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Opus 165: Opus 165 (July 10, 2005). A huge helping of hoppiness this time,
gang. A long essay on the alleged virtues of copyright is interwoven
with a review of Bob Levin's The
Pirates and the Mouse at the penultimate moment herein, followed
by a review of Rick Geary's latest
graphic novel. Before getting to that, though, we have a review of "Batman
Begins" and a lengthy report on the mischief being wrought in Mexico
with a stereotypical racial caricature. We also examine the unprecedented
heated passions in 9 Chickweed
Lane and the strip's equal daring in its treatment of a gay character
and accuse Stephen Pastis of swinishness. Plus, all
the other recent news that gives us fits. When I printed this installment
out, tovarich, it came to over 30 pages, so I'd recommend you take advantage
of our "Bathroom Button" feature, as below. Here's the contents,
in order: NOUS R US -a new
feature at the CBG site, the
deaths of Selby Kelly, Rowland B. Wilson, and Bruce Hamilton (with a harrowing recollection
of the perfidious Grandeys); Funky
Winkerbean and unexploded landmines, Max
Allan Colllins' documentary on Alley
Oop's V.T. Hamlin, Marvel's
kiddie line, and Joe Sacco's
latest graphic reportage; Mexico's stamp act, "Batman Begins"
(and the disparaged origins of the Batmobile);
Funnybook Fan Fare -reviews of The
New West, Judo Girl, Shanna, Heroes Anonymous, Dr. Blink, and Black Panther; George Perez's dilemma; Comic
Strip Watch -Will comic strips be the next thing newspapers cut
back on? Chickweed Lane and youthful passion, Pastis'
swine; Bob Levin's good book
and a question: Is perpetual copyright a good thing? Then, at last,
a review of Geary's book.
And once again, as always, our usual Solicitous Rejoinder: Remember,
when you get to the Members' Section, the useful "Bathroom Button"
(also called the "print friendly version") of this installment
that can be pushed for a copy that can be read later, at your leisure
while enthroned. Without further adieu-
NOUS R US When
Cathy Guisewite arranged
for her nose-less comic strip heroine, Cathy, to marry her on-again
off-again beau, Irving, she also set up an unusual gift registry for
the happy couple: instead of sending the newlyweds gifts, well-wishers
could donate the gift money to a fund for orphaned dogs and cats. The
result (up to now) has just been announced: $25,000 has been raised
for homeless felines and canines. ... The Comics Buyer's Guide, which went out
of the comics fandom business a year ago with its transition to magazine
format and an editorial concentration on comic book collectors and speculators,
has launched another online vehicle, attached to its current digital
presence: www.cbgxtra.com, it sez here,
will offer an online discussion board (with CBG
editors) in addition to its periodic news flashes. The site lists a
number of forums on various topics and reprises of some of the articles
in previous print issues of CBG.
All sorts of promotions abound on-site, including the proclamation
that CBG is the "longest running fan community." Now there's
a new buzz word-"community." One hopes, against all likelihood,
I realize, that this little slogan signals the publication's return
to its roots, comics fandom-namely, people who read and enjoy comics
for their own sake not people who buy them as investments. ... Warren
Beatty is suing the Tribune Media Services syndicate for violating a
provision of the contract he had for Dick Tracy projects; Beatty wants to do
another Tracy film, and TMS, which owns Dick
Tracy, is, apparently, throwing legal roadblocks in his way. ...
Pete Segar, a balladeer and the leader
of a band of right-thinking people for decades, turned 86 on May 3;
a belated best wishes, Pete. ... Jennifer Brummett, who writes a book
column online, cites a Nielsen Bookscan report indicating that 70% of
the graphic novel titles that appeared in 2004 were manga. It's been a bad fortnight for Grand
Old Names in cartooning. Just at press time ("digital time"?),
I learned that Selby Kelly, Walt
Kelly's last wife, who carried on Pogo
for a time after Kelly's death, died of complications from a stroke
on or about July 5. She was 87 and had been in a nursing home (in Santa
Rose, California, I believe) for quite some time; she may have been
suffering from Alzheimer's or some similar malady of the elderly. I
had dinner with her one memorable evening in 1998 when I was visiting
Mark Cohen in Santa Rosa;
Mark arranged it (as he did so many worthy things). Among the memorable
parts, Selby got lost trying to get herself to the restaurant where
we were meeting. By the time you read this, more information will doubtless
be available at the usual dependable places (Tom Spurgeon's www.comicsreporter.com
and Mark Evanier's www.newsfromme.com).
Try Steve Thompson's www.pogo-fan-club.org,
too: Steve is the President-for-Life of the Pogo Fan Club and co-author,
with Selby, of the Pogo Files
for Pogophiles, an invaluable compendium of incidental and vital
information about Kelly and the swamp and nature's "screechers."
And then there's www.pogopossum.com run, I
believe, by someone in the Kelly clan. ... And Rowland
B. Wilson, whose gracefully penciled cartoons in muted hues dressed
up the pages of Esquire and
Playboy, died of a heart attack on June
28 at the age of 75. Wilson also produced a series of pictures of persons
in dire albeit comedic straits as advertisements for an insurance company.
Many of his early classic cartoons were reprinted in The Whites of Their Eyes, a compilation now at least two decades old.
In recent times, he worked for Disney and is credited (it sez here)
as layout designer for "The Litt And Bruce Hamilton died, too, on Saturday, June 18, ending a four-month
hospital stay. A tall imposing man with a radio personality's clarion
vocal chords, Hamilton was a seminal figure in the history of comics
fandom. He was, as they say, there at the creation. Establishing a succession
of companies for each of his many enterprises, Hamilton revived several
vintage comics characters through reprint projects-Dick Tracy, Little
Lulu, and EC Comics among them. But he was renowned for his associations
with Disney comic books and Carl
Barks. He negotiated a deal with Disney that allowed Barks to continue
to produce and sell oil paintings of the celebrated ducks and subsequently
helped Barks get a better price for the paintings. In about 1980, Hamilton
obtained a license from Disney to publish The Fine Art of Walt Disney's Donald Duck,
a high quality reproduction of Barks' oil paintings, and, later, he
produced limited edition lithographs of Barks' works. And when Western
Publishing dropped the license for Disney comic books, Hamilton picked
it up, forming Gladstone Publishing for the purpose. Together with Russ
Cochran, with whom he established a partnership, Another Rainbow, Hamilton
successfully promoted Barks as a superstar. I didn't know him at all
except to recognize his snow-haired head towering above the crowd in
the distance at comicons. Diamond's Scoop site (http://scoop.diamondgalleries.com/scoop_archive.asp?m=6&d=24&y=2005
, if this'll get you there) carries a long warm-hearted appreciation
of Hamilton's contributions to comics, and both Tom Spurgeon and Mark
Evanier (URLs given above) recognize his achievements briefly, but I
gather they didn't know him much better than I did. The
Comics Buyer's Guide promises a long treatment in its next issue,
No. 1609. Nowhere yet, however, have I seen reference
to Hamilton's signal act of courage-bringing legal action against Carl
Barks, whom he loved. The action was a sort of Trojan Horse, however,
aimed not at Barks but at smoking out the parasitic couple, Bill Grandey
and Kathy Morby, who moved into a house next to Barks after his wife
died in 1993 and took control of the 92-year-old cartoonist's life and
work. They preyed upon the man in his old age, effectively living off
his talent and reputation, securing his cooperation and consent through
a blizzard of legal documents of questionable morality. Hamilton, seeing
how captive Barks had become, brought suit under some rubric that had
the ultimate effect of exposing the Grandeys' perfidity and driving
them out of Barks' life. It was a courageous act because the couple
had demonstrated a vicious instinct for self-preservation, resorting
to character assassination and slander to impugn the reputation and
veracity of anyone who attacked or questioned them. Their tactics had
cowed much of fandom into an uneasy silence; those who weren't cowed
stayed quiet out of respect for Barks, not wanting to make trouble for
him in his last years. Hamilton broke the silence. Once his suit was
filed, news accounts explaining the action, effectively recounted the
Grandeys various chicaneries. After the Grandeys were drummed out of
the Duck Man's life, Hamilton and Barks effected a reconciliation, I
understand. And Barks' last year or so of life was, I assume, somewhat
more placid than it had been when he was forced to produce more work
by the voracious Grandeys. To those of us who love Barks' work, it was
a relief to know that he was, at last, free. Thanks to Hamilton. In Tom Batiuk's Funky Winkerbean,
one of the two recently married couples, Wally and Becky, are going
to Afghanistan to join the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation's
project to clear the country of its many unexploded landmines. Wally,
who's Funky's cousin, served in Afghanistan in the post-9/11 invasion.
"He was shot down while in a helicopter," David Astor tells
us in Editor & Publisher, "captured, and held for ransom before
escaping. Then, with the help of an Afghan girl and her family, he was
rescued by American soldiers." Said Batiuk: "I think comics
are at their best when they deal with what's happening in the real world."
The story will include a near-tragedy and a massive car-bombing. The
cartoonist researched the story pretty thoroughly, consulting VVAF information
director, as well as numerous books and websites. "I'm probably
on some Homeland Security list at the moment," he joked to Astor.
Batiuk has delved into real-life issues before in his strip-teen pregnancy,
teen suicide, breast cancer, and Alzheimer's disease (in his other strip,
Crankshaft). But this time,
in Funky, he delves deep for
a different sort of reality: on July 5, Wally is given an old World
War II vintage flight jacket, worn, he is told, by one of the pilots
in the famed Flying Tigers. We can see the name stenciled on the collar:
T. Lee. Ahhh. Well, the Flying Tigers had gone kaput by the time Terry
Lee (of piratical fame) got his wings and commission, but it's a lovely
thought, Tom. And Terry did serve in the same theater of war, China-Burma-India,
but by now, the former Flying Tigers were an official U.S. Army Air
Corps outfit. The New York Times doesn't usually publish comics, Editor & Publisher observed June 21 online, "but it put a
comic collection on the cover of its Sunday book review section"
June 19. The book was The Long
Road Home: One Step at a Time, a compilation of Garry
Trudeau's Doonesbury strips
about B.D.'s losing a leg in Iraq and learning to deal with his disability.
Reviewer Kurt Andersen raved: "Garry Trudeau, who by all rights
should b phoning it in by now, still takes his responsibilities to the
strip and his audience seriously, and in service to them still takes
large and interesting risks. Which is one reason I am much more enthusiastic
about the Democrats' favorite comic strip than I tend to be about the
Democrats." Royalties from the book's sales will go to Fisher House
Foundation, which provides housing for families of wounded soldiers
visiting their relatives in military hospitals. On June 24, a documentary on V.T. Hamlin, creator of the comic strip
Alley Oop, premiered in Perry,
Iowa, Hamlin's birthplace. The premiere was attended by Hamlin's daughter
and his son and Jack and Carole
Bender, the current artist and writer on the strip. Hamlin died
in 1993 at the age of 93, but he'd relinquished Alley
Oop to an assistant, Dave
Graue, in about 1970; Graue was killed in an auto accident a couple
years ago, but the Benders had effectively taken over in 1990 or so.
