FRED Entertainment

Just before Christmas I began my extended commentary on Mark Evanier’s Kirby: King of Comics, his eagerly awaited book that serves as both a biography of Jack Kirby, the greatest adventure and fantasy artist in 20th century American comic books, and as an art book showcasing his work (see “Comics in Context” #207: “Royal Retrospective”), Right after New Year’s I did another installment of this column about the Kirby book, though half of it was actually about the BBC documentary In Search of Steve Ditko (see “Comics in Context” #208: “Creative Differences”). Then I agreed to postpone the rest of my commentary until Harry N. Abrams published the book in late February.

In the meantime I’ve devoted this column to other worthy subjects, such as Bob Clampett (“Comics in Context” #213), Steve Gerber (#214, 215 and 216), Darwyn Cooke (#217), Stephen Sondheim, of all people (#218), and Mephisto’s marriage counseling (#210). But now it’s March, Kirby: King of Comics is in stores, and I’ve received to go-ahead to resume what I consider not so much a review as my series of critical annotations on this landmark book.

Those of you who have read my contribution to the Beat’s annual survey this year know that I am interested in seeing how much coverage Kirby: King of Comics receives in the mainstream media. This would be a useful sign of just how wide and deep the mainstream culture’s new interest in the comics medium actually is.

So far I haven’t found much. But on Sunday March 23 The Washington Post ran a review by novelist Glen David Gold, a Kirby admirer who had already written about him in the catalogue for the “Masters of American Comics” exhibition (see “Comics in Context” #155: “Two American Masters”).

In his review Gold refers to David Michaelis’s recent biography Schulz and Peanuts that portrayed cartoonist Charles M. Schulz as a deeply troubled man (see “Comics in Context” #204: “Was It a Dark and Stormy Life?”). “Evanier, in contrast, presents Kirby as a decent and generous soul with some understandable fits of frustration. . . .but a reader”–by which Gold really means a specific reader, himself–“hungers for something deeper to explain his violent and angry imagery.”

Evanier refers to the nightmares that plagued Kirby after his return from World War II. Alluding to these, Gold continues, “Kirby seems to have had post-traumatic stress disorder after World War II, and I suspect that certain recurrent figures in his artwork came from his unconscious attempt to work out the horror of the battlefield.”

Well, perhaps the last part of the statement is true, although all one need do is look at the Captain America artwork from the early 1940s in Evanier’s book to see that Kirby was already creating explosively violent imagery before he ever entered the army. Gold may be overstating the case by claiming that Kirby had “post-traumatic stress disorder.” Yes, his nightmares were a symptom, but is there any evidence that Kirby’s behavior when he was awake was altered by his war experiences? The National Institute of Mental Health’s website states that people afflicted with this disorder “avoid situations that remind them of the original incident” that induced the severe mental stress. Then why did Kirby continually draw on his war experiences in his stories, as Evanier points out in the book?

On the other hand, Gold may be underrating Kirby’s “fits of frustration” as a source for his anger. In his book Evanier pointedly reprints Kirby’s full-page close-up of an enraged Silver Surfer from Silver Surfer #18 (September 1970) as an expression of the intensity of the feelings that led Kirby to quit Marvel for DC (see Evanier, Kirby: King of Comics, p. 162).

Moreover, I should think that Kirby’s childhood as a gang member on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, continually getting into fights, as Evanier describes in his first chapter, and as dramatized through the book’s reprinting of Kirby’s story “Street Code,” easily provides part of the explanation for the “violence” in Kirby’s comics.

Certainly Kirby, the co-creator of the Hulk must have known what it was like to feel anger, even rage. But to characterize Kirby’s visual imagery as “violent and angry” seems to me misleading. I wonder about the mindsets of various contemporary comics editors, writers and artists who inflict rape, mutilation and murder on longrunning characters. But I never have the sense that Kirby inflicts unwarranted cruelty upon his characters. (Even violence inflicted upon “Terrible” Turpin in The New Gods, unusually brutal for a Kirby book, ultimately serves to heighten the courageous cop’s heroism.) Ben Grimm’s battle cry, “It’s clobbering time!”, is more often than not an expression of joy. There is an exuberance about the heroes’ fight scenes in Kirby’s work, like Douglas Fairbanks or Errol Flynn dueling in swashbuckler movies. Captain America’s action scenes embody the classic American spirit, striving for freedom, triumphing over oppression. Other Kirby heroes may not be explicitly patriotic in theme, but they represent a similar spirit.

Besides, if you pay attention, Kirby doesn’t draw that much actual violence. He characteristically takes an abstract approach to it: he draws a flash of light representing impact, rather than actually showing a fist connecting with a jaw, as we shall see in the course of my commentary.

In other words, whereas recent superhero comics, at their worst, exhibit a sadistic fascination with pain and suffering, Kirby’s comics use images of the human body in action–running, leaping, flying, and even fighting–to convey sheer, uplifting joy. Far from exuding anger, Kirby’s comics communicate a positive outlook on humanity and the prospects for the world.

At the point in Kirby: King of Comics where I left off in January, World War II had ended, and DC Comics’ editorial had lost interest in having anyone–even the brilliant team of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby–act as outside suppliers for them. So, after a few commercial misfires at Harvey, Simon and Kirby launched the romance comic genre by creating Young Romance, which became a tremendous hit. So much for the foresight of the DC bureaucracy circa the late 1940s.

Although Evanier doesn’t make a point of this, the illustrations in this section of the book show that Kirby was rapidly growing as an artist in the postwar years. Look at the stoical face of the figure in the electric chair in the cover from Justice Traps the Guilty #8 (1948) (Evanier p. 73) and the classically handsome build of the half-crouching diver (as a school of fish drift past him, in a lovely grace note) in the cover of Black Magic #189 (1952) (Evanier p. 77).

An impressive page by Kirby and Simon from Boys’ Ranch #2 (1950) (Evanier p. 81) demonstrates their skill in enabling their characters to “act.” One usually thinks of Jack Kirby as drawing situations, emotions and characters that are larger than life, on an operatic scale. But consider the subtlety he shows on this page.

