Author Archives: Alex Buchet

Prehistory of the Superhero (Part 1): Waltzing with Frankenstein

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Manfred on the Jungfrau, by Ford Madox Brown

 
“In any case, one can state that much of the so-called Nietzchean ‘superhumanity’ has as its origin and doctrinal model not Zarathustra but the Count of Monte-Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas.”

– Antonio Gramsci, Letteratura e vita nazionale, III, ‘Letteratura popolare”.

This quote  comes from Umberto Eco‘s introduction to the French translation of his 1978 book of essays, Il superuomo di massa.

As Eco  elaborates:

 I found Gramsci’s idea seductive. That the cult of the superman with nationalist and Fascist roots be born, among other things, of a petty bourgeois frustration complex is well-known. Gramsci has shown clearly how this ideal of the superman could be born, in the nineteenth century, within a literature that saw itself as popular and democratic:

“The serial replaces (and at the same time favorises) the imagination of the man of the people, it is a veritable waking dream (…) long reveries on the idea of vengeance, of punishing the guilty for the ills they have inflicted (…) “

Thus, it was legitimate to wonder about the cult of the right-wing superman but also about the equivocal aspects of the nineteenth century’s humanitarian socialism. [tr:AB]

The French title of Eco’s collection is, aptly, De Superman au surhomme– ‘From Superman to the superman’.

But what of the reverse — how did we go from the superman to Superman?

 

How did we get from here:

…to here?

Art by Joe Shuster

The superhero is one of the strongest — and strangest–  modern pop charactertropes;  I propose we dig into its roots– which I maintain go back to the 18th century’s  massive cultural shift: a revolution in politics, thought, and culture.

The superhero is an ultimate narcissist fantasy of identification; it thrives in a modern world of atomised society, where the basic unit is the individual to a historically unheard-of degree. Thus we’ll start with the centuries that enshrined individualism, the better to give a cultural context to our enquiry.

We’ll also examine why the superhero is so dominantly an American cultural artifact; this will lead us into some dark territory.

First, though, we must distinguish the superhero from his heroic predecessors in myth and legend.

The Classic Hero

The idea of the superman was spawned in the 18th and 19th centuries. This statement may strike the reader as historically false; what of the superhuman heroes of myth and legend,  Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Herakles and Achilles, Roland and Rustam, Cuchulain and Tomoe Gozen?

Heracles Farnese

These heroes were enmeshed in the fabric of myth. They were part of the structure of society, of the “great chain of being” that descended from the divine to the infernal, through the human; many were demi-gods, the legitimacy of their power stemming from godly parentage. Others were avatars of a warrior culture– linked through duty and right to the formal, “ordained” structure of the polity: for example,  the knights of King Arthur’s Round Table, or the Argives besieging Troy.

What the classic hero was not was an individual.

Indeed, when the hero asserted his individuality — repudiating or even betraying the obligations that hampered and enmeshed him — the result was tragedy. The Greeks spoke of a person’s hamartia, or fatal flaw: very often, this took the form of hubris, pride or ambition so excessive as to invite divine wrath:

“Seest thou how God with his lightning smites always the bigger animals, and will not suffer them to wax insolent, while those of a lesser bulk chafe him not? How likewise his bolts fall ever on the highest houses and the tallest trees? So plainly does He love to bring down everything that exalts itself.”

– Herodotus,  History

Thus Herakles, after drunkenly massacring his family, is punished by enslavement to his enemy Eurystheus; Achilles in his anger withdraws from the Trojan war, so imperilling his fellow Argives and bringing about the death of his lover Patrocles.

Sir Lancelot betrays his liege, King Arthur, by taking the king’s wife as a lover: the kingdom is subsequently torn apart by civil wars. The mighty warrior Roland is trapped with Charlemagne’s rearguard at Roncevalles by an overwhelming force– but pride stops him from blowing his horn to summon help until it is too late, and his army is killed to the last man.