The film, four years in the making, is another of the worthy undertakings
by Max Allan Collins, known
to most of us as the one-time writer of Dick Tracy, mystery novelist, comics collector,
and author of the graphic novel Road
to Perdition, which was turned into a grown-up movie. Interviewed
by Dar Danielson of Radio Iowa, Collins said the film provides insight
about what it was like to be a syndicated cartoonist meeting weekly
deadlines with a daily strip. He also claimed that
Alley Oop had a big cultural impact on America, notably with a number
one rock and roll song, "Alley Oop." What's more, Collins
said, "[The strip] really was a feature that sparked a lot of interest
in dinosaurs and cave men and that kind of story. You can draw a direct
line between Alley Oop and the Flintstones and Jurassic Park and all
of that sort of dinosaur mania." Maybe, but I wonder. After a false
start in 1932 with a bush league syndicate, Alley
Oop re-emerged with NEA in the summer of 1933 as a comic strip about
a cave man with a pet dinosaur, but it achieved its imaginative pinnacle
after 1939, when the cave man started traveling through history in a
time machine. Although Oop returned to his prehistoric origins occasionally,
he spent most of the ensuing twenty years jumping from ancient Athens
to the American Old West to Rome and antique Britain. I rather doubt
that America's presumed fascination with dinosaurs was much fostered
by Hamlin's strip: I don't think it was circulated widely enough in
its dinosaur heyday to impinge upon the cultural mainstream. I suspect,
in fact, that Americans have almost always harbored a fascination for
dinosaurs, and we have evidence of their pre-Oop enthrallment. In 1930,
two years before Alley Oop showed up with his dinosaur, Sinclair Oil
adopted the giant lizard-like apatosaurus for its logo. An enterprising
advertising personage with the company had launched a monster-laden
publicity campaign springing from the plain fact that the oil they were
pumping out of the ground had been mellowing there during the Mesozoic
era when dinosaurs roamed the earth. "The obvious sales message,"
according to Sinclair Oil's history site online, "was-the oldest
crudes make the best oils. But how to dramatize this?" With dinosaurs,
they decided. The campaign featured the entire cast of dinosaurs-the
"hideous-fanged tyrannosaurus rex, the three-horned triceratops
and the unaggressive, vegetarian apatosaurs, a 40-ton lizard with neck
and tail each thirty feet long." Intended as a one-time effort,
the campaign yielded an unexpected result: the apatosaurus turned out
to be hugely popular, a real crowd-pleaser. The company forthwith adopted
the green giant as its symbol, and "Dino," as it was nicknamed,
roamed the country for the next forty years or so. Cartoonist Hamlin, who worked in the
oil fields of Texas at various times through the 1920s, was quite aware
of the Mesozoic dinosaur population-and he also recognized the popularity
of Sinclair's Dino. When he invented a pet for Alley Oop, he combined
distinctive features of several of the old monsters, including a 30-foot
neck and tail, to create "Dinny," the cave man's pet who adopts
the cave man for much the same reason as the lion followed Androcles
around: Alley rescued the big lizard, extracting him from a snare. We'll
have a full-dress rehearsal of Hamlin's history in our Hindsight department
in August. In the meantime, though, my guess is that Alley
Oop scarcely caused America's passion for dinosaurs. The strip was
less an influence and more an incidental sideshow as far as dinosaurs
are concerned. As a rollicking adventure strip, though, Alley
Oop was without equal, a genuinely unique creation of superior quality
in both art and story. And for chronicling the life of a syndicated
cartoonist generally-and Hamlin in particular-we are much in Collins'
debt. And he, like all of us, is much in Hamlin's debt. As Carole Bender
put it: "The film is a testament to the characters Hamlin created.
They're timeless. They can be anywhere and do anything." Added
Jack: "We'd be nothing without V.T." Naturally, I'd love to
see the film, and Collins is reported to be anticipating cable and DVD
sales. Tell me where to put my dollars down, Max. And
Elsewhere In the Public Prints: Newsweek (June 13) announced that Marvel, seeking to inculcate
a love of funnybooks in tomorrow's consumer, has launched a new series
aimed at "the ten-and-under crowd." The first title, staring
Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four (movie tie-in, tovarich), is less
violent and the page layout is less frenetic. And the drawings are more
cartoony, too (or maybe it's manga-like, again seeking synergy). Said
supervising editor MacKenzie Cadenhead: "It's a more vibrant style.
Kids will respond to that." DC, Newsweek
affirms, "already devotes about ten percent of its issues to kids."
Time
recently listed "5 Fantastic Graphic Novels": Ice Haven by Daniel Clowes, Ordinary Victories by Manu Larcenet, War's End by Joe Sacco, Why Are You Doing This? by Jason, and,
unaccountably, Little Lulu,
the third reprint book of John Stanley comic book stories from Dark
Horse, scarcely a "graphic novel." Time's
Andrew Arnold, who maintains the magazine's online comics site,
oughta know better. Maybe he's just pandering to an adult audience that
he thinks doesn't. Time
has started published a selection of editorial cartoons every week in
rather blatant imitation of its Newsweek
rival. But Time is much more
respectful of editoonists: it leaves their signatures in the artwork. Newsweek, which views editorial cartoons
as visual content in the same category as photographs rather than as
commentary in the same category as opinion columns, always excises the
signatures, giving credit to the cartoonists in agate type at the bottom
of the page, the same way as it treats photographers. Mother
Jones (July/August) runs an interview with Joe Sacco accompanied by a stunning mug shot: the guy looks a good
deal more intelligent and perceptive than his cartoonish alter ego in
the books he produces. The interviewer
notices the difference, too, and asks Sacco why he draws himself the
way he does. "When I started Palestine
[his first graphic reportage], it was a bit cartoony at the beginning
because that's the only way I knew how to draw. It became clear to me
that I had to push it toward a more representational way of drawing.
I tried to draw people more realistically, but the figure I neglected
to up-date was myself." With his latest endeavor, War's
End, Sacco returns to the Bosnian arena, his third foray into that
troubled terrain. "I think any journalist who spends time at a
place realizes that there are lots of stories around beyond their primary
story." He believes he has even one more good one he'd like to
do-this one, on the Serb side, where he spent "a fair amount of
time ... which isn't apparent in the other books." He works like
a journalist, interviewing people, but Sacco is also recording visual
information: he walks the locales he'll re-visit in a book, he photographs
those he interviews if they permit him (if not, he makes a quick sketch),
and when asking questions about past events, he often asks what people
are wearing. I wonder when Sacco will get to Iraq. CIVILIZATION'S LAST OUTPOST I
saw one of the new nickels the other day. It restores the old buffalo
to one side; Thomas Jefferson is still on the other side, but only part
of his distinctive profile is engraved thereon. And he's looking to
the right!
There is no limit to the extent the Bush Leaguers will go to
change America: they intend to infiltrate every single aspect of our
lives, however tiny an aspect it might be. Lincoln is looking to the
right on the twenty, I notice; and Washington on the dollar bill. A COMIC BORDER INCIDENT The
latest disturbance on the placid pool of international politics originated
a couple weeks ago south of the border. In Mexico, a new issue of postage
stamps featured several poses of a famous Mexican cartoon character,
Memin Pinguin, who was created in 1943 by Yolanda Vargas Dulche. A mischievous
but inept youth, Memin Pinguin is forever bumbling into trouble and
then being spanked by his mother. The problem-the international dis Civil rights activists and black historians
alike agree that racial caricatures like Memin Pinguin reinforce prejudices
and impede progress towards equality among races. And that, surely,
is true. Civil rights leaders in the U.S. all called on Fox to apologize
and on the U.S. President to denounce the images. Speaking for GeeDubya
in our nation's capital, Scott McClellan dutifully called racial stereotypes
offensive: "Such images as these have no place in today's world.
The Mexican government needs to take this into account." The Mexican government, on the other
hand, said Americans are over-reacting. The situation for Mexican blacks
scarcely parallels that of American blacks. Mexico abolished slave trade
decades before the U.S. did and never enacted Jim Crow laws to keep
the minority "in its place." Many black Mexicans are descendants
of African Americans who fled to Mexico to escape discrimination in
the U.S. But the black population in Mexico is relatively small and
politically weak. Sergio Penalosa, a civil rights leader in Mexico's
small community of blacks on the Pacific coast, said he wished the Mexican
government had been "a little more careful and [would] avoid continually
opening wounds." Some of the American press, Eugene Robinson at
the Washington Post among
them, unfurled another dimension in the brouhaha. Many African Americans
are already apprehensive about being supplanted by the Latino population
as the largest racial minority group in the U.S., and the prospect of
a Mexican racial caricature that demeans blacks seems likely to undermine
even further the social status and political power of the African American
community: Latinos coming to this country from Mexico will bring with
them the belittling stereotype fostered by Memin Pinguin. Robinson, an African American who spent
years living and reporting in Latin America, points out the difficulty
in trying to apply to one culture the standards of another: "Cultural
sensitivities don't translate," he writes. In Mexico, he goes on,
"Memin Pinguin is hardly controversial. In fact, he's almost universally
beloved, in part because Memin Pinguin comic books are seen as having
played an important role in successful literacy drives in the 1960s."
That was a long time ago, he admits, and times-and sensitivities-have
changed. Today, "a homage to Sambo, however you look at it, is
a big step backward." But many Mexicans love Memin Pinguin,
whose comic books are still produced there. Mexican Foreign Minister
Luis Ernesto Derbez said the U.S. response was "totally incorrect."
Said he: "Memin Pinguin is a character with a long tradition in
our culture. He is loved by all Mexicans." Rafael Laveaga, a spokesman
for the Mexican ambassador in the U.S., said: "Memin Pinguin is
a character like Speedy Gonzalez, and just as Speedy Gonzalez has never
been interpreted in a racial manner by the people in Mexico because
he is a cartoon character, I am certain that this commemorative postage
stamp is not intended to be interpreted on a racial basis in Mexico
or anywhere else." Julio Cesar, a newsstand operator in Mexico,
said: "Memin Pinguin is years old, but Americans don't know him
and there's a lot of racism there." A Mexico City postal clerk
agrees: "There's more racism in the U.S. [than in Mexico], which
may be why they are on the defensive." Sixto Valencia Burgos, the current
cartoonist on Memin Pinguin, worked with originator Vargas and is quick
to defend the character: "When I first heard about this, I couldn't
believe it," he said. "How could you take Penguin offensively?
I've always made him the good guy." Quoted by Monica Campbell in the San Francisco Chronicle, Valencia, 71,
recalled a 1960s Memin episode attacking racism in the U.S. Memin has
traveled to Texas with his soccer team, and when they stop at an ice
cream parlor, he orders a milkshake, and the waitress says: "Here
we don't serve Negroes, Mexicans or animals." Memin's friends are
outraged and a fight ensues. Memin ends up in jail, but the incident
made a point. "Yolanda and I wanted to address race issues in the
U.S.," said Valencia. "It wasn't always easy to do, but I
think we did it in a way that expressed unity and friendship."
Campbell also quotes Armando Barta,
a Mexican sociologist and comic book historian: "Memin Pinguin
actually took on racism several times; he hardly perpetuated it. This
is the context that Americans are missing when it comes to understanding
all of this. What I can't believe is that with all of the other problems
between the U.S. and Mexico, you could have so much attention on Memin
Pinguin. It's absolutely surreal. What about the militarization of the
border and immigration? Those are real issues." Cartoonist Valencia, Campbell says,
started working with Vargas on Memin Pinguin in 1963 and "appears
unfazed by the controversy." He is also apparently more attuned
to contemporary life and its attendant problems than the Memin caricature
would suggest: "His latest project is a collaboration with a Los
Angeles-based lawyer and immigration activist to create a cartoon pamphlet
assisting undocumented Mexicans with the ins and outs of living in the
U.S." Many Mexicans have taken offense at
Americans' taking offense. The stamps have suddenly become emblematic,
reports Mark Stevenson of the Associated Press, "a symbol of resentment
that the United States-where Mexicans have long faced discrimination-would
dare accuse Mexico of racism." "Americans are the racists,"
declared Cesar Alonso Alvarado; "they're worse than we are but
they just want to belittle us, like always." Quoted by Campbell, Domingo Perea,
a Mexico City artist who has known Valencia for decades, said: "Memorializing
a cartoon character that hardly represents a country's entire way of
thinking is something that we can do in Mexico without problems. The
U.S. gets so squeamish about these things. Meanwhile there's plenty
in Hollywood and Disney that stereotypes Mexicans. Should we ban all
of that?" Not everyone in Mexico agrees that
Memin Penguin is innocuous, Campbell points out. "Black Mexican
activists condemn the stamps. Elisa Velazquez, an anthropologist who
studies Mexico's black communities, calls the Memin Pinguin image an
insult to people around the world. 'It reveals our own ignorance of
what can be considered racist,' she told La
Jornada, a national newspaper." In all the excitement, the stamps have
become highly collectible. Speculators, hearing that the 60-cent stamps
are going for $200 a sheet of 50 on the Internet, stampeded to buy them.
The stamps were issued on Wednesday, and by Friday thousands of people
had lined up at post offices to buy sheets of the stamps, which depict
Memin Pinguin in five different poses. Calls for President Fox to recall
the offensive stamp issue are now immaterial: Stevenson reported that
all 750,000 stamps had sold out by the end of the week. The entire incident could pass for
ingenious satire if it weren't fact rather than fiction. The comedic
denouement defuses the passions animated by the ugly cruelty of the
racial caricature and, at the same stroke, makes ludicrous the folly
of trying to impose the standards of one culture upon another. The prospect
of material gain elbows all other principles out of the way. We remain
human despite our best efforts to become divine.
