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Opus 140: Opus 140 (June 21, 2004). Before we
consider Ronald Reagan and the Affability of Evil, which takes most
of this installment, we rehearse the astonishing adventures of another
traveling corpse, one that spent 66 years being carted back and forth
across the continent for the amusement of an otherwise idle citizenry.
We also take a look at some of the editorial cartoons produced at Reagan's
death before taking up the question of what national institutions or
portions of the country's geography we should re-name in honor of the
40th President. My candidate is geographic-that flow of water
that divides the country in two, just as Reagan did; hereafter, let
us refer to it as the Mississippi Reagan. We conclude with a long review
of Joe Kubert's graphic novel, Yossel, which, in turn, prompts us to remark upon some of the considerable
contribution made to the creation of comics by Jewish cartoonists and
writers. Between this preamble and the autopsy of Reagan, we review
the new monthly Comics Buyer's
Guide, extol Free Comic Book Day, report on the progress of the
next Batmovie, and digest some news about Donald Duck, Popeye, and Tintin,
the invasion of manga, and the outcome of Jimmy Johnson's poll to decide
how Janis should wear her hair. Here we go- A Big, Fat Once-a-Month The new Comics
Buyer's Guide is here-"the biggest monthly price guide in comics"
it proclaimeth, and it is surely true that it is big and that it is
mostly price guide. That's about what I thought it'd be. It has "Comics"
on the cover larger than "Buyer's Guide," but even a cursory
coursing of the content brings us up against page after page of tiny
tiny type in orderly columns, lists of prices and so-called "values"
of comic books. If you detect a somewhat disparaging quirk in my bent
thus far it's because I'm primarily a reader of comics, not a speculator
in them, and so the kind of horrifyingly punctilious approach to pricing
and whatnot that this tome epitomizes is no use to me whatsoever and
is more than a little off-putting. Apart from that, however, over-all,
the maiden voyage of the CBG monthly
magazine is an impressive achievement. One of the things I like most
about it is that the layout design clearly distinguishes ads from editorial
content, usually by confining ads to "ad pages" facing "editorial
pages" instead of mixing the two up in the hope that the reader
can't tell one from the other, can't tell, in other words, when he's
being informed from when he's being gulled. This is a signal distinction,
setting CBG apart from Wizard, for example-the magazine this production
seems geared (you should pardon the expression) to replace-by demonstrating
a consideration if not also a respect for readers. The usual columnists
and content can be found throughout the mag's 242 pages (minus Rancid
Raves, one of the print incarnations of this ethereal prose). There
are slick paper sections with color and newsprint sections with black
and gray. And for the most part, CBG
designers have avoided the annoying pitfalls that have pocked the surfaces
of so many comics publications-a tendency to subsume meaning under visuals,
to sink communication with flashy graphics. Only once or twice herein
do I see the most offensive of these misbegotten computer-generated
tricks, screening a drawing so it runs as a gray shadow behind the type;
that makes the type hard to read and the drawing impossible to appreciate.
So why commit this desecration? At least here, the shadow art is sort
of wallpapery, not actual line drawings. The artwork throughout is mostly
treated with respect, even when reproduced small (an inevitable concession
to the apportioning of content). And- thankfully!- we have no pages
on which typeset text is reversed white out of solid black or screaming
red, making reading a painful experience. So far, so good. Numerous
short articles and most of the reviews are tucked into the page designs
of the price guide sections, all very tidy. A helpful Table of Contents
quickly organizes the massive volume into discrete sections-for comics
news, reviews, events, and so forth. And there copious reviews of comics,
manga, books, anime-175 reviews, to be exact. (The editors counted 'em;
I didn't.) In short, there is so much here that no one could hope to
wade attentively through it in an afternoon. But since the magazine
is replacing four weekly issues, I suppose its producers expect us to
take four afternoons at weekly intervals to digest this behemoth. So
be it. As
a monthly publication, CBG will
not be able to give appropriate emphasis to as many developments as
a weekly newspaper could. A weekly paper has four front pages every
month; a monthly mag, only one. This month, the forthcoming "Spider-Man
2" flick gets cover treatment-plus a generous dozen or more pages
inside (the slick, color, pages). Missing from the cover is any mention
of the looming Free Comic Book Day, which will occur July 3, a couple
days after the Spidey film opens. Under the old weekly format, my guess
is that the week before Free Comic Book Day, CBG would have plastered it all over its
cover. Now, in the monthly mode, FCBD gets a blast on the Table of Contents
page, but the news about it gets relegated to pages 56-58, 'way inside,
kimo sabe. Promotion of comic books, which is what FCBD is designed
to do, is something CBG ought
to be as devoted to as the retailers and publishers, yet here, in the
industry's self-proclaimed bible, comic books take a back seat to movies
in this crucial FCBD month. Admittedly, "Spider-Man 2" is
a big deal, and it clearly has potential for affecting the comic book
business, any comic book based motion picture does (although not necessarily,
perforce, for the better). But what will CBG do next month when there's
no movie to hype? (There will be a movie, though: "Catwoman"
is to be released July 23, just after the next issue of CBG will hit
your mailbox. And in August, there's "Alien vs. Predator."
September, alas, is a dud of a movie month, it seems-judging from this
helpful listing that comes on pages 32-33, well before the FCBD promo.
But October will be flick rich: "Lady Death" and "Man-Thing."
Eventually, however, there won't be a movie-a-month, and then, as I
said, what will CBG tout?) But
let there be no doubt: this first issue is a hugely successful achievement.
Producing such an enterprise involves thousands of tiny decisions, some
made well in advance, others made on the fly as the circumstances warranting
them arise. And the result appears to do all of the things the publisher
and editors wanted to do, and it does it very well-neatly, attractively.
Impressively. But I'll miss the old weekly. I'll miss the succession
of emphases that a weekly publication is better suited to furnish. I'll
miss it's timeliness. And I'll probably miss a lot of actual "news"
or "information" because the dimension of this monthly package
is so daunting I can scarcely bring myself to sit down with it. NOUS R US At the Book Expo America, June 5-6, Andrews McMeel announced
that it will publish the complete run of Calvin
and Hobbes sometime in 2005-a 3-volume, slipcased extravaganza doubtless
inspired by the success of the 2-volume, slipcased Complete Far Side, an 18-pound production that went to a second printing
almost at once. ... Donald Duck,
whose film debut was in "The Wise Little Hen" released June
9, 1934, is seventy; accounts marking this anniversary divulged that
his middle name is Fountleroy, a fact revealed in a World War II cartoon
extolling the draft (Donald, like everyone else, had to fill out a form
and give his full name). ... Popeye's 75th anniversary is
being celebrated all year long with distinctive events marking most
months: in May and June, for instance, Weight Watchers International
circulated recipes for spinach to over a million members worldwide;
in July, Popeye-themed race cars will run at Daytona. At the end of
the year, a new Popeye film with CGI animation will be released-"Popeye's
Voyage: The Quest for Pappy," written by Paul Reiser ("Mad
about You") with Kathy Bates voicing the Sea Hag. In
recognition of Tintin's 75th
year, the twenty-fourth and last of the Tintin books has just been released
in England: an unusual but fitting last appearance, the book publishes
a "draft" of a tale entitled "Tintin and Alph Art,"
that creator Herge (George Remi) was working on at the time of his death
in 1983. Extracting a meaningful narrative from Herge's notes and preliminary
drawings, the book offers insight into the cartoonist's creative processes,
printing annotations as well as sketches. The tale isn't complete: Herge
left Tintin apparently doomed to die in a deluge of liquid polyester.
