Power Records Presents

Posted on December 18, 2014 by Brian Cremins

I first posted this essay on my blog early in 2013, not long after I’d seen Baz Luhrmann’s version of The Great Gatsby. This year I wrote about the Power Records sets again for the zine Towards a Poetics of Man-Bat and for The Los Angeles Review of Books, so I thought it would be fun to revisit this older post. Happy holidays.
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My first exposure to literature—to the “great books” I was asked to study in high school, college, and then in graduate school—came in the form of the book and record sets issued by Power Records in the 1970s.

The cover of Power Records Book and Record Set #12 (dated 1974), adapted from issue #168 of Captain America and the Falcon (Marvel Comics, December 1973), with a cover by Sal Buscema (pencils), John Verpoorten (inks), and John Costanza (letters).

One of my favorites was #14, an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein written by Gary Friedrich and drawn by Mike Ploog for Marvel Comics. Their comic book version of Shelley’s novel originally appeared in the first few issues of The Monster of Frankenstein, edited by Roy Thomas. Issue #1 has a cover date of January 1973. I was born in late November of 1973.

Issue #1 of The Monster of Frankenstein (Marvel Comics, dated January, 1973). Cover by Mike Ploog.

“It’s fun to read as you hear!” proclaims the copy on the cover of The Monster of Frankenstein, which included a 45 rpm record. At the end of each right-hand page the record would beep, a signal to turn the page to read the next panel. Each set, I realize now, was a radio play. By the late 1970s, radio dramas were already a relic of the 1930s and 1940s, a form of entertainment that had barely survived the 1950s as television took hold as the means of mass communication.

The 45 from my copy of Captain America and the Falcon.

The cover of The Monster of Frankenstein #1 is almost identical to the cover of the Power Records edition of the comic. Both promise a story of “The Most Famous, Most Fearsome Monster of All!” And, as drawn by Mike Ploog, Frankenstein’s creature is a hulking, ferocious presence: his enormous, cinderblock hands reach for his creator. The leather straps that held the creature to the dissection table fail to restrain him. A forlorn skeleton appears in the right-hand corner of the image, waiting for the inevitable struggle between the monster and his creator.

Mike Ploog’s granite-colored antihero is not the John Milton-reading, delicate, misunderstood romantic of Shelley’s text. In a famous sequence from Vol. II, Chapter 6 of Shelley’s novel, the creature stumbles across “a leathern portmanteau” that contains “several articles of dress and some books.” These books include Milton’s Paradise Lost, Plutarch’s Lives, and Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. In reading these books, Shelley suggests, the monster also learns what it is to be human:

The possession of these treasures gave me extreme delight; I could continually study and exercise my mind upon these histories when my friends were employed in their ordinary occupations. I can hardly describe to you the effect of these books. They produced in me an infinity of new images and ideas that sometimes raised me to ecstasy but more frequently sunk me to the lowest dejection.

When it came time in high school for me to read Frankenstein, I knew what I’d be studying. Friedrich and Ploog’s adaptation, despite the superheroic imagery and action familiar to readers of other Marvel Comics from the 1970s, is generally faithful to the novel.

I think this first exposure to literature in comics form shaped my expectations of the other classic novels assigned in middle school and in high school. I resisted The Catcher in the Rye and The Great Gatsby. My father insisted I would enjoy Salinger’s novel if I gave it a chance, but when I asked him to describe it to me, he could not remember the plot.

Most of the novels my middle school teachers recommended were about dogs—White Fang, The Call of the Wild. The Catcher in the Rye, I reasoned, must be about a dog.

Years before I read the novel, I imagined it: a young boy adopts a beautiful, spirited, bright-eyed retriever. They have adventures together. They follow the course of a major American river. They probably hop a train. Or they hitchhike. Later in the novel, the boy and the dog lose each other in a field of corn that sways in bright, clean, Midwestern sunlight. The sky is blue and cloudless as the boy observes his dog walking the field’s perimeter.

I don’t know, I told my dad. I don’t think I want to read about a dog. They always die at the end. Or they get eaten by something.

And, anyway, my family always had cats, not dogs.

The Catcher in the Rye’s oxblood cover was no help. It was blank except for the title and the name of the author. I took this as further proof that Salinger had written a kind of sequel to Old Yeller.

A few years later, I looked forward to reading The Great Gatsby, a novel about a famous escape artist and magician. To conceal his identity, the hero wears a mask and never speaks about his experiences in World War I. The first fifty pages of the novel describe his relationship with Houdini and with Walter Gibson, a pulp writer best known for his work on The Shadow in the 1930s and the 1940s. The Great Gatsby must be some distant relative of Doc Savage, I thought, except Fitzgerald’s hero probably falls in love and, as a consequence, loses his magic powers. He fights off a pack of dogs at the end. There’s always a dog. Also, he wears a gold mask and dresses in purple.

I still cherish my expectations of The Catcher in the Rye and The Great Gatsby. What I imagined each novel would be is still more compelling for me than the stories they tell. Some part of my imagination will always insist that The Catcher in the Rye is about a dog and that The Great Gatsby is about a spectacular, handsome, world-weary aviator and magician, sort of like this:

A June, 1972 paperback reprinting of the 1939 debut of pulp hero The Avenger written by Paul Ernst under the Street & Smith house name Kenneth Robeson. Author Lester Dent wrote the popular adventures of Doc Savage under the same pen name.

A friend asked me if Allison and I enjoyed Baz Luhrmann’s recent big-budget adaptation of Fitzgerald’s novel. Yes, I said, but I couldn’t bring myself to admit my disappointment that Luhrmann neglected to include the scene in which Gatsby, having failed to win Daisy’s love, dons his cloak of invisibility and vanishes, only to wash up a few days later on the shore of a volcanic island where he and his agents continue their war against various international crime syndicates.

“Like Comics Without Panels”

Posted on October 16, 2014 by Brian Cremins

“How are you with math?”

“What kind of math?”

“Math math. Numbers.”

I have a standard response to this question: “I haven’t taken a math course since the original line-up of Guns N’ Roses was together.”

“How about a level?”

“No idea what you’re talking about right now.”

When I began work with my colleague Jason Peot on the comics gallery show that opened at Harper College this week, I had no idea I’d have to employ my rusty math skills. The show features beautiful work from John Porcellino, Marnie Galloway, and Edie Fake. Friends have asked me about my first experience as a co-curator. How do I feel about original comic book pages hanging from the white walls of a small gallery? How did Jason and I select the pieces? What are we trying to say about the relationship between comic book narratives and the fine arts? I find myself wanting to talk instead about dusting frames, centering images, and learning about Plexiglas and L-shaped nails. I even got to sandpaper the edges of the plex we used to cover pages from John and Marnie’s books. Actually, I’m pretty happy with myself right now for using the word plex in that last sentence.

The cover of the program booklet for our show.

I’ll admit that I’m hesitant to call myself a co-curator. A couple of years ago, my writing students and I attended a lecture by two fairly well-known rock critics. One of them kept talking about “the curated experience.” The critic, he explained, is like a guide in a museum. Don’t we all look for a “curated experience” to know what’s good and what’s bad, especially in the arts? (I guess? Maybe? I don’t know.) He then asked the students in the audience how many of them liked the new Radiohead album. A room of vacant, late adolescent stares. “None of you listen to Radiohead?” Later that morning, one of my students confided in me: “Radiohead is music for old people.” I think she meant me, and she was right (right about the oldness but not about my favorite bands. I’ve never been much of a Radiohead fan. Or Wilco or Tom Waits or any of the music I’m supposed to like. I do enjoy the Radiohead song about the fishes, though). The phrase curated experience brought back a memory: my sister as a kid touching a Warhol on the wall of the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven. The guard yelled at her. She withdrew her hand but she continued to stare at the painting. That image of her is fixed. In fact, it’s more durable than my memory of the Warhol. A brief gesture, a touch. I wondered if Jason and I might provide that moment of wonder for our students.

Our idea for the show is driven by two ideas Edie Fake has expressed in recent interviews. The title of the show comes from a conversation with Megan Milks published in Mildred Pierce in 2011, not long after Secret Acres released the complete Gaylord Phoenix. “I think I’m interested in space without panels, I guess, or things that are like comics without panels,” he explains. “I hardly use a space break on my pages. Things just kind of move from one thing to the next” (Milks 6). I picked up Issue #5 of Gaylord Phoenix at Quimby’s in 2010 because of the cover. The blue clouds and flowers reminded me of a still from a Jack Smith film. I carried Issue 5 in my messenger bag for the next several weeks. It was as magic and dear to me as that phantom memory of my sister and the Warhol. I wanted to live in the spaces inhabited by the book’s protagonist. If I carried it with me long enough, I thought, maybe the Court of the Gaylord would manifest itself, as lovely and ornate as it appears in the book itself. I also loved the colors, gold and orange and black and red.

“Space without panels.” It could be a line in a poem, a note jotted in the margins of a commonplace book, or one of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies.

The cover of Gaylord Phoenix Issue 5 (2010).