Interlude On
a listserv devoted to Platinum Age Comics scholarship, a recent discussion
thread sought to discover how many, if any, cartoonists had achieved
their professional status while still teenagers. Historian Rick Marschall, managing editor of Rare Jewel Magazine, produced this gem: Gosh,
I'm coming up dry. Except for the recollection that the creator of Blondie was Young, we have- the
cartoonist of Sunflower Street
was Little; the
cartoonist of Salesman Sam was
Small; the
cartoonist of Outdoor Sorts was
just a little Tad; the
editor of those cool cartoon collections is a Kidd; and
then of course when I was editor at Marvel I worked with an Infantino. Otherwise,
we're left with Carl Ed, who was, of course, a Teen cartoonist. RCH
again: If you picked up on T. Lee in Funky
Winkerbean a few minutes ago, you oughta home in on these okay,
too.
BATMAN FLIES The
plight of the movie-maker planning to make a superhero movie is the
same as that faced by the writer of the comic books wherein that superhero
first found life: after you've done the schtick a few times, what's
left? Superman is the looming example of the predicament. His powers
are so stupendous that he's invincible. How do you create suspense about
your main man when he can leap any hurdle you put in his path? Every
writer of superhero comic books encounters this problem. And now the
producers of the motion picture versions of the same heroes are coming
to grips with it, too. Their dilemma, reprised, is this: if you have
a superhero who has been issued a certain number of superpowers and
you tell stories about him by confronting him with challenges that he
uses his superpowers to overcome, you will eventually exhaust the kinds
of difficulties he can overcome in any new and different way. Eventually,
given a finite list of superpowers, your superhero will have exercised
them all in every probable way at least once. Thereafter, you make movie
after movie of the same explosions and rambunctious action sequences.
The only innovations are purely technical: everything happens faster
and louder. So how do you do something new? I suspect we're reached
this daunting impasse with Spider-Man movies. Superman's been there
for decades. I'm not sure we're there with Batman, but the new movie,
"Batman Begins," suggests we are. The symptom of our having arrived at
this point is when the mythos of the character begins to change. Having
drained the possibilities from the initial concept, the concocters of
the stories begin to tinker with the original formula. It's all over
the place in "Batman Begins." The "pre-history"
of Batman-Bruce Wayne confined in a Bhutanese prison then learning martial
arts with a vigilante gang called the League of Shadows under the auspices
of Ra's al Ghul and his henchman, Henri Ducard; then comes the surprising
return to Gotham after seven years in Tibet (a circumstance not without
echoes of the origins of this notion). Mostly, I'm happy to say, this
stuff works just fine. The traditional Batman legend is a beckoning
void on the early life of playboy Wayne. As co-writer (with director
Christopher Nolan) David S. Goyer acknowledges, "No one has ever
told the definitive Batman origin story." So they did. The elaboration
of Bruce Wayne's personal history in that Asian redoubt takes almost
half the movie: we don't see Batman until we're into the second hour
of the show. The proportions alone reveal the movie-makers' purpose-to
tell "the true story of a man who has a series of odd, transformative
experiences," as Mick LaSalle puts it in the San
Francisco Chronicle. And Nolan insisted, Stephen Kiehl tells us
in the Baltimore Sun, that the truth be realistic, scorning Warner Brothers'
suggestion that he resort to computer graphics. "What I'd never seen in superhero
movies," Nolan told Kiehl, "or comic book movies, if you will,
is a naturalistic, more realistic, grounded tone to the film. [In this
movie] as in the comics, Batman is an extraordinary figure against a
relatively ordinary and recognizable contemporary reality." The result of Nolan's passion for realism,
says Kenneth Turan at the Los
Angeles Times, is "a consummately well-made piece of work,
a serious comic-book adaptation that is driven by story, psychology
and reality, not special effects." A new Batmobile is one of the stars
of this flick. The Batmobile was never as big a deal in the comic book:
a cute deployment of the bat emblem, sure; but nothing much else. Carmine
Infantino redesigned the vehicle during his "rescue" operation
in the mid-1960s, but it wasn't until we got the so-called "camp"
version of Batman with the giddy 1966-68 tv series that the Batmobile
emerged as a virtual character in the mythos. Strange, then-considering
how universally disparaged the Adam West series has become while the
more sophisticated Batmans go up on the big screen-that the Batmobile
of these latter-day movies is always just one more elaboration on that
tv creation. As a perennial symbol of the phallic power (think "thrust")
that all male adolescent power fantasies are at their core, the Batmobile
is probably, now, a permanent fixture of the mythos. Christian Bale's
Bruce Wayne and Batman seem the best so far; at the very least, he has
the biceps for the part. And I see, now, why in the Batman Adventures comic book, done in the
animated style, Batman's jaw has suddenly become pointed rather than
square: Bale's jaw is pointed. And the marketing geniuses at DC believe,
with every fiber of their alleged acumen, that they'll sell more comic
books if the comic book characters look like the movie incarnation.
It may seem silly to you and me, but consider, before you scoff, that
Mickey Mouse in the comics always looks just like Mickey Mouse on the
screen. With proof like that, who needs market research? Wayne's taking control of his hereditary
business empire by stealthily out-maneuvering Rutger Hauer's Earle is
a nice new wrinkle. But a lot of this movie's ploys have their origins
elsewhere. Batman's menacing raspy Darth Vader whisper seems appropriated
from the animated Batman. Morgan Freeman's role as the tech-genius comes
right out of the James Bond movies. But Alfred the butler is still the
stalwart family retainer. Michael Caine, who has been assuming character
roles with panache the last dozen years, does Alfred with his customary
elan, just shaking the impersonation easily out of his sleeve. (Caine's
career hit its first high point in a movie called "Alfie"-remember?
And so here he is playing "Alfred." I hope this doesn't mean
we've come full circle because I'd like to see a lot more of Caine in
the years ahead.) In all the persistent realistic seriousness
of the movie, however, I miss the devil-may-care grin that characterized
the Cowled Crusader in the comic books of the 1950s (which is when,
for me, the character came alive since that vintage was my first exposure
to him). No colorful costumed villains in this production either. Maybe
that suits the new paradigm better, but I miss the splash and dizzy
ambiance of the comic book in Nolan's conception. As Gene Seymour in
Newsday reminds us, invoking the great animator Chuck Jones, "the
point is not that cartoon characters be realistic but that they
should be believable." Nolan and Goyer may have gone too far in the
direction of realism. They work too hard, Seymour says, "to explain
Batman's psyche and not [hard enough] to let it run loose." Lots
of Eisnerspritz in the movie, though-rain dripping from every eve in
Gotham. Atmosphere galore. But not as much fun. And adventuring -superheroing-
oughta be fun, a little. Not all grim seriousness. The highpoint in the revamping of the
mythos-Batman flies! Yes, finally! I've been waiting for several generations
now for someone to realize that his batcape can function like the wings
of a glider. You just get up high on the roof's edge of some building,
then jump off and spread your cape, which then becomes your wings and
you soar like a glider. Presto: flight. Oddly, for years, I dreamt this
action: I'd find myself perched on a rooftop at some altitude, then
just "fall forward" and spread my arms and-presto! I'm gliding.
Just like Batman in this movie. As the dream ran on, I would "fall
forward" from ever decreasing heights. Eventually, I could "fly"
by falling forward while just standing on ground level. Astonishing.
Freud, by the way, maintained that the dream of flying symbolizes sexual
excitation. But I doubt it applies here: Katie Holmes' mouth makes too
lopsided a grimace for her to be a big screen icon of female pulchritude,
and her body lacks the embonpoint for a sex symbol. Although at least
one critic, Phoebe Flowers of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, thinks Holmes
"fulfils the apparent erect-nipple quota set by Kirsten Dunst in
'Spider-Man,'" I saw little outstanding evidence of it. No nipples
on the Bat-suit either. And since nipples are, in this society, the
supreme source of erotic stimulation, I can't see where the Freudian
flight syndrome originates. So I just enjoyed the flying. FOOTNIT: This weekend of July 9th, we'll see another
of those comic book matchups that were so popular a few years back as
Marvel puts its Fantastic Four flick up against DC's Batman movie. I
won't know the results for a couple weeks, though, because I'll be out-of-the-county
when they are reported.
FUNNYBOOK FAN FARE The
second and final issue of the two-issue series, The New West, is as satisfying a conclusion to Jimmy Palmiotti's tight-lipped tale as any student of noir could want.
Our anti-hero, the renegade cop turned private eye, cleans up the gang
of bad guys with some artfully placed swipes of his samurai sword, imparting
to the proceedings a generous dollop of bloody action. Despite a necessarily talky denouement in which the mayor explains
how he got entangled in a plot using the pulse weapon to shut off Los
Angeles' electricity, there are enough silent sequences to let the visual
medium play its part. And Phil
Noto's storytelling, prompted, presumably, by Palmiotti's plotting,
deploys an expert clear-line technique for dramatic staging-most evident
in the camera's focussing on the moment just after bodies are decapitated
or hands sliced off. There are also a couple of the snappiest black
comedy lines in literature. Our man Dan Wise, contemplating the young
Megan's outfit, mutters to himself: "Nice pants-any tighter and
I could read her lips." And, later, when she complains, asking
when he's going to stop treating her like a child, he replies: "The
minute you look over my shoulder and see the ceiling. ..." Some
things you should remember all your life. A couple pages of Noto pin-ups
at the end of the book are delicious, too. Judo
Girl No. 1 is a visual jumble. To add to the confusion, it's also
a "flip book," with half devoted to the "modern adventures"
of our heroine, the other half to her "retro adventures,"
the latter presumably in Comicbookland because the coloring is suddenly
vintage flat hues with flesh tones produced by tiny dot patterns. A
clever idea but perhaps too clever. The page layouts, however, destroy
the possibility that any but a dedicated fan of Nador
Balan's pencils and Nick
Schley's inks could make sense of all this-a riot of color and cascading
imagery with overlapping figure drawing and a dash of speech balloons,
sprinkled hither and yon across a screaming pictorial landscape. Too
bad. Frank
Cho continues to amaze in Shanna
Nos. 4 and 5. The story is as dramatically told as anything in comics,
superb timing and staging. And his artwork is a study in what a single
line-no feathering, no shading, just an undulating line-can be made
to do. How can it be used to model shape, to suggest weight and volume?
It works only if precisely placed. And Cho uniquely uses a fineline
tracery to suggest musculature. A master at work. The curvaceous gender
is well-done, too-so much so that it probably distracts from Cho's storytelling
and drawing skill. By the way, Cho has a new Sketches and Scribbles tome out, Book Two by count, just in time to shower
the aisles at the Sandy Eggo con with zaftig imagery. The 80-page volume
includes numerous preliminary pencil sketches side-by-side with the
final, inked art and a number of quite nekid ladies. Some Spider-Man
sketches, too. And, speaking of the ol' Webslinger,
we've known ever since he arrived that superheroes are in desperate
need of psychological counseling. Bill
Morrison and Scott Gimple
leaped to the rescue with Heroes
Anonymous, in which various of the longjohn legions show up at a
weekly group therapy session. Finally, after months of dilly-dallying,
the 6-issue mini-series comes to a conclusion. All the superheroes who've
been showing up for group therapy return in No. 6 for the grand finale
as they try to find out where The Blitz has gone. Adam
Van Wyk and his inker, Andrew Pepoy, have plenty to do: the crowd
of characters is more numerous than any in comics, and their attention
to detail is painstaking even in this crisp simple style of rendering.
It turns out that The Blitz is suffering from a species of multiple
personality disorder. Prior to losing control, he was Les Rose, the
inspirational half of a stand-up comedy team Rose and Howard, but when
he got recruited as an assassin for the Allies during World War II,
he ran off the track, assisted by a nefarious villain. Chandler Howard,
meanwhile, failed as a comedian without Les Rose's scripts and schtick,
and The Blitz's mysterious disappearance in No. 5 of this series is
caused by Howard kidnapping Rose. I'm not sure why, exactly (although
Morrison and Gimple are). But the book ends with The Blitz trying to
achieve therapy by the means he urged upon all the others-talking it
out. Nice wrapping up. Another pioneer in comedic psychic
superheroing is John Kovalic,
sometime editorial cartoonist and all-time publisher of the gaming-oriented
Dork Tower Comics (www.dorktower.com
and www.drblink.com
for titles and ordering information). Kovalic's
Dr. Blink, "Superhero
Shrink," showed up several months ago in one of the Dork Tower Comics, then debuted in his own title, No. 0, and is back
in No. 1 of the series. Drawn by Christopher
Jones and colored by Melissa
Kaercher, the book is a treat for the eyes. Jones invests his stylized
bold-lined simplicity with more nuanced facial expression and telling
details than you'd expect in that style, and Kaercher's colors often
underscore the mood of an episode. In No. 1, for instance, when Dr.
