Carol Tilley on “When Comics Almost Died”

On Monday night I had the pleasure of attending a lecture by Carol Tilley of the University of Illinois on Dr. Fredric Wertham’s crusade against comics in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

I knew that basic story well from Jules Feiffer’s Greatest Comic Book Heroes and more recent books. In fact, I remember finding a copy of Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent in a library during a high-school summer and wondering at its form of argumentation.

Tilley’s research has filled out that picture in several ways. One was, as I noted back here, to document how Wertham edited his notes on counseling sessions when he wrote his book, making his young patients say what fit his thesis and leaving out significant evidence that would undercut it.

Another, and for me this was a highlight of Tilley’s talk, was to collect and display the letters from young comic-book readers to Wertham arguing against his conclusions. They pointed out, sometimes eloquently, that they were more representative of kids who enjoyed comics than the juvenile delinquents and troubled youth he saw in his psychiatric practice.

Tilley had also found those teens’ yearbook photos and interviewed them so she could put (perfectly ordinary) faces up on the screen beside their names and words. Evidently Wertham read through their letters, marking grammar, punctuation, or spelling mistakes, before filing them away and never answering.

After Prof. Tilley’s talk, the question came up about how Wertham, a very progressive child psychiatrist who set up a practice in Harlem and provided evidence for the plaintiffs in Brown v. Board of Education, could be so oppressive when it came to comics. My view was that all those actions came from the same crusading desire to protect vulnerable children. These days most book challenges in America seem to come from the political right, but the anti-comics critics were all over the political spectrum.

Afterwards, a bunch of us went out for dinner and had a lot of laughs, so I should start calling Prof. Tilley “Carol” now. If you get a chance to see her “When Comics Almost Died” lecture, take it.

Jules Feiffer Tries Yet Another New Thing

Christopher Borrelli’s interview with Jules Feiffer in the Chicago Tribune brings out several interesting remarks about his multifaceted career:

Q: You've done so many different things — where do your biggest royalty checks come from?

A: (Laughs.) A diversity of places. Mostly children's books, I suppose. A lot of it comes from "The Phantom Tollbooth," the book I did with Norton Juster. That book has become a great annuity for me, a sizable one. It just celebrated its 50th anniversary, and it's amazing how well it still sells. It's also amazed me how much the book and my art has been remembered. At the time, in the early '60s, it was work that I didn't really appreciate that much. I had difficulty doing it and didn't feel like I was a natural at that kind of thing.

Q: Was it hard because so much of "Phantom Tollbooth" feels abstract?

A: No. Maurice [Sendak], in the new edition, wrote that I was one of the few cartoonists who can illustrate ideas. I've always felt that illustrating the abstract — drawing ideas — is one of the primary jobs of the cartoonist. . . .

Q: How did the death of Maurice Sendak affect you?

A: When you said his name my heart sank. I loved him. We rarely saw each other because he was in Connecticut. But we had deep affection for each other. When he had his first heart attack, he was in London and I happened to be in London, so I spent time with him. But we were very different in temperament. He was much more of a Russian Jew than I was, much more given to doubts of depression and grimness, and I never entirely lost some of the giddy boy-cartoonist traits I've always had. We would sit for hours and talk.

Q: And like Maurice, you seem too acidic to write children's books.

A: True. (Children's books) were a means to an end, a way to make me a living. Children's books were not a passion. That's how I felt in the '50s — once I met Maurice, I didn't think I would dare compete with him. But years later, after one of my plays, "Grown Ups," got beat up badly, I thought I needed another obsession. My idea was about this kid cartoonist, and that became "The Man in the Ceiling." I wrote it, then I called Maurice, and he gave me the name of his editor, Michael di Capua, and I've been with Michael ever since.

Feiffer’s current project is Kill My Mother, a graphic novel drawn in a film noir style he expects his fans not to recognize.

Yes, thought I could write a graphic novel, someone else could illustrate it. But as it developed, it ended up being long, starting in 1933, then switching to 1943, going from the Depression to World War II. And I couldn't find anyone to draw it right. For this kind of Chandler-Hammett noir thing, you need shadows, rain. So I had to learn how to do it. Fortunately, I have Turner Classic Movies. I record all this film noir, "The Maltese Falcon," "The Big Sleep," and hit pause on my remote. That's been my research medium. It will not be drawn (in a) traditional Feiffer style. I stole from [Will] Eisner. I hope it will be finished by the end of next year.