The second quotation that shaped our vision of the show is from another interview, this time from early last year. Edie’s show Memory Palaces, now also a book from Secret Acres, debuted at the Thomas Robertello Gallery here in Chicago last winter. In April 2013, Edie spoke with Thea Liberty Nichols about the show and about his artistic practice:

For as long as I’ve been an artist, I have felt part of communities where bartering and collaborating are critical parts of growth. Cross-pollinating is how ideas get spread and get expanded upon. Sharing what we can is how we help each other thrive on this messed up planet.

When Maryellen in our marketing office at school was editing the gallery program, she asked me for a quotation to introduce my essay, so I sent her a few choices. We both liked this one best. The community described here, the one Edie also talked about on the closing night of Memory Palaces when he discussed the influence of Samuel R. Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue on his art, is the community we’ve tried to imagine and celebrate in our gallery. A space of welcome, maybe a space of return. Always one of possibility and of love.

Before these possibilities could take shape, however, and before we could frame and hang each of these drawings, I had to bring a change of clothes. I started teaching when I was in my early 20s as a grad student at the University of Connecticut. I learned quick that to earn the respect of my students, especially the ones older than me, I’d have to dress up. This was ok. I’d gone to Catholic school for twelve years, kindergarten through college, so I was used to wearing a shirt and tie (my first day of college, I didn’t know what to wear. I felt overwhelmed. I decided to dress like one of The Replacements on the cover of Let It Be from 1984. Chuck Taylors and flannel. Cheap and simple). But, as I cleaned the frames for Marnie’s pages from In the Sounds and Seas, Volume I, I realized I’d made a mistake. My tie was getting in the way. I had plexi dust all over the place. I looked like an accountant or maybe (if I was lucky) somebody’s tour manager. The next day, I looked like Tommy Stinson (only not as cool, and only after I’d finished teaching my classes).

Two pages from Marnie Galloway’s In the Sounds and Seas, printed on large sheets of fabric (please note: hammer not included).

That was the day Jason figured out a system to frame and hang most of the loose pages, including selections from King-Cat Comics and Stories No. 73. I finally admitted the truth: “I’m not good at math.” He measured and leveled each image with meticulous care. We drilled pilot holes, a few of which were too wide for the thin, delicate L-nails that hold each piece of Plexiglas, each drawing, and each backing board to the wall. We had some wire left over from one of the frames. Maybe we could use that, wrap the nails in it? That would might give the nails some friction, Jason said. It worked.

Now John’s and Marnie’s images appear to float behind the clear, custom-cut pieces of clear plastic. Lights from the ceiling cast faint shadows.

A pedestal in the center of the gallery is covered with copies of Memory Palaces, In the Sounds and Seas, King-Cat. Leaf through the pages, read a few stories, but please return the books to the pedestal so other visitors can read them, too.

When I was in grade school my mom took a few art classes at Naugatuck Valley Community College in Waterbury, Connecticut, just a few miles from our house in Oakville. I’d sit and watch her draw still-lifes and perspective studies. I especially liked her portraits, drawn with Berol Turquoise HB pencils, each one so precise and perfect that, the next time I looked in a mirror, I saw more clearly the shape of my face, my ears, my eyelashes, my nose, my mouth. Maybe it was that sense of touch again—the feel of the sketchbook’s white pages covered in pencil and eraser shavings. These memories, like the one of my sister, flooded back as Jason and I hung the final set of drawings last Thursday.

On one wall of our show, you’ll see Edie’s original illustrations for Wallace Stevens’s poem “Floral Decorations for Bananas,” from the “Illustrated Wallace Stevens” roundtable right here at The Hooded Utilitarian, July 26, 2011. This series of drawings was also published as a zine in 2011.

And here’s the best part: for the next few weeks, when the gallery first opens in the morning, and before most of our students and other faculty have arrived at school (I commute from Chicago, so I’m on the road and in my office by 6 am to beat the traffic), I get to spend a little time with these precious and fragile works of art. If you find yourself in the northwest suburbs of Chicago in the new few weeks, look me up and I’ll give you a tour. But I don’t promise that I’m any better at math than I was two weeks ago.

Like Comics Without Panels: The Visionary Cartooning of John Porcellino, Marnie Galloway, and Edie Fake runs from now until November 13, 2014 in the Harper College Art Exhibition Space. Harper College is in Palatine, Illinois, just northwest of Chicago. All three artists will join Jason Peot and me for a Q&A on Thursday, October 30 from 12:30 until 2:00 pm. Contact me or visit this link for more details. The Q&A is free and open to the public. If you can’t make it to the show, email me and I’ll send you the program which includes images from the gallery and a short essay.

Another photo from the gallery: selections from Galloway’s In the Sounds and Seas, Volume I and Edie Fake’s “Stay Dead” (2007)

Work Cited: Milks, Megan. “Edie Fake’s Radical Bloodlust: The Comics Artist on Gaylord Phoenix, Queer Cartography, etc.” Mildred Pierce Issue 4 (February 2011): 6-10. Print.

Thanks to Allison for suggesting a way to approach writing about the gallery. Also, part of this post was inspired by Marnie Galloway’s fabulous essay on her dad. Read it here, and also pick up In the Sounds and Seas, Volume II, which was released last month.

Thierry Groentseen, densité, and Carol Swain’s Gast

Posted on September 4, 2014 by Brian Cremins

Carol Swain’s new graphic novel Gast (Fantagraphics, 2014)

After finishing Carol Swain’s Gast a few days ago, I found myself returning to Thierry Groensteen’s discussion of densité from Chapter 3 of Bande dessinée et narration (see pages 44 and 45 of the original French edition and page 44 of Comics and Narration, Ann Miller’s English translation). Gast, like Elisha Lim’s 100 Crushes (which I hope to write about soon), is a comic I’ve been enthusiastically recommending to friends. Swain tells the story of a young girl name Helen who, with the help of two dogs, a sheep, and a few birds, searches for clues about her neighbor Emrys and his sudden death.

I want to say very little about Helen and the small Welsh village where she and her family live. The mystery of Emrys’s life and death should reveal itself to the reader in the same slow, deliberate fashion that Helen comes to understand it. I’ll focus my attention instead on some of Swain’s page designs so as not to give away too much of the story. In Gast, the “density” of Swain’s compositions suggest the distance between Helen and Emyrs, a character who haunts the narrative. Like the protagonist of Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan or Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Helen has the impossible task of piecing together the fragments left behind by a man reluctant to tell his story. Swain conveys Helen’s joy and confusion in a series of regular, nine-panel grids. These repetitions convey the density, I think, of Helen’s curiosity and of Emrys’s loneliness. At times, in fact, it is not clear where one begins and the other ends—an important point to consider, especially for the reader, who, like Helen, is left to decide why Emrys took his own life.

In order to apply Groensteen’s idea of densité to Gast I am thinking phenomenologically. Doing so opens up a number of theoretical possibilities, especially if the densité Groensteen describes can be read as synonymous, for example, with the density philosopher George Yancy examines in his recent book Look, a White! First, let me quote from Ann Miller’s English translation of Bande dessinée et narration before I consider density in relation to Yancy’s discussion of race: “A further consideration for the critical appreciation of page layout needs to be introduced,” Groensteen explains.

This is density, alluded to above. By this I mean the variability in the number of panels that make up the page. It is obvious that a page composed of five panels will appear less dense (as potential reading matter) than a page that has three times as many. (Groensteen 44)

What role does density serve, then, for both the artist and for the reader? Later in the chapter, Groensteen argues that, in Chris Ware’s comics, these dense and complex page designs have an expressive purpose: “Symmetry, in particular,” Groensteen argues, “is used by Ware to heighten the legibility of the binary oppositions that structure the spatio-temporal development of the story, such as interior/exterior, past/present, or day/night. But when two large images mirror each other on facing pages,” Groensteen adds, “this can also signify other oppositions or correspondences” (49-50). The “binary oppositions” Groensteen discusses here are also present in Gast: male/female, old/young, urban/rural, animal/human. The use of words and pictures to convey meaning in comics also implies the phenomenological density of consciousness itself: the sudden awareness of the self in relation to the other.

In Chapter 1 of Look, a White!, Yancy argues that what he describes as “the lived density of race” (17) demands new forms of expression. Although he is writing here about philosophy, I am interested in how we might apply his ideas to the comics we create, read, and study:

To communicate an experience that is difficult to express, the very medium itself may need to change. On this score, perhaps philosophers need to write poetry or make films. When it comes to a deeper, thicker philosophical engagement with issues of race, the medium has to change to something dynamically expressive, something that forces the reader/listener to feel what is being communicated, to empathize with greater ability, to imagine with greater fullness and power. (Yancy 30)

Notice that in his second sentence Yancy refers to poetry and film, two forms with close ties to comics (see, for example, Hillary Chute’s recent essay from Poetry Magazine). How might a page filled with words and pictures, for example, enable “the reader/listener to feel” with greater intensity? For Yancy, of course, this affective experience must accompany or inspire real change. Feeling something is one thing. Acting on a feeling of identification requires radical selflessness and love.