Blink's daughter gets angry at being rebuffed by superhero idol Teen
Crush (who tells her that if she's not a superheroine or a super model,
he's "super un-interested"), she turns a smoldering red, and
then, lime-colored in an envious green panel, she undermines his reputation
by divulging to her girlfriends the results of her rummaging through
her father's files: Teen Crush, it seems, is a "chronic bed-wetter
with the mother of all mother complexes." But this episode is just
one of several satiric diversions on the path of the issue's main storyline,
which concerns the plight of Major Amazing, the world's only "suicidal
superhero" who is seeing Dr. Blink because, being invulnerable,
he can't kill himself. After the opening sequence in which
Major Amazing throws himself off a skyscraper to no effect, we attend
a meeting of a group of superheroes who are struggling to find a name
for themselves. The Avenging Legion of Titan Justice Defenders Society
of America League, they decided, is a bit too cumbersome. Perhaps they
were misguided to have outsourced the naming task. ("Outsourced?"
exclaims one of the group, "-we gave the job to a chimp."
"A super-chimp," corrects
a cohort.) Meanwhile, Major Amazing is having a session with Dr. Blink,
who's trying to make him see that living is better than dying. Being
one with the cosmos, Dr. Blink suggests, ought to be stimulating intellectually.
Major Amazing, however, is not impressed. The universe and all its secrets,
most of which he's mastered, bore him. "Do you know what point
all civilizations end up at?" he asks. "Boy-bands and telemarketers,"
he sniffs. "Life forms! Bah! They take one step with a vaccine,
a moon-landing or time-travel, then before you know it, it's personalized
license plates, pet rocks, and low-carb diets! In the blink of a cosmic
eye, it's like a billion steps back." But when he hears that the
Avenging Legion etc. is under attack from outer space, he dashes off
to join them, albeit still sulking. "Why fight?" he asks.
Athena tells him: "We fight because others can't. We fight against
injustice because we've got the power to." In other words, we fight
because we can, a persuasive if pithy philosophy. Shortly thereafter,
Major Amazing suffers a psychic turning point with huge thematic implications
(buy the book) and decides to enter the fray. But not before settling
an argument with Captain Omnipotent, who thinks "this is my kind
of operation, you know." "No," says Amazing, "this
is definitely a job for Major Amazing." And then he settles the
dispute: "Stand down, Captain," he growls, "as
Major
Amazing, I outrank you." He flies off, saying (or singing?), "By
the cosmos' awesome might, I alone shall put things right!" And
Captain Omnipotent, left behind, scratches his head in wonderment: "These
ranks really mean something?" he says. Fun stuff. And more to come. Kovalic
says they've sketched out at least four more issues-"with more
to come as Chris and I discover what makes the characters tick and what
drives them off the deep end. Though this is ostensibly a humor book,
these are characters we actually care about, and I can't wait to delve
into their hopes and fears (and psychoses) in the coming months and,
hopefully, years." Incidentally, in a two-page story in
Dork Tower No. 30, we witness
Dr. Blink's session with the Amazing Aracno-Lad (who looks, naturally,
very much like Spider-Man) as the superhero rants on about an endless
series of frustrations and disappointments in his life ("My boss
is always firing me, I can't get another job, my apartment is crummy
because I can afford nothing better, and my aunt died and came back
to life"). His complaints so depress Dr. Blink that he visits a
shrink himself, Dr. Beth Jennings, who, in real life, Kovalic explains,
"is the expert I turn to when I need to make sure the comic book
has at least some foundation in actual science." Some, yes-just
enough to make the character and the series hilarious. One of the future
issues of Dr. Blink will collect
all the Dork Tower back-up
stories. The fifth issue of the new Black Panther series is out, and in it,
the African nation of Wakanda, where the Black Panther is the warrior
king, is, at last, being invaded by the hostile forces that have been
gathering for four issues. John
Romita, Jr.'s taut compositions and carefully staged breakdowns
continue to lend visual drama to the proceedings, and
Klaus Janson's crisp inks underscore Romita's graphic restraint,
the sort of prowess that, by not calling attention to itself, seems
more potent, like a coiled spring. Reginald Hudlin's story, now that war
is underway, resonates occasionally with vague echoes of the quagmire
in Iraq, the "Mess o' Potemia" as Jon Stewart says. And Hudlin's
sense of humor is often on display. In No. 3, for example, the psychic
vampire Cannibal witnesses the antics of the Black Knight, who, mounted
on a flying horse, leaps over her head. "Not to sound too crude,"
she says, "but with that horse flying around, has anyone ... Oh,
no-he didn't." But he did. Even as she speaks, she feels the horse
apples landing on her nice, clean white broad-brimmed chapeau. Hudlin
also takes a shot at the Vatican, which, as he portrays it, is just
another gig for the power- and money-hungry. The series' concept, involving a technologically
advanced African nation never defeated or subjugated, gives Hudlin ample
room to indulge in a sort of racial revenge riff, taking digs at racists
and extolling African excellences. In No. 4, the letters column starts
to reflect a certain, er, "dissatisfaction" with Hudlin's
apparent racial agenda. One writer objects to a scene in the White House
in which an official calls blacks "jungle bunnies," which,
the writer asserts, is a ridiculous situation and "speaks to Mr.
Hudlin's hatred of Bush." Later, the same writer protests Hudlin's
portrayal of "all black people as good, all white people as bad."
Hudlin replies: "I've been black for a long time and I've met prejudiced
people in every walk of life-regardless of race, creed, social position
or political affiliation. Acknowledging their existence does not imply
that whatever group they belong to automatically shares their beliefs.
As for whether such talk could occur in such rarefied circles, plenty
of Presidents, from Woodrow Wilson to Lyndon Johnson to Richard Nixon,
have been documented saying racist remarks. Do I think it's in the realm
of possibility that a White House staffer from either the Clinton or
Bush Administrations (remember, the story does not specify who is President)
might make a racist comment? Yes. Would such a remark be tolerated?
Well, in my story, the black woman who is running the meeting-Dondi
Reese [Condi Rice] -summarily dismisses the idiot without breaking a
sweat. ... [As for all whites being bad and all blacks being good] this
remark says more about you than the comic I wrote. Aren't the first
'bad buys' in the book black invaders with body part trophies from previous
raids? If you think I'm vilifying the administration, isn't that a black
woman in charge? Clearly, all black people aren't 'good' in this issue.
So maybe the problem, in your eyes, is that there aren't enough 'good'
white people." Hudlin concludes by saying that he's "an equal
opportunity offender" and that ensuing issues will "challenge
readers of every political stripe." But mostly, he says, "I'm
all about kick-ass action and heroics." I'll buy that. But I'm
also enjoying Hudlin's seeming enjoyment of indulging in the old adage,
"turn about is fair trade." Hudlin has long been a kibitzing comics
reader, and he got this Marvel gig after his friends got tired of listening
to him telling them how it should be done. So "they put me in the
same room with Joe Quesada and Axel Alonso," Hudlin told Richard
Vasseur at www.jazmaonline.com,
"And amazingly enough, Joe and Axel liked what I had to say; next
thing you know, I'm banging out two books for Marvel." The other
one is Marvel Knights Spider-Man. It is "a
lot more comedic a character," Hudlin said, "so I write that
book with an eye toward humor. Panther
is all about epic." Does his Hollywood experience help in writing
comics? "It doesn't matter what the medium is," Hudlin said,
"-telling stories, pleasing an audience-every time you try, you
learn something."
PEREZ'S UNHAPPY COMICON George
Perez, who was to be a guest at the Sandy Eggo Con later this month,
has been forced to cancel. Here's his letter, which has been posted
on various listservs on the Web: As
some of you may already know, I've had to cancel my appearance at Comic-Con
International in San Diego. The official reason stated on the site "circumstances
beyond George's control" has, as I figured it would, started people
speculating as to what those circumstances are. I certainly appreciate
Comic-Con's desire to protect my privacy, but I also don't want people
panicking about my health-especially with my known history of diabetes.
Here, edited to remove any non-pertinent info, is the letter I sent
to Sue Lord, Head of Guest Relations for the con:
Sue: You cannot imagine how much I hate having to type this e-mail,
but, please believe me that I would never do this unless the situation
was absolutely dire. I'm afraid I will have to cancel my appearance
at San Diego this year due to my contracting severe psoriasis, which,
in less than a year's time (much to my dermatologist's surprise) has
now taken over a third of my body and has made it all but impossible
for me to sleep, work or just sit without being in major discomfort
or burning pain. This genetic disease (which I did not know existed
in my family line until a couple of months ago) is incurable and what
treatments I am now forced to take (pills, creams, injections and possible
phototherapy treatments) will require a minimum of 6 months to start
showing results, and even then there are no guarantees. I had gone to
the movies for the first time in months to see if I could sit through
the length of a film without discomfort. I lasted about two hours before
the itching and burning started. This made the prospect of a five hour
plane flight all but inconceivable. And being in a hotel without my
wife to rub lotion on my back or finding a way to use a shower without
my skin feeling like it's being sprayed with acid, or having to vacuum
the bed every day due to the flaking dead skin that I shed profusely
are likewise unpleasant prospects. One of the side effects of my current
medication is possible mood swings, although it's uncertain whether
that would actually be attributable to the drug or the psoriasis itself.
Regardless, I'd hate for a fan to be the inadvertent target of a negative
shift in temper.
Thankfully, psoriasis is not life-threatening, but it is a serious
blow to my lifestyle. Never in my wildest dreams would I have figured
that I'd cancel an appearance at San Diego, but Mother Nature has really
slapped me in the face here. Having to deal with psoriasis on top of my
diabetes is a major life change for me and these next few months will
be hard, but I'm grateful for the good things I still have going for
me: an adoring wife, good friends, and a still-prospering career. Hopefully,
things will get better by next year should you decide you'd like to
give me a raincheck. Thank you for everything you and the con organizers
have done to make me feel special. I know the Con will even bigger than
ever, and I'm really sorry that I won't be part of it. Sincerely, George Perez
As a follow-up [Perez
continues], my wife and I have come up with a therapy regime that has helped relieve the itching and
burning somewhat and I've gotten back to work on the Return of Donna Troy. Unfortunately, my treatments require that my wife and I be available
to each other and, since her job limits her ability to travel with me,
I will be canceling all my public appearances for the rest of the year.
Right now I have to work to keep my stress levels down and will be following an incredibly restrictive
diet and following up on other treatment options. If all goes well,
I hope to attend next year's Comic-Con since the organizers have graciously
and generously extended a "rain check" invitation, my condition
permitting. I cannot express enough how touched and humbled I am by
everyone's concern. As I said, this isn't life-threatening, but it is life-altering. With the support
and kindness of so many people and the love and care of my dear wife
Carol, I'm confident that I will be able to beat this thing enough to
be able to get out there and thank all of the fans in
person. Take care, George Perez And here at This Colyum, we hope the
treatments and therapy do the job they're intended to and that Perez
is fully recovered soon.
COMIC STRIP WATCH Passing
through the city of my misbegotten youth a few months ago, I picked
up a copy of the Rocky Mountain
News, Denver's tabloid behemoth, which is now in a Joint Operating
Agreement with its arch rival, the Denver
Post. My father subscribed to the Post
during my growing up years: the Post
is a broadside paper, and I suppose he thought it was a soberer recorder
of daily events than a tabloid, which are traditionally screaming rags.
The Rocky Mountain News I saw only at friends'
houses-or during paper drives, which, during the years just after World
War II, were fairly numerous as money-raising projects for our Boy Scout
troop. Under today's Post-News
JOA, the Saturday paper is a joint publication, and the comics page
runs the strips and panel cartoons from both papers-a stunning compilation
of 58 strips and 14 panel cartoons. It goes on and on, for four pages.
On Monday, the News reverts to its normal allotment of
funnies, 31 strips and 5 panel cartoons-still an impressive array on
two pages. I remained impressed by this vista of funnies stretching
out before me until I returned home to Champaign, Illinois, where our
local paper, the News-Gazette, runs a page-and-a-quarter
of strips, a total of 28 strips, plus two more buried in the Classifieds
(Judge Parker and The Boondocks) and a panel cartoon-total, 30 strips plus one panel
cartoon. Considering that Champaign is home to only about 100,000 persons
while Denver, alone without its sprawling suburbs, boasts a population
of over 500,000, the News-Gazette's
line-up is pretty startling. Based on population alone, the circulation
of the News-Gazette must be only 20% that of the
Rocky Mountain News -or, to
take into account a two-newspaper town which must divide newspaper readership,
let's say the N-G has 40%
of the circulation of the RMN.