Tintin's life has been one such life-threatening moment after another,
but this time, Herge offers no hint as to how the intrepid boy reporter
might escape. Maybe Herge intended to end his creation's life as his
own was drawing to a close. The
Association of American Editorial Cartoonists has published, through
the auspices of John Kovalic's
Dork Storm Press, a collection of rapier-witted political and social
insights by 150 of AAEC's members, each allotted a page for a brief
biographical note and sample cartoons. Entitled Attack
of the Political Cartoonists: Insights and Assaults from Today's Editorial
Cartoonists, the volume hits the bookstores July 4 Manga,
the Japanese comic book genre, is the fastest growing segment of the
publishing industry in the U.S. according to Milton Griepp, president
of ICv2, a pop culture publisher. In its native land, manga accounts
for roughly a third of all print publications. In the U.S., English
translations are appearing in all the bookstore chains, usually filling
tier upon tier of the shelves. One manga publisher, Viz, releases about
200 titles a year; two of its titles recently broke into USA
Today's "Top 150" list of adult trade books. TokyoPop,
the U.S. manga leader, publishes 35-40 titles month. All publishers
of manga in English are being aided and abetted by an Internet phenomena
called "scanlation," a portmanteau word that fuses "scan"
and "translation." In the hacker realm, determined manga fans
translate the Japanese books into English, then release them into a
worldwide chat network from whence they are downloaded in droves. Thievery
of this sort infested the music business and soon became the target
of legal action, but scanlation is viewed by some U.S. manga publishers
as a blessing. Scanlators play a role in identifying new titles that
are in demand. Said Steve Kleckner of TokyoPop: "If you get 2,000
fans [through the 'Net] saying they want a book you've never heard of,
well, you gotta go out and get it. If the music industry had used downloading
and file sharing properly, it would have increased their business, not
eaten into it." In Japan, different manga are produced for specific
target audiences, and the practice has begun to yield tantalizing results
here. One of the audiences is teenage girls, for whom "shojo"
("girls' comics") are created. Translating them into English
and marketing them in this country, manga publishers have experienced
a dramatic gender shift in their customer base, a remarkable development
in an American industry that has been traditionally oriented to adolescent
males. "Last year,"
said Kleckner, "55 percent of our consumers were female."
He plans to publish 500 new volumes in 2004, almost doubling last year's
catalog, and 60 percent of its intended readers will be female. Just
on the horizon, "manhua"-Chinese comic books, a rich lode
not yet being much explored. But a newly formed company, Comics-One,
is busily obtaining publication rights. Cracked, the Mad knock-off whose demise was widely reported in 2001 (including
here), isn't dead after all (I corrected that impression somewhat later
in this very department). In fact, it's lively enough to move around:
it's leaving its Florida haunts (where it was owned by the most laughable
"news"-paper in the universe, Weekly
World News, which pictures the Loch Ness monster on its front page
periodically) for Rockford, Illinois, where its new owner, Dick Kulpa
and his Mega Media Corp, are headquartered. The most recent other excitement
in Rockford was whether or not the city fathers and their state representatives
could get legislation passed for the state to grant another riverboat
gambling license, this one for their city. Kulpa, once an alderman in
the city, vows to revive Cracked and thereby to make Rockford the
comic book capital of the world. And he'll probably find the Loch Ness
monster, too. In
the comic strip Garfield,
Jim Davis, the fat cat's creator, says,
"I only get 25 words or less every day. What happens when 'Garfield'
gets 85 minutes [in the movie]-it's another way to entertain and, therefore,
another challenge." Judging from the critical pans the movie earned,
the challenge wasn't met. The lasagna-loving feline is popular enough
to accumulate 2,600 subscribing newspapers worldwide, but he didn't
translate well from the static medium to the moving one. Davis, however,
is not likely to give up. Garfield was deliberately conceived as a marketing
product as much as a comic strip character, and it has undeniably been
a licensing bonanza for Davis. But Davis likes comedy, too. Asked if
he is ever bored in manufacturing gags for the lazy cat (which he does
once a month in a two-three day session with a co-conspirator, Brett
Koth), Davis said he wasn't: "I'm still trying for that one perfect
gag that will make the whole world laugh." The
Tribune Company, which in 2000 added to its holdings the Times Mirror
newspapers (including the Los
Angeles Times and the Baltimore
Sun), is going to cut jobs across the board in order to compensate
for declining advertising revenues. The L.A.
Times, which garnered five Pulitzers in the most recent round of
awards, was singled out for its failure to generate enough ad income.
The Tribune Company reported that its profits dropped 15 percent in
the first quarter. Since newspaper profits are generally about 15-20
percent, a drop of 15 percent of that 15-20 percent is, actually, fairly
negligible-to anyone in the business world but newspaper owners, who,
these days, are stock-holders and Wall Street sharks, not journalists.
They're interested only in profit margins, not public service or civic
pride or any of the things that once motivated newspaper publishers.
Sad. The
Stan Lee inspired reality tv show, "Who
Wants To Be a Superhero?" surfaced in the news again recently as
MTV took up the prospect. Apparently it's a "go." On the show,
it sez here, "eight lucky comic book fans-who dress up as their
own original comic book heroes-will get a chance to compete against
each other in games and challenges that transform their comic book fantasies
into the most exhilarating real-life situations they could ever imagine."
The winner "gets to see his/her character featured in his/her very
own comic book-written by none other than comic book legend, Stan Lee."
Talk about reality. Over
at DC Comics, a new law suit looms. Carmine
Infantino, freelance cartoonist who was once publisher of the comic
book line, is suing Time Warner for "breach of contract" in
connection with his creation of several Silver Age characters-Batgirl,
Poison Ivy, and the Flash, not to mention the Batmobile. Inspired, doubtless,
by several other claimants of recent years who seek compensation for
creating such superheroes as Superman and Captain America, Infantino
approached DC two years ago and was insulted when he was offered $25,000.