Page 127 of Gast

For Helen, the gradual shift from theory—her curiosity about Emrys’s life and death—to praxis takes shape on page 127, where she finds one of her neighbor’s books. In the first panel, we see a copy of Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage. The book is fragile. In the second panel, she tears the illustrated cover from its binding. “This book belongs to Emrys Bowen,” reads a note written on the back of the cover. In the fourth panel, she tucks that slip of paper beneath her arm, and holds the book in her hand in panel #5. She runs her fingers across the pages. Bits of paper fall like leaves.

Like Gatsby’s worn edition of Hopalong Cassidy in the final pages of Fitzgerald’s novel, Emrys’s copy of Riders of the Purple Sage reveals, perhaps, the dream image he cherished of himself. But, then again, no—as Helen tosses the book aside in the next panel, she implies that Emrys refused to play the role of the rugged cowboy. She conceals the torn cover in her bag.

Swain implies that, as readers, we would be wise to be suspicious of allusions. This sudden reference to another text cannot convey the full complexity of Emrys’s consciousness. As I read Gast, I thought of another writer who spent his career recording the silences of rural spaces. Most of the late John McGahern’s novels are set in Country Leitrim in northwest Ireland, not far from Yeats’s home of Sligo. In the introduction to his 1974 novel The Leavetaking, McGahern, who revised the novel in 1984, discusses the challenges of writing both self and other. “The Leavetaking was written as a love story,” McGahern explains,

its two parts deliberately different in style. It was an attempt to reflect the purity of feeling with which all the remembered “I” comes to us, the banal and the precious alike; and yet how that more than “I”—the beloved, the “otherest,” the most trusted moments of that life—stumbles continually away from us as poor reportage, and to see if these disparates could in any way be made true to one another. (McGahern 5)

Like Yancy, McGahern suggests other terms we might use to describe the density of experience expressed on page 127 of Gast: where do the “I” and “the ‘otherest’” meet?

As I study the last three panels on page 127, I find myself wishing I could retrieve Emrys’s copy of Riders of the Purple Sage. What if we missed something? What if the book contains the key to understanding Emrys? But the grid prevents me from turning back. I must follow Helen as she walks to Emrys’s house, just as I must follow McGahern’s narrator as he moves from rural Ireland to Dublin to London and back again (as I try to disentangle the real from the imagined in McGahern’s autobiographical fiction, most of which takes place in the same region of Ireland where my paternal grandmother, Mary Anne Bohan, was born in 1910).

Both McGahern and Swain tell their stories with clarity and compassion. Swain’s use of the grid, I think, is a reminder of the inevitable barriers between the subject and the object being observed. These barriers, like the borders that separate one panel from the next, suggest that densité is both an aesthetic choice and a phenomenological imperative: the storyteller and the reader must take into account what McGahern calls “the banal and the precious alike” in order to make less terrifying the space between the “I” and “the ‘otherest.'”

Can we read Groensteen’s densité, then, as a synonym for the density that Yancy describes? Can you think of other page designs that seek to express the phenomenology of the self? Do comics provide a means of eliminating the distance between the two?

References

Groensteen, Thierry. Bande dessinée et narration: Système de la bande dessinée 2. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2011. Print.

Groensteen, Thierry. Comics and Narration. Trans. Ann Miller. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2013. Print.

McGahern, John. The Leavetaking. London: Faber and Faber, 1984. Print.

Swain, Carol. Gast. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2014. Print.

Yancy, George. Look, a White! Philosophical Essays on Whiteness. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012. Print.

This is a cross-post from my blog. Thanks to Qiana and Adrielle for inviting me! Thanks also to my dad’s cousin Oliver Gilhooley of Mohill, Co. Leitrim, for taking us to the John McGahern Library at Lough Rynn Castle in the summer of 2012. Oliver, a great storyteller himself, also gave us a suggested reading list of McGahern’s fiction.

The McGahern Library at Lough Rynn. Photo courtesy of Allison Felus.

Charles Johnson’s “It’s life as I see it” and Single Panel Cartoons

Posted on July 31, 2014 by Brian Cremins

The cover of Johnson’s 1970 collection.

Note: This essay on Charles Johnson’s Black Humor is a cross-post from my blog. It’s also a preview of a roundtable on Thierry Groensteen’s Comics and Narration that will begin here at Pencil, Panel, Page in a few weeks.

Early in Chapter Two of Comics and Narration, theorist Thierry Groensteen extends some of the questions he first posed in The System of Comics, also available in an English translation from the UP of Mississippi. “Can an isolated image narrate?” he asks. “Can it, on its own, tell a story?” (Groensteen 21). I’d like to consider this question in relation to “It’s life as I see it” from Charles Johnson’s 1970 collection Black Humor. Groensteen borrows some ideas from film theory in order to explore the narrative potential of single, static images: “Some film theorists,” he points out,

most notably André Guadreault, have asserted that an intrinsic narrativity is associated with movement, because it implies a transformation of the elements represented. Obviously, the same cannot be said of the still image. Given that its narrative potential is not intrinsic, it can only arise, where it does arise, out of certain internal relationships between objects, motifs, and characters represented. (Groensteen 21-22; English translation by Ann Miller)

With Groensteen in mind, I’d like to consider the “internal relationships” of the “objects, motifs, and characters” in this single-page cartoon, in which an African American artist explains his work to an older, white visitor. As I took notes on Johnson’s work, I thought again about Qiana’s “What is an African American Comic?” from earlier this year on Pencil, Panel, Page. I am thinking about how theories from African American literary theory and philosophy might inform our readings of comic strips, comic books, and graphic novels. But I also have larger questions in mind—what secrets will Johnson’s cartoon reveal when also read as part of the tradition of American literary discourse? What affinities might we discover, for example, if we juxtapose Johnson’s “It’s life as I see it” with Phillis Wheatley’s poem about the work of artist Scipio Moorhead, for example?

Of course, by writing about Johnson’s cartoon, I’m cheating a little. Is this really a single-page comic? It might be read as a work containing at least three panels—the image itself, as well as the artist’s two paintings: the one hanging on the wall and the other work-in-progress on his easel. So I should revise what I asked earlier: how do we read a single panel or page like this one that includes other, smaller images embedded within a larger frame? Here is “It’s life as I see it” from Black Humor:

Johnson, as Tim Kreider points out in his 2010 TCJ essay on the artist, is best known as one of the most influential and visionary American novelists of the last thirty years. Middle Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is now a perennial text in 20th century American and African American literature courses—I’ll be teaching it again in one of my classes this fall—and Dreamer, his 1998 novel about Dr. Martin Luther King’s experiences in Chicago in 1966, is, like Edward P. Jones’s The Known World, one of the most complex and evocative historical novels of the last two decades.

Jill Krementz’s 1974 publicity photo of Johnson for the
writer’s first published novel, Faith and the Good Thing (Viking).

Writing about Johnson’s early work as a cartoonist, Kreider writes, is like trying “to give a magnanimous little career boost to a struggling unknown cartoonist named Wolfe or Fellini.” But as his introduction to Fredrik Strömberg’s 2003 book Black Images in the Comics makes clear, Charles Johnson has a deep affection for comic books and comic art. In the conclusion to his essay, Johnson includes a discussion of the kinds of comics he would like to read:

I long—as an American, a cartoonist, and a writer—for a day when my countrymen will accept and broadly support stories about black characters that are complex, original (not sepia clones of white characters like “Friday Foster” or “Powerman”), risk-taking, free of stereotypes, and not about race or victimization. Stories in which a character who just happens to be black is the emblematic, archetypal figure in which we—all of us—invest our dreams, imaginings and sense of adventure about the vast possibilities for what humans can be and do—just as we have done, or been culturally indoctrinated to do, with white characters ranging from Blondie to Charlie Brown, from Superman to Dilbert, from Popeye to Beetle Bailey. (Johnson 17)

Johnson’s argument here raises interesting questions about the page from his 1970 book. As readers, with whom do we identify? With the artist who shows his work or with the man who stares at the black canvas? Do we immediately identify with one or the other based on our race? What role does gender play? Do we identify with neither but find ourselves observing what Groensteen calls the “internal relationships” between these two men and the objects that surround them? I think an answer to these questions might lie in the juxtaposition of the artist’s two canvases. One is abstract. The other, the one on the easel, is the more realistic of the two, although it is less figurative than the one hanging on the wall. “It’s life as I see it,” the artist explains.

I find myself working in collaboration with Johnson as I read this page. First of all, where are we? This appears to be the artist’s studio. Is this a studio visit by a curator? By a patron? Why is the middle-aged, balding man so startled? Was he expecting something else? The artist’s other work appears more conventional—a variation on Pollock’s Abstract Expressionism. Now the artist is a minimalist. Then again, I don’t know if the painting on the easel is finished. Maybe it’s still in progress. The painter, after all, is holding a palette and brush and he is wearing a white smock.