In the second panel a Native American, Running Bear, races from a burning cabin, carrying a white boy he has rescued. There are no words in this panel, nor the speed lines so often used to indicate motion in comics. The figure of Running Bear is positioned as if running, but has a stillness about him as well. His face concealed, pressed against the baby, to shield both the child and himself from the flames, his arms firmly wrapped around the boy, Running Bear seems like an iconic figure of parental concern. Pieces of wood are falling from the cabin, yet they seem to hover around Running Bear, as if time has stood still for a moment as he makes his escape. Rather than give us a conventional look at flames, Kirby takes a nearly abstract approach. as if Running Bear has emerged from a portal of light and shadow. In the right foreground we see the back of another Native American’s head, with his left hand raised, watching. Again, we are shown no facial expressions, and read no dialogue, yet the onlooker’s sense of concern comes across simply from the position of his hand and the tilt of his head. He stands in for the reader, reacting as we should, with a certain awe, to the sight of this heroic rescuer of the child escaping this inferno.

In panel three the rescued child wails silently, venting emotion as openly as an infant, but his rescuer is far more reserved, looking outward, presumably at the burning cabin, as he states that the child’s parents are dead. There is a look of quiet melancholy in hs eyes, reinforced by the darkness beneath his eyebrows and the thin lines indicating shadows along his cheeks.

Running Bear declares he will adopt the white child, but another tribesman insists that he return the boy to the flames. This is a serious clash, but Kirby and Simon continue to underplay effectively: in panel five Running Bear looks grimly at the other Indian, clenching his jaw in quiet anger, as he states, simply but firmly, “I keep the papoose!” Bawling only a moment (and two panels) before, the baby is now quiet, looking warily at the other Indian while seeming comfortable in Running Bear’s grasp, apparently recognizing him as his new protector.

The final panel of the page is a little masterpiece of “acting,” as running Best looks down at his newly adopted son, with parental warmth, the child responds, smiling up at him, and the other Indian watches, his jaw set in a tight frown, clearly resentful of Running Bear’s decision.

Longtime Marvelites may realize that Kirby later restaged this scene of a warrior adopting an orphaned son of his enemies, in the Tales of Asgard story in which Odin found and adopted the infant Loki (in Journey into Mystery #112, 1964).

Then there’s the cover to Simon and Kirby’s war comic Foxhole #1 (1954) (Evanier p. 85). Recently a friend and I were leafing through a copy of Kirby: King of Comics at a bookstore and came across this page, whereupon my friend declared it to be one of the greatest comics covers ever. (In his Washington Post review, Gold says he was stunned by it as well.) In the foreground is a soldier, his face wrapped in bandages, save for one eye, and his mouth, holding a cigarette. The bandages on the side if his head are stained with blood. He wears a helmet with two thick dents caused by bullets. He looks something like DC’s later war comics character, the Unknown Soldier. But the man on the foxhole cover is another of Kirby’s iconic figures, this one representing both the horrors suffered in war and the survivors’ ability to endure. The soldier is writing a letter to his mother, and we see part of it floating above a scene of the aftermath of battle, with corpses on a shore and medics attending a wounded man. The letter provides easy irony: the war is “a day on the beach.” But the soldier isn’t smiling or even looking at what he’s writing. His single eye stares emptily, as if he is lost in his own thoughts about the war, disconnected from the brave, witty front he is putting up for his mother back home. This cover is an entire story in itself.

Simon and Kirby and their studio kept busy and prospered during this period, but Evanier quotes Kirby as saying it was “too good to last” (Evanier p. 80) and it didn’t. I’ve learned from my own experience and observing those of others that when you–and your colleagues–are in a successful period in your life and career, it may seem as if it will last forever, but everything changes, and success can be surprisingly fleeting. Kirby had enough insight to realize this even this early in his career, with greater triumphs and equally great disappointments still lying before him.

Apart from “Street Code,” the only complete story reprinted in Kirby: King of Comics is “The League of the Handsome Devils!” from Simon and Kirby’s Fighting American #2 (1954). Fighting American and Speedboy were variations on Captain America and Bucky: the patriotically-themed hero and his kid sidekick. Evanier points out that by 1954 the superhero genre was mostly “passe.” Indeed, as I noted two weeks ago, except for the Big Three of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, superheroes had virtually vanished from comics, and the superhero phenomenon must have seemed like a passing fad that had run its course. Hence, Simon and Kirby thought that taking a tongue-in-cheek approach might breathe new life into it. However, Evanier points out that “Fighting American. . .just got sillier and sillier, prompting one critic to suggest that Joe and Jack were deliberately screwing with the formula they’d invented, just to see if anyone would notice” (Evanier p. 88).

A sign that a genre has run its course in its current form is when it degenerates into self-parody. Hence, for example, Universal”˜s versions of Dracula and Frankenstein originated in serious horror films in the 1930s, but were reduced to playing villains to Abbott and Costello by the late 1940s. I’ve also seen it said that you know when a genre has run out of steam when Mel Brooks gets around to parodying it. With Fighting American it seemed that not even two of the foremost creators of the Golden Age of superheroes could take the genre seriously any more.

But thinking about Fighting American, I realized that in one way Simon and Kirby were once again ahead of their time with that series. Didn’t Fighting American in 1954 anticipate the “camp” treatment of superheroes in American pop culture a dozen years later, most notably through the 1966 Batman TV show? Wasn’t the Batman show really a parody of the superhero comics of the 1940s and 1950s, viewed from the ironic perspective of the 1960s, as if the genre had failed to adapt to changing times?

But I don’t believe that any major genre truly dies. Rather, it may languish until an inspired creator finds a way to revitalize it for a new generation and time, as, say, George Lucas did for the “space opera” with Star Wars or the adventure movie serial with the Indiana Jones movies.

When Simon and Kirby created Fighting American, the birth of the Silver Age of Comics, with the debut of editor Julius Schwartz’s revamped Flash in Showcase #4, was only two years away. But the true revolution in the superhero genre would come about in the early 1960s through Stan Lee’s collaboration with Kirby, Steve Ditko and others on “the Marvel Age of Comics.”

Thus Kirby would be in large part responsible for the resurrection and reinvention if the superhero genre which transformed it from a wartime fad into an enduring component of American popular culture that has now spread from comics into novels, cinema and television.

But, it appears, it was Stan Lee who was the essential catalyst in the Marvel revolution. Simon and Kirby were content in Fighting American to mock a genre that had seemingly run its course. They did not come up with a way of revitalizing the superhero genre for the postwar era. It was Stan Lee who instigated taking the superhero genre in a new direction that led to its great success in many media today.