 

Too late, Charlemagne

To deviate from duty, from his proper place in the scheme of the world, brings about the hero’s downfall and inflicts disaster on  the community.

This is decidedly not the fate of the new  character type– the superman.

The Birth of the Individual and the Coming of the New Hero

We have undertaken to discourse here for a little on Great Men, their manner of appearance in our world’s business, how they have shaped themselves in the world’s history, what ideas men formed of them, what work they did;–on Heroes, namely, and on their reception and performance; what I call Hero-worship and the Heroic in human affairs.

(…)  For, as I take it,Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modellers, patterns,and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realization and embodiment, of Thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world: the soul of the whole world’s history, it may justly be considered, were the history of these.

Thus Thomas Carlyle (1795 — 1881) in Heroes and Hero Worship (1840). For Carlyle, the sole true root of human progress was that man who could rise above the mass, transcend his time and shake the world into a new form– the Hero.  Examples he cites include Muhammad, Cromwell, Shakespeare, and Napoleon.

Unlike classic heroes, these men were not the servants (if often rebellious ones) of fate: they shaped fate. They stood above it.

The individual as giant was the logical extrapolation of the individual per se, who had in the eighteenth century assumed an importance never before acknowledged:

I have entered upon a performance which is without example, whose accomplishment will have no imitator. I mean to present my fellow-mortals with a man in all the integrity of nature; and this man shall be myself.





I know my heart, and have studied mankind; I am not made like any one I have been acquainted with, perhaps like no one in existence; if not better, I at least claim originality, and whether Nature did wisely in breaking the mould with which she formed me, can only be determined after having read this work.




These are the opening words of the 1769 Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 — 1778).




Portrait of Rousseau by De la Tour




It was something unheard-of:  the Self as subject, in all its raw nakedness, faults and all.


The rise of the individual found political expression in the Enlightenment, as well.  The notion of his or her personal rights was enshrined in such foundational documents as the Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution and the French  ’ Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen’.


Individualism also flourished in the wider culture. The school of sentimentality in literature, as typified by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe‘s The Sorrows of Young Werther or Laurence Sterne‘s A Sentimental Journey, valued the enjoyment of emotion for its own sake– not as a source of empathy or catharsis. In parallel, the psychological novel was born — examining the inner life of the self.


The Italian innovation of the apartment,  intimate, cosy and — above all–  private, began to supplant the old houses and manors where many generations of different families and classes would live together.


Diners were less and less eating à la française,  seated at large banquet tables and sharing from common dishes: in the new restaurants, they could be seated and served alone, at their own separate tables.




Dinner service à la française


The dance craze that was sweeping Europe was the waltz;  in contrast to the group dances such as the pavane or the quadrille theretofore prevalent, couples twirled alone.




Even so seemingly trivial detail as shoe size underwent the individualistic evolution; in prior centuries, shoes were undifferentiated between left and right foot, and came in few standard sizes. Now cobblers were literally tailoring each piece of footwear to the specific foot.


Yes, heady times for the individual! All the headier after the French Revolution sent shock waves rocketing through Europe, ripping up the ancient structure of the world, bringing terror and war in its train.


The old order was  shattered; the new citizen was deprived of “natural” superiors to look up to, the King, the aristocrats and the clergy. This was a vacuum waiting to be filled.


Came the moment, came the man — the Hero as Carlyle later conceived him, who bent the forces of history itself to his will; the true progenitor of the superman– Napoleon Bonaparte.






Napoleon crossing the Alps, by David




The armies of  revolutionary France were marked by a new kind of professionalism: an officer’s commission was no longer secured by genteel birth or outright purchase. Thus men rose in the ranks through merit– and in the case of the artillery lieutenant Bonaparte, he would rise to the throne of the world’s mightiest empire.


Nothing seemed able to stop him; destiny was clay in his hands; nations fell or were born at his word. He elicited worldwide admiration even from his enemies. (To this day, the British, his most tenacious foes, allude to Waterloo as if it were a defeat — ‘He met his Waterloo in the 2008 election’– rather than the greatest victory in British history; and it is a compliment to call a man, say, ‘the Napoleon of finance’.)