Yet it publishes almost as many comic strips and cartoons. Impressive.
When the News-Gazette revamped its comic strip line-up
a few years ago, it added a quarter-page of strips instead of simply
substituting "new" strips for "old" strips to keep
the funnies on a single page. Impressive. So I got to wondering why.
The News-Gazette is a locally-owned paper; the RMN is a link in the Scripps-Howard chain. Chain papers have become
notoriously pinch-penny in recent years, seeking to enhance stock-holders'
annual earnings. Locally-owned papers, in contrast, don't have to please
Wall Street investors. If the
Rocky Mountain News were locally-owned, would it be running comic
strips in a quantity proportionally equivalent to the News-Gazette?
That'd be, conservatively speaking, a total of, say, 42 or 43 strips
instead of 31. But the Rocky Mountain
News, interested, like all chain newspapers, in keeping expenses
low in order to boost profits (and, thereby, stockholders' earnings),
doesn't want to incur the additional cost of running more comic strips.
Twelve more strips at an average of $15/strip/week would add nearly
$10,000 to the paper's operating cost over a year. The News-Gazette,
on the other hand, because it is locally-owned, is more committed
to keeping its readers happy than to increasing earnings for stockholders,
those villainous absentee owners of song and story. When you think about the annual cost
to a newspaper of running a full page of comic strips, the wonder of
it is that the Rocky Mountain
News (or any other chain newspaper) runs comic strips at all. It
could save thousands by dropping its comics altogether. Most newspaper
editors believe that their comic strip sections are the second-most-read
section in the paper (after the sports section), and since editors have
no wish to commit suicide, they keep right on publishing comic strip
sections. But what if they change their minds? The New York Times survives quite nicely without
comic strips. Or editorial cartoons. As we contemplate the gradual disappearance
of staff editorial cartoonists across the country, let's hope they're
not the canaries in the mine shaft: let's hope comic strips aren't next
to go the way of the dodo. Newspapers, however, are keeping a
stiff economic lip. In Editor
& Publisher's online edition for June 21, Knight Ridder's CEO,
Tony Ridder, while acknowledging that newspaper readership is in a downward
slide, reminds us all that 52% of adults in any given week still read
a newspaper, 60% on Sunday. Not yet dead. The New
York Times has been branching out into the Web, as have almost all
big-time newspapers; but Leonard Forman, executive vice president, reaffirmed
the company's commitment to print, which, he said at a mid-year media
review, "will be a strong part of our business. No one is disputing
there is a decline. It's not disappearing. ... It's a tough business
to manage," he continued. But "you can do quite well with
3-5% growth." McClatchy Company, owner of the Sacramento
Bee and the Minneapolis Star Tribune, projected its year-end earnings at or just barely below
the average Wall Street forecast. At Gannett, retiring CEO Doug McCorkindale
isn't wringing his hands according to Time's "Inside Business" dated July. Gannett is investing
in Internet technology, but the chain's newspaper circulation isn't
down "anything like a lot of the folks in the industry. And in
fact, USA Today, which just raised its cover
price from 50 cents to 75 cents, actually had a positive circulation
for the period ending in April. The world is not coming to an end,"
he continued. "Young people do read print if you take a traditional
Gannett medium-size market newspaper and you package the same information
but in a way that younger people want to see it-shorter stories, more
graphics, easy maneuverability." But USA
Today publishes no comics section. Ouch. In Wiley Miller's Non Sequitur
for July 4, I read that the famously silly Runaway Bride has signed
a tv movie deal. Is that right? Can that be true? Wiley's character,
Joe Pyle, goes on: "Once again, people of genuine achievement go
unnoticed while media reward spectacular idiocy with fame and fortune."
That's right. That's true. When we last left 9 Chickweed Lane, Brooke McEldowney's visually imaginative and humanely engaged comic
strip, the household of women at that address was breaking up after
a dozen years: teenager Edda has gone to the big city to join a ballet
company, mother Juliette moved out to a farm, her mother (Edda's grandmother)
going with her. Mostly since the break-up, we've watched Edda. And she's
been on a rampage of spectacular taboo-bending escapades. First, she
moves in with her male dancing partner, Seth; and if that wasn't scandalous
enough, Seth, it slowly develops, is gay. Then, even more alarming,
in May, Edda's highschool friend Amos shows up, and Seth, who is both
mother hen and match-maker, arranges for the two of them to meet at
a tango salon he and Edda sometimes visit. As soon as Amos gets his
arms around Edda, their passion is aflame and nearly consumes them.
It's the hottest nuzzling the funny pages have witnessed since Burma
vamped Terry in Milton Caniff's last month on Terry
and the Pirates (December 1946). And it's mostly done without a
word being said-just pictures of dancing, twirling, embracing, touching,
and then, a long, two-day kiss. Finally, Amos says, "Should my
glasses steam up?" And Edda replies: "If I'm doing my tango
right." Then they leave the tango salon and go to Edda's apartment; Seth obligingly stays away, telling his friend that he's left a note on Edda's pillow, advising her about what she should do next. Edda invites Amos in and slips into something more comfortable-a pair of striped pajamas. Just what an amateur seductress (or friend?) might do. Wonderful. And her entrance culminates in the most uproarious of non-seductive collisions of uncontrollable amorous intent ever. A beautifully clumsy moment of pure adolescent passion.
Then follows an overheated week of heavy petting on the couch;
Edda's pajama top slips off one bare shoulder, and one pajama leg gets
shoved up to expose a naked knee, then a thigh. This, you must admit,
is hot stuff wherever it may appear, but it's unheard of in a newspaper
comic strip. Just as we verge on a physical intimacy that would send
shock waves through the marrow of the nation's prudish bones, McEldowney
arranges a graceful exit-for Edda and Amos not to mention for McEldowney
and his readers and the 60 or so family newspapers in which the strip
appears. In the spirit of their long friendship, Amos buttons Edda's
pajama top, says goodnight, and leaves. It is a beautifully and unabashedly
truthful stretch of storytelling. Events exactly like this transpire
between adolescent lovers in livingrooms all across the land: the temperatures
rise, breathing shortens, and hearts beat faster and louder as hormones
exert their ageless influence. To say that McEldowney is daring as well
as visually inventive and perfectly attuned to the human comedy is not
to say too much. McEldowney is also the subject of a
June 21 article in The Advocate,
a bi-weekly magazine for the lesbian, gay and bisexual community. Here,
the cartoonist says pretty much what he said to me when I asked me about
Seth (Opus 158). The article begins with a question: "How do you
work gay characters into the comics without making a fuss? Don't make
a big deal about it." And writer Adam B. Vary goes on to observe
that McEldowney had no political motive in introducing Seth-unlike Garry
Trudeau with Mark Slackmeyer and Chase Talbott III in Doonesbury
or the teenager Lawrence's coming out in Lynn Johnston's For Better or For Worse. "No need for overt hand-wringing about
coming out," Vary notes. And McEldowney agrees: "I never think
of bringing it up-to have Edda's mom say, 'Oh, is he gay?' or anything
like that. I just think it would be one of those things that wouldn't
be an issue because he is just the way he is." The successful non-combustible
introduction of Seth is due, McEldowney believes, to the organic way
his readers have discovered the character's sexuality: he was never
introduced as a gay man. No one ever said anything about it. He was
just there, as gays often are. His sexuality, Vary notes, is "slyly
hinted at through subtle asides and gestures for months until a sequence
of strips featuring Seth's boyfriend, Mark, appeared the first week
of May." Then we all know for sure. Just as it happens in life
outside the funnies. There was, then, virtually no outcry.
Even if there had been, McEldowney has no intention of altering his
strip to appease the clamor. "I've had the strip going since 1993,"
he said, "and I want to do it the way I want to do it. If somebody
wants to make an issue out of Seth being gay, then I'm just going to
bring him out more and more. I got a letter from some reader saying,
'Does Etta realize that Seth's gay? I hope she's careful.' I felt like
writing back, 'He's a cartoon! What is it you think could happen to
Edda?'" About Seth, the cartoonist adds: "[He's] this person
who is going to be Edda's best friend, who fusses over her, worries
about her when she's on dates-[and critics] just see this as some innate
evil. I was thinking, 'My God, their minds are so terrible.' They have
their own terrible thoughts and then blame them all on me. I don't understand
these people who dub themselves the religious right. They're worried
about going to hell-they're already there. It's in their heads."
The same article notes that Rick Stromoski has an effeminate character
in his strip, Soup to Nutz -namely,
the six-year-old Andrew. But Stromoski doesn't know if Andrew is gay
or not: "I think when you're six years old, you're not really sure
what sex is at that point." But he has no intention of changing
Andrew, whatever his sexual orientation, to satisfying the ravening
right. Vary lists other gay characters in mainstream comics: in addition
to those in Trudeau's strip and Johnston's, there's Akbar and Jeff in
Matt Groening's Life
in Hell, Freddie in Lynda
Barry's Ernie Pook's Comeek, even, startlingly,
Peppermint Patty and her pal Marcie in Charles
Schulz's Peanuts, although
Vary admits that Schulz would "no doubt deny any lesbian subtext"
between the two.
SO WHO, EXACTLY, ARE THE SWINE? Contrary
to popular opinion, Stephan Pastis, who produces the comic strip Pearls Before Swine, can actually draw.
You can't tell from the usual stick-figure tripe that he foists off
on us every day, but occasionally-for instance, during the week of June
27-he betrays himself. During this series, Pastis gets his star players,
an unnamed Rat and an equally nameless menagerie of barnyard beasties
and exotic species, to speculate on the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden.
Rat's theory is that bin Laden has slipped into the U.S. as an exchange
student and is living with some American family that has no idea who
he is. Says Goat: "Oh, please-what American family could be that
out of touch?" The last panel shows the cast of Bil
Keane's Family Circus around a dinner table, with the mother saying to the
bearded turbaned person sitting across from her, "I'm sorry, Osama,
but at the end of grace, we say 'Amen' not "Death to America.'"
The so-called joke is that Keane's ever-so wholesome family is clueless
as well as wholesome-in fact, one may be a condition of the other. In
other words, Pastis is taking a slap at an American comics institution
that he finds so bland as to be not-of-this-world. It is, in short,
an insult. Satire, yes-ridicule of Family Circus for being bland, er, wholesome
to the point of boredom (for Pastis)-but insulting satire. As attentive readers of This Colyum (and of Pearls) know, Pastis frequently "pokes fun" at his cartooner colleagues by referring to their strips in his, usually not in complimentary terms. Usually, for this purpose, Pastis picks on hugely successful-that is, widely circulated-comic strips, strips that appear in 1,000 or more papers. After all, his so-called "jokes" at the expense of other cartoonists' creations wouldn't make sense if Pearls readers didn't recognize the butts of the joke; comic strips that appear in over 1,000 papers are likely to be familiar to Pearls readers. And such celebrated strips as these are not likely to be hurt any by Pastis' ridicule. But my point, which I'll eventually get to, is that in mocking Family Circus, Pastis manages to draw the characters perfectly. And his picture of Osama bin Laden is also a passable rendering of the human physiognomy.
Not
Pastis's usual painfully infantile stick-figure doodles. So he can draw.
Why doesn't he? Why are his regular characters little more than stick
figures? Because, kimo sabe, he scorns the medium-particularly,
but not exclusively, the more simply rendered efforts (Cathybert, probably, but also Drabble and a host of other barely competent
enterprises by today's crop of pseudo cartoonists). He not only ridicules
other, usually more celebrated than his, comic strips by "making
fun" of them in the storylines of his strip, but with his own graphic
style, he mocks them, showing how ludicrously simple the acceptable
comic strip drawing has become. It's as if he's saying: if Cathybert can be successful, why should any comic strip cartoonist
attempt to draw in any but the crudest, simplest style? His contempt
is palpable. Look, he seems to be saying to his college fratboy fans,
I can be funny in a comic strip without drawing anything but childish
stick-figures. And with that, his contempt spills over onto the entire
profession: all you misguided souls who actually draw your comic strip
are squandering your talent and wasting your time, he seems to be saying-you're
devoting hours and hours to drawingboard duties when you could dash
off a few stick drawings and spend the rest of the week on the golf
course. You're obviously fools and dim bulbs. Pastis' cynical disdain for his own
profession is matched only by Chester
Gould's famous put-on in Dick
Tracy. Well, "matched" is not exactly right: Gould made
sure we all knew he was being satirical; Pastis is working under cover.