Evanier explains that the particular Fighting American story he reprints was originally published just before the institution of the Comics Code Authority, the comics industry’s self-censorship board, and was subsequently republished in 1966. He provides “before” and “after” versions of the first panel after the introductory splash, showing a murder victim being seized from behind, as his hat falls off to one side. In Kirby and Simon’s original, a menacing hand extends from the right, holding an ice pick, about to thrust it into the victim’s chest. A hand from the left grips the man’s throat. The victim’s eyes are tightly shut, and his tongue extends outward as he screams: “AAAA!” In the Code-approved 1966 version, the ice pick, the sound effect for the scream. and even the hand that gripped the victim’s throat have all vanished. The man’s eyes are now open, and his tongue is no longer visible (Evanier p. 88).

But I find I prefer the second version to the first. Kirby puts such anguish into the murder victim’s face, and creates such a vivid sense of movement –the way the man’s head tilts back, the way his hat falls away–that he creates a powerful image of desperation, pain, and distress. The hand on the right may no longer hold a weapon, but clenched into a fist, it remains both ominous and mysterious. The deleted scream, ice pick and tongue seem like gilding the lily. The later, simpler version is perfectly sufficient, again demonstrating Kirby’s ability to capture iconic imagery on the page.

The rest of the story has some striking visual images. Take panel four of page two (Evanier p. 90), in which the two gentlemanly murderers bow, hats in hand, to an elderly lady. The two men do not look alike, and yet their identical poses and expressions make them comical mirror images of one another. The top of a skyscraper rises above each man’s head, adding to the sense of duality.

The topmost panel of the story’s fourth page might be the archetypal Kirby image of a punch (Evanier p. 92). Kirby doesn’t actually show Fighting American’s fist connecting with the bad guy’s jaw; rather, Kirby has created a picture of the sheer energy of the punch. Fighting American’s left arm is at the bottom of a half-circular arc tracing the movement of his fist. There is a flash of light, signifying the energy released by the force of Fighting American’s blow. The villain is catapulted away, so powerfully that he seems to fly through the air, and collides with a wooden post, which snaps and shatters from the impact. Kirby and Simon have given us not the punch itself but its immediate aftermath, which provides the more dramatic image.

The most remarkable visual sequence in the story comes in the bottom tier of the fifth page (Evanier p. 93). On first glance it seems to be a cinematic sequence in which a single villain pulls off his face mask over the course of three panels. Look again and you’ll find that each of the three panels depicts a different man, each ugly in a different way. But Kirby and Simon have staged the sequence so that in the first panel a man begins pulling off his mask, which still covers the top of his head; in the second, a different man has pulled his mask entirely off, and in the third, an unmasked man grotesquely smiles in triumph as he lifts his mask up high. It looks like a single continuous action divided among three men. This serves a thematic purpose, as well, linking the three men together as members of the “Handsome Devils” by having them act in unison, just like the handsome bowing murderers on the second page. But this tine the effect is not comedic but eerily bizarre.

In the middle tier of the next to last page of the story, Kirby and Simon devise a variation on the classic pyramidal composition in art. This time the pyramid consists of the three bad guys, bunched together, framed in either side by Speedboy and Fighting American, each delivering knockout blows. The plots in Fighting American might not have been serious, but Simon and Kirby’s devotion to the craft of visual storytelling was.

But despite Simon and Kirby’s mastery of their artform, the comics industry was in sharp decline, in large part due to the widespread allegations in the 1950s that comics fomented juvenile delinquency. Simon and Kirby’s own company, Mainline, went under, and Simon became an editor at Harvey. One of the greatest artists in the business, Jack Kirby, who had been riding high only a short time before, was now on his own and out of work. World War II aside, it was the scariest time of his life,” Evanier recounts, literally giving Kirby nightmares about being unable to support his wife and children. This man of extraordinary talent found himself figuratively on the edge of an abyss. Considering the economic news in the papers lately, and commentators likening the present day to 1929, perhaps it is easier for many of us today to comprehend what that must feel like.

Some of us might also identify with Kirby in that, like many creative people who are best suited to working in their art, he was temperamentally unsuited to networking and self-promotion. Simon had been the businessman in their partnership; “as skillful as he [Kirby] was with stories and art, he was still weak in the area of salesmanship” (Evanier p. 99).

People in today’s comics industry might further see parallels in their own lives with Kirby’s dilemma in looking for work outside comics. “No luck,” reports Evanier. “His skills only seemed marketable in one line of radically diminishing work. If he could do anything else, he didn’t know what it was” (Evanier p. 99). Kirby was one of the greatest masters of his chosen artform, yet the rest of the world regarded him as useless.

After a short stint doing the Yellow Claw for Stan Lee at the company that would later become Marvel, Kirby briefly reunited with Simon to create Challengers of the Unknown at DC. Silver Age artist Gil Kane asserted that the DC production department “kept demanding Jack strip his work of all the sharp edges and stylistic innovations that gave it its power and energy” (Evanier p. 101). This is an example of corporate conventional wisdom at its worst: unable or unwilling to perceive Kirby’s true artistry, these champions of mediocrity demanded that Kirby reduce his creative standards to their level. Evanier quotes Kirby as saying, “They kept showing me their other books–books that weren’t selling–and saying, “˜This is what a comic book ought to be'” (Evanier p. 101). This is the measure of their blindness: they would rather go down with the ship rather than try something different that might save them in a changing market. Yet Kirby, who had had so many hits over two decades by this point, was hardly a radical newcomer! And, to pose a rhetorical question, just how do the artistic reputations of the majority of DC’s pencilers of the 1950s compare to Kirby’s nowadays?

Perhaps you are telling yourself that the world of comics is much more enlightened now, a half century later. Is it? Ask yourselves which of your favorite artists or writers–newcomers or veterans–isn’t getting enough work in comics right now, perhaps because his or her work doesn’t fit the conventional wisdom at the major companies about “what a comic book ought to be” in today’s market. Who’s being unjustly ignored now?

Next came Kirby’s remarkable collaboration with another legend, Wally Wood, on Sky Masters, a newspaper comic strip about space travel: Wood’s inking endowed Kirby’s visions of the fantastic with the look of precise, detailed realism.