Said Infantino: "I told them, I'll give you $25,000 and you give
me the characters. That shut them up." STRIP WATCH. In Jimmy Johnson's Arlo and Janis,
you'll remember, Johnson conducted a reader poll to select from
an assortment offered by Arlo the new hair style for Janis (whose former
hair style, it was alleged by some aggrieved reader, looked like a saucepan).
The week of June 7, Johnson revealed the results. Of the seven hair
styles in the running (see Opus 138), the one with the long locks dubbed
"Retro" won (reportedly getting nearly 15,000 votes, which
beat the nearest competitor, the "Tweak," by a couple thousand).
So on June 8, Johnson started announcing the outcome to his avid readers.
In
a quite possibly satiric remark, Greg
Evans, who won NCS's Reuben last month for his comic strip Luann, observed later that the Reuben statuette
he received is "bizarre"-depicting, as he said, a pile "of
naked guys stacked on top of each other." Elsewhere
in the funnies: in Dick
Tracy, our favorite villain-turned-comic-relief, B. O. ("Body
Odor") Plenty has returned and has summoned Tracy to the farm where
he found a foot sticking out of a pile of manure. The foot, it seems,
belongs to his cousin, whose name, suitably, is Aroma. ... In Annie,
the artwork, ostensibly by Alan
Kupperberg for the past couple years, started looking a little strange
recently, not quite up to Kupperberg's crisp standard. Turns out he's
leaving the strip at the end of this month; beginning July 5 (for the
daily strips, July 18 for Sundays), Annie
will be drawn by Ted Slampyak.
As for the unsigned strips the week of June 14, no one's saying who
drew them: they look vaguely like Kupperberg's work, but a little sloppy.
Maybe he has an assistant, trying to ape his master? ... In the Sunday
Phantom, one of the most popular
comic strips worldwide, the Ghost Who Walks is puzzled by an underwater
mystery and decides to consult "old man Mozz" for an explanation.
As those of us who have perused Al Capp's Li'l Abner over the years know, Old Man
Mose was the character in a mountain-top cave to whom Abner resorted
every year just before Sadie Hawkins Day to find out of he was going
to escape the clutches of clutching Dogpatch womanhood on the annual
footrace in which the women caught bachelors and made husbands of them.
Mose, unfortunately, always spoke in riddles, which were so obscure
in meaning that Abner never knew, in advance, whether he'd emerge from
the footrace still a free man or not. So-is the Phantom going to run
a footrace for bachelorhood now? Or, considering the source of his dilemma,
will it be a swimming contest? And will there be a riddle to solve?
And, at last, will it be a joke? Or what? Happy Comic
Book Day The comic book industry is bent on establishing a new
national holiday-Free Comic Book Day. This year, it's on Saturday, July
3, and, like its three predecessors, it is hinged to the opening of
a movie based upon a comic book, in this case, "Spider-Man 2,"
which is destined to open on or about June 30. "Free
Comic Book Day is a holiday!"
proclaims publisher Nat Gertler of About Comics (quoted in CBG's June issue). "Set your mind back to when you were ten.
Think of how the words 'Free Comic Book Day' would have sounded to you
then. It sounds as good as 'National No-Homework Week,' better than
'Cake for Breakfastmas.' On the chart of holidays, it would fall just
below 'Get Up In the Morning and Unwrap Piles of Gifts Day' and "Dress
Up In a Costume and Get Candy Just by Asking Day.'" The
essence of FCBD (as it is denominated in the comics press) is that comic
book specialty stores will be giving away, absolutely without charge,
a whole lot of comic books. This is the fourth year this event has been
staged, and it's now a long-established fact: vast quantities of comic
books in these stores are free for the taking on this day, July 3. Two
million of them, it is estimated, will fly out the doors of the nation's
3,000-plus comic book shops. Not
all the comic books in the stores are free. But a great many are, and
some of them have been manufactured expressly for the occasion. Some
publishers have produced "sampler" comic books-titles that
bundle together several short tales taken from different regular, continuing
titles by way of introducing new readers to the variety of genre available;
or "teaser" material, fragments of stories intended to persuade
people to buy the books from which they've been culled. Some publishers
have created titles designed to introduce newcomers to the wonderful
world of the contemporary comic book. But most of the free comic books
are like regular comic books with free-standing complete stories in
each issue. In some cases, the books are overstock-titles that didn't
sell that well in the first place and that, until FCBD, were gathering
dust in the distributor's warehouse. Now, they're free. More than 20 special edition FCBD comic books will be available. Most stores (according to CBG) offer at least these: *Archie, Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse (a rare reprint of the only Mickey Mouse story famed Duck artist Carl Barks ever did), Marvel Age Spider-Man, Teen Titans Go!, *Star Wars: Clone Wars Adventures, *Image Comics Summer Special, Duel Masters, *IDW Sampler (featuring CSI, 24, and The Shield), and Ballad of Sleeping Beauty (a "dark" retelling of the classic fairy tale). (The asterisk signals new content.) But most stores will be stocking more than these; for a complete list of what might be there, consult www.freecomicbookday.com. The
purpose, as opposed to the essence, of FCBD requires less explanation:
it is an unabashed crusade to get people into comic book shops in the
hopes that vast hordes of them will become repeat comic book readers.
And buyers. Nothing complicated about that. Straight PR. Free books.
The inventors of the holiday hoped, when inventing it, that the maneuver
would serve to introduce new readers to a vibrant entertainment medium,
and to thank long-time readers for their loyalty. More than that, they
hoped to re-acquaint former comic book readers with what the medium
has become in recent years. It's no longer just longjohn legions. Writing
in Sojourners Magazine (July
2004), David Wade notes a benchmark in the development of the medium
with the work of British writer Neil
Gaiman, who created a 75-issue run of a comic book called The Sandman, published by the mainstream house, DC Comics. "Gaiman
explored issues of depth psychology, the relevance of ancient mythology,
the sources of Shakespeare's inspiration, the subtleties of Oriental
calligraphy, and the relationship between dreams and death." After Gaiman's work proved wildly successful,
Wade says, "even the publishers of such staples as Superman, Batman,
Wonder Woman, the X-Men, and Spider-Man have created comic lines that
mirror this new style" of thoughtful sometimes provoking material.
In short-to deploy an over-used bromide-comics aren't just for kids
anymore. But there are plenty that are just for kids, too, so bring
them with you to Free Comic Book Day. While
I applaud the notion of FCBD, there are gaseous effusions in the promotional
breezes that are a little too pungent for me. Some of the hype incorporates
not just a little hysteria by way of indulging an apparently ungovernable
enthusiasm. This year, in the wake of several years of successful comic-book-based
movies, some of the more extravagant hype connects comic books to motion
pictures as a way of promoting the legitimacy of the former as entertainment
equal to the latter. The logic that is displaced by this flowing syntax
is impressive: it begins by tying comic books to the successful movies
many of them have inspired and then reverses the process to proclaim,
in effect, that all those movie producers are elevating the comic book
medium by making them into movies, as if movies were somehow a superior
art form to comics. And then, to turn around yet another time, the discourse
swims back upstream to aver that Hollywood is "dependent"
upon comics for really good entertainment. The spinning makes me dizzy.
