday speech with dark themes that undercut his laugh-out-loud stories” (p. 55). There are similarities, but I doubt there was a “straight out” connection. Twain’s “tall tales” went so far as to include time travel in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, but in that novel he characteristically brings a subversively ironic treatment to the romance of Arthurian legend. Amidst all the comedy of Thimble Theatre, Segar created a genuine American hero of larger-than-life proportions in Popeye, a successor to the likes of Pecos Bill. I suspect that Segar used Popeye as a seafaring traveler to create a satirical version of the adventure stories of the 19th and early 20th centuries, complete with fantasy elements: hence not only searches for hidden treasure and Popeye’s famed quest to find his long-lost Pappy, but also mythical kingdoms (Spinachovia), magical animals (Eugene the Jeep), strange savages (the Goons), and even an evil witch (the Sea Hag).

More importantly, Segar deals in exaggeration in creating the personalities of his most significant characters, whereas Twain aimed for realism. One can imagine Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn being real people in a real world, but Popeye, Wimpy and company are inescapably cartoons, not only in their caricatured physiques but in their characterizations. Robert Altman and Jules Feiffer’s live action Popeye movie (1980) did not work, and perhaps there was no way that it could.

Carlin correctly agrees with comics historian Bill Blackbeard’s recognition that Popeye is a proto-superhero. (In a Sunday October 11, 1936 strip in the show, and on page 54 in the book, Popeye lifts up an entire house, without the aid of spinach.) But then Carlin goes on, “At the same time Popeye is a much more complex and sympathetic character than the later superheroes, who tend to be somewhat stiff and colorless” (p. 58). How much “later”? Once Stan Lee and his colleagues revolutionized the superhero genre in the 1960s, this was unquestionably no longer true.

Feiffer’s own appreciation of Segar and Popeye in the Masters book is far more successful. Feiffer makes the case that Popeye is the heroic representation of the American spirit that remained “undaunted” by the Great Depression of the 1930s: “Popeye was the forgotten man: uneducated, unsophisticated, untamable” (p. 208). More surprisingly, whereas I always thought that Popeye’s distinctive way of talking reflected his lower class background and lack of formal education, Feiffer regards it as a sign of something else: “His mangled English pulsated with the vital spirit of immigrant America. . .” (p. 208). Best of all, Feiffer identifies Popeye’s true peers: Segar’s “Popeye stands with the best of his thirties competitors, who happened not to be comic strip characters but movie clowns: W. C. Fields and the Marx Brothers” (p. 208). They portrayed larger than life characters, too.

My main disagreement with Feiffer’s essay is with his blanket condemnation of Popeye’s entire history in animation, though Feiffer rightly praises the performances of voice actors Jack Mercer and Mae Questel as Popeye and Olive Oyl. Feiffer is also right about the uninspired Popeye cartoons produced by Paramount’s Famous Studios in the 1940s and 1950s, which smoothed over the rough edges that make Popeye’s personality interesting, devolving him into a postwar suburban bourgeois.

But I think Feiffer is unfair about the Max and Dave Fleischer Popeye cartoons of the 1930s, which keep the title character irascible and irreverent (especially through Mercer’s seemingly improvised asides). Feiffer disdains the formula that the Fleischers devised for Popeye: the Popeye-Olive-Bluto triangle, and the seemingly magical ability of spinach to boost the hero’s strength in time of need. But within the seven or eight minutes allotted to one of these animated cartoons, the Fleischers understandably couldn’t undertake one of Segar’s elaborate narratives (although they tried with the search for Pappy in the 1938 short Goonland).

I think it’s also worth exploring why the Fleischers’ formula proved so successful. If Popeye is indeed a hero born of the Great Depression, as Feiffer argues, then the key moment in the Fleischer cartoons, when Popeye declares “That’s all I kin stand, I can’t stands no more” (a forebear of Bugs Bunny’s “Of course you know this means war” and even Droopy’s “You know what? You got me mad.”), downs the spinach, and lets loose, dramatizes the urge of the forgotten man to fight back against everything that holds him down. Feiffer dismisses the cartoons’ spinach as “steroids”; I see it more as an objective correlative for Popeye’s will power, stimulating the burst of adrenaline he needs to win.