Wordsworth, Goethe, Beethoven, Byron– they were excited by this seemingly superhuman figure who was poised to sweep the old corrupt order onto the trash-heap of history.


(Great was their disgust and sense of betrayal when the former revolutionary crowned himself emperor:


          O joyless power that stands by lawless force!

Curses are his dire portion, scorn, and hate,

Internal darkness and unquiet breath;

And, if old judgments keep their sacred course,

Him from that Height shall Heaven precipitate

By violent and ignominious death.

–Wordsworth,  1809


The moral being: don’t expect too much from supermen, and you’ll not be disappointed.)


It is a cliche of the lazy writer or  cartoonist to depict a lunatic as one persuaded he is Napoleon;  yet there have been hundreds of  such cases documented, from Napoleon’s own time to the present, attesting  his power over the imagination. Napoleon himself was a canny curator of his own image. That famous pose with the hand tucked under his shirt? It was suggested to him by an actor. That hat? He had dozens of them, to be left as souvenirs wherever he travelled.


(He is also the exemplar for world-conquering villains; there is a direct line of descent from Napoleon to Doctor Doom.)


Napoleon formed a template for the superman; and he further smoothed the path for the latter by radically institutionalizing meritocracy, “career open to talents” as embodied in the Grande Ecole  schools of France or in the University of Berlin, institutions of excellence set to turn out the genius leaders of tomorrow.


A new elitism was in the shaping, and the idea of the superman largely sprang from it into the cultural zeitgeist.


Masters of Nature


Welch erbaermlich Grauen Fasst Uebermenschen Dich?


[What vexes you, oh superman?]

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust (1808)


The eighteenth century was also marked by a growing mastery over the physical world. The very idea of progress flourished as never before; for most of history, it was thought that mankind had regressed from a long-vanished golden age. (Mark how the classic heroes all belonged to the past.)  Human beings now, however, were going from strength to strength with no end in sight.


This was the age of the Industrial Revolution.  Steam power gave men the might of Titans;  nature seemed to yield more and more of its secrets to the natural philosophers not yet given the new name of “scientists” ( coined in 1833).


Let us consider the below painting, An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump, painted in 1768 by Joseph Wright of Darby (1734 – 1797):








click image to enlarge






A cockatoo is trapped in a glass jar from which the air is gradually pumped out, leaving the bird slowly to die, suffocating in the vacuum.


Note the two weeping little girls to the right, distressed by such cruelty; but one of the experimenters is at hand to explain how this suffering is necessary for the progress of science. The other experimenter stares out at us — challenging us, perhaps, to dare contest his will to knowledge.


This painting presages another avatar of the superman: the scientist, wresting control of the secrets of the universe as the titan Prometheus stole fire from the gods.


Yes: a modern Prometheus… as an 18-year-old Englishwoman dubbed her fictional challenger of Heaven:


So much has been done, exclaimed the soul of Frankenstein — more, far more, will I achieve; treading in the steps already marked, I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation.

–Victor Frankenstein, in Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, by Mary Shelley


 




Frankenstein and his monster; illustration by Theodor von Holst


Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797 – 1851) published her novelFrankenstein; or, the modern Prometheus in 1818.


The title hero usurps God’s privilege by creating life: a monstrous, manlike creature endowed with reason.


Yet, to do so, Frankenstein eschews the occult, magical methods of the Fausts  of previous fiction. His power derives from a mastery of the elements attained by rational study and experiment– from science.  He aims to join that near-Godlike elite of researchers so admiringly described by his teacher Waldman:




They ascend into the heavens: they have discovered how the blood circulates, and the nature of the air that we breathe. They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its shadows.


– Shelley, op.cit.