In 1964, Gould introduced a cartoonist character in Tracy,
Chet Jade. To satirize the current state of the comic strip in newspapers
of the day-which were steadily shrinking the space allotted to strips-Gould
gives Jade a strip called Sawdust,
which, because there is so little space for comic strip art, consists
entirely of tiny specks in each of four panels, with speech balloons
hovering over the specks. The jokes are all bad puns: "He's not
knotty?" says one; "No, but somehow he goes against my grain."
As an additional fillip in his satire-this time ridiculing the growing
trend in multiple authorship of strips (artists assisted by writers
and the like)-Gould gives Jade four assistants, Al, Ray, Jack and Rick;
they work on the strip simultaneously, each one drawing the specks in
one of the four panels. Later, Gould returned with more satire on shrinking
strips: in 1969, he brings in another cartoonist, Vera Alldid, who produces
a comic strip called The Invisible
Tribe. Yup-in this one, there are no pictures at all. Just speech
balloons. Subsequently, in 1973 Gould did another encore on the subject
when a ten-year-old kid named Peanutbutter "draws" a strip
called Bugs and Worms, depicted as squiggles rather
than specks. Gould's Dick Tracy
set the pace for detective comic strips in the history of the medium;
alas, his assault on shrinking comic strips had no impact at all, if
we are to judge from the present state of affairs. What Gould would
make of Pearls we can only imagine (but it doesn't take much imagination).
Pearls
is, however-against all probability-funny; which proves only that scoffing
can be amusing. Pastis is outrageously blunt; his humor is dark. His
strip is typically sick, twisted, and astonishing. His credo, if we
are to judge from a note reportedly on his bulletinboard, is: "When
in doubt, kill cute things." He pretends that Charles Schulz is
his idol. That, perhaps, is job insurance: he works three days a week
at the Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, California. Says Pastis: "All
roads lead to this one man [Schulz]. I picked up everything from him."
Everything? Really? If so, then Pearls is a passing strange manifestation
of gratitude. Pearls is absolutely,
top to bottom, nothing like Peanuts.
The humor in Peanuts pulls
at the heartstrings of the human condition, reveals insecurity, confronts
personal shortcomings and societal failures. Pearls
makes fun of death and stupidity. Shulz's characters are resilient:
they never give up. Pastis's characters never begin: they sit on the
sidelines and snipe at their betters. Oddly, Pastis' colleagues in the inky
fingered fraternity apparently find his mockery amusing. Bil Keane told
reporter Paul Giblin of the East
Valley Tribune near Phoenix, Arizona, that he's flattered that Pastis
drew inspiration from Family Circus.
Moreover, Pastis' treatment is so ridiculous, no one could consider
it mean-spirited. The situation is absurd: Bin Laden is too old to be
an exchange student. Said Keane: "I don't mind being lampooned
by a person that has a good sense of humor." But Pastis wasn't
so sure of his ground: he sent the entire week's strips in advance to
Keane's collaborator, his son Jeff, to see if the Keanes were amenable
to the scheme. Pastis had taken shots at Family Circus before, but only in a single
daily installment; this was a week long. And Keane had threatened legal
action several years ago when a Website cartoonist recycled Family Circus drawings, giving them obscene
captions. Pastis' plan was no such thing, of course. The Keanes signaled
their approval. And Pastis went ahead. "Family
Circus is so consistently sweet and pure," Pastis said. "When
you mix it with something edgy like Osama, I think it makes for good
comedy." He also pretends to be a big fan of Family
Circus. He collected many of the reprint books when he was a kid.
But he doesn't read the cartoon these days: in drawing the Family father, he left off the glasses the character now wears; and
he gave the mother the hair style she abandoned several years ago. So
how big a fan is he? More disdain oozing contempt. Inter-strip comedy may be highly amusing,
but it can backfire. Keane said he's considering doing a cartoon in
which the Family father squashes
a rat, Pastis' lead character. Said Keane: "I could say, 'Well,
what's Pearls Before Swine going to do now that
you've killed the rat?' It might do better," he finished. Pastis' victims seem to enjoy ridicule
at the hands of his merciless Rat and mindless Pig. Well, we knew, all
of us, that after 9/11, irony was dead. Pastis is proving it every day. FOOTNIT: Pearls fans,
being highly trained in deadpan ironic humor, will be able to discern
that this whole diatribe is merely a tongue-in-check screed, a hilarious
satire. The rest of us will realize that I'm entirely serious, that
my deep psychological analysis of Pastis' motives, conscious or not,
is intended to show him the error of his ways in the hopes that he'll
find ways to be funny without using other people's creations.
COPY RITES AND THE REWARDS OF PIRACY On
the high seas of cultural well-being, it turns out, piracy is not necessarily
the scourge of civilization. Not, at least, where Mickey Mouse is concerned.
And for this smidgeon of insight, we have Bob Levin and Lawrence Lessig
to blame. In an age in which Creator's Rights reigns rampant, Levin
and Lessig, together, insinuate the warm gray shades of nuance into
the cold black-and-white certitudes of moral absolutism. Bob Levin's book about "Disney's
War against the Counterculture," The Pirates and the Mouse, is an exuberant romp through legal thickets
and hippie eccentrics. His narrative style is joyfully discursive, a
giddy ramble that frequently detours into rich atmospheric detail culled
from the lives and attitudes of the indigent cartoonists Dan O'Neill
enlisted in the Air Pirates in 1970 to help him rout the perniciously
saccharine influence of fictive Disney values upon the lives and welfare
of real Americans. Not content with a meandering storyline laced with
parenthetical asides, Levin festoons the book (Fantagraphics Books,
272 6x9-inch pages in hardback, $24) with footnotes, every one of which
trickles into the mainstream of the story rivulets of fascinating and
often integral tidbits of supplemental information. Reading this volume
is a little like going on the road with Jack Kerouac: the headlong dash
down the highway of the century's most pesky copyright excursion alternates
with relatively inert interludes of introspection and inebriation when
Levin is diverted into the intoxicating byways of anecdotal history
and biography (even autobiography). I've known for years that the Air
Pirates case ended with a defeat for O'Neill and his fellow parodists,
but until reading this engaging tome, I've managed to keep myself quite
ignorant of exactly what constituted that ignominious ending. Levin
changed that with this gleeful volume. The case, which began with a Disney
filing in the fall of 1971, took a long and torturous route to its conclusion
in 1980. It was, Levin asserts, "one of the longest and most absurd
in the history of attempts to use copyright to stifle artistic expression
in America. The lessons learned from it are more relevant than ever
to anyone who chooses parody as a way to speak to power, especially
corporate power." Leading up to his careful exegesis
of the legal issues, Levin rehearses the history of comic books and
of the Disney empire, retails O'Neill's biography and those of his henchmen,
and recounts the emergence of Marvel Comics and the growth of underground
comix. In the introductory pages of the book, Levin sets the scene for
O'Neill's disaffection by conjuring up the early 1970s. "In the
first days of the 1970s, America had seemed ready to tear itself apart.
... The expanding war in southeast Asia was a meat grinder, shredding
connections and civilities. ... It was a time for well-considered fire-bombing
of judges' homes and liquor-fueled vigilante raids on communes. For
armed assaults on courthouses and vandalizing of alternative newspapers.
The ambush of policemen on patrol and the brutalizing of hippies passing
through town." It was also a time of nearly ritual reaction to
the "dominant ethos of the country ... [the] muted consensus and
polite conformity [of the 1950s and early 1960s] ... [when] Elvis Presley
not being televised below the waist ... made perfect sense...."
The reaction created a "new nation"
that "came wild-haired, bare-footed, costumed as frontiersmen and
buccaneers, Renaissance princesses and fairy sprites. It cavorted in
the nude. It replaced keg parties, backyard barbecues, and the cocktail
hour with marijuana, LSD, methedrine, laughing gas, mescaline, magic
mushrooms, opium, STP, and anything it could find in the medicine cabinet.
It had its own bone-jarring, head-rattling music, augmented by light
shows that rewired any senses the music and drugs and missed. ... its
own 'far out,' 'mind-blowing,' 'mellow,' language. 'Come together,'
it sang. Pick up the 'good vibrations.' 'Wear ... flowers in your hair.'
It lived on over 2,000 rural communes and operated over 5,000 cheese-selling,
baguette-vending, taxi-driving urban collectives. And it took to sex
like it was grabbing M&M's from a bowl." Reading Levin's invocation of those
heydays of the counterculture, it's easy to understand the "moral
values" voters in the 2004 Presidential Election: their votes were
not so much for
GeeDubya and his henchmen as they were against the raging liberalism that,
in the view of Middle America, had spawned the debaucheries they'd witnessed
thirty years before when they, and those whose behavior so outraged
them, were young and impressionable. What is liberty to some is licentiousness
to others. We have since learned that the "moral
values" vote was a chimera of the exit poll moment. A Gallup Poll
conducted under somewhat less intense circumstances in early December
revealed that only one in ten citizens thought that "moral values"
were "the most important problem facing the country today,"
tying for fourth place with unemployment/jobs. The so-called war in
Iraq ranked first, followed by terrorism and the economy in general.
According to Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center, the manner in
which the exit poll was conducted doubtless influenced the response:
presented with a list of answers in a multiple-choice question, many
people would choose "moral values" because of its high rank
in "social desirability." Still, as Thomas Frank convincingly
argues in What's the Matter with
Kansas?, the conservative posture of the electorate in the opening
years of the 21st century is pretty clearly the accumulated
backlash against the seemingly laissez faire liberalism of the sixties
and the resulting permissive momentum that coursed through the rest
of the century. Nostalgia for a lost moral center has dragooned itself
into an impressive if unholy alliance with soulless corporate America,
leaving those who would march to a different drummer without so much
as a tomtom to their name. In the late sixties milieu of free-wheeling
morality, O'Neill had decided that what America desperately needed was
the destruction of Disney. As Levin writes in his characteristically
tumbling prose, "The trajectory of O'Neill's career, though mostly
downward, was, in its commitment to a free-spirited, convention-defying
bluenose-shocking, light-out-for-the-territory view of the personal
and public good, just as resolutely mythic-American as Disney's."
In short, unbeknownst to either party, O'Neill and the Disney enterprise
were fated for a collision. By mid-century, Disney's signal achievement
was the creation of a fantasy world so sanitized as to be perfectly
harmless entertainment. But what was harmless in entertainment could
be dangerous self-delusion in real life-at least, so O'Neill and his
cohorts believed. The American Way of Life was corrupted by Disney's
appropriation, emasculation, and sugar-coating not only of America's
folklore but of the world's fairy tales and myths as well. Mickey Mouse,
the Pirates believed, was "part of our national collective unconscious,"
and while he may once have been "innocent and delightful,"
he had become "a reactionary force [devoted to] Establishment values
... a partisan of elements and values in American government and society
which the Air Pirates oppose." And so in 1971, the Pirates set out
with a comic book, Mickey Mouse
Meets the Air Pirates Funnies, to correct the erroneous impressions
they felt Disney had foisted onto unsuspecting Americans. Most significantly,
they reminded their readers that all animals (including the human variety)
have sex lives thereby exploding the central a-sexual myth of a Disney-fied
universe. Once this affront was brought to the attention of the Mouse
House, Uncle Walt's minions were furious and sued to block further publication
of the comic book in which these antics were portrayed, saying Disney's
image was being tarnished. At issue was the copyright protection
that Disney believed applied to its creations. The Pirates, however,
felt they had not infringed on Disney's copyright. In the tradition
of Cervantes, Shakespeare and Swift, they were parodying Disney. To
succeed, Levin points out, parody must be based "on conflict between
the expected and the actual," juxtaposing "a known existing
work" against "something else" all the while keeping
the reference to the original work absolutely clear. The "fair
use" clauses of the copyright law permit limited copying of copyrighted
material in certain circumstances, and in one of those, successful parody
claims a special status: by its very nature, it must imitate its target
precisely or it will misfire altogether. But Fair Use was not the Pirates'
only defense: in their parody, the Pirates were engaged in "aesthetic
and political criticism of a deeply serious nature," an endeavor
they felt was protected by the First Amendment's championing of free
speech and freedom of the press. O'Neill's affidavit said: "Disney
presented Mickey Mouse to us when we were children. As cartoonists and
adults, we approach Mickey Mouse as our major American mythology. I
chose to parody exactly the style of drawing and the characters to evoke
the response created by Disney. My purpose in using the Mouse as a character
is not to destroy the Disney product but to deal with the image in the
American consciousness that the Disney image implanted." "This here is a free republic,"
O'Neill said elsewhere, amplifying his purpose; "and if I don't
like what this guy is saying, and I happen to have the same language
gift he has-the same ability to speak with words and pictures-I can
reply in his language. The characters might look like Disney, but the
soul is 180 degrees turned away. The original work is conjured up to
the reader's eye as closely as possible, but the behavior is exactly
opposite. The closer you draw the parody, the greater the shock, the
greater the criticism. The less you look like the original, the weaker
the parody; and, no matter how weak it is, there's always the possibility
of a lawsuit, so publishers will fear to print all but the very weakest.