It might have seemed an ideal project, except for the fact that Kirby was getting paid so little for it. The real life villain of this piece was DC’s Batman editor Jack Schiff, who demanded an undeserved cut of the earnings. It’s bad enough for Schiff’s reputation that he presided over Batman during the series’ creative nadir, but that merely makes him guilty of having bad taste. The Kirby book casts Schiff as a greedy, vengeful man who did his best to sink Kirby’s career; Superman editor Mort Weisinger also comes across quite poorly in Evanier’s telling.

A half century ago Schiff and Weisinger doubtless thought that no outside party would ever learn about their mistreatment of Kirby, and even if anyone did, no one cared about people who worked in comic books. But today’s comics company executives and editors should take notice. There will be more biographies about major figures in American comic books, and autobiographies by some of them as well. Kirby: King of Comics will be far from the last book that probes the history of the American comics industry. If film histories provide an example, these scholars are far more likely to take the side of the creative artist in a dispute with one or more of the “suits.” Today, for example, who defends the RKO studio’s corporate decision to take The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) away from its director Orson Welles, severely cut it, and shoot a new ending? People at comics companies should now ask themselves: how will their decisions look to historians ten, twenty or fifty years from now? The present administration at Marvel had nothing to do with the company’s poor treatment of Kirby in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, yet that still stains the company’s reputation, and probably will continue to do so for years to come.

In 1959 Kirby briefly collaborated again with Simon on two projects, including Adventures of the Fly, a revision of a previous series concept of Simon’s, The Silver Spider. Since Schiff had slammed DC’s doors sit on him, Kirby had only one place left to find work: the company once called Timely, then known as Atlas, and that would soon take the name Marvel. Kirby, it seems, would have preferred not to work for Lee, who had been his former office “go-pher.” But Stan Lee recognized Kirby’s greatness as an artist, and, however obvious that may seem to us today, it appears to have been a rare insight back in 1960. Give Stan Lee credit as a visionary who could see back then what the editors at DC–and, indeed, the world at large at that time–could not.

Back then, Marvel, now this corporate monolith, was so small that, Evanier remarks, “some felt that he [publisher Martin Goodman] only kept the comics going so Stan Lee would have a job” (Evanier p. 111). Goodman had nearly shut the comics line down in 1957, and Kirby recalled Goodman briefly terminating the comics in 1961, although Evanier casts doubt on this.

What would have happened if Martin Goodman had closed down his comics line for good? If Stan Lee and Jack Kirby had never had the chance to collaborate on the Marvel revolution? If instead Lee and Kirby had both ended up leaving the comic book business–although what they would have done instead is a good question–and had never teamed up again? Would there be superhero comics today? Would there be superhero movies today? Would there be comic books of any kind, or the specialty stores that sell them? Would the graphic novel revolution of the last few decades have occurred without the comics shops and a prosperous American comics industry? Or would American comic books have simply died as the “mom and pop” stores that sold them to kids faded away. as did the 1960s head shops that sold the undergrounds?

Without Lee and Kirby’s Marvel revolution, which redefined and reenergized the superhero genre for a new generation of older readers, this column would not exist, nor would most of the Internet sites about comics, and most of us in America who have devoted our careers to comics as an art form would be doing something else.

How easily the course of American popular culture would have been different if Martin Goodman had given up publishing comics as a dead end, or if Stan Lee, feeling creatively frustrated, had quit comics in 1961 as he once intended, or even if Jack Schiff had not blackballed Jack Kirby from DC. How many lives would have been changed over the last four decades?

These are questions that Mark Evanier does not address in his book. What if circumstances had been different and Jack Kirby had taken a different path when he reached this crossroads in the history of popular culture? Now there’s a “What If?” story for Marvel!

But Lee and Kirby did come together at the right time and the right place, and in 1961 they jointly created Fantastic Four #1, the Big Bang of the Marvel Universe. Look at the familiar final pages of the FF’s origin story reprinted in this book (Evanier pgs. 116-117). We’ve ready seen in Kirby: King of Comics that Jack Kirby could masterfully draw action scenes, visually render characterization, and even draw monsters like the FF’s Thing. But in this collaboration of Lee and Kirby, both in the words and in the pictures, there is a sense of drama, rooted in character, expressed through dialogue and action, that is unlike anything Evanier showed us earlier in his book. Here at the crossroads, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby laid out the new road for the superhero genre and for American comics, as we shall see next week.

–Copyright 2008 Peter Sanderson

People who aspire to become actors want to be on stage or on television or in the movies. Even those of us without that particular career ambition may fantasize about being “in the movies” in a different sense. In the silent comedy Sherlock, Jr. (1924), Buster Keaton’s character falls asleep in a movie projectionist’s booth, and in his dream sees the figures on the movie screen. enacting the tale of a jewel robbery, transform into people he knows. Keaton’s dream self proceeds to walk up to and into the screen, interacting with the characters on-screen. After being catapulted from one movie location to another by a series of edits, Keaton’s character eventually returns to the first setting, this time having metamorphosed into a character in the story, the detective, Sherlock Jr., who sets out to find the thief and recover the jewels.

Travel between reality and illusion goes in the opposite direction in Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), in which a heroic figure from a movie steps down from the screen and enters the real world.

In animation there is a long tradition of attempting to break down the barriers between the real world and the cartoon world. In Max and Dave Fleischer’s Out of the Inkwell cartoons, the animated Ko-Ko the Clown repeatedly escapes and wreaks havoc in the “live action” world of Max (see “Comics in Context” #190: “Pop Eye-Con”), while in Walt Disney’s early Alice shorts, a real girl appears within a cartoon environment (see “Comics in Context” #211: “The Silent Rabbit”). Over succeeding decades filmmakers continued to experiment with mixing live action and animation, as in conductor Leopold Stokowski shaking hands with Mickey Mouse in Fantasia (1940), Gene Kelly dancing with Jerry (of the Tom and Jerry team) in Anchors Aweigh (1945), the “Jolly Holiday” sequence in Mary Poppins (1964), complete with dancing penguins (see “Comics in Context” #158: “Jolly Holiday”), and Robert Zemeckis’s visually astounding Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). Since then, advances in computer technology have resulted in the creation of animated characters that blend seamlessly into “live action” environments. While watching the films, it is easy to forget that Gollum in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies or the title character in his 2005 King Kong (see “Comics in Context” #121: “The Once and Future Kong”) are merely digital constructs interacting on-screen alongside real people. Zemeckis’s The Polar Express (2004) and Beowulf (2007) seek, not entirely successfully, to fuse live action and animation, utilizing real actors; performances as the templates for digital characters (see “Comics in Context” #66: “A Christmas Potpourri” and #205: “Identity Theft”).