No need for bowing to demons to do his bidding. Frankenstein is free of God and Satan alike. (Shelley was, in her youth at least, an atheist.)  He replaces God, in fact; and though the novel shows him punished for his deeds, it is clear that his destruction comes not from a vengeful heaven, but from his own flawed character– Shelley, like her female equivalents in the Darby painting, could see the cruelty in the scientist’s will to power.


Victor Frankenstein points forward to other, future ‘scientific superman’ characters; to Verne’s Captain Nemo and Robur the Conqueror, to Wells’ Griffin (the Invisible Man) and Dr Moreau, to countless Mad Scientists and scientific heroes like Tom Swift, Doc Savage or Captain Future.


(As for his tormented monster spawn, he too has superhero descendants, in the ‘monstrous’ vein: the Heap, the Hulk, Swamp Thing…)


Indeed, many literary historians credit Mary Shelley with creating a new literary genre:  science fiction, of which more anon. She was also writing within the perimeters of another new genre: the Gothic.


Romanticism and the Gothic Backlash


Not everyone welcomed the new industrial age. The rapid changes of the modernising world alarmed and alienated people of all classes. There came to be a yearning for nature, for sublime landscapes and ruins, for an idealised past; to the cold new rationality were preferred the warmth of feelings.


The literary expression of this backlash was the Gothic novel, the first of which is generally agreed to be that of  Horace Walpole (1717–1797), The Castle of Otranto.




Walpole’s neo-Gothic castle, Strawberry Hill


 

There followed a flood of spectre-haunted volumes, many of which featured brooding predecessors of the superman: the title character of William Beckford’s The History of the Caliph Vathek,  who dares to invade Hell; Charles Maturin‘s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820),  a damned, dark near-immortal;  Lord Byron‘s Faust-like Manfred, who defies God and Satan alike; and perhaps the most proleptic of all, Byron’s secretary John William Polidori‘s The Vampyre (1819).


The Gothic novel was also the first narrow commercial genre of popular fiction.


The nineteenth century saw the rise of the first true mass media, and the birth of literature for the masses;  Polidori’s book will serve as a useful transition to the next chapter.


Next, in Part 2:  The true birth of the superman.

					

		
		
	


				
					
	

		

						
Oddity: Uderzo and Jacobs

			
						

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The Frenchman Albert Uderzo attained international fame as the cartoonist half of the team that produced one of the most successful comics characters of all time: Asterix the Gaul. Prior to drawing Asterix, however, Uderzo had spent some 15 years drawing other characters — most of whom are presented in this montage:


albert-uderzo-personnages-11


Wait a minute… up there in the right-hand corner…that blue-clad superhero looks suspiciously like an American character, Captain Marvel Jr., as published by Fawcett Comics in the U.S.A.


What gives?


It seems that in 1950, the Belgian comics weekly Bravo (fl.1936 — 1950) licensed Captain Marvel Jr. and decided to create its own stories:




The serial ran for sixteen issues and was seen no more. Here’s some of Uderzo’s original art:




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Young Albert Uderzo




Bravo was also responsible for another odd artistic pairing.


In 1942, Bravo was serialising the famed comic strip creation of Alex Raymond (1909–1956), Flash Gordon. Belgium was then under Nazi Germany’s occupation; so when Germany declared war on the United States in 1941, the supply of strips from the U.S.A. dried up completely. This was awkward, as Bravo was right in the middle of a storyline. So Bravo commissioned another artist to finish the story, and five final episodes were written and drawn — after which, the occupiers banned all American comics outright. A sample of this ersatz Flash:




Nazis and Fascists had an ambiguous relationship to American pop culture. On the one hand, they officially loathed it for its cosmopolitanism, its supposed degeneracy.


Typical is this German poster attacking degenerate (‘entartete) music, i.e. jazz; note the Star of David on the stereotyped Negro’s lapel:


entartete-musik-poster


And yet…the German army, the Wehrmacht, had its own official touring jazz bands! American pop culture continued to be prized, and the authorities had to make uneasy compromises.