The best Fleischer Popeye cartoons don’t necessarily adhere to formula; take the cases of Goonland and The Jeep (1938), in which Bluto never appears. And even the better Fleischer cartoons that use the triangle can ring imaginative variations on the theme, just as Krazy Kat did with its own formula. For example, the Fleischers’ celebrated A Dream Walking (1934) is less about Popeye competing with Bluto for Olive than about the three of them rhythmically sleepwalking along a vertiginous network of girders in a skyscraper under construction, in a triumph of visual design John Carlin would appreciate.

This gives me the opportunity to mention two of the last cartoons I still haven’t written about that I saw at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s 2005 retrospective of musical cartoons, “I Love to Singa” (see “Comics in Context” #100, #136 and many others in between). In the two color featurettes Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor (1936) and Popeye the Sailor Meets Ali Baba’s Forty Thieves (1937) shown there, the Fleischers rework their formula by recasting Bluto as characters out of the Arabian Nights. Popeye becomes not only an explorer but an American venturing abroad to combat foreign enemies. Following the 9/11 attacks, the sight of Popeye taking on Arabian adversaries takes on new resonance. Significantly, Popeye’s final, triumphant battles against his foreign opponents are accompanied on the soundtracks by John Philip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever.” In these featurettes the Fleischers seem to be consciously portraying Popeye as a modern American mythic hero, who can stand up to and overcome morally corrupt mythic figures of older cultures. Sindbad even turns Popeye into a monster slayer, placing him in a tradition that goes back to Gilgamesh.

In the Masters book Carlin states that “Segar did not invent graphic comic strip conventions or experiment with them the way that Herriman and McCay did. Segar simply showed how rich and supple those conventions could be in terms of creating believable characters and stories. . .” (p. 56). In other words, in this case Carlin shifts from his usual emphasis on visual design to what I consider the true essence of the comics medium: visual storytelling.

Even so, I suspect that Carlin underrates Segar as visual innovator. Where would Robert Crumb be without Segar, whose drawing style clearly influenced his? In “Masters” I was pleased to see examples of Segar’s “topper” strip for the Sunday Thimble Theatres, Sappo, which began as a rather dull domestic comedy, but flared into life with the addition of science fiction elements courtesy of the aptly named Professor O. G. Wottasnozzle. Apart from his sizable snozzle, the Professor, bald with a long beard, could be a relative of Crumb’s Mr. Natural. The henpecked Sappo’s wife, who towers over him, could be a forerunner of Crumb’s own unusually large women. Segar’s standard face for extras in Thimble Theatre could be the visage of Crumb’s Flakey Foont.

Going through the Segar section of the exhibit, I was struck by the sheer dynamic force power of the shots of Popeye punching his opponents. These panels reminded me of the work of Jack Kirby, who was once an in-betweener at the Fleischer studios. In the Masters book you can find shots like this on pages 59, 204 and 205, but what most impressed me was a series of Sunday Thimble Theatre strips that are at the Newark Museum but not in the catalogue. Running from April 26 through May 24, 1931, they depict Popeye in a boxing match, full of such Kirbyesque power. The sequence also demonstrates Segar’s visual inventiveness. At one point Popeye is hit so hard he sails into the air, and we follow his flight through a series of panels, as if they were successive framers on a film strip, until he lands atop a spectator in the audience. In another panel Segar deploys multiple images of Popeye to indicate the speed and ferocity of his punches. Segar also portrays the audience as a sea of identical round heads, creating a near-abstract effect.

Some Popeye strips on display also echo earlier parts of the exhibit. An enormous drawing of Eugene the Jeep hovers atop the panel grid of the Sunday, August 9, 1936 Thimble Theatre page (p. 209) like the moon with the man’s face in the December 3, 1905 Little Nemo (p. 176). There’s also a Sunday Thimble Theatre from August 23, 1935 (p. 205), which I’ve discussed previously (in “Comics in Context” #63), in which, to test Popeye’s love for her, Olive masquerades as a man (not difficult, considering her build) and claims to be her own suitor. Enraged, Popeye clobbers her. Dazed but happy, Olive tells herself, “He loves me,” as if she were Krazy Kat right after being hit by a brick.