You try to explain that to lawyers and judges, they go 'What?' The trouble
with evolution is it's not happening for some people." Court decisions had determined that
parodists could copy enough to "conjure up" their target,
but the court before which the Pirates appeared held that they had appropriated
more than was necessary, therefore more than Fair Use permitted. Nor
did the First Amendment apply: if it did, it would "obliterate
copyright protection anytime anyone asserted their infringement conveyed
an idea." The Pirates had other ways of expressing their ideas,
so the First Amendment did not allow them to infringe Disney's copyrights.
The Pirates were ordered to pay Disney $190,000, plus attorney's fees
and other miscellaneous costs. Enjoined, also, against future parodying
of the Mouse, the Pirates appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which
declined in January 1979 to hear the case. That spring, O'Neill arranged for the
publication of a four-page "Communique No. 1 from the MLF"
(Mouse Liberation Front) in which Mickey and Minnie Mouse speak out,
crediting the Pirates with turning their lives around and defending
the artists' right to copy Disney characters for the purpose of parody.
O'Neill violated the injunction deliberately in order to provoke response.
"Doing something stupid once is just plain stupid," he explained;
"doing something stupid twice is a philosophy. When you're down
$190,000 in a poker game, you have to raise." As Levin puts it:
"The next step was obvious: commit a new crime. If O'Neill defied
the injunction, Disney's only recourse would be to have him held in
contempt of court. 'And then they have to put you in jail,' O'Neill
says. 'For drawing a mouse? In the land of the free? No way.'" The legal machinery ground to a stall
in attempting a response to this fresh insult. By this time, the copyright
law had been recently revised (1976), and the crucial question under
Fair Use was whether Disney was caused economic harm by the "Communique."
Since the Mouse House suffered no demonstrable losses, O'Neill was covered
by Fair Use. His "Communique" was "a political essay,"
Levin explains, "exploring the 'metaphysical distinctions' underpinning
copyright law and dramatizing Disney's 'draconian efforts' to muzzle
O'Neill. Like any citizen, O'Neill had the right to mock Disney's prosecution
of him. As a cartoonist, he had the right to use pictures to do so." Within months, the whole matter was
settled. In 1980, the Pirates agreed to abide by the original injunction
not to draw Disney characters any more; they accepted the financial
judgment, too, and Disney, apparently, agreed not to attempt to collect
damages if O'Neill never drew the Mouse again. O'Neill's recollection of the final
decision is wonderfully comedic: "It was great. The judge told
'em, 'You knocked him down once, and he got up and hit you back. You
knocked him down twice, and he got up and hit you back. You knocked
him down three times, and he got up and hit you back. By now, you should
have figured out he's Irish.'" The opposing attorneys remember no
such catechism. "It's what the judge should have said," one
of them allowed. "There are some facts too good to check." Particularly if one relies upon O'Neill
for those facts. Early in the book-and frequently throughout it-Levin
cautions against accepting O'Neill's testimony. "He is a man unhobbled
by factual restraints when a touch of moon-dust will enliven life's
dance. He is a storyteller in its most noble of manifestations, relating
to the world through re-worked lines and remodeled anecdotes, more devoted
to achieving the most affecting of tellings than the exactly replicated,
always less satisfying [than] what was. To quote his attorney, 'You
don't talk to Dan if what you're interested in is some Kantean discourse
addressing the abstract nature of truth. He's Irish.' It is surprising,"
Levin concludes, "how often this explanation, uttered by others,
surfaces to account for some quirk in O'Neill." Moon dust indeed, a wholly serviceable
example of the kind of verbal festivities Levin conducts throughout,
alive with leap-frogging lingo shored up with as much fact and truth
as can be ascertained. An attorney himself, Levin displays the typical
lawyerly ability to marshal a vast array of facts and details and to
organize them succinctly and tellingly. This ability serves him well
both in rehearsing the legal issues involved (including a short history
of copyright law) and in seasoning the otherwise dry recitation with
spicey anecdotal material derived from countless interviews that he
conducted. In discussing the "anti-Disney" movement, Levin
reveals that the heirs of the man who created Pinocchio, Carlo Collodi,
were "so upset with Disney's changes in the story [that] they sued-unsuccessfully."
In the midst of tracing the living and working arrangements the Air
Pirates found themselves in as they moved around to find the cheapest
accommodations, Levin recalls-and splices in-the fact that O'Neill has
a bias against health food: "Health food is cheap food with soy
sauce," he once wrote. Lovely. None of the Pirates cooked, apparently,
and in one of their hovels, they were so far from the nearest restaurant
that "by the time you got back, your dinner was wasted because
you were hungry again." Levin occasionally slips up: Walt Disney's
mother's name was Flora, not Ella (although she lived in Ellis, Kansas,
when she first met her husband-to-be). And the proof-reading sometimes
goes fishing, leaving the remnants of preliminary syntax flapping in
the breeze. Moreover, it is sometimes difficult, due partly to the density
and minutiae of the issues being discussed, to keep track of the sequence
of events. Levin's deployment of the novelist's narrative mannerisms
results in an eccentric citation of dates: he drops them in at conversational
intervals rather than as milestones in a chronology, an irregularity
compounded by Levin's gleeful surrender evry so often to the temptation
to take long detours in pursuit of other, amusing, facts. But these
are majestically minor hurdles in the path of the parade of prose delights
that Levin leads. In a segment relating how the Air Pirates' defense
team sought to expose the real motive for Disney's bringing the suit,
Levin writes: "Disney wanted all criticism of its world view extinguished.
It wanted the Pirates' tongues torn out; their pens ground into dust;
their pages burned; salt plowed into their fields." And if the
prospect of savoring verbal effusions like this isn't enough to persuade
you to pick up this book, then perhaps its astonishing illustrations
can. In addition to photographs of the principals in the adventure,
the book reprints several scabrous pages from both issues of Air Pirates Funnies (including a 4-page episode during which Mickey
tries to persuade Clarabelle Cow to give him a blow job) and the entire
"Communique No. 1." We can scarcely appreciate the issues
involved in the case without seeing the causes of it all, but, as Levin
told me when we met for the first time several months ago, he marveled
at Fantagraphics' courage (or foolhardiness) in tempting the Disney
powers once again. More than a decade after the presumed
settlement of the Air Pirates case, the U.S. Supreme Court took up another
copyright case and in its decision created a loophole through which
Levin believes the Air Pirates could have escaped, had it existed before.
While a key question in Fair Use is whether the alleged copyright infringement
destroys the commercial value of the original-in effect, superseding
it in the marketplace-under the latest decision, "the question
is whether the copying cast new light upon the original, enabling the
public to view it in a new way," Levin explained. "And the
Court made clear that it did not matter if the parody depressed the
sales of the original. Even a 'lethal' parody that 'kills demand' entirely
may be a Fair Use. 'Displacement' could be prohibited; 'disparagement'
could not." Levin continues: "If Air Pirates Funnies did not 'satisfy the
same purpose' as Walt Disney's
Comics and Stories -and how, in God's name, could you conclude it
did? -it was a Fair Use." Levin was, briefly, encouraged by this
development, but when he asked a copyright expert if the Air Pirates
could have prevailed under this new dispensation, the answer was depressing:
because of the sexual content of the parody, the courts would probably
have ruled against the Pirates. "Most courts are too sexually ill
at ease to give Air Pirates Fair Use." Except, perhaps, in Massachusetts,
where at least one court was comfortable enough with human sexuality
to countenance the marriage of same sex couples. As for the rest of the country-well,
what can we expect? In the Bush League's Ashcroftian Universe, we have,
alas, lost sight of the naked boob of Justice. The shroud of decorum
has replaced simple unadorned honesty just as spin has elbowed facts
out of the room. In this climate, "fair use" must be "balanced"
as well as fair, with the balance tipping, relentlessly, in the direction
of corporate America. And it is precisely this kind of machination
that Lawrence Lessig wrote a book to combat. The book, entitled Free Culture (in which "free"
is verb as well as adjective), argues that corporate America is using
the copyright law to eliminate competition with the incidental effect
of suppressing creativity. In the fall of 2002, Lessig had appeared
before the U.S. Supreme Court, hoping to get that worthy body to deny
Congress the right to extend the copyright protection of the U.S. Constitution.
But the Court upheld Congress's right, 7-2. At issue was the 1998 law known as
the "Mickey Mouse Extension Act" because it came into being
as a result of aggressive lobbying by Disney, whose earliest representations
of its mascot were set to slip into the public domain in 2003. To prevent
that from happening, Congress extended copyright protection an additional
20 years for cultural works, thereby protecting movies, plays, books
and music for a total of 70 years after the author's death or for 95
years from publication for works created by or for corporations. In
challenging the extension, Lessig contended that the Constitutional
provision for copyright was intended to protect a creator's right for
only a limited time and that by extending this protection every time
it verged on expiring, Congress was, in effect, granting copyright protection
forever, a perversion of the Constitution. In the majority opinion that
sustained Congress, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg cast aspersions on the
"wisdom of Congress's action," but allowed as how ruling on
the wisdom of congressmen is "not within our province." Well,
it is within my province, which, being that of tireless typist, includes,
naturally, all of the known and unknown galaxies. Judging from the number of extensions
Congress has granted over the years, we are perilously close to having
copyrighted material protected in perpetuity. This is clearly contrary
to the original intent of the Constitution, which states, in Section
8 of Article I, that Congress "shall have the power ... to promote
the progress of science and useful arts by securing for limited times
to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings
and discoveries." In other words, the essential purpose of copyright
is to encourage creativity by assuring that creators will be rewarded.
Creativity is, in human psychology, its own reward: creative personalities
create because their inner selves drive them to. Still, it's nice to
have bread on the table and various other creature comforts as a result
of one's creative endeavor-hence, the value of copyright. Between the lines, however, another
value lurks. The language implies that even after the expiration of
copyright protection, society at large will continue to benefit by enjoying
the unfettered circulation of such works as have, for a "limited
time," been protected. Publishers, for instance, who no longer
have to pay permission fees to copyright holders, could publish works
in the public domain at prices that are much more affordable to the
general populace, thereby fostering learning and pleasure and other
benefits to good order and cultural vitality. The very use of the term
"public domain" implies a societal value beyond the private
benefits that accrue to copyright holders. Extending the protection
of copyright deprives the public of much of the benefit it might derive
from creative endeavors. Instead of promoting creativity as
intended, saith the Washington
Post Weekly after Lessig's defeat, the current law "has turned
whole categories of American national culture into heritable assets
owned by people who had nothing to do with their creation." And
it inhibits free expression by restricting the dissemination of cultural
artifacts. If artistic works had been perpetually protected by copyright
in the past as they seem likely to be in the future, we would, presumably,
have no animated version of "Cinderella" from Disney. Nor
would Disney have been able to produce the very film that threatened
to fall out of copyright, 1928's "Steamboat Willie," which
was a comedic re-enactment of a Buster Keaton feature, "Steamboat
Bill, Jr." The sort of "piracy" that
"Steamboat Willie" represents is, Lessig says, "Disney
creativity." And Disney creativity is manifest throughout our culture,
not just at the Mouse Factory in Burbank, California. "The film
industry was built by fleeing pirates," Lessig observes-entrepreneurs
who, in moving to California, expected, correctly as it turned out,
to be far enough away from the East Coast to permit them to evade the
enforcement of the law that protected Thomas Edison's patents on the
motion picture camera, patents that demanded that anyone using such
equipment apply to him for permission. For would-be filmmakers, that
was a cumbersome and expensive obstacle, and to steer around it, they
took Edison's patented equipment to Hollywood where, in the early years
of the 20th century-the formative years of the film industry-they
were effectively out of sight and beyond the law. Similar piratical
acts ("Disney creativity") resulted in the record industry,
radio, and cable tv. And in Japan, where the population seems to subsist
entirely on manga, a huge portion of the manga industry, Lessig says,
is made up of "doujinshi," manga that copies, with slight
variations, other manga. Steamboat Willies all over the landscape, here
and there. This sort of "borrowing"
is likely to be curtailed by the present interpretations of the copyright
law, putting an end to a distinct kind of creativity-the kind that is
inspired by one work to invent another that is similar but different,
the kind, ironically, upon which Disney built his entire empire. The copyright owners who support the
continual extension of copyright protection are not interested in the
right of a creator to reap rewards for his successful endeavors. That
may happen (and I applaud it whenever it does), but the copyright holders'
real agenda is, as Lessig puts it, "to assure that nothing more
passes into the public domain." Says he: "It is another step
to assure that the public domain will never compete, that there will
be no use of content that is not commercially controlled, and that there
will be no commercial use of content that doesn't require their permission
first. ... Their aim is not simply to protect what is theirs. Their
aim is to assure that all there is is what is theirs" (Lessig's
emphasis). I'm all for creators' getting their
due, but I question whether their entitlement exceeds their lifetimes.