For instance, Mussolini’s Fascist government once banned the Popeye comic strip. but the popular uproar of protestation was so intense that soon the adventures of “Braccio di Ferro” returned to Italian newspapers.


And Hitler’s favorite movie, reportedly, was Disney’s Snow White, of which he owned a personal print. Indeed, the popularity of Mickey Mouse and company was so great in Germany that Nazi propaganda circulated the  notion that Walt Disney wasn’t American, but Spanish!


To return to that faux Flash Gordon: the author? Edgar P. Jacobs (1904–1987).


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Edgar P. Jacobs




Jacobs was the creator of another tremendously successful and influential comic, after the war: Blake and Mortimer.




The blanket Nazi ban on American strips turned out to be a boon for Jacobs, as he was asked to replace Flash Gordon with an original science-fiction strip; the result was the highly imaginative Le Rayon U, a major step in his development as a cartoonist.






from ‘Le Rayon U’




Jacobs was also key in “re-looking” Tintin, the famed creation of George‘Hergé’ Remi (1907–1983) — and the war was largely responsible for that, as well.


One  effect on comics of the war was an acute paper shortage. Herge’s publisher, Casterman, informed him that it could no longer print his usual 100-plus page albums; henceforth they were to be limited to 62 story pages; to compensate, they would switch from black-and-white to color. This set a standard format for French and Belgian comics albums that endures until today.


Jacobs standardised the pastel color schemes typical of Tintin and other “clear line” comics; he also extensively redrew the older albums for the new format. His influence on the look of Tintin is second only to Hergé’s.


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Edgar P. Jacobs, Jacques van Melkebeke, and Hergé in 1944. Van Melkebeke was Herge’s editor during the Occupation, and served time for collaboration.




I hope to post on occasion other oddities of artist/subject matchups… and would be grateful for any suggestions!

					

		
		
	


				
					
	

		

						
Oddity: Neal Adams

			
						

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Neal Adams (1941–      ) is one of the most famous and influential superhero cartoonists of all time; it thus comes as no surprise that, in the 1975 celebratory compendium The Art of Neal Adams, the cover shows a face-off between the superheroes of Marvel Comics (left) and DC Comics (right)

 


art-of-neal-adams-1001


 

But who is that funny-animal in a cape playing the peacemaker between the two camps? Just a parody Adams dropped in to deflate the pretension of the set-up?


Not at all! That’s Atomic Mouse, a character created in 1953 by Al Fago (1904–1978)  for Charlton Comics. Adams drew a couple of stories for the feature– he has stated that it was his favorite ever strip to work on. Atomic Mouse returned on the cover of the second volume of The Art of Neal Adams, in 1978:

 


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Adams did humorous, funny animal and “big-foot” strips for several years; in fact, below is Adams’ first published comic book page:

 


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Adams also worked for Harvey Comics (Hot Stuff) and did long runs on DC’s licensed Jerry Lewis and Bob Hope books. In his Shop Talk with Will Eisner, Adams stressed the necessity of a ‘big-foot’ style of cartooniness as a foundation for realistic comics art. In fact, Adams never really was a realistic draftsman as were, say, Gray Morrow or Alex Raymond. As Bill Sienkiewicz put it, Adams would basically triple-light Charlie Brown; and as John Byrne said about Adams’ characters, “That’s the way people would look, if people looked that way.’


Adams’ characters are all overactors.


In the theatre, there’s a severe distinction between acting and signalling.


Signalling means communicating by conventional signals of gesture and poise. For instance, after a scene of being rejected for a job, a signaller will literally let his shoulders slump. To show anger, he’ll furrow his brow and draw down the corners of his mouth while clenching his fists. Joy: skipping and smiling. Grief: burying his face in his hands, wiping away a tear.


Adams’ characters are all signallers.


And that’s fine.