You could argue that this same desire to mix cartoons with reality underlies the live action screen adaptations of comics properties from Robert Altman’s Popeye (1980) and Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy (1990) to the current wave of live action movies featuring Marvel and DC superheroes.

And then there are the attempts to adapt cartoon properties to the stage. Victor Herbert wrote the music for a 1908 operetta based in Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo, and the classic Broadway musical of Al Capp’s Li’l Abner premiered in 1956.

The Walt Disney Company’s first effort to adapt one of its animated films to the Broadway stage was Beauty and the Beast in 1994. With its talking animals, it might have seemed impossible to translate The Lion King to the stage. Rather than attempt the hopeless task of persuasively disguising her cast as realistic animals, director Julie Taymor triumphed in her 1991 Broadway production by imaginatively emphasizing theatrical artifice. Some members wore animal masks or costumes that did not conceal their real faces. Other animals, including various principal characters, were represented by puppets, yet the puppeteers remained clearly visible. Through such means Taymor openly acknowledged that she was dealing in make-believe and was inviting the audience to participate in the process by using their imaginations to pretend that the puppets and masked figures onstage were real animals. It worked brilliantly, and the Broadway Lion King was and remains a tremendous artistic and commercial success. (Taymor is reportedly currently working on a Spider-Man stage musical, which will include a group of singing comics fans known as “the Geek Chorus” who recount Spider-Man’s history. I do not feel complimented.)

Walt Disney Theatricals has launched other stage versions of past Disney animated or partly animated films, such as Tarzan (see “Comics in Context” #133: “Swinging down Broadway”) and Mary Poppins (see “Comics in Context” #158: “Jolly Holiday”), but each time has fallen short of the standards set by Taymor’s Lion King. The latest of these is the new Broadway musical version of The Little Mermaid, and I did promise a while back to review it for this column. Unfortunately, I’ve decided against it. In large part this is due to my current financial straits, and also, thanks to my recent software upgrades on my computer, to the encyclopedic video resources of the Internet. On YouTube it’s easy to find videos of the Broadway Mermaid‘s versions of the best known musical numbers from the animated film, but the stagings are in each case disappointing. For example, in the film “Under the Sea” is sung to a rollicking montage of dancing fish that builds to a climactic spectacle. In the Broadway Mermaid performers move around on skates in order to convey the impression of swimming, and following the Taymor mode, their costumes do not conceal their faces. Even so, in this Good Morning, America clip of “Under the Sea”, the performers seem to ne no more than they really are–weirdly costumed humans performing surprisingly conventional choreography–rather than somehow, through movement, costume and acting, conjuring a world of frolicking fish in the imagination. And if I can tell from the videos that the Broadway Mermaid can’t pull off the big musical numbers from the animated film, then odds are that I’d find the show as a whole disappointing. It would cost at least to but a ticket for Mermaid, and in my current financial state, the gamble doesn’t seem with it.

But a while back, before my current situation arose, I purchased a less expensive advance ticket to another current Broadway show, which provides an amazing new twist on the theme of combining the world of animation and the world of reality. This show employs computer animation directly on stage. Most of you are surely aware of how movie actors perform in front of “green screens” so that CGI animation or computer-generated backgrounds can be inserted later. Imagine attending a Broadway show in which the actors perform against projected CGI backgrounds and interact with CGI characters!

In “Comics in Context” I write about comics and cartoon art in their various forms, and any related subjects: for example, a live action film adaptation of comics material is fair game. Sometimes it may seem like a bit of a stretch to include a particular subject within this column’s purview. Longtime readers may recall that one week in my column I wrote about waiting outside Manhattan’s Symphony Space to see a panel discussion with Buffy the Vampire Hunter creator Joss Whedon and the great Broadway composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim; I never got in, but the panel discussion was broadcast outside through speakers, so at least I got to hear and report on it (see “Comics in Context” #77: “Gone with the Steam”). Now what did this have to do with comics and cartoons? Well, Whedon has written extensively in comics, including Astonishing X-Men for Marvel (see “Comics in Context”#42: “Joss Whedon’s Comics and Stories”), and his current Buffy “Season 8” comics series for Dark Horse. But Sondheim? Well, if I push a point, he did write the songs for the 1990 Dick Tracy movie and even lyrics for a song for off-Broadway’s The MAD Show, inspired by MAD Magazine, back in 1966. But now I’ve got a better answer: it is the Roundabout Theatre Company’s new production of Sondheim’s and book writer James Lapine’s 1984 musical Sunday in the Park with George, at Manhattan’s Studio 54, that employs animation so astonishingly onstage.

(Yes, that’s right. I can now claim to have been to the notorious Studio 54 three times, albeit long after its days as a notorious discotheque. Before that, it was a CBS radio and television studio that was once home to The Jack Benny Program, What’s My Line? and even Captain Kangaroo. See here.)

The first act of the musical is about the 19-th century French neo-Impressionist painter Georges Seurat and the creation of his masterwork A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (Un dimanche apres-midi a l’Ile de la Grande Jatte), which now hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago. (Back in the 1980s, I attended the Chicago Comicon several tines, back when it was held in Chicago, not Rosemont, Illinois, and before Wizard bought it. By Sunday afternoon I would feel saturated with comics and would walk a few blocks up Michigan Avenue to the Art Institute, where I would spend most of my time in the museum’s world-class Impressionist collection, including La Grande Jatte.)