Like so many cartoon characters, Segar’s are far more resistant to physical injury than real people are. For example, Popeye withstands a hail of bullets in an April 7, 1932 daily strip (p. 206). Even so, the comedic sadism in this particular Sunday strip is startling. In a daily strip from August 21, 1935 on display (but not in the book), Popeye has become “dictipator” of a small country but is disappointed that “Me sheeps”–his subjects–“ain’t got no sense.” As you can see, unlike the animated Popeye, Segar’s Popeye, as Feiffer notes, is “untamable”: though a hero, he has a violent temper and even a will to power.

At the Newark Museum I overheard one woman, who was looking at the Herrimans, comment to her companion, “Is this really for kids? Look at the vocabulary?” There are plenty of people who haven’t yet gotten the memo that comics aren’t just for kids. As Spiegelman told Time, maybe this museum show will help. We will continue making our way through “Masters” in next week’s column.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF
It’s here at last! DK Publishing has released its Marvel Encyclopedia, for which I was a contributing writer. Profusely illustrated in full color, it’s the perfect Christmas gift for any Marvel aficionado. Not only will you enjoy reading it, but it is so large and massive that you could use it for weightlifting exercises! A treat for both the mind and the body!

–Copyright 2006 Peter Sanderson

Has the fine art world’s growing interest in comics and cartoons achieved critical mass? If not quite yet, it is certainly rapidly getting closer, as evidenced by the surprising number of shows devoted to comic and cartoon art this fall in New York City, the capital of the American art world, and its vicinity.

At the top of the list is the large traveling exhibition “Masters of American Comics,” which is a collection of mini-retrospectives for fifteen cartoonists whose careers together span the history of the artform in the Twentieth Century and into the Twenty-First: Winsor McCay (Little Nemo in Slumberland), Lyonel Feininger (The Kin-der-Kids), George Herriman (Krazy Kat), E. C. Segar (Thimble Theatre Starring Popeye), Frank King (Gasoline Alley), Chester Gould (Dick Tracy), Milton Caniff (Terry and the Pirates), Charles Schulz (Peanuts), Will Eisner (The Spirit), Jack Kirby (Fantastic Four), Harvey Kurtzman (MAD), Robert Crumb (Mr. Natural), Art Spiegelman (Maus), Gary Panter (Jimbo) and Chris Ware (Jimmy Corrigan).

Curated by art scholar John Carlin and comic strip historian Brian Walker (see “Comics in Context” #66 and 71), the “Masters” show debuted last year in Los Angeles, where it was divided between the Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art. The exhibition moved to the Milwaukee Art Museum before arriving in the New York City area, split between the Jewish Museum, several blocks up the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Newark Museum in New Jersey.

Yale University Press has published the handsomely designed catalogue for the show, which not only includes reproductions of the artwork and a lengthy treatise by co-curator Carlin, but also features a commendable assortment of essays about the individual Masters by a wide array of non-academics, including jazz critic Stanley Crouch on Herriman, cartoonist (and screenwriter for the 1980 live action Popeye movie) Jules Feiffer, journalist Pete Hamill on Caniff, Mutts creator Patrick McDonnell on Schulz, Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman on Kurtzman, Simpsons creator Matt Groening on Panter, and novelist Dave Eggers on Ware.

Regular readers of this column will recall my report on the “Masters of American Comics” panel held at this year’s San Diego Comic Con (see “Comics in Context” #145).

And there’s lots more. Accompanying the “Masters” show at the Jewish Museum is “Superheroes: Good and Evil in American Comics,” an exhibit of original artwork from superhero comics of the “Golden Age” of the 1940s, curated by one of that period’s leading figures, Jerry Robinson (see “Comics in Context” #141). Like the “Masters” show at both museums, “Superheroes” will run through January 29, 2007.