Let’s look at probably the most famous sequence Adams ever drew (script by Denny O’Neill):

 


green-lantern-076-008-708934


 

Panel 1 contrasts a realistic, old Black man (although we might be put off by his ‘shuffling’) with a hysterically over-tensed GL figure. The second panel also shouts ‘I’m doing realism!’ while affecting an extremely dramatic upward angle point of view. The third panel — a down shot for a ‘downer’ moment– shows Adams signalling as blatantly as any Vaudeville ham performer. GL slumps, stares down at the ground in shame…


But it all works. I think comics are more tolerant of overstatement than most other artforms. Whether this overstatement is necessary is another debate…cartoonists such as Adams, Jaime Hernandez, Robert Crumb or Jack Kirby navigate from the subtle to the blaring with a sure sense of what’s fitting.


When Adams turned his hand at overt, Mad-style cartooning his efforts seem a little too over-the-top, as in this TV parody (of McCloud) from Marvel’s Mad knock-off, Crazy — basically, he tries too hard:

 


crazy-mag2_0009


 


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Neal Adams in the ’70s


 

Much better were his relatively straight works for National Lampoon, such as Son O’ God or Dragula — the latter some sort of monument of homophobia in comics and comedy:

 




 

He is very much capable of satirising his better-known superhero style, as he did in this 1979 story published in the French humor weekly Fluide Glacial, over a script by Jacques Lob:


fluidglacial


A sample panel:


7175964


The story featured some mild nudity; Adams only seems to have once really gone soft-porn, in the 1975 underground comic Big Apple. Comics

 


mat_bigapple_img04


 

Neal Adams drew half the story, on the left-hand part of the pages, following the day of a fun-loving yuppie lady; the right-hand dealt with the grimmer day of a prostitute, and was drawn by Larry Hama and Ralph Reese.


I think this is the only published story featuring an Adams-drawn erect penis…

					

		
		
	


				
					
	

		

						
Steve Ditko Oddity

			
						

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gano022




The above bit of ribaldry may disconcert certain comics fans. Its style of drawing evokes that of Steve Ditko, the creator of Spider-Man and of Dr Strange — wholesome comic-book superheroes for kids. Is there a secret side of Sturdy Steve we don’t know about?


Yes and no.


Ditko attended the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, where he made friends with another budding cartoonist, Eric Stanton (1926– 1999). He and Ditko shared a studio on 8th Avenue from 1958 to 1966.

 


eric-stanton-in-studio2-gla


 

Stanton had a specialty, though — kinky sado-maso bondage comics– his “stantoons”. Legal dynamite in the ’50s, they look oddly innocent in our current  porn-saturated times.

 


ditko_pic_brettstaton


Steve Ditko, at the same period


 

The two cartoonists had superficially similar styles, and were given to helping each other out with deadlines. So the above strip has, at the least, Ditko inks in the equation; the next one seems to have been laid out by him, as well.

 




 

Ditko never made a secret of his association with Stanton. With his reputation as a stern moralist, though, he seems open to a charge of hypocrisy.


But Ditko is a conservative of the Libertarian kind, and as such would have a keep-the-damn-government-out-of-the-bedroom attitude.

 


confidential-tv2

 

As for Stanton’s assists to Ditko, it’s long been rumored that he’d contributed to the first Spider-Man story. Stanton  does claim to have come up with the idea of webs shooting from the character’s hands. When asked by Greg Theakston about the extent of his contribution to Spider-Man, Stanton replied:


“Almost nil…. I think I added the business about the webs coming out of his hands.” 


He elsewhere makes the intriguing claim, though, that he helped Ditko out with “storyboards”.


By that word, did he mean storyboards in the usual sense — for TV or movies? New York was, and remains, a major center for the audiovisual industry, and certainly many cartoonists based in the area, such as Lou Fine and Bill Everett, produced storyboards for TV advertising. Ditko and Stanton might well have done a job or two for the screen.


Or did he use the term “storyboards” to mean comic book layouts? Ditko, at the time, was an astonishingly productive artist, not just for Marvel but also for Charlton and Warren comics. And he certainly wasn’t averse to artistic collaboration: he was sometimes inked by Dick Ayers or Mike Esposito, among others, and he himself often inked Jack Kirby ( a wonderfully quirky pairing.)