Last month Feiffer told Publishers Weekly about this project:

Feiffer went on to explain that, “when I started out in the comic book business, I didn’t plan on producing social and political commentary,” and said he really wanted to produce action/adventure comics strips like his cartoonist heroes, Will Eisner (The Spirit) and Roy Crane (Wash Tubbs). “But I couldn’t draw like them. Since I had no qualifications and couldn’t imitate them, I tried to do my own thing,” Feiffer said.

The Tribune interview also contains remarks about Hugh Hefner as an editor, Philip Roth as a joker, Jack Nicholson starstruck by Warren Beatty, and more.

Jules Feiffer’s Secret Origin

My favorite detail of GraphicNYC's interview with author, playwright, and cartoonist Jules Feiffer is the revelation of who was responsible for his pioneering history of superhero comics: future National Book Award-winning novelist E. L. Doctorow.

“Doctorow was the senior editor at Dial Press, and we were friends,” Jules remembers. “He called me up one day and said ‘I want to do a book called The Great Comic Book Heroes, and I can’t think of anyone else but you to write it. Are you interested?’

“I said ‘Where do I sign?’

“We worked it out, and I told him from the beginning that I didn’t want to make it a work of scholarship, because I didn’t do homework. I didn’t do it in school, so why should I do it as a grown-up? I wanted it to be my reminiscences of comic books, and since I was there from the beginning in 1938, I was nine when Superman came out.”

The interview also spends significant time on Feiffer's "semiautobiographical novel" for young readers, The Man in the Ceiling. Feiffer is now working on an unabashed memoir of growing up, so he really warmed up to that theme:

“School [was] impossibly difficult on every level, and expectations from grown-ups were beyond what I could meet, but something I could fake and faked all the time,” Jules says. “I faked my way through school and the approval of family. Childhood was the act of being a CIA agent in enemy territory, waiting to get back home. Getting back home was where I could run my own life, and my own life was represented by what I read in newspaper strips and particularly comic books, which were home turf to me. . . .

“I was just doing time. The sense was that I was the prisoner of these grown-ups and other peoples’ opinions and priorities. Through some miracle, I had a mother who allowed me to act out my ambition and dreams and that was my out. That was the straw [with] which I breathed through underwater.”

The man has a way with metaphors, doesn't he?

How Do Audiobook Editors Decide?

Toward the end of last year, Big A little a asked:

Why do some publishing houses (Random House) have their audio up and ready when the book is released? And, why do others wait and wait and wait[?] . . . Does anyone know which questions are at play here in deciding which books will have audio and which will not?

As I pointed out in the comments to Kelly’s posting, Random House owns Doubleday, the imprint that published the book she was hoping to find in audio form. So it can't be a matter of Doubleday not having an audio publishing partner available.

Rather, the audiobook field seems to be driven by print publishing. Books that have proven themselves in print are recorded, but the only new titles produced as audiobooks at the same time as their print editions seem to be those guaranteed big sellers from established authors with eager fans.

But is print success not just the primary but the only criterion for what makes a viable audiobook? Are there borderline cases, in which a book with marginal sales is recorded because it would be exceptionally good as an audio book, or set aside because it just wouldn't work in that medium? I looked for online interviews with audiobook editors to see if they answer this question, but came up empty. So does anyone have insider insights to share?

The current popularity of audio editions, boosted by MP3 players and online downloads, is at odds with another trend: increasing use of graphics in novels for kids. I'm not talking about comics, but full prose novels that incorporate illustrations into their storytelling. Those don't translate well into audio form.

As I wrote back here, I first took in Jules Feiffer's The Man in the Ceiling in audiobook form, but that book should not be in audio without more careful adaptation. The end of the book is incomprehensible without a visual dimension.

Last month, Scholastic issued an audiobook of another truly graphic novel, Brian Selznick’s Invention of Hugo Cabret, which required so much special treatment that it merited its own press release. The publisher boasts of "translating the more than three hundred pages of original black and white illustrations in the novel using vivid sound design." Still, the book is so visual that Scholastic also includes "an exclusive behind-the-scenes bonus DVD" for listeners to watch.

Robin, the Littlest Guy in the Fight

A month ago I quoted Jules Feiffer's explanation of why he hated Robin, the Boy Wonder:

One need only look at him to see he could fight better, swing from a rope better, play ball better, eat better, and live better. . . . He had the build of a middleweight, the legs of a wrestler. He was obviously an "A" student, the center of every circle, the one picked for greatness in the crowd--God, how I hated him.