The questions raised by Johnson’s cartoon are also present in Charles W. Mills’ “Non-Cartesian Sums: Philosophy and the African-American Experience,” the essay that opens his 1998 book Blackness Visible. In the essay, Mills describes the obstacles he faced as he designed a course on African-American philosophy. First, for example, he “had to work out what African-American philosophy really was, how it related to mainstream (Western? European/Euro-American? Dead White Guys’?) philosophy—where it challenged and contradicted it, where it supplemented it, and where it was in a theoretical space of its own” (Mills 1). Mills turned to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man as a guiding text. As he reflected on the experiences of Ellison’s narrator, Mills began to formulate a conceptual basis for his course:

African-American philosophy is thus inherently, definitionally oppositional, the philosophy produced by property that does not remain silent but insists on speaking and contesting its status. So it will be a sum that is metaphysical not in the Cartesian sense but in the sense of challenging social ontology; not the consequent of a proof but the beginning of an affirmation of one’s self-worth, one’s reality as a person, and one’s militant insistence that others recognize it also. (Mills 9)

In Johnson’s cartoon, the artist asserts his subjectivity. The painting, like the cartoon’s caption, is a simple statement of fact: life as he sees it. The painting breaks the silence that Mills refers to in this passage. The humor in this cartoon—the disconnect between what the man in the suit expects to see and what he finds on on the easel before him—is part of Johnson’s narrative, I think: a cartoon is a work of popular art that challenges our notions of fine art, just as the painter’s canvas challenges the observer’s narcissistic complacency.

This new painting, then, is like a course in African American philosophy, one that makes certain demands on the curriculum as it articulates “a (partially) internal critique of the dominant culture by those who accept many of the culture’s principles but are excluded by them. In large measure,” Mills continues, “this critique has involved telling white people things that they do not know and do not want to know, the main one being that this alternative (nonideal) universe is the actual one and that the local reality in which whites are at home is only a nonrepresentative part of the larger whole” (Mills 5-6). The subject of Johnson’s narrative is the dissonance between what the observer believes and what the artist knows to be true.

As I look at the cartoon, I also wonder if I might trace its origin to one of the earliest collaborations of words and pictures in American literature, that of Phillis Wheatley and artist Scipio Moorhead.

Wheatley’s poem about Moorhead’s work appears in her 1773 book Poems on Various Subjects, a text that includes an engraving based on Moorhead’s portrait of the poet (you can read more about Wheatley and Moorhead here and here). “To S.M. A Young Painter, On Seeing His Works” opens with a question as the speaker studies one of Moorhead’s paintings:

To show the lab’ring bosom’s deep intent,

And thought in living characters to paint,

When first they pencil did those beauties give,

And breathing figures learnt from thee to live,

How did those prospects give my soul delight,

A new creation rushing on my sight?

An important difference between Johnson’s cartoon painter and Moorhead, however, is that Moorhead’s work, with the exception of his portrait of Wheatley, has not survived. As we read this poem, we must imagine his drawing, the evidence of his “lab’ring bosom’s deep intent” which has brought life to these “characters” and “beauties.” After a detailed description of her response to Moorhead’s work, Wheatly concludes the poem with a plea:

Cease, gentle muse! the solemn gloom of night

Now seals the fair creation from my sight.

But while night and shadow might obscure Moorehead’s drawing, it remains vivid and startling in her memory. When I first saw Johnson’s cartoon, I immediately thought of Wheatley’s poem (and of Adrielle’s early Pencil, Panel, Page essay on comic scholarship and ekphrasis). At the end of the poem, as night falls, the speaker can no longer see Moorhead’s painting, so she does the next best thing: she writes it from memory and, therefore, gives her friend the lasting fame that Shakespeare’s speaker promises to his subject in the Sonnets. The poem, like Johnson’s panel, is filled with light and meaning that some observers, like the old man in the suit, might fail or refuse to see.

Johnson’s “It’s life as I see it” is an interesting test case for Groensteen’s theories, not only because it is a single image that narrates, but also because it is part of a collection of other cartoons. At the end of Chapter Two of Comics and Narration, Groensteen discusses Frans Masereel’s woodcut novels and Martin Vaughn-James’s The Cage (see Groensteen 35). These examples, of course, are not collections of single-page cartoons, but Groensteen’s suggestion on how we read and respond to these texts might shed light on how we read a collections like Black Humor. “In works of this type,” Groensteen explains, in which “there are never more than two images visible to the reader at any one time, split across two pages,” the reader’s imagination and memory play a crucial role: “The dialogue among the images depends on the persistence of the memory of the pages already turned” (Groensteen 35).

The next page in Johnson’s book, for example, shares affinities with “It’s life as I see it.” An older white gentleman and his wife listen to a Beethoven recital. The pianist, his hands perched dramatically over the keyboard, is about to begin. A gray-haired old man in the audience whispers, “Psst, he’s a mulatto…pass it on.”

The cartoon that appears on the page opposite
“It’s life as I see it” in Johnson’s Black Humor.

By placing these two cartoons together, Johnson, according to Greonsteen’s theory, is also challenging the reader—how does our reading of one page shape our understanding and recollection of the images on the pages that preceded it? Both of these cartoons invite us to consider two African American artists–a painter and a musician–and the white audience members who observe them.

But how do you read “It’s life as I see it”? Is it a single-panel cartoon , and, if so, what can it tell us about “the persistence of memory,” as Groensteen describes it?

References

Groensteen, Thierry. Comics and Narration. Trans. Ann Miller. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2013. Print.

Johnson, Charles R. Black Humor. Chicago: Johnson Publishing Company, Inc., 1970. Print.

Johnson, Charles. “Foreword” in Fredrik Strömberg, Black Images in the Comics: A Visual History. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2003. 5-18. Print.

Kreider, Tim. “Brighter in Hindsight: Black Humor by Charles R. Johnson.” The Comics Journal. January 18, 2010. 9:00 am. Web.

Mills, Charles W. Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998. Print.

Wheatley, Phillis. “To S.M. A Young African Painter, On Seeing His Works.” Poetry Foundation. Web.

Walt Kelly and Me

Posted on April 9, 2014 by Brian Cremins

“The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again. ‘The truth will not run away from us’: in the historical outlook of historicism these words of Gottfried Keller mark the exact point where historical materialism cuts through historicism. For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.”

–Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (English translation Harry Zohn; Illuminations p. 255)

Fig. 1: Clipping courtesy of the Bridgeport History Center at the Bridgeport, Connecticut Public Library

I wonder sometimes if I’m being followed. I can’t seem to escape from Walt Kelly. R. Fiore’s recent TCJ review of the new Hermes Press collection Walt Kelly’s Pogo: The Complete Dell Comics Volume 1, compels me once again to consider the cartoonist, who died in 1973 and lived his formative years in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The Park City is about thirty miles south of Oakville, my hometown, and Oakville is just outside of Waterbury, where the Eastern Color Printing Company began producing comic books in the 1930s. Of course, I’d heard of Kelly long before I’d read any of his work. He’s on a short list of Connecticut luminaries, along with Nathan Hale, Rosalind Russell, Paul Robeson, and Thurston Moore, but I didn’t read Kelly’s celebrated strip until I was in my mid-thirties. Several years ago, one of my students gave me copies of two of her late father’s beloved Pogo collections. I know you enjoy comics, she said, and you teach them, too, so I think you might like these: Pogo, the first Simon and Schuster collection from 1951, and The Pogo Papers, from 1953. Covers creased, paper tan and brittle, bindings cracked. Her dad, I know, loved these books, returned to them, left them behind for his daughter, for me. I thanked her for this kind gift, but even then, in the summer of 2007, I neglected them. A year later I was asked to contribute an essay to a collection on Southern comics and I remembered what my student had said: You might need these. I think that’s what she said. I’d like to think so, anyway.

I begin with what is probably more than you need to know about me and Walt Kelly because, like Fiore, I, too admire the artist, and, in the years since my student handed me her father’s Pogo books, I’ve written about his work twice: first, in an essay on Bumbazine for Brannon Costello and Qiana Whitted’s collection Comics and the U.S. South (UP of Mississippi, 2012) and again last year for a paper presented at the Festival of Cartoon Art at the Ohio State University’s Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum. In the first essay, which Tom Andrae cites in his introduction to the new Dell Comics collection, I discuss the two scenes Fiore addresses in his review— the watermelon panel from “Albert Takes the Cake” (Animal Comics #1, dated Dec. 1942-Jan. 1943) and the railroad sequence from “Albert the Alligator” (Animal Comics #5, dated Oct.-Nov. 1943). You can read that 2012 essay, “Bumbazine, Blackness, and the Myth of the Redemptive South in Walt Kelly’s Pogo” here or from your local library; the Google Books version does not include the illustrations.

Fiore takes issue with Andrae’s analysis of the black characters who appear in “Albert the Alligator.” While he begins with the suggestion that “Andrae is on firmer ground in denouncing the characterizations in the story from Animal Comics #5,” Fiore then asks that we consider other readings of the narrative:

Once again, however, [Andrae] is sloppy in characterizing [the characters] as “derisive minstrelsy stereotypes.” The conventions of the minstrel show were as formalized as the Harlequinade, and the characters in the story at hand don’t fit them. Further, I believe a more sophisticated and context-conscious reading would come to a different conclusion.

As I read these remarks, I began to wonder, what would a “context-conscious reading” of this sequence look like? And is Fiore correct? Would it reach a different conclusion than the one in Andrae’s introduction?