The “Masters” show has inspired controversy since all of the cartoonists selected for this honor are male. But this fall New York City hosted two exhibits of work by female cartoonists. The Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art has staged “She Drew Comics: 100 Years of Women Cartoonists,” curated by Trina Robbins, which continues into early November. The Adam Baumgold Gallery on 74 W. 79th St. just closed its fall show, “Telling Tales: Contemporary Women Cartoonists” (curated by Dan Nadel and including works by Roz Chast, Phoebe Gloeckner, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, and others), which followed its late summer show, “Jules Feiffer: The Strips, 1960-2000.”

Aside from the African-American George Herriman, all of the cartoonists in the “Masters” show are white, but “African Comics“ opens at the Studio Museum in Harlem on November 15 and runs through March 18, 2007.

Until October 21 the Society of Illustrators is running a thirtieth anniversary retrospective of comics published by Fantagraphics (including works by Daniel Clowes, Frank Frazetta, Bill Griffith, Jaime Hernandez, Stan Sakai, and Chris Ware) at its Museum of American Illustration in midtown Manhattan.

Even the United Nations has turned its attention to cartoon art. Thanks to the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art getting me in, on Monday, October 16, I attended “Cartooning for Peace,” a day-long series of seminars with political cartoonists from around the world serving as panelists. The introductory speech was made by the Secretary-General himself, Kofi Annan, whom I would previously have considered the least likely person to turn up at an event I covered in my column. (How much more evidence do you need for a cultural shift in attitudes towards cartoon art?) “Cartooning for Peace” is also the name of an exhibit of political cartoons by these artists that is currently being held in the United Nations’ Visitors’ Lobby before embarking on a world tour. (You can also see these cartoons at www.cartooningforpeace.org.)

It may be coincidental that so many exhibits on cartoon art are being held at once in New York City. But this isn’t simply a phenomenon restricted to the fall of 2006. Last winter the Museum of Modern Art staged its exhibition of Pixar animation art (see “Comics in Context” #120) and the Pratt Manhattan Gallery featured “Speak: Nine Cartoonists” featuring work by Crumb, Spiegelman, Ware and others, even including Gasoline Alley‘s Frank King (see “Comics in Context” #122). This year on December 1 the Morgan Library and Museum opens “Saul Steinberg: Illuminations“, featuring the work of the late New Yorker artist whose drawings can be classified as either illustrations or cartoons; this exhibit closes on March 4, 2007. The Baumgold Gallery will also be opening a Steinberg show. On the day that the Morgan’s Steinberg show closes, the Museum of Modern Art will open “Comic Abstraction: Image Breaking, Image Making,” billed as an exhibit of work by artists who utilize the “visual language of comics”. (Whether MoMA will deign to display work by actual professional comics artists in this show, I do not yet know.)

It’s not just New York City that has caught comics fever. On November 2, “Cartoon America: Highlights from the Art Wood Collection of Cartoon and Caricature“ opens in the great hall of the Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress in Washington D. C.. The Library recently acquired this collection, which includes works by Feiffer, Feininger, Herblock, Herriman, King, McCay, Schulz, Steinberg, and James Thurber, as well as animation art from Disney classics including Fantasia (1940), and arrays them alongside work by Honore Daumier, the 19th century French illustrator and caricaturist who has long been accepted into the pantheon of fine art.

Back in New York City, the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art will stage its own exhibit of animation art, “Saturday Morning Cartoons,” opening on November 18 of this year. And this seems the appropriate time and place to announce that I will be co-curating an exhibition on the career of Stan Lee that will open in February 2007 at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art. Right now MoCCA is looking for people who are willing to help sponsor the show and collectors who would be willing to lend original artwork from 1960s Marvel comics for display. If any of you are interested, please contact me through the e-mail address for this column (comicsincontext@aol.com).

But if a cartoon art exhibit falls in a forest, and The New York Times ignores it, did it make a sound? The Times reviewed the Pixar and “Speak” shows last winter, but it has so far ignored all of the fall shows except for “Masters,” which opened on September 15 at the two New York area museums but did not get reviewed by the Times until Friday, October 13. Still, it’s obvious that the Times Arts and Leisure department would put a higher priority on reviewing some of the other high profile art shows on more widely accepted subjects, such as “Cezanne to Picasso” at the Met and “Picasso and American Art” at the Whitney.