The scenes shift between Seurat’s studio and the setting of the painting, a park on an island in the Seine River in Paris. But the set looks like a large indoor room, complete with doors, but all in white, like a new canvas for a painter, or the blank white page that is supposed to intimidate the writer who is trying to get started, or even a blank computer screen. Seurat enters, makes verbal commands or gesture with his hands (like that archetypal figure, the conductor), and the room around him begins to change. A huge streak of black materializes on the walls, running across the set. An oddly tied white curtain, wide at the top, narrow below, suddenly bursts into colors, and thus transforms before our eyes into a tree. Before long, the walls of the set have transformed into what seems to be one of Seurat’s studies for La Grande Jatte in conte crayon, all in black and shades of gray. Rightly impressed by this opening coup de theatre, the audience burst into applause. But there was more to come: eventually, perhaps without the audience even noticing exactly when it happened, this preliminary version of La Grande Jatte blossomed into color.

This opening suggests that, even when the story is literally taking place within Seurat’s studio or on the island of La Grande Jatte, the real setting of the first act is Seurat’s imagination. Just as the evolving work that will become La Grande Jatte covers the walls of the set enclosing Seurat, Seurat is, figuratively, within his own painting. Seurat is consumed by his passion to create art; everything else, even his lover Dot, must take a secondary place. No matter where Seurat is physically, psychologically he exists within the world of art he is creating.

At two points during the show, the same point is made through simpler, less spectacular means. We see Seurat standing behind a semitransparent screen on which the evolving La Grande Jatte appears, as he works on it. The figure of Seurat–or, all of it that we can see–is completely contained within the frame of the painting. So Seurat looks as if he is inside the painting, working on it from within, while Dot, his neglected lover, can only gaze at them both from outside.

So the setting is ambiguous. Indeed, at one point Seurat decides to remove a tree from his painting (another curtain with projected color, which proceeds to move offstage). Shortly afterwards, Seurat’s mother, whom he uses as a model for one of the figures in La Grande Jatte, enters, presumably on the real island. But she then wonders aloud what happened to her favorite tree. It’s as if Seurat’s decision to dispose of the tree in his painting somehow altered the landscape of the real island.

The identities of most of the first act’s supporting cast of characters are similarly ambiguous. They are primarily supposed to be the real people who Seurat used as models for the figures in the painting, including Dot and Seurat’s mother. But at times these actors are playing not the models but the figures in the painting, as in the first act finale, when Seurat, acting as conductor or director, maneuvers them into the places they occupy in his finished painting. The second act opens with the song “It’s Hot,” in which the figures in the painting complain about having to remain frozen in place in the painting for year after year, as if they retained the personalities of their models.

Not every figure in La Grande Jatte is represented onstage by an actor. In the original 1984 production, the other prominent figures were represented by life-size three-dimensional cutouts. (The original production was shown on PBS in 1986, was made available on home video, and, chopped into over twenty sections, has been posted in YouTube, probably in violation of copyright.) In the course of the Roundabout production, animated sailboats sometimes pass along the river, and occasionally an animated human figure appears and moves in the background. There are two soldiers standing side by side in La Grande Jatte. In the Roundabout production one soldier is played by a live actor but the other is a CGI animated figure, which interacts with actors onstage. Seurat brings out small screens on which animated dogs appear, one of which scampers about merrily. (You can get some idea of what the production looks like from The New York Times‘s audio slide show here.)

The second act takes place a hundred years later, in the 1980s, and centers on Seurat’s (fictional) descendant George (played by the same actor who portrayed Seurat), an artist who finds himself in a creative rut. In the song “Putting it Together” this George explains how life in the modern art world forces him continually to network and schmooze with wealthy collectors, museum executives and art critics in order to obtain the commissions he needs to finance his work. In the original production the actor playing George moved life sized cutouts of himself into position on stage during a party scene. The idea was that these doppelgangers represented George’s public self, chatting away amiably with the people he needed to impress at the party, while the actor playing George represented his true, inner self, singing about his disdain for the necessity of having to sell himself in this manner. (You can see the original staging for “Putting It Together“.)

But in this new production George’s doppelgangers are moving, projected figures of himself. There is even a point at which the actor playing George pours a drink into a glass held by one of the projected George dopplegangers!

The reviews and articles about this Roundabout production put such emphasis in the animation that I expected more of it than there was. Still, I was impressed with what I saw. This production originated at the Menier Chocolate Factory, a small company in London, before transferring to the West End. In all three of its venues, the production was directed by Sam Buntrock, who was formerly best known as an animator. (See his February 2008 interview in The New York Times). Buntrock explains in a video on the Roundabout website that animation has been used in stage productions before (though it’s the first time I’ve seen it onstage) but what makes this production different is that the animation is integral to expressing the meaning of the show. Sondheim told The New York Times that “The play is about perception, and here we see the work as George perceives it,” as it evolves.

I’m surprised that I haven’t seen anything about this Sunday revival on animation websites I visit. Now that CGI animation has been used so effectively in a live stage production, where will it go from here? I would be surprised if Disney Theatrical Productions–and Disney Imagineering–were not studying Buntrock’s use of animation onstage and planning how to take it further, both in theme park attractions and onstage. I would have supposed that creating computer animation for a stage production is expensive, but maybe not, considering that this Sunday revival started out in such a small venue with a presumably low budget.

Would “Under the Sea” have worked better onstage with live action performers interacting with CGI fish? Is it possible that a future live action production of Mary Poppins could have a live action Bert dancing with animated penguins, recreating the number from the movie right in front of us? The animation in Sunday in the Park seems to me to be only the beginning of a new stage technology. How much further will it have advanced ten years from now?

Sunday in the Park with George is not simply about Seurat and his fictional descendant, but about the life of the creative artist, a theme that I’ve found in other works I’ve discussed in past installments of this column. Critics find autobiographical themes in Sunday: The New York Times‘ Ben Brantley wrote in his February 22, 2008 review that “As a portrait of the artist as an embattled and rejected man Sunday has been read as a sort of apologia pro vita sua by Mr. Sondheim”. If so, then perhaps Sunday also has autobiographical meaning for James Lapine, who wrote the show’s book and directed the original production. Seurat was a painter, but Sondheim the composer and Lapine the playwright can identify with him because they are all creative artists.

And I think of writing criticism as an art. I saw the original production in the 1980s and, though I admired it, I felt no emotional connection with the work. But perhaps that was because back then I thought of myself as a student. Now that I’ve been a professional writer for decades, upon experiencing Sunday again, I see all these connections to my own experience. If Seurat created his paintings from dots if color (using the pointillist technique he devised), and Sondheim creates music from individual notes, then each week I start with nothing–like the white set at Sunday‘s opening–and assemble one of these columns out of individual words, studying the works I review (as Seurat studied his models), forming ideas, developing them, discovering connections, and fitting my concepts together into an overall structure.