I'll recover, I'm sure, in time to pick up a few free comics on FCBD.
Hope you do, too. More News of
the Superior Artform The a-borning new Batman movie made it to the front-cover
squib line of the current (June 21) issue of Newsweek, and inside, reporter Devin Gordon provides some insight
into the present state of the Christopher Nolan directed venture. "The
new chapter, which will hit theaters in June 2005, is called 'Batman
Begins'-presumably because 'Batman Sucked the Last Time So We're Starting
Over' was too clunky." When Alan Horn assumed the helm at Warner
Brothers four years ago, "'one of his mandates was to get 'Batman'
back out there,' says president of production Jeff Rabinow." And
so they've taken up the gauntlet with Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne/Batman
and Michael Caine as Alfred. And they're re-telling the hoary origin
of the Caped Crusader. "One chapter [of Batman's career],"
Gordon opines, "has never received comprehensive treatment: the
first one." The one in which, after seeing his parents murdered
before his eyes, Bruce Wayne decides to become Batman. Apparently Gordon
hasn't been reading the comic books (indeed, he barely mentions the
comic books, so Bob Kane, Bill
Finger -all those guys-never get credit at all) where "the
first one" has been rehashed only a few dozen times. Nolan's movie
version appears set to deal with such questions as: Why does Bruce Wayne
become Batman? (He could, after all, extract revenge on the ungodly
but some other means.) Where do the suit and cape come from? Nolan reportedly
researched 65 years' worth of comics (more than Gordon did) and came
up with this story: "After a long exile, Wayne, now a 25-year-old
scion, returns to Gotham City intent on kicking criminal butt. His family's
military subcontracting business, Wayne Enterprises, has been seized
by shareholders, who've relegated the company's most ambitious designs-and
their inventor, Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman)-to the scrapheap. Wayne
befriends Fox, using his designs to create an alter ego." Still
doesn't say why,
exactly, Wayne chose a batman costume, does it? I suppose we'll
have to see the movie for an actual answer to that. "In contrast
to the gothic fantasia of Tim Burton's operatic 1989 version, Nolan
has opted for gritty urban realism," Gordon goes on. Except for
the new Batmobile, which, "covered in jagged plates of armor ...
looks like something Pablo Picasso might take to a monster-truck rally-a
muscle car for a tortured soul. Perfect for Batman." The article
also totes up the box-office revenues for the previous Batpics: the
original, $251 million; "Batman Returns," $163m; "Batman
Forever," $184m; and "Batman and Robin," $107m.
And there's more, much more. It's a three-page article with a
massive double-truck photo of Batman spreading his wings, er, cape,
and another of the Batmobile, a completely unrecognizable heap of metal,
seems to me. But then, I'll have to wait to see the movie. Lest We Forget
As I watched Ronald Wilson Reagan's corpse being carted
back and forth across the country, I was reminded of Elmer McCurdy.
McCurdy died in 1911 but wasn't buried until 1977, a lapse of 66 years,
a record that Reagan threatened, briefly, to break but that, happily,
survived the challenge. Born out of wedlock in Washington, Maine, in
1880, McCurdy took to drink fairly soon-as soon, in fact, as he learned
he was, by birth, a bastard, and that was while he was still a teenager.
He wandered off in a westerly direction, and by 1903, he was in Iola,
Kansas, where he worked as a plumber for a time. In 1907, he joined
the army and was stationed at Fort Leavenworth, to which, shortly after
McCurdy arrived, a young lieutenant named Douglas MacArthur was posted.
While there, MacArthur worked with the Engineering Corps and earned
"a considerable reputation as an explosives expert," according
to Mark Svenvold, a wonderfully facile wordsmith and author of Elmer
McCurdy: The Misadventures in Life and Afterlife of an American Outlaw.
McCurdy, Svenvold speculates, learned about explosives from the
Fort Leavenworth expert, and, after his discharge in November 1910,
he and another ex-soldier were arrested in St. Joseph, Missouri, on
suspicion of planning a robbery. They had attracted the attention of
local law enforcement officers by the difficulty they exhibited in lugging
around a large bag, which, upon inspection, was discovered to contain
a force screw, a door jimmy, assorted drills and hacksaws, cold chisels,
a nitroglycerin funnel, gunpowder, and a gunpowder funnel-all of which,
it was afterwards alleged, seemed to be "mechanical devices adapted,
designed, and commonly used for breaking into vaults and safes."
At his trial, McCurdy claimed all of this equipage constituted parts
of an invention he was working on, the jury believed him, and he was,
forthwith, a free man. But while awaiting trial, he had been jailed,
and from one of his cellmates, he'd been infected with a criminal contagion,
an uncontrollable urge to follow the owlhoot trail. McCurdy
traveled from St. Joseph to the opposite end of Oklahoma, where he joined
up with a nascent outlaw band. Inspired by the legends of Jesse James,
this would-be wild bunch held up a train, and McCurdy set himself to
blow open the safe, employing such skill with explosives as he'd acquired
in the service of his country. With his fourth try, he successfully
blew the door off the safe, but by that time, the heat of the previous
explosions had fused $4,000 in silver coin to the sides of the safe,
a glittering mass that could not be pried loose. McCurdy made another
attempt or two at becoming the scourge of western Oklahoma, but his
first adventures had established the pattern: he was a resounding flop
as an outlaw. But he had nonetheless attracted enough attention among
the law dogs of the West that they tracked him to a ramshackle ranch
in Osage County near the Kansas border where he had fled following another
undistinguished train robbing venture (he and his cohorts stopped the
wrong train: the money was in another one). Early in the morning of
October 7, 1911, the possee approached the hayshed in which McCurdy
reposed with a jug of whiskey and a rifle. He answered their salutation
with an oath and a few shots from the rifle; they responded with a fusillade
that killed him. The
body was turned over to the funeral director in nearby For
the next seven decades, the mummified McCurdy was on display in a succession
of sideshows all around the country, and then in December 1976, his
petrified remains were discovered, hanging by the neck, in an amusement
park fun-house ride, "Laff-in-the-Dark," in Long Beach, California,
one of a succession of scary sights the fun-house visitors would be
exposed to on their ride. He had been discovered by the crew of the
tv show, "Six Million Dollar Man," which was reconnoitering
the fun-house as the locale for a forthcoming episode. One of the crew,
observing what he supposed was a paper mache nude man hanging along
a wall, tugged at one of the "mannequin's" arms, and it fell
off, revealing, not hooks or wires inside but what appeared to be a
bone. The body was turned over to the coroner's office where the officiating
factotum found, in the corpse's mouth, a single, green, corroded copper
penny dated 1924 and several ticket stubs, one that read "Louis
Sonney's Museum of Crime, 524 South Main Street, Los Angeles."