In this passage, Feiffer seems to have been imagining Robin sauntering into his schoolyard in the Bronx. And of course the comic-book character would stand out from all the other young teenaged boys. He was a paragon of American youth.

But that's not the context in which comic books usually showed Robin, of course. Instead, readers saw him accompanying Batman on crime-fighting patrols. And in that context Robin wasn't the "center of every circle, the one picked for greatness." He was always the littlest guy in the fight. He was repeatedly getting beat up, screwing up, or feeling clueless. In perhaps one in every twenty stories Robin got a chance to shine and save the day.

Among DC's major comic-book heroes, Superman and Wonder Woman can do practically anything. The Flash, Green Lantern, and many others have superhuman powers. Batman has none, but he's the scariest, smartest guy around, as well as immensely rich. Robin is just a sharp, athletic kid with neat toys and guts.

(Yes, Robin has the advantage of being friends with the scariest, smartest guy around, but that means having to live with the scariest guy around and to measure up to the smartest guy around. Those tensions were only implicit in the first decades of Batman comics, but have became abiding pressures for the Robin characters in the last quarter-century.)

Feiffer had trouble identifying with Robin because he was about the same age as the character and knew that he hadn't developed the Boy Wonder's athletic or detective skills. But for other readers, Robin's youth and lack of powers have made him more compelling. He has to struggle with what comes easily to older, more powerful superheroes. He makes mistakes and loses fights (the little guy must have suffered more concussions than an NFL lineman). He learns and keeps plugging.

Which of course makes Robin's triumphs--those one in twenty Batman stories, his adventures on his own or with fellow teenagers--all the more improbable, and all the more satisfying.

Batman's Ace in the Hole

In The Great Comic Book Heroes, his pioneering look back on America's early superhero comics, Jules Feiffer declared:

I couldn't stand boy companions. If the theory behind Robin the Boy Wonder, Roy the Superboy, The Sandman's Sandy, The Shield's Rusty, The Human Torch's Toro, The Green Arrow's Speedy was to give young readers a character with whom to identify, it failed dismally in my case.

The super grownups were the ones I identified with. They were versions of me in the future. But Robin the Boy Wonder was my own age. One need only look at him to see he could fight better, swing from a rope better, play ball better, eat better, and live better--while I lived in the east Bronx, Robin lived in a mansion, and while I was trying, somehow, to please my mother--and getting it all wrong--Robin was rescuing Batman and getting the gold medals. He didn't even have to live with his mother.

Robin wasn't skinny. He had the build of a middleweight, the legs of a wrestler. He was obviously an "A" student, the center of every circle, the one picked for greatness in the crowd--God, how I hated him.

Reading this as a lad made me wonder, again, whether I was mistaken in not loathing the character of Robin from an early age. But again, I did the math.

Feiffer's response to Robin, however deeply felt, was a minority view. Many more readers liked the character. Robin's presence might have helped Batman last through the late 1940s and 1950s while so many other superheroes were canceled and forgotten. According to Bob Kane's memoir, sales for the issue of Detective Comics that introduced Robin on its cover were double the usual. Understandably, the next 115 covers also featured the boy wonder. Of the first hundred issues of Batman magazine, Robin appeared on all but three.

Another reliable yardstick of Robin's popularity is how so many other superheroes quickly gained their own young sidekicks. Feiffer himself listed six, yet still left out Bucky, companion to Captain America; Captain Marvel, Jr., and Mary Marvel; and the Star Spangled Kid and Stripesy, an unusual pairing in which the adult was the sidekick, apparently because the kid was upper-class. (Feiffer also disliked boy companions enough to misremember the name of the Shield's partner; he was, the internet assures me, Dusty the Boy Detective.)

There were also whole series about groups of young heroes with little adult supervision: the Young Allies, a Captain America spin-off; the Boy Commandos, which shared Detective with Batman during World War II; the Newsboy Legion, who bumped the Star Spangled Kid off the cover of Star Spangled Comics; and on to such small-timers as the 1951 creation Dan Tayler, Boy Detective.

Boy sidekicks remained de rigueur in DC's superhero comics as the decades passed, with writers creating young companions for Tomahawk, Aquaman, the second Flash, and (in the person of Jimmy Olsen) Superman. The company also devised adolescent versions of Superman and Wonder Woman to have their own adventures.