The show describes Seurat as having a “mission to see.” That captures the artist’s sense of duty to his or her art, to follow the muse wherever she takes him or her. (In the second act, when Dot appears to Seurat’s descendant to encourage him to pursue his art, she is not so much the “real” Dot as she us the personification of the muse.) As this musical shows, that sense of mission is so strong that it can outweigh practical concerns and even reduce personal relationships to secondary importance. Dot leaves Seurat, and his descendant George parts from his wife, probably in both cases because the artist’s devotion to his art takes first place. I can understand this sense of isolation as well; writing is a solitary task. Brantley’s reference to Seurat and Sondheim as “embattled” may be too strong a word, but in the show Seurat has to contend with people–a successful fellow artist (who, of course, is now forgotten) and even hs mother–who do not comprehend what he is attempting to do. (Why, it’s like people who are bewildered at the idea that someone would take the comics medium seriously and spend his life writing about it.)

Yet the show demonstrates that the artist’s life of devotion to his “mission” is a noble quest. One of the show’s songs is titled “Children and Art”, asserting that these are the proper legacies for any person to leave behind him. Seurat only inadvertently fathers a daughter, but his true legacy is his art, both through its own merits and as an inspiration to future artists (like Seurat’s descendant George) who will build upon this heritage. The first act of Sunday ends with Seurat arranging the other cast members into the positions the figures take in his finished composition, fixed “forever” as an enduring work of art, achieving transcendence. In the finale of the second act the figures from the painting reappear and bow to the 1980s George, encouraging him to follow his ancestor’s example and pursue his own new creative path.

In the final moments, the supporting cast leaves the stage, and the projections vanish, returning to the production’s original image of the blank white room. But this is not an image of emptiness; rather, the 1980s George gasps with joy, seeing possibilities for creating something new out of this blank slate. It’s like that famous saying of Michelangelo’s, that the sculpture he created was already in the block of marble he started with, and he merely had to uncover it.

Should a writer or a creative artist of any kind need reassurance that he or she has embarked in the right path, and need inspiration to go further, that person should see this show.

My only qualm about Sunday is that it seems to insist that the creative artist’s life must be a solitary one. (In Seurat’s darkest moment in Sunday, he agrees to let Dot and her new husband care for his–Seurat’s–own daughter because he “cannot look up from my pad” to be a proper father.) I may live by myself, but certainly I know plenty of creative people who have kids and significant others. Indeed, one of the main points of Mark Evanier’s new biography and art book Kirby: King of Comics is that Kirby had two principal motivations in life: to pursue his artistic goals, but also to support his wife and children. In Sunday Seurat speaks of “balance” as one of his artistic virtues. Jack Kirby evidently found the balance between art and family that the Seurat of Sunday was incapable of achieving.

I began my commentary on Kirby: King of Comics months ago, but agreed to postpone the rest until after the book had come out and you all had a chance to read it. If all goes according to plan, next week I will resume my Kirby review.

Last fall’s Disney musical film Enchanted, which came out on DVD this week, provides yet another clever variation on the themes of mixing live action with animation and forging links between the cartoon world and the world of reality. I’ve read some negative comments to the presentations of the three nominated songs from Enchanted at this year’s Academy Awards ceremony. Granted, the songs may not work well out of the context of the film, but this should not stop anyone from seeing the movie, which is a delight.

Like DreamWorks Animation’s Shrek movies, Enchanted satirizes the long tradition of Disney animated features, especially those adapting classic fairy tales. But unlike the increasingly crass and unfunny Shrek movies (see “Comics in Context” #186: “Le Petit Chef”), Enchanted is not only genuinely witty and imaginative, but also succeeds in revivifying that sane tradition for a 21st century audience, demonstrating that it isn’t outdated after all.

The movie opens in a cartoon world that evokes Disney’s Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, and yes, it is presented in traditional, “2-D,” hand-drawn animation. Not long ago, the conventional wisdom was that hand-drawn animated features were dead, having been supplanted in the public’s affections by computer animated movies, and Disney even disposed of its old animation tables and other tools for making hand-drawn animation. Let’s hope that Enchanted, along with last year’s Persepolis and The Simpsons Movie (see “Comics in Context” #188: “D’ohme!”), signals that “2-D” animation isn’t a dead and obsolete artform in the realm of feature films after all.

Within the land of Andalasia in this cartoon world lives the film’s young heroine Giselle, who falls in love at first sight with a handsome prince, Edward, after he rescues her from a troll. But Edward’s archetypal wicked stepmother Narissa believes that if Edward marries, his bride will displace her as queen. Employing her sorcery to transform herself intro an old crone, Narissa pushes the unsuspecting Giselle down a well (rather like Snow White’s wishing well). Plunging through darkness (rather like Alice falling down the rabbit hole), Giselle emerges in the middle of Times Square in the real, “live action” world. What’s more, she has been transformed into a real, live action human being herself. Eventually other characters from the cartoon world will follow Giselle into the real world, including Prince Edward, Queen Narissa, her henchman Nathaniel, and Giselle’s chipmunk friend Pip. (In the cartoon world Pip could talk; in the “real world” he can’t, though he retains his human -level intelligence. In Andalasia Pip is a hand-drawn animated character, but in the “real world” he becomes a computer-animated figure, since CGI, in this film, reads as “real.”)

Last November I saw Robert Zemeckis’s Beowulf and Enchanted only one week apart, and I’ve come to think of them as opposites. The epic poem Beowulf, as it has come down to us, depicts an ideal hero. As I wrote in my review (“Comics in Context” #205: “Identity Theft”), one of the anonymous Beowulf poet’s themes “is to describe and commend the behavior of the “˜good king,’ the good leader of men, and, perhaps, the good man in general.” Zemeckis’s film reveals this supposedly good man as a fraud, a liar who succumbs to his lust for an enemy and who literally fathers the evil that later plagues his kingdom and brings about his own death. The Beowulf movie seems to suggest that the truly good man does not exist and never did, that stories of noble heroes are falsehoods, and that the high ideals of the Beowulf poet are merely delusions.