Here’s a casual claim by Stanton that seems plausible, in connection with a bondage comic:


“I made ‘Sweeter Gwen’ from John Willie’s ‘Gwendoline.’ I roughed out (penciled) 30 pages and took them over to Burtman and he said ‘great … but then I got another commission and I had to stop on ‘Sweeter Gwen.’ I asked Steve Ditko to ink it for me and we’d split the money 50% / 50%. So then we story boarded like we used to do for Spider-Man. We gave ideas to each other. We came up with a very beautiful story and we finished it and took it over….”


We’ll never know for sure. Stanton is dead, and Ditko is famously adamant in refusing to speak about his career.

 


kinky-hook-use4


 

Why did the pair break up? According to Stanton’s daughter Amber, her father announced to Ditko he was getting married. Ditko took this as a betrayal of Stanton’s principles… and the partnership, and friendship, were over.


One last sample, and you be the judge: how much is Stanton’s, and how much — if any– is Ditko’s?

 




 

(Nota Bene: the comics in this post were researched for reasons of scholarship ONLY.)


stantditko097

					

		
		
	


				
					
	

		

						
Peanuts Oddity

			
						

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The most popular, and arguably the best-beloved comic strip in American history is  Peanuts, by Charles M. Schulz (1922 — 2000). Above is a sample of his charming artwork for the strip…


NOT!


 


Notice the signature in the last panel? Who is this guy Plastino?


It’s Al Plastino (1921–  ), a cartoonist best known as a superhero illustrator for DC Comics characters such as Superman, Supergirl (whose debut he drew) andSuperboy:






Art by Al Plastino


 


shapeimage_2


At right, Al Plastino draws Superman. In the center is Joe Simon, while at right Bill Vigoda draws Archie. Photo taken at New York’s Armory in 1949




Where on Earth did this strip come from? Schulz was famously individualistic about his strip, never so much as employing assistants to ink or letter. And why choose a superhero artist like Plastino?


There are two explanations put forth.


One concerns tense 1977 contract negotiations between Schulz and his distributor to the newspapers, United Features Syndicate. Schulz wanted a bigger share of ownership. UFS was afraid he would leave the strip. In this scenario, Plastino was commissioned to take over Peanuts if Schulz walked, and a reserve of strips was built up. However, when negotiations finally worked out to Schulz’s satisfaction, Plastino’s efforts were shelved.


Plastino wasn’t as absurd a choice as might seem. He had considerable experience in comedy strips and in ghosting other cartoonists’ styles, most notably with his 19 years (1970 — 1989) on Ferd’nand:






Art by Al Plastino




The other scenario was advanced by Plastino himself. He claims the syndicate commissioned the strips in 1983, when Schulz underwent heart surgery,  in case Schulz were incapacitated. But the replacement strips were never needed.


Whichever theory is correct, it’s agreed that the hiring of Plastino was kept secret from Schulz; when he learned the facts years later, he wasn’t happy. The Plastino strips were destroyed.


One more look at the Peanuts that never was:




Art by Al Plastino


 

Plastino has been out of comic books for forty years now; comic book fans, rather unfairly, mainly remember him as one of the infamous retouchers of Jack Kirby’s faces for Superman in Kirby’s 1970 run on Jimmy Olsen as seen below:


SupersJO133pg19_sml


Pencils by Jack Kirby; Superman redrawn by Al Plastino; background figure inked by Vince Colletta


 

This is a pity; yet Plastino, excellent craftsman though he be, left behind no distinctive body of work. He was a chameleon.


droppedImage


Al Plastino in 2007


 

Update: In comments, Gary Groth explains the story behind the Plastino cartoons.