And then there’s the problem of the geographical separation of the two halves of “Masters.” The show was divided between two museums in Los Angeles, but Southern California has a car culture; New York City doesn’t. New Yorkers like myself don’t have cars and rely on public transportation instead. It is difficult enough to persuade a Manhattanite to venture into the dreaded outer boroughs; mounting an expedition to Newark, New Jersey would be closer to inconceivable. (It is indeed a lengthy trip, though there are commuters who must do it every workday.) The exception would be going to the Newark Airport, one of the three airports in the metropolitan area; I’ve been to Newark Airport, but I can’t recall ever having been to Newark proper before. Besides, New Yorkers tend to regard Newark, and New Jersey in general, as uncool. (I’ve spent time in some picturesque sections of the state; then again, I’ve also traveled through industrial areas of New Jersey which Peter Jackson could have used for Mordor.) So I suppose that means that a Manhattanite would be more likely to go to Newark Airport in order to fly to London than he would to go to Newark in order to visit, well, Newark.

I’m not just kidding about New Yorkers’ reluctance to visit the Garden State. It even seems that one of the reasons that Art Spiegelman, who helped organize “Masters,” withdrew his own work from the show was that he believed that New Yorkers wouldn’t expend the time and trouble to travel all the way out to Newark to see the first half of the show.

So I can understand that it might take the Times a while to send one of its art critics to museums in two separate cities to cover the same show.

But the Times review was well worth the wait. It was the paper’s lead art critic, Michael Kimmelman, who reviewed the exhibition, and he declared that “”˜Masters of American Comics’ is a landmark and a pleasure. For many people, I suspect, it will be a revelation too.” (Oct. 13, 2006). It clearly was a revelation to him. Kimmelman was also wise enough to recognize his own limitations in exploring a form of art he wasn’t knowledgeable about and to bring along an expert to guide him: Spiegelman himself played Virgil to Kimmelman’s Dante as they descended into (gasp!) Newark.

If you follow the link to Kimmelman’s review, you’ll also find the “slide show” of highlights from “Masters,” several of which I will discuss in the course of my own review. Strangely, the Times “slide show” offers two Eisners and two Kirbys, but no examples of work by Crumb, Herriman or Segar.

I managed to decipher the mysteries of PATH trains and New Jersey Transit sufficiently well to make my own way to the Newark Museum, sans guide, to see the first portion of the “Masters” show: McCay through Schulz. The principal factor in determining how to divide the exhibition between two museums, whether in California or the New York area, seems to be chronological. Jack Kirby started in comics before World War II, but his best work began in the 1960s, so his work was in the Jewish Museum. “Masters” featured some of Chester Gould’s late Dick Tracy strips from the 1960s, but Gould created Tracy in the 1930s and his great period began in the 1940s, so his work was in Newark.

However, Will Eisner did The Spirit in the 1940s, before Charles Schulz’s creation of Peanuts in the 1950s, but “Masters” placed Schulz with the earlier cartoonists in Newark, while assigning Eisner among the later cartoonists at the Jewish Museum.

Hence, the Newark portion of “Masters” dealt with the evolution of the American comic strip, from McCay to Schulz. The Jewish Museum’s portion of the exhibit instead chronicled the history of comic books, starting with not only Kirby’s Golden Age work for actual comic books, but also Eisner’s Spirit sections, which were effectively short comic books, for Sunday newspapers, and culminating with Chris Ware’s graphic novels.

Of course “Masters” begins with Winsor McCay (1869-1934), who is generally regarded as the first genius of both the comics artform and animation. The Newark Museum’s introductory wall text for the McCay section (written by John Carlin?) asserted that “Winsor McCay did for comics what D. W. Griffith did for movies and Louis Armstrong did for music: he transformed mechanical reproduction into a creative medium for self-expression.” The comparison with D. W. Griffith works for me, since Griffith is universally acknowledged as film’s first creative auteur. I’m not so sure about the reference to Armstrong. Did the wall text’s writer meant to imply that McCay, Griffith, and Armstrong were each the first in his medium to create great works of personal expression? Is that true about sound recordings? What about, say, Enrico Caruso?