No creator has any use for material reward after death, surely. So why
extend the copyright protection beyond the creator's life? Legitimate
as creator's rights are, they must have a limit, it seems to me. Otherwise,
as Lessig shows, they begin to impede creativity generally and the cultural
well-being of a society. Lessig's chief interest in changing the copyright
law springs from his desire to nurture the creative potential of the
Internet's technology. But the case he makes applies to many other creations
from which society has a right to benefit. How much Shakespeare would
we find on stage in America if all producers had to apply to the Shakespeare
Trust for permission to stage one of his plays? What about a creator's family and survivors?
Isn't a creator entitled to provide for his heirs out of his creative
enterprise? Yes and no, I'd say. If creations earned enough during their
creators' lifetimes to compensate them appropriately, then the creators
could make adequate provision for their heirs to benefit, somewhat,
from their work. Not, probably, enough to guarantee a life of ease and
idleness, but enough, doubtless, to gratify a son or daughter or distant
cousin who had nothing to do with the original acts of creation. In
the last analysis, however, perhaps the best we can do for our children
is to bequeath them the will and skill enough to make their own way
in the world and be self-sufficient. What more could any reasonable
person want? Had the old law been restored, we would
have reaped at least one benefit: if copyrights are permitted to expire,
eventually, young campers can huddle around their campfires at night
and sing Irving Berlin songs without fear of ASCAP's charging in out
of the dark to claim licensing fees. In the meantime, while we await the
return of common sense to the commonweal, we can, for the pure sake
of nostalgic reminiscence about a more exuberant time, visit Levin's
book to savor its cascading prose and the manic crusade it so vividly
and engagingly celebrates-and to take to heart the warning it imparts
about the impending sleep of creativity that perpetual copyright protection
is likely to induce.
GRAFIK NOVELZ Graphic
novelist/historian Rick Geary
has made a thoroughly respectable career out of Victorian crime-murder,
to be gruesomely precise. He has produced grisly examinations in graphic
novel form of Jack the Ripper's slaughters, the Lizzie Borden axe murder,
the assassination of President Garfield, the serial killer H.H. Holmes
of Chicago, and others, all from NBM Publishing under the general heading
of A Treasury of Victorian Murder (www.nbmpublishing.com).
Most recently, he has focused his ghoulish gaze on what is doubtless
the most sensational 19th century killing in American history
in The Murder of Abraham Lincoln (80 6x9-inch
hardback pages in black-and-white, $15.95). As always, Geary's narrative oozes
with an authenticity derived from exhaustive research. He lists nearly
a dozen works on Lincoln's assassination in the bibliography, and the
book includes carefully wrought maps of downtown Washington, D.C., showing
the relative positions of various sites associated with John Wilkes
Booth's plot, the infamous Ford's Theatre where the deed was done, Surratt's
boarding house where Booth met with his co-conspirators, the Peterson
house where Lincoln died, and the assassin's escape route through Maryland
to Virginia and the Garrett farm where he died in a barn fired by his
pursuers. Geary begins with Lincoln's second
inaugurral on March 4, 1865 and concludes on July 7, 1865 with the execution
of four of the conspirators. He conducts a nearly day-by-day rehearsal
of the events leading up to Lincoln's murder on April 14 and Booth's
subsequent flight and death on April 26. As Lincoln, on the steps of
the newly domed capitol building, anticipates the end of the Civil War
(which occurs a month later with Robert E. Lee's surrender to U.S. Grant
on April 9) and speaks of "malice toward none," the actor
Booth watches from the attending crowd and seethes in a rage born of
his Southern sympathies. With six others, Booth has been hatching a
plot to kidnap Lincoln and convey him to Richmond, the Confederate capital,
where he will be held until ransom is paid-namely, the release of thousands
of Southern prisoners of war. Booth and his cohorts actually assemble
for this purpose in the woods along a road north of the city, expecting
Lincoln to pass by on his way to a military hospital to speak to wounded
soldiers. But when they learn Lincoln has changed his plans, they believe
their plot has been discovered, and the hoodlum band breaks up. Only
three of the original six stand by Booth as he evolves a new plan, this
time to kill Lincoln. Geary's nearly hour-by-hour account
of the day of the assassination is complete with maps and cut-away diagrams
of the presidential box in Ford's Theatre, showing where all its occupants
were seated when Booth entered and aimed his single-shot derringer just
inches from Lincoln's head and fired, sending "a half-inch ball
of lead deep into the skull of its victim, the projectile [taking] a
path from the left to the right, through the mass of the brain and lodging
behind the right eye." At approximately the same moment, two of
the other three conspirators attack Secretary of State William Seward
in his home; the third villain, assigned to kill Vice President Andrew
Johnson, loses his nerve and wanders the streets all night. The rest
of the story traces Booth's flight, alternating with scenes at the Peterson
house where Lincoln lay dying for nine hours and glimpses of the subsequent
entrained funeral procession across the country to Springfield via Philadelphia,
New York, Chicago and several places in between. Before closing the book on Lincoln's
murder, Geary lists several of the provocative unanswered questions
that still hover around the infamous event. Was the Booth plot part
of a larger enterprise? Did he have "inside information"?
(How else to account for his having with him only a single-shot derringer
and a knife? Did he know Lincoln would not be well guarded that night
in Ford's Theatre?) Why did Secretary of War Edwin Stanton destroy 18
pages of the journal Booth kept during the days of his flight after
the assassination? If Seward and Johnson as well as Lincoln had been
killed, would Stanton have become President? Was he, then, the master
assassin? The history of Lincoln's assassination
is familiar to most of us in its larger outlines. Geary adds many details
that are less widely known, but in recounting these matters in the graphic
novel mode, Geary gives dimensions to the story that are missing in
any other medium. His drawing style evokes woodcuts, but Geary's lines
bristle uniquely along the edges, giving to the visuals the fustian
patina of early Americana. The technique of Geary's storytelling lends
the tale its peculiar tone. The pictures add little substantial narrative
information. Apart from bird's-eye views of key scenes and maps, the
story is carried entirely in the verbal captions. But the pictures accompanying
the captions lend to every event, no matter how trivial, a strangely
foreboding aspect. Geary's prose is spare, almost completely devoid
of adjectival nuance; it's deadpan and factual. In this context, the
pictures function as illustrations of the text, and the illustrations
add an eerie ambiance. When a new personage is introduced, Geary pictures
him or her straight on, full face, from the waist up, as if sitting
for a 19th century studio photograph. But the eyes often
glance to the side, making the person seem vaguely guilty. In various
sequences, the characters frequently look over their shoulders, almost
fearful of some lurking threat. Geary draws in a cartoony rather than
realistic manner, and although his skillful use of linear shading techniques
produces an illusion of realism convincing enough for his serious purpose,
the caricatural impulse persists as a structural underpinning, adding
a sense of detachment that, oddly, augments the aura of menace. Because
we are distanced from the events depicted, they seem dreamlike-or, more
exactly, nightmarish. When the would-be assassin of Seward leaves the
house of his victim, he finds his accomplice has already left, and Geary
depicts the deserted murderer standing, motionless, in front of the
house, knife in hand, staring out at us as if caught in the act by an
unanticipated witness. That's exactly what Geary's "camera"
is, of course, but Geary's deployment of it makes the camera an actor
in the drama, often an intruder. And so the impression emerges, over-all,
that the storyteller is the lurker, the threat, an augury of retribution
that haunts these evil doers. Geary's pictures of Lincoln are deft
invocations of the classic image, a treat for the eye. Beyond mere depiction,
however, Geary infuses the tale with an antique sense of the macabre
by his narrative mannerism and graphic style, and it is in these aspects
that the visual nature of the medium complements and enhances the story,
bringing an appreciative shiver to the experience of reading it.
Are
Liberals Just More Rational than Conservatives or What? I
have struggled, until June 21, 2005, with the nagging thought that maybe
I'm as rabid and closed-minded a liberal as the right-wing nut conservatives
I scoff at for being rabid and close-minded. Maybe my liberal myopia
is the reason I think liberals are more sensible than right-wing nuts.
But on June 21, 2005, I realized that wasn't the case. Watching a so-called
debate on the NewsHour between a conservative critic of PBS and a defender
of PBS, I realized why I think liberals are more sensible. Because they
are. Right-wing nuts, in contrast, are merely doctrinaire. They mouth
party lines and platitudes, slogans and "talking points,"
and they say them over and over, whether they are appropriate responses
to the questions or the circumstance or not. The strategy, clearly,
is the Bush League war plan all over again: tell the Big Lie often enough,
and enough people will believe it to secure your position and guarantee
your triumph. No matter what the question or the comment from the PBS
defender, the conservative mouthpiece had only three things to say,
and he repeated them as often as he could: 1) Bill Moyers is a rampant
liberal and his presence on PBS confirms the liberal slant of the network;
2) the animated cartoon rabbit who went to visit lesbian parents shows
just how "deeply embedded" the liberal bias is in PBS; and
3) the majority of Americans disapprove of this liberal bias in a medium
they help pay for, and we know it's a majority because they elected
GeeDubya President twice, their votes establishing beyond a doubt two
things: the enduring popularity of George W. ("Whopper") Bush
and therefore the majority endorsement of the conservative point of
view. The PBS defender reminded us that PBS broadcast a talk show hosted
by William F. Buckley for 30 years, and if that wasn't as conservative
a "balance" as Moyers was liberal, what was? The conservative
scoffed at this: Buckley was mere tokenism; Moyers was pervasive. (From
this, we may assume that any attempt at "balancing" one point
of view against another is merely "tokenism" for the point
of view that is not being championed.) When the PBS defender pointed
out that Moyers had retired, it didn't faze the critic: he kept on invoking
Moyers' name as proof of liberalism in PBS. The defender missed a bet,
though: every time the PBS critic cited Bush's immense popularity, the
defender ought to have pointed to Bush's steadily declining approval
rating, now below 50%. Scarcely a "popular" president any
more (if he ever was: remember, he lost the popular vote the first time
he "won"; and his second win was merely a victory for the
status quo, the incumbent-always preferred over something new and different).
The defender consistently answered questions put to him; the conservative
critic consistently repeated Moyers and the "majority opinion"
that is overwhelmingly poised against liberal views, coast to coast.
The defender had a mind and exercised it; the conservative had only
a mantra, and dared not stray from it for fear he'd get to a place where
he'd have to think. So, the lesson I learned was that the liberal "point
of view" includes a thought process; the conservative, does not.
And that's why I like liberals. Nothing myopically knee-jerk about it. To be scrupulously fair and balanced,
however, I must acknowledge that if the Bush League and their conservative
minions succeed in silencing forever any opposing voices on PBS and
everywhere else, the country will be in better shape. Clearly there
would be less disruption of our daily lives if everyone held the same
undeviating opinions about everything-if we all believed that Iraq has
been liberated (not invaded and occupied), that the Clear Skies Act
reduces pollution rather than perpetuating it, that what's good for
American business (particularly the oil business) is good for us all
individually, that homeland security is worth giving up a few paltry
rights for, and that GeeDubya walks on water and is a model of eloquence.
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