With this clue, authorities were able to identify the body as McCurdy's
because, until his sojourn in the "Laff-in-the-Dark" ride,
McCurdy's name was part of the outlaw status that made him a carnival
attraction. On April 22, 1977, McCurdy was interred at Guthrie, Oklahoma,
where the city fathers, anxious to revive an economy that was failing
because the Interstate by-passed their town, acquired the remains and
subsequently made McCurdy's grave a destination for tourists. Elmer
McCurdy, following an afterlife of trekking around the country, had
finally come to rest, still a sideshow attraction. There
is something undignified about our morbid fascination with the dead,
even (or perhaps especially) the famous dead. And so when Ronald Reagan's
coffin went on display in various distinguished venues hither and yon,
I couldn't help but think of old Elmer McCurdy. Not that Reagan is an
outlaw by any means. And we've certainly treated his remains with more
respect than McCurdy's. Still, the similarity lurks. And the suspicion
that more than mere homage motivated the Reagan Road Show. His long-suffering
wife Nancy was clearly the only heroic figure in the piece: quite apart
from her desire to glorify her beloved husband and secure his place
in history was her fortitude over the last decade as she watched him
slowly slip into a dark and distant place and her grace during what
must have been a physically exhausting and emotionally draining week-and
her impassioned plea that the Bush League revise its current posture
opposed to stem cell research. Her henchmen in commemorating her husband,
however, probably had another purpose in mind in canonizing Reagan.
The purpose may be discerned in George W. ("Wishful") Bush's
eulogy at the funeral, a transparent attempt at sanctifying his policies
and poses by describing Saint Reagan's presidency in terms that echoed
those Dubya often uses in describing his own. Hence, if you loved Reagan,
you must love me. It was a clumsy attempt at giving himself and the
neo-cons a posthumous stamp of approval, issued by the Main Man himself.
(One of the highpoints of the funeral, to me, was when, in one of tv's
post-ceremony commentaries, one of the video pundits allowed as how
the Dubster's speech was wonderful, a marvelous tribute, particularly
since it scrupulously avoided altogether any reference to his own attempt
to assume the Reagan mantle and concentrated, exclusively, upon Reagan's
achievements and leadership. At first, I thought the commentator a complete
fool. And then I realized how fiendishly clever he had been. The Bush
League is notorious for intimidating the news media and thereby shutting
down all hostile coverage. Under the circumstances, the only way to
criticize the occupant of White House is to do it covertly-in this case,
drawing attention to his self-serving eulogy by proclaiming that it
did precisely the opposite.) Like
newsmen everywhere, John Foreman, publisher of the News-Gazette in my hometown of Champaign, Illinois, reviewed Reagan's
term as President and wondered why he was so popular. "Scholars
can decide what they will about the greatness of this President, but
America has rendered its opinion. We clearly saw something special in
this son of Illinois. ... The commentators tried all week to put their
finger on what it was-his decency, his candor, his affability, his optimism,
his sense of humor, his common touch. Even his critics-and they certainly
remain-concede him all of that. But truthfully, these are not uncommon
qualities. Nice men and Great Communicators die every day without lines
at their funerals. Was it his accomplishments then?" Foreman reviews
several-including the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold
War, restoration of American pride and national confidence. But Foreman
still asks: "What did we see in him?" What
we saw in Reagan was a very good performance in the role of President.
He said it himself when he remarked, once, that he didn't see how anyone
could do the job of President of the U.S. without being an actor. And
Reagan was an actor, first, last, and always. As a people in the second
half of the 20th century, we loved celebrities, and most
of the celebrities came from one of two venues-sports or acting. Astonishingly-revealingly-a
public opinion poll a couple years ago determined that the second most
popular President after Reagan was Jeb Bartlett. Two of a kind, surely.
And Reagan proved as much a master of the entertainment medium as Martin
Sheen in the same medium and role. Reagan wore an ordinary business
suit throughout his political career until his press secretary Lyn Nofziger
said: "I want you to be a cowboy because that's what the people
will identify with. He said, 'Well, all right.' So he went back in and
changed into jeans and boots." Nofziger was right. At Reagan's
death, three national magazines used an identical photograph of him
on their covers, the one of him smiling that lopsided "aw-shucks"
grin, his creased and weathered-looking visage under a broad-brimmed
cowboy hat. Time, Newsweek and TV Guide -an unprecedented duplication of imagery. (Appropriately,
the TV Guide's Special Tribute
Edition dealt with the subject from the perspective of Reagan's acting
career.) All speak to Reagan's success in assuming so completely the
role, the grandfatherly cowpoke who reassured us with his venerable
age and his smiling face and self-deprecating one-liners. My favorite
of the latter: when he announced, in the campaign against Fritz Mondale,
that he didn't want age be an issue in the campaign-"I will not
use my opponent's youth and inexperience against him." Mondale
broke up over that one. And so did most of us. Humor has a way of uniting
us all. Oddly, it validates our common humanity by demonstrating that
most of us laugh at the same sorts of jokes. So
convincing was Reagan in his chosen role that we forget the policies
he spawned. He put a smiling face on conservatism, obscuring forever
the dour brows of Calvin Coolidge, Robert Taft, and Barry Goldwater,
persuading us by his affability that conservatives were not, necessarily,
self-centered and greedy. He overwhelmed us with his perpetually sunny
self-confidence. Even today, in the week after his ghoulish tour from
sea to shining sea and back again, we remain in thrall to the cheerfully
optimistic personna he invented, forgetting that he cut federal lunch
programs for poor children and subsequently proclaimed ketchup a vegetable,
extended tax credits for segregated schools, extolled the inherent virtue
of "states' rights" (code for a segregated South), launched
a recession and ten percent unemployment with his first massive tax
cut, broke the law with the Iran-Contra deal, de-regulated until the
savings and loan scandal erupted, attacked OSHA and workplace safety,
reduced food stamp allotments, ignored AIDS, presented happy fictions
as if they were facts ("Facts are stupid things"), colluded
with Guatemalan thugs, defended the apatheid regime of South Africa,
cut back funds for public housing and education, and piled up a budget
deficit so obscenely gargantuan that it impoverished the federal government
and made it impossible to attend to many of the nation's crying needs
(a Machiavellian way of making government smaller, Reagan's avowed purpose
when he ran for election in 1980)-to take a few from David Corn's list
of "66 Things to Think about When Flying in to Reagan National
Airport" (The Nation, March 2, 1998), "a cheat sheet," Corn says,
that remains relevant for "those who dare to point out the Reagan
presidency was not all that glorious and was more nightmare in America
than morning in America." A little severe, perhaps, but, as balance
for the effusions in the other direction, not altogether untoward. Without
such a cheat sheet, we forget, conveniently for the marauding conservative
half of the population, that Ronald Reagan's shining city on the hill
was infested by new multitudes of raggedy unkempt homeless people, sleeping
in cardboard boxes and living in squalor under the overpasses of futuristic
superhighways. He gave us the Reagan
Revolution, all right-a complete about-face, a revolution of 180
degrees, in which we turned our backs on the impulse to compassion for
our fellow citizens that had been so successfully inaugurated by Franklin
Roosevelt and fostered by his successors for two generations. Much of
the time, I liked Reagan in spite of his policies, in spite of his being
an actor (or perhaps, because of it). But like Bill Clinton, whose policies
and leadership I liked and admired, Reagan ultimately disappointed me
because he squandered his gifts. Reagan wasted his singular charismatic
leadership by employing it to lead us away from our responsibility to
the poor and deprived. He effectively championed our ego-centric selves,
persuading us that it was okay-even desirable-to turn our Christian
backs on the needy. And so he led us to our baser selves instead of
to our better selves, an abdication of the obligations of leadership.