					

		
		
	


				
					
	

		

						
Car-TOON cha cha cha

			
						

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This is part of a series on people who, renowned for other accomplishments, have also been cartoonists– some professional, some amateur


xaviercugat


Francisco de Asis Javier Cugat Mingall de Brue y Deulofeo (1900–1990), better known by his stage name Xavier Cugat, was the prime big-band maestro of Latin American music: rumba, mambo, cha-cha.


He was also a professional cartoonist and illustrator all his life.






Cugat and his band at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria hotel. One of his trademarks was conducting while holding a Chihuahua dog.




Born in Catalonia, Spain, Cugat moved with his family to Havana, Cuba, when he was three. A trained violinist and arranger, he packed up and moved to Los Angeles, where he worked as a cartoonist for the Los Angeles Times newspaper during the day and played in  a band at night.


This is a neat reversal of the usual situation of an artist working a day job and cartooning in his free time.






Greta Garbo




After a few years of playing smaller clubs in the Los Angeles area, Cugat  got his big break when he and his band played the prestigious Coconut Grove nightclub in 1928. His style of music caught on; in the ’30s and ’40s he was nicknamed “The Rumba King” because of his popularization of that dance.


But despite all his success in concerts, records, radio, movies and (later) television, Cugat never quit drawing, providing humorous covers for several of his own record albums, publishing collections of his star caricatures and even producing an illustrated curtain for Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.


His caricatures are spare and assured, reminiscent of those of Al Hirschfeld. Below are some radio comedians:






An album cover:




A painting done for his personal pleasure:




Finally, a self-portrait:




In previous installments of this series on part-time cartoonists (with more to follow), we saw a talented amateur in Enrico Caruso, and a skilled dilettante in G.K.Chesterton.


Cugat stands out because he remained a professional cartoonist all his life, taking his graphic work as seriously as his music.


For which I tip my hat…and dance a few steps…cha-cha-cha !

					

		
		
	


				
					
	

		

						
“The human race, to which so many of my readers belong…”

			
						

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Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) was one of those prodigious artistic polymaths the last two centuries brought forth. He was the author of 80 books, 200 short stories, over 4000 essays, and several plays; today he is chiefly remembered for his ‘Father Brown’ stories, still widely considered to be some of the greatest detective tales of all time, and his Christian apologetics; his novel The man who was Thursday is a masterpiece of fantasy, hailed by writers ranging from Jorge Luis Borges to Neil Gaiman.






G.K.Chesterton




However, his original training was as an artist, at London’s prestigious Slade school; and though he shifted his ambition to writing, Chesterton continued to produce drawings for the rest of his life.


Chesterton was a large, imposing figure in his great overcoat and  floppy hat, a favorite target of caricaturists — the latter  including himself, as the next four drawings show:










His sense of humor often tended to the macabre:




Others also felt his satirical lash, for instance his ideological foe and personal friend George Bernard Shaw:




Where Chesterton was famously portly, Shaw was all but skeletal; which explains this exchange between these two sharp wits:


Chesterton: “To see you, one would think there were a famine in the land.”


Shaw: “And to see you, one would know who caused it.”


His personal drawings show a like playfulness:






“Catching a Train”








“Enraged Gentleman and His Victim”




Chesterton also illustrated the work of others. Below are three illustrations forBiography for Beginners, the 1905 collection of biographical quatrains — or clerihews — by Edmund Clerihew Bently.




The Art of Biography

 Is different from Geography.

 Geography is about Maps,

 But Biography is about Chaps




Sir Humphrey Davy

 Abominated gravy.

 He lived in the odium

 Of having discovered sodium




What I like about Clive

 Is that he is no longer alive.

 There is a great deal to be said

 For being dead.




The people of Spain think Cervantes

 Equal to half-a-dozen Dantes;

 An opinion resented most bitterly

 By the people of Italy




Chesterton extensively illustrated- in color- a collection of whimsical fables and tales, The Colored Lands.








The wit and whimsy of Chesterton’s writing — as evinced by this article’s title, taken from the opening line of The Napoleon of Notting Hill– is neatly echoed in these entertaining illustrations: he thus earns the title of cartoonist!