Kimmelman interrupts his own discussion of McCay in his review to ask, “Did I mention that Mr. McCay, in his ultra-finicky way, drew like a dream?” That’s a felicitous phrase, since dreams were McCay’s primary subjects: the fantasy worlds dreamed by the title character of Little Nemo in Slumberland and the proto-Twilight Zone nightmares that overtake the hapless sleeping adults in Dream of the Rarebit Fiend. But Kimmelman is pointing out to the reader that McCay was a master of the craft of realistic illustration. McCay’s prowess in delineating reality in naturalistic detail makes the fantastic elements of his strips look real.

Hence I find it somewhat misleading for Carlin to state in the Masters of American Comics book that “though most Americans were not fully aware of modern art until the Armory Show in 1916″–and actually, I expect that the majority of Americans in 1916 paid no more attention to cutting edge art then than they do today–“they had already seen the essence of modernism in McCay’s comics without knowing it. McCay utilized many of the hallmarks of modernism–figures in motion, twentieth-century machines, and urban architecture–in much the same way as later Cubist and Futurist painters.” But from Cezanne onward, the early figures in the history of modern art were veering away from naturalism, distorting the reality they depicted. McCay’s illustrative realism and his mission to make the fantastic look naturalistic clearly stands at an opposite pole from, say, Picasso’s efforts to deconstruct reality through Cubism. Strictly defined, abstraction does not depict reality at all, yet however much they may metamorphose in his work, McCay was drawing real people and things–and fantastic people and things as if they were just as real. Even in a page included in the show (Feb. 2, 1908), in which McCay impossibly stretches the heads and bodies of Nemo and his companions into fun-house mirror reflections of themselves, McCay is still working from a foundation in reality: what the human figure actually looks like.

McCay’s work is “abstract” only in the sense that, as the examples in the exhibition show, he paid strong attention to shapes and other design elements in constructing his work. Hence, in a Dream of the Rarebit Fiend page (Sunday, Feb. 9, 1913) that is excerpted on the web page with Kimmelman’s review, the dreamer, a man in formal wear, is running along the street when suddenly, in panel 2, the street curves upward both at the left and the right, distorting the shapes of the tall buildings rising from the street. The dreamer runs like a mouse on an exercise wheel, as the curved street recedes from one panel to the next, until it becomes a multicolored circle, reminiscent of what one might see through a kaleidoscope.

Similarly, consider the Little Nemo in Slumberland page (Sunday, Dec. 3, 1905) that is included in the Times slide show. The topmost panel not only includes Morpheus, the King of Slumberland (looking quite different than in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman), but also introduces this page’s circular motif in the form of the moon with a face. But this isn’t a benign Man in the Moon but instead looks vaguely sinister.

The next tier consists of four panels of equal size, the first showing the boy Nemo sleeping in bed. The conventional look of these panels denotes the mundane nature of Nemo’s reality in contrast with the dreamworld. However, these four panels actually show Nemo’s transition from reality into the dreamworld, as his bed rises from the floor and drifts into the night sky.

Such step-by-step changes from panel to panel must be what Kimmelman meant when he wrote that McCay’s work “married something of [Eadweard] Muybridge’s stop-action photography with Lewis Carroll.” This four-panel segment also exemplifies the Newark Museum’s wall text’s statement that McCay’s “successive action sequences anticipated later experiments in film animation.”

The large middle section of the page is divided into four panels in which the spherical moon, its mouth ominously agape, steadily grows closer and larger with each succeeding panel, while Nemo’s bed rocks about in the air and falls apart, leaving him helpless to escape the oncoming threat. This middle section of the page is dominated by an immense, circular drawing of the face/moon, enveloped within an oval, thus becoming a fifth panel. This becomes the centerpiece of the entire page, bringing the circle motif to its culmination. (I wonder if this sequence might have been inspired by the sequence of a moon with a face in Georges Melies’ famous 1902 short film A Trip to the Moon.)