I attempted just that sort of contextual reading in my Bumbazine essay, in which I trace the impact not only of minstrelsy but also of the rhetoric of the South as redeemer, a concept Kelly inherited from the Southern Agrarians. But any reading that hopes to place Kelly in historical context must take into account the tensions and fractures that exist in his body of work. Kelly is a significant cartoonist not because he was more progressive than other artists working in the 1940s but because he records for us the contradictions in his own thinking and practice.

Fig. 2: Pogo takes on one of the Kluck Klams in a story from The Pogo Poop Book, 1966

Kelly, the child of working-class parents, a left-leaning, often progressive autodidact who, later in his career, would challenge Senator Joseph McCarthy, the Ku Klux Klan, and the John Birch Society, demands our attention because he forces us to ask another question: given his reputation as a cartoonist beloved by students and liberal intellectuals of the 1950s and early 1960s, how could he also have produced works such as “Albert the Alligator,” stories that clearly owe a debt to the conventions of the minstrel stage, and that traffic in derogatory stereotypes? To answer this question, I believe we need to understand Kelly’s nostalgia for his hometown of Bridgeport, Connecticut. One of the flaws in some of Kelly’s early work was his inability or unwillingness to interrogate the images and ideas he’d inherited from childhood artifacts such as, for example, Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories. As Andrae reminds us in the introduction to the Dell Comics collection, Kelly’s father enjoyed readings those stories to his son.

Fig. 3: Image of Bridgeport from Andrew Pehanick, Bridgeport 1900-1960, p. 124

What effect does nostalgia have on us, as writers, as artists, as critics—as fans? When I speak about Kelly, I find it difficult to separate my nostalgia for home from Kelly’s fondness for the Bridgeport of the late teens and 1920s. When I read Kelly now, I am reminded of my childhood in Connecticut, not because Kelly’s comics played any role in it, but because the setting he describes in his essays, for example—the industrial landscape of the Northeast—is also the world of my imagination. By the late 1970s and the early 1980s, however, the brass and munitions manufacturers that had attracted so many immigrants from Europe and migrants from the South were fading. The only traces that remained were signs with names like Anaconda American Brass on redbrick walls of abandoned factory buildings. And the stories, of course, of the men and women who, like Kelly’s father, like my grandparents and great grandparents, worked in those mills.

Fig. 4: My grandmother, Patricia Budris Stango, second from left, at work in 1941 at the United States Rubber Company, later called Uniroyal, in Naugatuck, Connecticut

As I argue in my essay on Bumbazine, Kelly did not write about the U.S. South. Rather, he told stories in a setting that, for all its southern trappings, looked and felt more like New England. The city of Bridgeport, Connecticut, was, in the early twentieth century, as Kelly describes it, “as new as a freshly minted dollar, but not quite as shiny. The East Bridgeport Development Company had rooted out trees and damned up streams, drained marshes, and otherwise destroyed the quiet life of buttercups and goldfinches in order to make a section where people like the Kellys could live.” In this essay from 1962, Kelly might be describing Pogo’s Okefenokee Swamp: “Surrounding us was a fairly rural and wooded piece of Connecticut filled with snakes, rabbits, frogs, rats, turtles, bugs, berries, ghosts, and legends” (Kelly, Five Boyhoods, 89).

Fig. 5: Clipping from the Bridgeport Post, January 14, 1951. Courtesy of the Bridgeport History Center.

Kelly scholars from Walter Ong to Betsy Curtis to R.C. Harvey to Kerry Soper and Tom Andrae have since the 1950s been looking closely at some of these legends. In his essay “The Comic Strip Pogo and the Issue of Race”—along with Soper’s We Go Pogo (UP of Mississippi, 2012), one of the best academic analyses we have of Kelly’s strip—scholar Eric Jarvis points out that Kelly often referred to “his elementary school principal in Bridgeport as a rather nostalgic model of how society should approach these issues with ‘gentility’” (Jarvis 85). Jarvis then includes passages from Kelly’s introduction to the 1959 collection Ten Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Years with Pogo in which the artist again remembers the Bridgeport of his childhood and that principal, Miss Blackham: “Somehow, by another sainted piece of wizardry, she sent us off to high school feeling neither superior nor inferior. We saw our first Negro children in class there, and believe it or not, none of us was impressed one way or another, which is as it should be. Jimmy Thomas became a good friend and the young lady was pretty enough to remember even today” (Kelly, Ten Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Years, 6).

As Kelly biographer Steve Thompson reminded us at the OSU conference, however, in other interviews Kelly describes the racism and ethnic tensions in the Bridgeport of the 1920s. So, like Jarvis, I am fascinated by the role nostalgia plays in Kelly’s art and in his essays because, after all, as Svetlana Boym reminds us, nostalgia is a utopian impulse, a desire not so much to recover the past as it was lived but to recall the life we wish we’d lived, in a world that never was. But, if it had existed, what would that world have looked like? “Nostlagia (from nostos—return home, and algia—longing),” Boym writes, “is a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. Nostalgia is a sense of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy” (Boym XIII).

When Brannon Costello asked if I’d contribute an essay to Comics and the U.S. South, I hesitated. My first thought was to write an article on Howard Cruse and Stuck Rubber Baby. Already taken, Brannon told me. Then I asked, What about Pogo? You can’t publish a book on comics and the South without Pogo. A friend later remarked, Why would you write about the South? You lived there for less than a year, and the whole time all you talked about was New England. That’s not exactly what she said. What she said was something closer to this: You hated it there. But, more recently, when I told my friend that I’ve now written two essays about Kelly and the South, she smiled and said, Of course. The more we resist something, the more we are drawn to it. The more I resisted Kelly’s comics, the more I found myself drawn to them and to the South and to the myths of Kelly’s youth—my youth—that I had ignored

So, in reading R. Fiore’s review of the new Pogo collection, I again find myself face to face with Walt Kelly. And I keep returning to Walt Kelly’s early comics not because they transcend discourses of race; rather, I return to them because they include these stock figures and because I believe these early stories, like my student’s gift, offer an opportunity to think and to reflect on how these discourses—how these racist stereotypes—have shaped my life, my thinking, my conduct in the world. I am writing about Kelly because, to borrow a phrase from Walt Whitman, he and I were “form’d from this soil, this air,” and I turn to him because he invites me to dig through that soil, to breath the air again, to remember.

Fig. 6: The final Pogo collection Kelly published in his lifetime (1972)

It is perhaps too easy to say that these early comics are a record of their time. They are, of course; they demand that we investigate and reconstruct the discourses of the era that produced them. But to deny the hurtful and derogatory nature of the images in Kelly’s early work, I believe, is also to deny his power as an artist. The images in these early issues of Animal Comics are ugly, but there is something in them that will not be ignored. In his mature work—read, for example, Ten Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Years with Pogo, or The Pogo Poop Book, or Kelly’s final collection, We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us—Kelly breaks with these conventions. And the image he leaves behind is this one: P.T. Bridgeport, the circus bear, the character who was, in many ways, the real soul of Pogo, now old, tired, but more real and true as he stares at his beloved swamp and sees not a pristine wilderness but a wasteland of junk. But even here we find a possibility of hope and renewal:

Fig. 7 and Fig. 8: From the last two pages of the title story of Kelly’s We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us (1972) (pages 41-42)

I started this post with a quotation from Walter Benjamin (translated into English by Harry Zohn) not for you but for me, as a way to remind myself of the value of interrogating images like the one of Pogo and Bumbazine sharing the slice of watermelon. If we fail to recognize images from the past as part of our “own concerns,” Benjamin argues, we run the risk of losing them, and their meaning, entirely. But here again I have left something out. Benjamin adds this final parenthetical statement to his fifth thesis: “(The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.)”

So, a paradox: we must look carefully, search for these “flashes,” but we also risk negating them and their meaning when we speak or write about them. But to remain in watchful silence offers no real alternative. We must speak of these things, although, as we do so, we are not speaking about the past, not really. We are instead addressing the pain of what it is to live here, now, with each other and with these discourses that continue to blind and disorient us.

Fig. 9: Two gifts.

References

Andrae, Thomas. “Pogo and the American South” in Walt Kelly, Walt Kelly’s Pogo: The Complete Dell Comics Volume 1. Neshannock: Hermes Press, 2014. Print.

Andrae, Thomas and Carsten Laqua. Walt Kelly: The Life and Art of the Creator of Pogo. Neshannock: Hermes Press, 2012. Print.

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Shocken Books, 1968. Print.

Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Print.

Curtis, Betsy. “Nibble, a Walt Kelly Mouse” in The Golden Age of Comics. No. 1 (December 1982). 30-70. Print.

Fiore, R. “Sometimes a Watermelon Is Just a Watermelon.” The Comics Journal. April 3, 2014. Web Link.

Jarvis, Eric. “The Comic Strip Pogo and the Issue of Race.” Studies in American Culture. XXI:2 (1998): 85-94. Print.

Kelly, Walt. The Pogo Poop Book. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966. Print.

Kelly, Walt. Ten Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Years with Pogo. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959. Print.