But at the first news of Reagan's death, editorial cartoonists fell
all over themselves in a gushfest unequaled since the assassination
of John F. Kennedy. As
cartoonist Mikhaela Reid said
in her weblog (www.mikhaela.net/weblog/blogger.html),
far too many of the cartoons marking Reagan's death and legacy were
"overwhelmingly positive and personality-focused (as opposed to
policy or history-focused) ... even though he was a very contentious
figure while he was in office and probably many of these cartoonists
weren't too fond of him back then." It was doubtless inevitable,
given the profound sadness of his long, slow Alzheimer's journey into
the clouds, that so many commentators chose fond memories rather than
harsher ones. The cartoonists celebrated his everlasting affability,
not the cold-hearted calculation (approaching meanness) of some of his
policies. Reagan's public life was rich in the possibilities for visual
metaphors, and so we had scores of cartoons about jelly beans, cowboys
riding off into the sunset, and tearings down of walls (Berlin's, the
Pearly Gates', or the stem cell). My favorite of the latter is by Robert Ariail, who depicts St. Peter at the check-in desk outside
the Pearly Gates; off-camera to the left, a voice says, "St. Peter-tear
down this gate!" St. Peter looks to the right and mutters, "Guess
who's here." Just the right note, a little mockery mixed with the
remembrance. Henry Payne did
the best caricature, or portrait, of Reagan, thumbs up with the famous
lopsided grin on display, his fabulous hair-do an American flag.
The prognosis was exact, and as the memorializing turned into a week-long indulgence, some edgier cartoons surfaced. Nick Anderson did a cartoon in strip form about George Kennan, with captions explaining that "he was a U.S. diplomat in Moscow 1946-1948 [who] in two profoundly influential writings ... argued that the U.S. would defeat Communism without firing a shot, that the inherent flaws of Communism would lead to its eventual destruction from within, and [that] we would prevail by virtue of the superiority of our system. A fervent anti-Communist, he was the chief architect of the Cold War's policy of containment followed by seven presidents." And then comes the final panel, "But who gets all the credit for defeating Communism?" accompanied by a caricature of Reagan. Among my other favorites are those we show here: Kirk Anderson's acerbic catalog and Bill Schorr's irreverent insight.
While browsing all of these, I couldn't help but remember
my favorite Pat Oliphant cartoon
from early in the Reagan era, the one in which Reagan's budget director,
David Stockman, shows us how the Gipper's cutbacks in social program
spending is not at all endangering the "safety net"-a perfect
visual metaphor for the mendacious double-talk of the Reagan Gang (now
being imitated so skillfully by the Bush League).
(Incidentally,
E&P reports that the news
media are now formally mounting a campaign to thwart the Bush-Cheney
program of complete government secrecy by acting through the Freedom
of Information Committee of the American Society of Newspaper Editors
and a new Coalition of Journalists fo Open Government."[Washington
news] bureau chiefs are urging their reporters to get more information
on the record and stop allowing federal officials to hide behind the
mask of anonymity." Associated Press chief Tom Curley "unveiled
a plan on May 7 for a 'media advocacy center' to lobby for open government
in Washington. 'The government is pushing hard for secrecy,' Curley
said in a speech announcing the plan. 'We must push back equally hard
for openness. ... The essence of the FOI Act is that government information
is open and accessible to the public unless there is a very good reason
to keep it secret." In this emerging climate with its passion for
truth, maybe someone will finally notice that in his executive order
sealing Presidential papers, George W. ("Whopper") Bush was
breaking the law-just as he did when the Bush League used money appropriated
for the War in Afghanistan to build a launching pad for the as-yet-unannounced
invasion of Iraq. When a public official breaks the law, that's grounds
for impeachment, aristotle-a far more grievous offense against democracy
that covering up about a blow job. Moreover-and I can't resist this
one-I'd much rather have a President who makes love too indiscriminately
than one who makes war with the same licentiousness.) Before
we abandon forever the subject of our affable actor-president, here,
from Kristen Schorasch at the Iowa City
Press-Citizen, is an account of Berke
Breathed's telephonic encounter with the Gipper one Monday morning
in 1983 while Breathed was still living in Iowa City, from whence he
produced Bloom County 1981-85. The cartoonist stepped
out of the shower that morning to answer the phone call, and the voice
on the other end sounded, Breathed said, like that of an awkward, insecure
fan. It was actually the voice of Ronald Reagan. "He
had no cockiness. He had no swagger," Breathed told Schorasch,
who was interviewing him at his home in Santa Barbara, California, earlier
this month. "He didn't even have the conversational patter that
one develops from being so at ease with oneself around strangers because
of one's celebrity." Herewith,
Schorasch's narrative, nearly verbatim: Reagan was calling to say how
much he liked Breathed's comic strip published that day, which included
a picture of First Lady Nancy Reagan drawn in the background. The strip
was about a woman who put a personal advertisement in a newspaper for
a new husband and had nothing to do with Nancy Reagan, said Breathed.
"He
was basically tickled by seeing a flattering picture of Nancy in the
background," he continued. "He wasn't used to seeing charitable
drawings of his wife." The
First Lady's picture was a copy of one taken of her when she was about
40 years old, Breathed said. In 1983, she was about 60. After learning
White House staff got his phone number from the Press-Citizen,
Breathed at first thought the phone call had been a publicity stunt
to better Reagan's reputation. After their conversation, though, he
determined he was wrong. "Reagan
was so confident in his own skin that he had an honest innocence to
his conversation that was irresistible," Breathed said. What
came from Reagan was genuine emotion, Breathed said, thinking that was
the source of the former president's popularity. He offered to give
the president the original cartoon strip and remembers Reagan sounded
flattered. "Oh!