Nemo was shown in square panels in the first tier. In the next four panels, Nemo appeared in rectangular panels, which were invaded by the curvature of the central oval enclosing the moon; the page design thereby dramatizes how this seemingly threatening fantasy world is disrupting Nemo’s sense of reality. In the central oval, Nemo appears within the circle formed by the face/moon: he has been swallowed up by the fantasy world.

Here the face/moon abruptly turns into a kind of stage set: the servant of Morpheus emerges from the moon’s mouth, as if it were the gateway to a castle, or the backdrop of a theatrical set, to invite Nemo to the king’s court.

In the final tier of panels, the face/moon continues to grow, frightening Nemo, but it is now so large that its full size cannot be encompassed by an individual panel. The panels have returned to square shape, indicating that Nemo is making the transition back to reality, and in the final panel Nemo indeed wakes up from this latest of his nightmares.

As the wall text asserts, “McCay brought an abstract formal dimension to comics, which added to the theatrical action that one sees through the panels. This technique allowed the page to be read both as a story told over time and a relation of design elements printed on a page.” This is true, and the use of the moon as backdrop in that central panel is evidence that McCay was alluding to theater. This seems to be a recurring motif in early strips: E. C. Segar created Popeye for a strip called Thimble Theatre.

But in his review Kimmelman went further, maintaining that McCay’s comics panels “magically blended to make a collective cogent abstraction out of the page: the essence of comics art.” Here we run into trouble.

As readers of Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics know, the essence of comics is visual storytelling. Will Eisner renamed comics “sequential art”: the art of conveying a narrative through a sequence of pictures. Kevin Eastman named his comics museum (which is now unfortunately defunct) the Words and Pictures Museum; actual words aren’t necessary to comics, but a narrative is.

In my writing and lecturing about comics, I deal with comics as literature, emphasizing the narrative, but I try to take care to show how visual imagery plays its part in expressing the themes and characterization. “Masters” goes in the opposite direction. In an online interview I have quoted in a previous installment, “Masters” Brian Walker explained that his fellow co-curator “John [Carlin] helped me understand in the beginning that, in this type of [museum] environment, you really have to search for examples of work that are the most visual – graphically powerful. . . . I’m probably a little more content-oriented, and he’s probably a little more form-oriented.” Walker said at the San Diego “Masters” panel that comics storytellers were not included in the show if they were not considered to be important visual innovators “in layouts or design.”

This emphasis on visual design over visual storytelling isn’t a major problem in evaluating the work of McCay, whose narratives usually seem primarily to be pretexts for his visual experimentation.

One of the themes of the “Masters” exhibition appears to be a metafictional approach to comics: comics that are about the comics medium, which draw attention to themselves as fictional constructs, and which draw attention to and play with the conventions of the form.

For example, the show includes a noted example of McCay’s strip Little Sammy Sneeze, a series which, even more than Herriman’s Krazy Kat, sought to wring infinite variations out of a single basic gag: like Clark Kent in the October 5, 2006 episode of Smallville, aptly titled “Sneeze,” Sammy wreaks destruction whenever he unleashes one of his catastrophic nasal discharges. In this particular example (Sept. 24, 1905), Sammy is pictured within square panels with thick black borders. This time when Sammy sneezes, he shatters the panel borders, and in the last image in the sequence, he sits bewildered among the fragments of the broken borders.

Similarly, in a Dream of the Rarebit Fiend from April 7, 1907, the dreamer finds himself increasingly covered by ink blots from the unseen cartoonist’s leaky pen.

The McCay pieces in the exhibition were well chosen, and include examples from such celebrated Little Nemo sequences as “The Palace of Ice” and “Befuddle Hall,” with its vertiginous architecture. It was a particular pleasure to see exhibited here the original art for the Little Nemo Sunday page (Sept. 29, 1907) in which the title character and the Jungle Imp, both at giant size, clambers over Manhattan skyscrapers to arrive at the bank of the East River. Art Spiegelman included this particular installment in his book In the Shadow of No Towers (see “Comics in Context” #60), and since then, Neil Gaiman reprinted it in his 2006 short story collection Fragile Things.