—. “1920’s.” Five Boyhoods. Ed. Martin Levin. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1962. 79-116. Print.

Pehanick, Andrew. Bridgeport 1900-1960. Charleston: Arcadia Publishing, 2009. Print.

Soper, Kerry D. We Go Pogo: Walt Kelly, Politics, and American Satire. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2012. Print.

Thanks to Mary Witkowski and Robert Jefferies at the Bridgeport History Center for their assistance in locating materials included here from the Center’s Walt Kelly clipping file. Also, I talk a little more about the Walt Kelly panel a November’s OSU conference here.

Is Otto Binder and Joe Orlando’s “I, Robot” a Protest Novel?

Posted on January 2, 2014 by Brian Cremins

The cover of the 1965 Paperback Library novel Adam Link—Robot,
which collects Otto Binder’s Adam Link stories from the late 1930s and 1940s.

As I watched and enjoyed the new Spike Jonze science fiction film Her, I began to wonder, What would Otto Binder think of this? Although best known to comic book readers and scholars as the writer of Captain Marvel and Superman, Binder began his career as a science fiction writer, first in collaboration with his older brother Earl. The pair began publishing under the pen name Eando Binder (Earl and Otto) in the early 1930s. By the time “I, Robot,” the first in a popular series of adventures featuring the artificial man Adam Link, appeared in the January 1939 issue of Amazing Stories, Otto was writing on his own, but retained the Eando Binder byline.

In science fiction circles, Otto Binder’s best-known work remains the Adam Link series, which served as the inspiration for Isaac Asimov and for countless other writers exploring the idea of artificial intelligence. Over the course of his comic book career, Binder adapted some of the Adam Link stories for EC Comics in the 1950s and again for Warren Publishing’s Creepy in the 1960s. When Qiana invited me to contribute another guest post for Pencil Panel Page, I began to think again about her December 2011 essay “Can an EC Comic Make ‘You’ Black?” and what it might tell us about Otto Binder and Joe Orlando’s adaptation of “I, Robot” from Weird Science-Fantasy Number 27 (dated Jan.-Feb. 1955). In the EC version of “I, Robot,” Binder’s use of the second-person you places the reader in a complex position: as we read the story, do we identify with the hero, Adam Link, or with the violent mob threatening to destroy him?

The first page of Otto Binder and Joe Orlando’s adaptation
of “I, Robot” for EC’s Weird Science-Fantasy Number 27 (Jan.-Feb. 1955). Colors by Marie Severin.

In a letter to science fiction fan and editor Sam Moskowitz dated October 4, 1952, Binder discusses the scripts he’s been producing for EC Comics. He explains that he’s “gotten into the groove on thinking of [science fiction] plots for them, even if they are more simplified and corny than what would go into a pulp.” Binder then appears to reconsider his summary of EC’s science fiction and fantasy comics and adds the following parenthetical comment:

(But a suggestion….pick up a copy of WEIRD FANTASY or WEIRD SCIENCE comics sometime and read them….the comics are not too far behind the pulps in well-plotted stories, believe it or not!)

In the early 1950s, after over a decade as a prolific comic book scripter, Binder was hoping to return to the science fiction market and was looking to Moskowitz, to whom he later left the bulk of his personal and professional correspondence, for advice and support. As Bill Schelly notes in his excellent biography Words of Wonder: The Life and Times of Otto Binder, the writer had to make some adjustments to his style when he began working for EC: “Binder’s job, as he saw it, was to emulate the writing style of Al Feldstein, who always put lots of lengthy captions into the scripts. This wasn’t Binder’s normal inclination, but he did his best.” As a freelance writer, Binder survived by adapting himself and his style to suit the requirements of his publisher and of his audience. As he explained in the letter to Moskowitz, “Now I have no prima-donna qualms about accepting ideas from an editor….it doesn’t violate my lone-wolf sensibilities. In fact, in the comics, editor and writer often whip up ideas between them.”

While in both the EC adaptation of “I, Robot” and in the 1939 original, Binder employs first person point-of-view as Adam Link tells the story of his creation, by the end of the Weird Science-Fantasy version, Binder shifts to the second-person as the robot addresses his tormentors—and, by extension, those of us reading the story. On the final page of the 1955 “I, Robot,” Adam Link, wrongly accused of murdering his creator and surrounded by an angry mob, exclaims, “Beware that you do not make me the monster you call me!” In his journal, he writes, “As I finish writing this, here among blasted memories, I know that there is no hope for me. You have me surrounded…cut off. I can see the flares of your torches between the trees. Your hatred lust is aroused. It will be sated only by my death…”

The final page of the 1955 EC Comics adaptation of “I, Robot.”

Those two panels in the center of the page pose an interesting challenge for the reader: first, Orlando and colorist Marie Severin ask us to identify with Adam Link, whose long, cylindrical forehead and mechanical jaw cast distorted shadows on the yellow wall behind him. He is, for a moment, almost human, as he makes a plea not to be turned into a monster by humanity’s hatred and violence. The text that appears over the panel, however, tells us, “I hear you now, shouting outside…” While we might sympathize with the protagonist, especially after the loss of his dog Terry on the previous page (in the original story, as the mob fires on Adam, a stray bullet kills the dog), we also, for a moment, inhabit the role of the aggressor.

The next panel is even more fascinating. We share Adam Link’s point-of-view as we stare out a window at the men, most of them carrying a rifle or a torch or both. Just two panels earlier, we saw Adam Link before that same window, reading his creator’s copy of Frankenstein. Now, however, the scene has changed, and we stare with horror at the grotesque figures that approach Dr. Link’s laboratory. Again, the text box disrupts our sense of identification with the robot: he addresses us directly. We are part of the mob. As we stare out the window, we are looking not at a display of “hatred lust” and impending “death” but at ourselves, and our petty hatreds and small-minded prejudices.

“I, Robot” inverts Qiana’s original question and seems to ask, Can this EC comic transform you, the reader, into a lustful, bloodthirsty, bigoted villain? Or have Otto Binder and Joe Orlando merely held a mirror up to EC’s audience, one they hope will challenge readers to reflect more deeply on issues beyond the fantastic realm of the comic itself?

Binder addresses these issues in another EC adaptation of one of his earlier science fiction stories, “The Teacher from Mars,” also drawn by Joe Orlando and colored by Marie Severin for Weird Science-Fantasy Number 24 (dated June 1954). As Schelly points out in Words of Wonder, Binder selected “The Teacher from Mars,” first published in Thrilling Wonder Stories in 1941, for Leo Margulies and Oscar J. Friend’s 1949 collection My Best Science Fiction Story, which includes stories from Isaac Asimov, Robert Bloch, and Harry Kuttner. In his introduction, Binder explains that “the story,” in which human students abuse and terrorize their Martian teacher, “was a good medium for showing the evils of discrimination and intolerance. Sadly enough,” he continues,

we have not yet eliminated those degrading influences on our world. The Martian in this story is the symbol of all such reasonless antagonism between “races.” Not that I wrote the story solely for that reason. It just happened to strike me as the best “human interest” approach. The “moral” was incidental.

In most of his work, from the Captain Marvel stories of the 1940s through his Superman narratives in the 1950s and even his scripts for Gold Key’s Mighty Samson in the 1960s, Binder again and again sought to explore what he refers to as the “‘human interest’ approach.” As Bill Schelly has argued in his comments on “The Teacher from Mars,” “Though Binder denied that the anti-discrimination sentiments in the story were his main reason for writing it, they are there nonetheless.” Therefore, is the “moral” really “incidental” in “I, Robot” or “The Teacher from Mars”? And what does Joe Orlando’s work bring to these comic book versions of Binder’s original short stories?

The final page of Binder and Orlando’s adaptation of “I, Robot” for Warren Publishing’s Creepy
No. 2, 1965 (page 43).

The EC version of “I, Robot” raises interesting questions, not only about adaptions of prose works into comic book form, but also about the moral imagination of creators like Binder and artist Joe Orlando. The complexity of the point-of-view in Adam Link’s narrative might be read in light of a passage from James Baldwin’s essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel”:

The failure of the protest novel lies in its rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty, dread, power, in its insistence that it is his categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended.

How might Baldwin’s critique of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the “protest novel”—a work of fiction that sets out to raise consciousness and fight social injustices—help us to read the many versions of Binder’s “I, Robot”?

One possible answer is this: because the story of Adam Link is a very obvious fiction, one built, as Binder himself admitted in the January 1939 issue of Amazing Stories, on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, it makes clear its status as a work of the imagination—that is, as a text (you can read more of Binder’s introduction to the original “I, Robot” in Schelly’s biography). “I, Robot” makes no claims to realism or verisimilitude. It might be read simply as an engaging adventure, or as a moral lesson on our jealousy, hatred, and ignorance. But we might also place the multiple versions of Binder’s story in dialogue with each other as well as with other texts from the era in which they first appeared. The January, 1939 issue of Amazing Stories, for example, appeared just a few months before the first publication of James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” another relic of the period that continues to fascinate American audiences in the form of Ben Stiller’s new film. As we explore the shape and the dimension of the society in which Binder lived, we have an opportunity to investigate how his America shaped our own. And as we read this comic book from 1955, Adam Link continues to address us, even now, as, in the closing lines, he remarks, “Ironic, isn’t it, that I have the very feelings you are so sure I lack?”