I didn't think you fellas liked to give those away!" Breathed recalls
Reagan saying. "Well
Mr. President, there's a short list of people that we're willing to
give them to, and you're on it," Breathed said. But
he could not find the original art-the only strip out of Bloom County's 10-year history of 5,000 cartoons he could not find.
Instead, Breathed sent to the president a signed copy. He said he doesn't
think anyone ever noticed. RCH
again: It's a good story, I ween, and it aptly illustrates what is as
true of Reagan as it is of all of us: we each have virtues as well as
flaws, and any genuinely honest assessment of one of our lives must
include the good as well as the bad, the bad as well as the good. POST SQUIB:
Ray Charles died while the
Reagan paroxysm was in full flower. And we did a better, more honest,
job of eulogizing a man who'd brought more happiness to more people
for longer than the 40th President: we played his music. Not the Holocaust
This Time Cartoonist Joe Kubert is 78 years old. He is a comic
book legend. The legend began in 1945 when he started drawing Hawkman
for DC Comics; it continued through the three decades that he created
Sgt. Rock war stories and in 1976, when, in his hometown of Dover, New
Jersey, Kubert founded the first and, to-date, the only accredited school
devoted wholly to teaching the arts of storytelling graphics. "I
got my first paying job as a cartoonist for comic books when I was eleven-and-a-half
or twelve years old," he said. "I have never been unemployed-even
for one day-since that time." Says he: "I am lucky." But
it might have been otherwise. He might not have grown up in America.
He might not have grown up at all. In
the spring of 1926, Kubert's father and mother left Yzeran, a small
town in eastern Poland, for Southampton, England. Because his mother
was pregnant, they were initially denied passage to America, but two
months after Joe was born that September, they applied again, obtained
the necessary visa, and, shortly thereafter, disembarked in the New
World. Joe grew up in Brooklyn, where his father was a Kosher butcher.
"I've
always wanted to be a cartoonist," Kubert said. He started by drawing
in chalk on the sidewalk. When he was thirteen, he was honing his skills
at the famed High School of Music and Art in New York City. He was also
drawing comic books. Across the Atlantic, Hitler had invaded Kubert's
native Poland and the extermination of European Jews was well underway.
"If
my parents had not come to America," Kubert writes, "we would
have been caught in that maelstrom, sucked in and pulled down with the
millions of others who were lost." The
cartoonist could not help but wonder what his fate might have been in
Hitler's Poland as a teenage Jew who loved to draw. Last year, Kubert
envisioned that unlived life in a graphic novel, Yossel:
April 19, 1943 (128 6x10-inch pages in hardback, black-and-white;
ibooks, $24.95), a stunningly executed and horrific tale-"a work
of fiction," he says, "based upon a nightmare that was fact." His
fictionalized self, Yossel (Yiddish for "Joseph"), is relocated
with his parents from Yzeran to Warsaw, where they are confined to the
infamous ghetto. To escape the misery all around him, Yossel draws,
making pictures of superheroic characters like those he saw in newspapers,
where such American comic strips as Flash
Gordon and Tarzan were appearing until the outbreak
of World War II. The therapeutic function of art for an artist, repeatedly
invoked throughout the book, seems a trifle fantastic, a romantic fiction.
But the annals of cartooning offer at least one actual instance of precisely
this situation. Britain's celebrated Ronald Searle was serving in Singapore
when, in February 1942, the garrison there, hopelessly outnumbered by
the invading Japanese, capitulated. Searle spent the rest of the War,
all four-and-a-half years of it, being brutalized as a prisoner, working,
for part of the time, on the notorious "Death Railway" made
famous by the movie, "The Bridge on the River Kwai." By his
own account, Searle, afflicted with malaria, beri-beri, and a host of
other plagues, survived by drawing. Dedicated to keeping a visual record
of life in the camp, he managed to obtain paper and ink, and he drew
pictures. A fellow prisoner is quoted in a Searle biography by Russell
Davies: "Imagine something that weighs [about 84 pounds], is on
the point of death and has no qualities of the human condition that
aren't revolting, calmly lying there with a pencil and a scrap of paper,
drawing,
[and] you have some idea of the difference of temperament that this
man had from the ordinary human being." For
Kubert's young Yossel, drawing is likewise survival. His artwork attracts
the attention of the German guards in the ghetto, and they bring him
into their barracks daily to amuse them by drawing pictures of superheroes,
whom the guards mistakenly take to be the Reich's fabled supermen. When
Yossel's parents are evacuated to Auschwitz, the youth is exempted from
the trip. And Yossel and his young friends form an underground resistance:
they resolve to kill a German every night, night after night, taking
the weapons of their victims to accumulate an arsenal. Eventually, the
Germans strike back. Reprisal begins on April 19, 1943-the book's subtitle,
the date that year of second night of Passover. The Germans expect to
destroy Jewish opposition in two or three days; but they are disappointed.
The resistance lasts over a month. Midway
through the book, Yossel meets an escapee from Auschwitz, who reveals
(and Kubert graphically depicts) the all too familiar (now) degrading
horrors of the death camp-the pointless labor, the starvation, the beatings,
the systematic gassing and cremation of thousands. But this is not another
book about the Holocaust. This is a book about heroism. Fittingly,
Kubert, who has depicted heroic action for most of his cartooning career,
chose to portray his unlived life in the context of one of the most
celebrated instances of Jewish defiance to emerge during the Holocaust,
the famed uprising of the Warsaw ghetto. Kubert researched thoroughly
in preparing to tell his story. He immersed himself in Holocaust books
and diaries and studied photographs
of the streets of Warsaw, the ghetto wall, and German equipage
and uniforms. In
what could have been a fatal assault on the book's verisimilitude, the
narrator, Yossel, dies at the end of the book after emptying his pistol
into the approaching German horde ("they tumbled and fell ... they
were not supermen," he realizes before he dies). But the visual
nature of the medium cloaks this incongruity so completely that we do
not notice. The pictures, alone without verbal accompaniment, carry
the narrative past the cessation of the narrator's voice, beyond Yossel's
death. We see the German soldiers standing over the dead bodies of the
Jewish youths. One of the soldiers stoops and picks up a scrap of paper.
It is, no doubt, one upon which Yossel had been drawing just before
the final German attack. The soldier looks at the paper, then drops
it. We turn the page, and we see that the paper he was looking at is
blank. It
is a powerful and provocative moment, turning the story inside out.