The “Masters” show also has the same page of Lyonel Feininger’s Kin-der-Kids, “The Kin-der-Kids Abroad: Triumphant Departure of the Kids in the Family Bathtub!!” (May 6, 1906), that Spiegelman ran in No Towers (see “Comics in Context” #59). But this isn’t the original art for the page. In fact, there are only a few examples of the show of Feininger’s original art for comics; most of what is on display are actual newspaper pages on which Feininger’s Sunday comics were printed.

I was surprised to learn from the labels that these newspaper pages were lent to the “Masters” exhibition by the Museum of Modern Art, to which Julia Feininger had donated them. During its long history the Museum of Modern Art has mostly overlooked comics, but the Museum clearly made an exception here inasmuch as Feininger went on to become an important painter of the early 20th century.

I presume that “Masters” used so many newspaper pages for the Feininger section because the original art for these strips was unavailable. These pages reminded me of a question raised by the Dahesh Museum’s show “Stories to Tell: Masterworks from the Kelly Collection of American Illustration” earlier this year (see “Comics in Context” #132). Since these illustrators specifically designed their work to be reproduced in magazines and books, it can be argued that the reproduction is the true artwork, and not the original drawing or painting. The same argument could be made about comics.

Feininger only worked in comics for nine months in 1906 and 1907, creating two strips, The Kin-der-Kids and Wee Willie Winkie’s World. One of the pages with a Wee Willie Winkie strip on display was dated Sunday, September 23, 1906, and there I was at the Newark Museum on Saturday, September 23, 2006, looking at it exactly a century later.

“Masters of American Comics” is such a large and important exhibition that I cannot hope to do it justice in a single week’s column, so I will continue my review of the show next week.

LINKS IN THE GREAT CHAIN OF CYBERBEING
In response to my memorial to the late Mark Gruenwald last week, Peter B. Gillis, once writer of such Marvel series as The Defenders, The Eternals (the unjustly forgotten 1980s revival), The Micronauts and Strikeforce Morituri, has created his own beautifully written an insightful tribute to Mark on his blog. Peter focuses on Mark as a visionary in his approach to Marvel’s fictional universe. If you look further down the section of his blog devoted to comics, you will also find Gillis’s homage to the late, great artist Alex Toth, whom he knew personally. There is also Gillis’s tribute to Charles Schulz, which takes the form of a story about what happened to the lead Peanuts characters when they became adults: it is everything that Dog Sees God, the recent off-Broadway play about the Peanuts characters as teenagers, should have been but wasn’t (see “Comics in Context” #120).

But don’t just read the sections of Peter Gillis’s blog that are about comics. He also does incisive political commentary and even offers (very) short science fiction stories for your perusal. His blog is one of the smartest and richly, masterfully written blogs I’ve ever come across. Read it and you too will wonder why the comics industry was foolish enough to let him leave the field.

Former Movie Poop Shoot contributor Scott Tipton has already done just what I have been advocating lately: a thematic analysis of Mark Gruenwald’s body comics stories apart from Squadron Supreme. You can find Tipton’s perceptive survey, titled “Because It’s Right: Ethics and the Work of Mark Gruenwald,” here.

I’ve written approvingly twice about the Star Wars Fan Film Awards (see “Comics in Context” #5 and #142), so it should not surprise you that I also enjoyed the very similar “Green Screen Challenge” on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report. In this case fans constructed CGI videos around footage of the noble Stephen Colbert demonstrating his prowess wielding a lightsaber in front of a green screen. Even George Lucas himself joined the competition, as we learned on the October 11, 2006 episode (to be rerun on October 25). But it was Bonnie Rose, a freelancer here at Quick Stop Entertainment, who triumphed, and I suggest you read her memoir of her experience.

Finally, three cheers for Quick Stop’s Fred Hembeck, whose Cartoon Fred makes his long overdue and dependably amusing return to the pages of Marvel comics in the new Stan Lee Meets Spider-Man one-shot. It’s proof that exile from the House of Ideas need not last forever!

–Copyright 2006 Peter Sanderson