Last week, after we saw Her at the Landmark on the corner of Clark and Diversey in Otto Binder’s old hometown of Chicago, I wondered, What would Binder have thought of this 21^st-century story of the love between a middle-aged man and his operating system? And what does Binder’s “I, Robot” in all its forms—from the original story to the later EC Comics and Creepy versions to the novel Adam Link—Robot Binder published in 1965—ask of us as modern readers and as comics scholars?

References and Further Reading

Baldwin, James. “Everybody’s Protest Novel” in Notes of a Native Son. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984.

Binder, Eando. Adam Link—Robot. New York: Paperback Library, Inc. 1965.

Binder, Otto. Letter to Sam Moskowitz. October 4, 1952. Courtesy of the Otto Binder Collection, Cushing Library, Texas A&M University.

Binder, Otto. “The Teacher from Mars” in Leo Margulies and Oscar J. Friend, My Best Science Fiction Story. New York: Pocket Books, 1954. 18-36.

Schelly, Bill. Words of Wonder: The Life and Times of Otto Binder. Seattle: Hamster Press, 2003.

You can also read Noah’s discussion of Her and its relationship to Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? at Salon. Qiana’s paper at the 2013 Dartmouth College Illustration, Comics, and Animation Conference, “Science Fictions of Race in EC’s ‘Judgment Day,’” was another inspiration for this post.

Gil Kane, Memory Drawing, and Bob Dylan’s Self Portrait

Posted on April 17, 2013 by Brian Cremins

The index to the Comics and Music roundtable is here.
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There are two musics (at least so I have always thought): the music one listens to, the music one plays.
–Roland Barthes, “Musica Practica,” 1970

I just write ’em ’cause nobody says you can’t write ’em.
–Bob Dylan on his songwriting process, 1987

My dad is not convinced we saw Bob Dylan at Lake Compounce in Bristol, Connecticut on July 16, 1989. It was my first concert and it rained for most of the evening, from the start of Steve Earle’s loud, abrasive opening set to Dylan’s final encore of “All Along the Watchtower.” Earle was promoting his 1988 album Copperhead Road and Dylan was in the early stages of the Never Ending Tour, which continues this month as Dylan and his band visit the Northeast and the Midwest. On that rainy night in the summer of 1989, Bob Dylan, wearing a grey hooded sweatshirt and sunglasses, performed some of his most familiar songs: “Shelter from the Storm,” “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Blowin’ in the Wind.” The audience cheered the first note of his harmonica solo on “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” But Dylan never spoke to the audience and he never took off the hood or the sunglasses. It could have been anybody up there.

So, almost twenty-five years later, my dad still wonders who we saw that night. Are we sure we saw Dylan? he’ll ask. He’s kidding, I think, and I guess the answer to that question depends on the Bob Dylan the two of us were looking to find.

I thought again about that July concert as I read Captain Marvel #20 (Marvel Comics, dated July 1970) to write this essay for the music and comics roundtable. “The Hunter and the Holocaust” opens with Captain Marvel’s alter ego Rick Jones performing for an ecstatic audience at a Greenwich Village folk club. The story, written by Roy Thomas with pencils by Gil Kane, inks by Dan Adkins, and letters by Artie Simek, spends most of its time exploring the relationship between Jones and the alien warrior Captain Mar-Vell, two heroes who, as we learn on the splash page, struggle with their dual identity: “What’s it like to be two different people??” asks Thomas in the first line of the issue.

In the next twenty pages, Rick Jones and his alien counterpart fight a pack of thieves, save a little girl from the wreckage caused by a tornado, confront a team of “hardened looters” called “The Rat Pack!” (see page 13) and, in the issue’s closing panels, finally come face to face with the Hulk. Only two pages of Captain Marvel #20, then, are about music, but I find myself thinking about Rick Jones’s folk song and what it might tell us about Gil Kane’s visual strategies and Roy Thomas’s nostalgia for early Dylan.

Thomas and Kane, I discovered, were also searching for Bob Dylan and, in the summer of 1970, they had plenty of company, as the singer had just released Self Portrait, a double album that shocked, disappointed, and divided his fans and his critics.

Captain Marvel #20 (Marvel Comics, June 1970)

Rick Jones’s performance also challenged me: what do I hear when I read a comic book page? In the coffee house sequence that opens the issue, Thomas and Kane are inevitably working with memory. For Thomas, Rick Jones is the embodiment of the excitement of hearing Highway 61 Revisited or Blonde on Blonde for the first time. For Kane, as we shall see, drawing a page about a musical performance is an exercise in technique: how does an artist design a page about music, either the act of playing or the enjoyment of listening? In order to hear the music of Kane’s Captain Marvel page, the reader must interpret the words and images just as a musician reads a score. The visual soundtrack of Captain Marvel #20, however, depends on the reader’s familiarity with Bob Dylan—or, more specifically, on the reader’s familiarity with the myth of Bob Dylan.

Greil Marcus, Ellen Willis and, later, Dylan’s biographer Robert Shelton all heard Self Portrait as Dylan’s rejection of his iconic status.

Bob Dylan’s Self Portrait (1970)

An easy-listening Dylan record featuring songs written by Gordon Lightfoot, Paul Simon, and Rodgers and Hart? Greil Marcus’s review of Self Portrait begins with one of the most infamous lines in the history of rock criticism: “What is this shit?” (Marcus 7). Marcus heard the double album as Dylan’s willful retreat from the myth of being Bob Dylan and, therefore, as a kind of abdication. Early in his 1970 Rolling Stone review of the record, Marcus admits, “We are dealing with myth, after all, and the more Dylan stays away the greater the weight attached to anything he’s done” (Marcus 12).

Although no less puzzled by the record, Marcus’s friend and colleague Ellen Willis was more measured in her assessment. After she’d lived with the album for a few months, she wrote about it in the context of Dylan’s New Morning, the quick follow-up to Self Portrait released in the fall of 1970. Willis, whose essay on The Velvet Underground should be required reading for all young writers learning the craft of music criticism, argues that, despite its weaknesses, Self Portrait “proved that no matter what is put on a Dylan record—and ‘Blue Moon” is about as absurd as anything this side of a reading of the phone book—it ends up a self-portrait, because Dylan himself is so much more important than any record of his could ever be” (Willis 31-32). At the end of the review, after listening to Arlo Guthrie’s version of “Percy’s Song,” Willis longs for the “crude impact” of Dylan’s early work. Dylan’s new records are a reminder of the passage of time, of age and experience. By the summer of 1970, the days of “Blowin’ in the Wind” and The Times They Are a-Changin’ must have seemed very distant and strange.

Read in this historical context, “The Hunter and the Holocaust” might also be understood as belonging to the wave of “relevant” comics ushered in by Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams with Green Lantern/Green Arrow #76 (DC Comics, dated April 1970). This new wave of comics addressed a variety of social, political, and cultural issues. O’Neil and Adams even include their own Bob Dylan tribute in the form of a character named Johnny Walden in Green Lantern/Green Arrow #77 (also dated June 1970). According to one of the miners in the story, Walden is a young man who “taught hisself to play on the guitar” and “started singin’ songs ’bout us an’ our troubles,” songs that helped inspire “self-respect” and “a whole lotta discontent with the way we been treated…” (see O’Neil and Adams 38-39).

Critics associate the “relevance fad” in American superhero comics of the early 1970s most often with the socially and politically engaged work of writers such as Denny O’Neil and Steve Englehart. Will Jacobs and Gerard Jones describe relevance as a “passing trend” which “nevertheless helped expand the field of comics” by “loosening the outdated rules of the Comics Code Authority, broadening characterization, increasing the power of writers and artists, and drawing the aims of Marvel and DC closer together” (Jacobs and Jones 161). However, “relevance,” at least as defined by this issue of Captain Marvel, is also an acknowledgement of the fact that a comic book, like other cultural products, circulates in a much larger political and social context. The opening pages of this Captain Marvel story, then, are as much about a sense of loss as they are about music. The folk singing Rick Jones fills the empty space left behind by Bob Dylan after the release of Self Portrait.

On the second page of “The Hunter and the Holocaust,” in the magic world of a costumed superhero, Thomas and Kane set out to slow the passage of time which has eroded the promise of the 1960s. Rick Jones performs at a coffee house “where,” the text box that introduces page 2 tells us, “for a few, time is standing still…!” In the first panel, we see a sidewalk, a staircase, and a word balloon filled with lyrics and eighth notes: “One of these mornings / You may wake up dead…” The word balloon is colored blue and drifts like a cloud from the basement club:

Panel 1 of Captain Marvel #20, page 2

We can read the words, but we cannot hear the music, nor can we read these musical notations. Rick Jones’s lyrics, Thomas explained in a recent email, were based in part on a poem by his friend Linda Rahm: “In my mind’s eyes I saw/heard them being sung in a rather Dylanesque manner.” Kane’s panel compositions and character designs assist us in imagining the melody, the chord structure, and—to borrow a term from Roland Barthes—the “grain” of the singer’s voice.