Is this what has become of Yossel's life? Has it come, at last, to nothing,
a mere blank? I don't think so. Instead, that last picture jolts us
as readers of a "nightmare fiction" into remembering that
the life we've been witnessing is the one Kubert never lived. But he
might have. And if he had, would it have been as meaningless as a blank
sheet of paper? Or would it, like Yossel's, ironically achieve meaning
in the act of defiance that marked him for death? Kubert is clearly
asking himself this question. But in the life he lived, he filled countless
reams of sheets of paper with drawings. The
visuals of this book are extraordinary. Kubert chose not to ink his
pencil drawings but to leave them in varying degrees of finish-sometimes
almost sketchy, sometimes burnished to a nearly final state. The gray
pencil drawings against a gray background enhance the somber mood of
the story. And here and there, splashes of white highlights stand starkly
against the otherwise unrelieved gray of the background. Kubert's intention
is to give us a sense of Yossel's life: under the conditions of his
ghetto existence, the youth would have drawn only in pencil. The raw
pencil drawings expertly, tellingly, evoke the atmosphere of the story:
their unfinished state suggests the frayed lives of the characters,
their reduced circumstances, the depredations they endure.
More
than in many graphic novels, Kubert's pictures carry the story. There
are no speech balloons; only blocks of narrative text and quoted dialogue
among the characters. The pictures, then, stand apart. And Kubert's
astonishing facility as a draftsman and his pervading sense of design
make the artwork beautiful even as it depicts horrors and misery. With
Kubert's book-as with Art Spiegelman's Maus
and Will Eisner's Contract with
God and Fagan the Jew (not to mention some of
his semi-autobiographical works)-we come again, in a poetic manner of
speaking, full-circle, to the Jewish presence in comics-specifically,
in the creation of the comic book medium itself. A preponderance of
the pace-setting persons whose names dot the landscape of the early
history of comics are Jews, a fact that has recently exercised several
commentators (among them, Arie Kaplan, in a three-part article in
Reform Judaism, Fall 2003, "How the Jews Created the Comic Book
Industry"). A reasonable
question immediately arises: Why were so many comic book creators and
pioneers Jewish? One theory is that because anti-Semitism in the early
decades of the century closed so many avenues of access to the mainstreet
of American life, Jews got into comics because it was not yet an established
industry. Kaplan quotes Mad
cartoonist Al Jaffee: "We
couldn't get into newspaper strips or advertising-ad agencies wouldn't
hire a Jew ... [but] comic book publishers were Jewish." Much the same
reasoning explains why so many of the founders of Hollywood studios
were Jews, as convincingly explained by Neal Gabler in An
Empire of Their Own. I submit, however, that there are other, tangential,
reasons for the Jewish presence among comic book pioneers-part geographic,
part demographic, and part ethnic. The
pulp magazine publishing business, in which comic books were born, was
located chiefly in New York; and New York, including its burroughs,
had significant enclaves of Jewish population- mostly in neighborhoods
that many Jews wanted to get out of, particularly if they were young
and second generation. Proximity created opportunity. Would Irving Berlin
have become a professional song-writer if he'd grown up in a suburb
of There
are claims of overt evidences in comic books of embedded Jewish culture.
"We are people of the Book," Eisner observed, implying a somewhat broader
interpretation of that expression than Mohammed intended. "We are storytellers,
essentially, and anyone who's exposed to Jewish culture, I think, walks
away for the rest of his life with an instinct for telling stories."
Even more specifically, some critics see in Shuster and Siegel's Superman
an incarnation of the golem, the legendary super-powered creature conceived
by a medieval rabbi in Prague as a protector of the community against
anti-Semitic enemies. The risk in such extrapolations is that we read
too deeply into the material and find evidences of influences that never
explicitly existed. I suspect, for instance, that all cultures have
storytelling traditions at least as lively as the Jewish tradition.
If not all cultures, at least most of them. Storytelling is a human
trait, not just a Jewish one. As for the golem, much referred to in
the years following Michael Chabon's
use of the myth in his Pulitzer-winning novel about the early days
of comic book manufacture, The
Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, I suspect that the human
psyche is sufficient of itself to spawn the creation of superheroic
figures without recourse to Jewish legends in antique Europe. Early
comic book readers everywhere, adolescents (then and in subsequent generations,
the chief audience for the medium), feel enough put-upon by their parents
and other authority figures to fantasize about superpowers and a heroic
status that would make them immune from adult oppression. The creators
of Superman were explicit in sharing this adolescent fantasy and in
creating Superman as a result of its promptings. They didn't need the
ancient golem for inspiration. The
Jewish heritage in comic books does not seem to me to be particularly
distinct or obvious. Nor is it, apparently, intentional, even if it
is actually there. In the summer of 2002, the current custodians of
Marvel Comics revealed that the Hulk, one of the heroes invented by
Jack Kirby and Stan
Lee, both Jews, is Jewish. Lee, now chairman emeritus of Marvel
and no longer associated directly with the production of comic books,
was tracked down by an inquisitive radio talk show host who confronted
him with the news. Lee sounded both flattered and flustered. "You know,
I didn't intend for him to be Jewish," he laughed. "I never thought
for a minute what the characters' religions were." On
the other hand, perhaps without realizing it, Lee and Kirby may have
reproduced in the squabbling Fantastic Four some long forgotten but
internalized reminiscence of a radio program they must have heard while
young: just as with Molly Goldberg and her brood, the familial bickering
among the Fantastic Four was endemic and heated but the affection and
regard that bound the participants together was the dominant fact of
the relationship. Was that the influence of Jewish culture? Or simply
of eastern European immigrant culture? Or neither? Regardless, the most
fondly recalled of the haunting influences of Jewish culture that can
be detected in comic books remains, for me, Scribbly's world, one in
which the artistic aspirations of the young are given so much credence
as to result in their being accepted, without quibble, into the professional
world of adults. Moreover, in Scribbly we may have the emblem for the
very development and maturation of the artform of the comics. In
the ensuing years, the Jewish influence became obvious. Chris Claremont,
a Jewish immigrant from Comics
created over the next twenty years became more and more introspective
and artistically ambitious, and the issues in Jewish history and culture
could be faced directly, not metaphorically, just as the issues in all
ethnicities could be encountered. Jews have a huge role in the creation
of the medium from the very beginning, but in my view, their influence
at the beginning was as artists and creative personalities, not as Jews.
Their Jewish heritage influenced them, surely, and therefore influenced
what they created and how they created it. But the driving force in
their work was probably their common humanity rather than their Jewish
heritage. Comics are not a Jewish phenomenon, as denominating Superman
a golem seems to imply. Superman was not so much golem as he was the
enactment of an adolescent daydream. But for those of us who love the
medium, we're lucky comics got started in Without
further adieu, metaphors be with you. To find out about Harv's books, click here. |
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