You might expect that Enchanted would similarly demolish the Disney fairy tale tradition. Once Giselle lands in New York City, the film puts this unworldly innocent though misery until she finally is taken in by the story’s leading man, single parent named Robert, whose profession, divorce lawyer, indicates that he doesn’t believe in anyone living happily ever after with his or her one true love. The movie continues to mock Giselle’s childlike naivete, gently but nonetheless pointedly. It seems impossible for her to fit into the real world. We associate the world of Disney animated features with childhood, so the real world must be that of adulthood. Giselle’s plight is a comic metaphor for someone struggling with the transition from childhood innocence to adapting to reality as an adult.

And yet Giselle not only succeeds in fitting in, but does so while remaining true to herself, and even triumphantly changes her new world for the better. Although she comes from a world in which magic is real, Giselle lacks any magic powers. Yet somehow her innate optimism, her capacity for joy, and her sheer goodness have a positive influence on the people-and even the animals–around her. In the musical number “Happy Working Song” Giselle enlists animals to help her clean Robert’s apartment, just as friendly animals aided Disney’s Snow White and Cinderella in their chores. In this case, though, since it’s in Manhattan, Giselle’s animal assistants include rats and pigeons. Visiting Robert’s office, Giselle weeps over a couple who are seeking a divorce and who seem to think she’s crazy, yet by the end of the movie the couple happily report that they’ve reconciled thanks to Giselle’s influence. In the movie’s musical high point, “That’s How You Know,” people in Central Park spontaneously form into a singing and dancing parade, with Giselle at their lead, inspired by her infectiously cheerful presence.

Giselle dies adapt to her new world by “growing up” in certain ways. She comes to recognize that she didn’t truly love her bubbleheaded suitor Prince Edward. A turning point comes when, in a clash with Robert, she realizes she has become angry for the first time in her life. Jungians would say she has tapped into the “shadow” side of her personality; having gotten in touch with her anger, she will no longer be simply the passive potential princess, waiting for her prince to rescue her. Indeed, towards the film’s end, Giselle even pulls out a sword that had been struck into the floor (thereby mimicking the future King Arthur in Disney’s The Sword in the Stone) and goes to rescue her true love, Robert, from Narissa’s clutches.

But while Giselle rises above her naivete and passivity, she retains all of her many virtues: her empathy, her idealism, her great capacity for love, and her sheer goodness. If Zemeckis’s Beowulf contended that its epic hero was a fraud, Enchanted maintains that its heroine’s virtues are not only real but are viable even in the supposedly cynical world of the 21st century.

Amy Adams’ performance as Giselle is absolutely essential to the success of Enchanted. Although she brings out the comic side of Giselle’s childlike innocence and enthusiasms, she never ironically comments on the character. rather, Adams pulls off the miraculous feat of making Giselle’s unworldly goodness and innocence completely credible. Not only that, but in this role Adams exudes a sheer, irresistible lovability appropriate for a classic Disney heroine. As Manohla Dargis so vividly put it in the November 21, 2007 New York Times, “Ms. Adams doesn’t just bring her cartoonish character to life: she fills Giselle’s pale cheeks with blood and feeling, turning a hazardously cute gimmick into a recognizable, very appealing human confusion of emotion and crinoline. ”

In a December 13, 2007 interview for London’s Times Online, Enchanted director Kevin Lima explained that “With this movie I set out to make Mary Poppins. With that in mind, I had to throw away the mean tempered mockery. It has been done so much. The Shrek movies were very successful in turning the screws on Disney in that way. So I was looking for a new way.” Hence, as the reporter put it, “he managed to persuade the company that there was a way to make the film as a love letter rather than a cynical pastiche. The result is a film that, although a departure for Disney, also has a charming, old-fashioned innocence.”

Moreover, the Times states, “according to its director, Kevin Lima, it is effectively Disney’s first postmodern movie.”: Enchanted is filled with references to classic Disney features. Lima said “it became an obsession. Every single name had to somehow have a relation to Disney, every image had to relate back to the Disney iconography.”

Some of the references take the form of archetypal plot elements. For example, Narissa is a wicked queen who, like the one in Snow White, has a magic mirror, magically disguises herself as a crone, and administers a poisoned apple to the heroine. Longtime readers know that I’m an admirer of Susan Sarandon, who makes this wicked queen surprisingly sexier than her Disney prototypes. When Sarandon wears heavy old page makeup as the crone, I was struck by how recognizable her distinctively large eyes remain.) Robert proves himself to be Giselle’s true love–and surmounts his cynicism over “fairy tales”–by reviving this sleeping beauty with a kiss.

Watching the movie I spotted other references. Most viewers will recognize the voice of Julie Andrews, Disney’s Mary Poppins, as the narrator. But i was pleasantly surprised to see Jodi Benson, the voice of the animated Little Mermaid, turn up in the role of Robert’s secretary (complete with a fish tank in the office). Of course I noticed that the couple seeking a divorce in Enchanted were Mr. and Mrs. Banks, named after the dysfunctional parents in Poppins (see “Comics in Context” #160: “Banks’ Holiday”). There are numerous other allusions as well, many of which are catalogued in Enchanted‘s Wikipedia entry; it’s rather like decoding all the references in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

I received a big surprise when I discovered that throughout the film Lima and company duplicated visual compositions from classic Disney animated features. (You can find some examples here) Might this have a subliminal effect on viewers, especially those well versed in the Disney canon? It’s as if Lima and company are saying that these archetypal stories and characters still underlie modern reality, even if we are unaware of it.

That may be the ultimate lesson of Enchanted. We may live in an age disposed towards realism and irony, and yet, as Robert comes to learn in the course of the film, the archetypes of these great fairy tales still survive and continue to carry psychological and emotional power, even in the early 21st century, and even into our adult lives.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone who hasn’t yet seen Enchanted that Giselle and Robert end up living happily ever after together (presumably as husband and wife, though this is, surprisingly, not made explicit). I was amused to see that for two other characters in the film, their equivalent of living “happily ever after” is writing a book and getting to do a signing! Well, yes, I’m proud of being a published author, and I always enjoy doing signings of my new books. But as I well know, in most cases, unless you’re J. K. Rowling, a single book doesn’t pay the bills for very long. But I still appreciate the fact that Enchanted regards the publication of a book as a cause for celebration!

–Copyright 2008 Peter Sanderson