One of Marvel's innovations in the 1960s, the decade when Feiffer assembled his book, was to create superheroes without young sidekicks. Or perhaps it's better to say that the company had one teen companion, Rick Jones, doled out to several heroes in turn. Yet the stellar success of Marvel's Spider-Man and later of The X-Men showed how many young comic-book readers were still happy to read about heroes close to their own age--even if they did have unusual strengths and didn't have to live with their mothers.

The Back of The Man in the Ceiling

NON-COMICS WEEK at Oz and Ends continues with thoughts on novels about creating comics--more specifically, creating adventure comics of the sort that dominate the field in America.

As comics have achieved more literary respect, so respectable fiction has opened up to stories about the crafting those comics. The leading example in literary fiction is Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001, the year after it was published. Can you imagine an American novel published in the 1950s through the 1980s that treated the creation of a superhero comic called The Escapist as a serious enterprise? Showing an author or artist toiling in that field would more likely have signaled creative frustration or a fall.

I think the real start of this trend was Jules Feiffer's The Man in the Ceiling, published for young readers in 1993 and put on some of that year's "best" lists. It's about a boy named Jimmy trying to create comics for popularity and self-respect, against a backdrop of his uncle's efforts to write a Broadway musical and ordinary family life.

Feiffer had already written about the comics he drew as a boy in The Great Comic Book Heroes. I think there's a fair amount of autobiography in this first novel. As I wrote earlier, The Man in the Ceiling doesn't have the period detail to set it in the 1930s and ’40s, when Feiffer grew up, but neither does it quite feel like it's taking place in the 1990s. One of the giveaways is the type of comic book Jimmy creates; his stories seem to reflect the anything-goes period when superheroes were still new rather than the continuity-, celebrity-, and event-driven business of the last two decades.

In addition to treating comics as a respectable hobby for a young fellow, The Man in the Ceiling also took a step forward in integrating text and illustration in a middle-grade novel. Now we see a lot more of that: Ruth McNally Barshaw's Ellie McDoodle, Jeff Kinney's Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and Greg Fishbone's Penguins of Doom are all very recent examples.

How tightly are words and pictures integrated in The Man in the Ceiling? Here are the novel's last words:

Jimmy dug his head deep into Uncle Lester's shoulder, forcing him to bring his right arm up to get a better hold. His right hand grasped a sheet of paper that Mother had not noticed before. Uncle Lester gripped it tight, as if it meant the world to him. Mother tried to see what was on it, but couldn't, so she moved quietly and swiftly down the steps to get a better look.

See for yourself, it's the last page of this book.

You then turn the page and see--well, I'm not going to spoil it. But I will say that this ending doesn't translate well to an audiobook. I had to go back to the library for a print edition in order to understand what was going on.

Feiffer on comic books

In 1965 Jules Feiffer, cult cartoonist for the Village Voice and illustrator of The Phantom Tollbooth, published a volume called The Great Comic Book Heroes. The book reprinted several "Golden Age" superhero comics, including material from both big surviving companies, DC and Marvel. It appeared before Stan Lee launched his Origins series, before DC started mining its library with quality reprints, before anyone else had written about superhero comic books between hardcovers in a respectful way. Feiffer mixed artistic and storytelling insight, recollections of reading comic books as a child, and his own experience working for Will Eisner. I have a copy of the book's first paperback edition.

(Fantagraphics has republished Feiffer's text with fewer illustrations "in a compact and affordable size," the publisher says. In marketing, that's called "bugs into features." The book is smaller and more affordable because it doesn't include all those reprinted 1940s comics. The rights to them are no doubt far more expensive now that the first edition helped prove the market. But since I'm not selling my copy, the reissue might be the best way to enjoy Feiffer's insights.)

When Feiffer began to write his own children's books in 1993, he started with the theme of comic books. The Man in the Ceiling is the story of a nascent comic-book artist, with such raw emotions it often feels like autobiography. The timeframe doesn't feel like the 1940s, though, but it doesn't feel like the 1990s, either.

With Meanwhile..., Feiffer returned to the same territory in picture-book form. The hero is once again a young comic-book reader. But this time his biggest problem--he thinks--is that his mom is calling him before he's finished reading his story. He creates a magical text box that says, "Meanwhile..." in order to change his scene, only to find himself in increasingly worse trouble. I thought the hero should have cried, "It's not fair!" one or two fewer times, but otherwise this is a gem.