In order to hear the music, the reader must identify the cultural signifiers Thomas and Kane include in this opening panel. The reader is asked to remember the young Bob Dylan. “Coffee House” and “Greenwich Village, ” for example, are synonymous with the folk movement of the early 1960s. Standing with an acoustic guitar in a beam of orange light in the second panel of the page, Rick Jones resembles the Bob Dylan of D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary Don’t Look Back (1967).

Panel 2 of Captain Marvel #20, page 2

Jones, however, was also, according to Thomas, “colored so that he reflected both Billy Batson—and James Dean in ‘Rebel without a Cause,’ except with a yellow shirt/t-shirt instead of a white one like Dean had…the yellow [was] the Billy Batson add-on.” Rick Jones, then, is a figure who embodies a nostalgia for these heroes from the past—the orphan whose magic word transformed him into the World’s Mightiest Mortal (and, as a result, into one of the most popular and lucrative comic book heroes of the 1940s and early 1950s); the iconic Hollywood rebel who, along with Jack Kerouac’s Dean Moriarty, inspired the counter-culture of the 1960s; and the folk rock legend who, by the summer of 1970, and as a result of Self Portrait, had come to symbolize the lost promise of the 1960s.

Gil Kane’s compositional choices are essential in hearing Rick Jones’s “Dylanesque” music. As in most of Kane’s work, the placement and movement of figures in space creates meaning between and within panels. Kane was fascinated by figures in motion. Given his often blunt criticism of comic book narratives, why did Kane spend so much of his career drawing superheroes? In the 1969 Alter Ego interview, John Benson asks if Kane’s attraction to costumed heroes was a simple matter of proficiency: “I take it from your earlier comments that the main reason why you are illustrating super-heroes,” Benson comments, “is that you feel that this is the area in which you are most proficient. Is that correct?” (Benson 164-165). “Yes and no,” Kane explains. Drawing superheroes—idealized bodies in motion—allowed Kane the opportunity to invent and analyze forms:

It’s a comfortable area for me to operate in, since it depends to a great extent on action, and it also coincides with my interest at the moment, which is learning to design anatomical structure. I’m busy solving technical problems for myself, and sometimes it’s very convenient when the idiom that I am involved in happens to be sympathetic to the technical problems that I am solving. (Kane qtd. in Benson 165)

On page 2 of Captain Marvel #20, Kane sets out to solve a number of significant problems regarding music, words, and images.*

Page 2 of Captain Marvel #20

Kane has designed a page that analyzes the relationship between the performer and his audience. After a close-up of Rick Jones in the page’s third panel, Kane devotes the fourth and final panel to the singer’s profile. Jones, his eyes closed, sings for us and for his coffee house audience. In the foreground of the image, Kane has superimposed a series of figures over Jones’s profile. As a result, we witness the performance and the response of the audience simultaneously, but not with a split-screen image as, for example, in Michael Wadleigh’s Woodstock, which was also released in the spring of 1970. Rather, Kane employs a kind of montage in which the singer, the song, and the audience share a singular moment that, all too quickly, will recede into memory.

Rather than cutting from an image of Rick Jones to figures from the audience and back again, Kane offers readers a portrait of the social function of music—how it works as a means of collaboration and, in this example, as a form of ecstatic communion between the performer and the audience. The effectiveness of the panel, however, depends on the memory and imagination of the reader. The reader must recognize the allusions to Bob Dylan embedded in Thomas’s text in order for Kane’s images to resonate. In other words, Thomas and Kane are inviting the reader to remember the myth of Dylan and the utopianism he inspired.

In Section 4 of The Natural Way to Draw (1941), Kimon Nicolaïdes argues that all drawing is an act of memory. He also suggests various exercises in “memory drawing”:

With the exception of the contour study, there is no drawing that is not a memory drawing because, no matter how slight the interval is from the time you look at the model until you look at your drawing or painting, you are memorizing what you have just seen. Of course, in that kind of drawing in which the student looks back and forth from the model continuously, he is memorizing little bits at a time, hoping to be able, after he has assembled all the little bits, to put them together by some preconceived theory or plan or by some belated effort to see the model as a whole. (41)

Comics are ideal archives of memory and motion. Kane, always an innovator, circumvents the limits of the form by depicting music’s role in the building of a community. More specifically, he brings to life what has been lost, that yearning for a return to what Bob Dylan signified during the 1960s. The ecstasy of these figures in the final panel of page 2—the two women with their eyes closed, the hands raised in exultation—is the ecstasy of a lost moment, of a memory, or of a forgotten ideal.

From “Memory Drawing and Other Quick Studies,” Section 4 of Kimon Nicolaïdes’ The Natural Way to Draw (1941)

Despite the ecstatic, communal celebration of Jones’s performance, there is also something terribly lonely about it. The figures, despite Kane’s best efforts, remain locked in time and motion. There is no substitute for the visceral power of music heard live and loud in a small room.

Words and pictures are at their best when memorializing what was or imagining what might come. Even music that evokes memories of the past remains powerfully and persuasively present. A melody or lyric might trigger images from the past, but we have no choice but to hear the music itself here in the present, note by note, moment by moment. The longing and loneliness I sometimes associate with words and pictures might explain why for so many years I saw music as an escape from the world of comics. As I once told one of my guitar students, music requires some sort of audience, or at the very least a collaboration between the performer and the listener (unless the performer and listener are one). A year after I saw Dylan for the first time, I got a guitar. Three years later, I joined a band.

I’ve neglected to mention that Dylan himself is a visual artist. The cover of Self Portrait features one of his paintings, and over the years he’s written songs from the perspective of painters and other artists. Dylan’s 1997 album Time Out of Mind ends with “Highlands,” a slow, deadpan narrative of over 16 minutes (you can listen to a somewhat shorter but inspired live version from 1999 here). In the middle of the song, after several stanzas in which he drifts between the “rat race” of his life and his dreams of the Scottish highlands, the singer finds himself in a Boston restaurant where he orders a plate of hard-boiled eggs. The waitress makes an unexpected request:

Then she says, “I know you’re an artist, draw a picture of me!”

I say, “I would if I could, but

I don’t do sketches from memory”

But, as Gil Kane has shown us, the singer has no choice. Every sketch is a sketch from memory, and each line and gesture offers another shot at recollection.

Meanwhile, I’m not sure how to answer my dad when he asks if we saw Bob Dylan that summer and, really, it doesn’t matter. We stood there together, and that memory is more important to me than the music itself. Besides, Dylan and his band played most of our favorites, except for “Boots of Spanish Leather.” I can’t imagine a place I would rather have been on the rainy evening of July 16, 1989, a date that, without my dad and without Dylan, would have been an otherwise meaningless set of coordinates in time and space.
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*Of course, one simple solution to this dilemma—how to create a page a reader can hear—is to include the melody of the lyrics in some form of musical notation. A reader familiar with notation, itself a series of symbols invented to record and document sounds, would then be able to read the score and hear Rick Jones’s song. Or, why not include a soundtrack with the comic itself? This, of course, is a viable option today in the age of web comics, and even by the early 1980s some writers and artists began exploring forms of multimedia. Issue #3 of Mike Baron and Steve Rude’s Nexus (Capital Comics, 1981), for example, included a flexi disc. “Comics in Stereo!” declares the black and white magazine’s colorful cover. Tim Truman also included a flexi disc in issue #19 of Scout (Eclipse Comics, May 1987) with songs recorded by his band The Dixie Pistols. Eclipse then released a full-length album by The Dixie Pistols in 1987. The record included a Scout minicomic.

An image of the flexi disc included with Tim Truman’s Scout No. 19 (Eclipse Comics, May 1987)

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References

Barthes, Roland. Image—Music—Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.

Benson, John. “A/E Interview: Gil Kane” in Roy Thomas and Bill Schelly (Eds), Alter Ego: The Best of the Legendary Comics Fanzine. Raleigh: TwoMorrows Publishing, 2008. 156-168.

Marcus, Greil. “Self Portrait No. 25” in Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus: Writings 1968-2010. New York: PublicAffairs, 2010. 7-27.

Jacobs, Will and Gerard Jones. The Comic Book Heroes from the Silver Age to the Present. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc. 1985.

Nicolaïdes, Kimon. The Natural Way to Draw: A Working Plan for Art Study. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1941.

O’Neil, Dennis and Neal Adams. The Green Lantern/Green Arrow Collection. New York: DC Comics, 2004.

Shelton, Robert. No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan. Milwaukee: Backbeat Books, 2010. (e-version)

Thomas, Roy. E-mail to author. April 7, 2013. 8:15 pm.

Thomas, Roy (w), Gil Kane, (p), Dan Adkins (i), Artie Simek (l). “The Hunter and the Holocaust” in Captain Marvel No. 20 (Marvel Comics, June 1970).

Truman, Tim. “Houserockers” in Scout No. 19 (Eclipse Comics, May 1987).

Willis, Ellen. “New Morning: Dylan Revisited” in Nona Willis Aronowitz (Ed.), Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 2011. 30-33.

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