Will Eisner Week in Metro Boston

The Million Year Picnic comics shop, Stephen Weiner of the Maynard Public Library, the Cambridge Public Library, and folks from the Boston Comics Roundtable are collaborating on a local celebration of Will Eisner Week.

On Thursday, 6 March, the Cambridge library will host a conversation between two comics creators about Eisner’s art and legacy:

• Paul Hornschemeier, creator of Mother, Come Home; The Three Paradoxes; and the New York Times best seller Life with Mr. Dangerous, among other titles.
• Denis Kitchen, “underground comix” cartoonist, founder of Kitchen Sink Press and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, and Eisner’s literary executor.

That event is said to be scheduled from 6:00 to 8:00 PM at the library. This will be followed by a signing at the Million Year Picnic in Harvard Square, which has a weeklong sale of Eisner books. (I just bought one using another discount.)

On Saturday, 8 March, several local comics creators will lead comics workshops for kids (and interested adults who bring kids along) at the Cambridge library. Those creators are Jef Czekaj, Josh Dahl, Bob Flynn, Dan Mazur, Dan Moynihan, Braden Lamb, and Shelli Paroline. Those workshops start at 12:30 PM and run for two hours. Afterwards, there will be another signing at the Million Year Picnic from 3:00 to 5:00 PM.

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.

“Characters were constantly speaking to themselves out loud”

At a new blog called Comics Without Frontiers, Miguel Rosa traces the development of thought balloons in the first year of Superman and Spirit comics.

[Rosa started his blog to promote discussion of comics from outside the US, but a lot of the postings are on the standard American superhero stories. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.]

This posting complements my discussion of the same topic, which watched how thought balloons developed alongside whisper balloons since early on characters often seemed to be voicing asides to the audience.

Rosa writes:

I realized that one of the reasons why thought balloons were seldom used in those years was because the characters were constantly speaking to themselves out loud, like in this panel from Action Comics #1. In many of these cases, thought balloons should have been used instead. Rather than speaking out loud, a thought balloon containing a line like, “The cops are coming; I better change to my civilian clothes!” would make more sense.

He also reprints a delightful Spirit panel which shows the hero trapped under water and saying out loud: “I...can’t... hold...my...breath... much...longer!”

Soon, however, the thought balloon became a standard part of American comics punctuation, avoiding such unrealistic moments. Because superhero comics had to be realistic.

TOMORROW: Who started the thought balloon’s hibernation over the last thirty years?

It’s Birds! It’s Planes! It’s…Supermen!

Supermen!: The First Wave of Comic Book Heroes, 1936-1941 promises to fill gaps in “the origins and early development of superheroes and the comic book form.” Editor Greg Sadwoski has assembled an eye-catching collection of stories, magazine covers, and house ads showing unfamiliar faces from the first years of American adventures comics.

There are many familiar names, however. Sadowski appears to have sought out stories by creators who eventually found success with other characters: Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Jack Cole, Will Eisner, Bill Everett, Joe Simon, and Jack Kirby, among others. The collection includes two stories by the execrable Fletcher Hanks, who’s on his way to being the least deserving artist to have his entire oeuvre reprinted. My favorite item is the cover of Fantastic Comics, #3, by Eisner and Lou Fine.

Along the way there are a few landmarks in the development of the American superhero. We see the first caped flying hero (Zator, 1936), the first masked comic-book hero (the Clock, 1936), the first adolescent hero in cape and shorts (Dirk the Demon, 1938—two years before Robin).

But Supermen! is most interesting for what didn’t lead anywhere. All these comics are in the public domain, which of course makes them cheaper to republish. The book is thus a collection of failures—characters and storylines that didn’t attract enough readers to survive. There’s nothing from the firms that became DC and Marvel, and only a couple of items from M.L.J. before it found Archie. In the evolution of the American comic book, these are dead ends.

Seeing what didn’t work or become the norm can be as illuminating as seeing what did. For example, the field was already on its way to male domination when Al Bryant used the pen name “Allison Brant” for a horror story about “Fero, Planet Detective” in May 1940.

We can see publishers figuring out what sells. Silver Streak Comics’s first covers in late 1939 featured a villain—a sort of superhuman Fu Manchu named the Claw. By issue #3 the magazine showed off a hero named Silver Streak instead, and by issue #7 another new hero called Daredevil was fighting the Claw.

Several stories in this volume, especially the earliest, are space-opera science fiction, inspired by Buck Rogers (1928) and Flash Gordon (1934). Their heroes aren’t costumed crime-fighters, but square-jawed men with ordinary abilities in futuristic settings.

The earliest are chapters within continuing stories: the adventures of Dr. Mystic (1936), Dan Hastings (1937), and Cosmic Carson (1940) break off at cliffhangers rather than conclude with triumphs. Clearly, early comic-book publishers and creators were taking their cues from newspaper comics, with their ongoing adventures. But families had newspaper subscriptions, and municipal distribution networks were solid. In contrast, fledgling comic-book publishers probably couldn’t deliver the next installments so reliably, so readers gravitated toward magazines that told complete stories.

Now the industry’s gone back to stretching storylines out over several issues, a form of storytelling possible only because their readership has fallen and their distribution though comic-book shops is narrow but reliable.

Holy Moley! I Thought That Robber Looked Familiar!

Universal Hub informed me that today is the sixtieth anniversary of Boston’s Brinks Robbery. Back in 1950, that crime was the largest heist in US history. The gang got away with almost three million dollars.

But what, you might wonder, does that historic event have to do with the usual topics of Oz and Ends? (Not that that’s ever stopped me before.)

The FBI webpage on the Brinks Robbery states that all the robbers wore rubber Halloween masks, including the faces of Captain Marvel and Captain Marvel, Jr.

Now that was just wrong.

In addition, the Brinks Robbery—or, to be more exact, the hunt for its perpetrators—inspired a storyline or two in Will Eisner’s Spirit comic.

Comics Memoirs about Comics History

Late last year I read both Eddie Campbell’s How to Be an Artist and Will Eisner’s The Dreamer. Both are lightly fictionalized memoirs about being part of a momentous scene in the history of comics.

Both were originally published on their own, but have been collected in thick volumes: Eisner’s Life, in Pictures and Campbell’s Alec: The Years Have Pants.

In Eisner’s case, the scene is about 1937-42, what was later called “the Golden Age of Comic Books.” It involved cramped offices, unreliable publishers, and both Depression and World War. Though the stories that Eisner and his colleagues produced were mostly about heroism, his own story is mostly about money, or lack of it.

Campbell’s topic is the British graphic novels movement of the late 1980s. It’s a picture of what Brian Eno has dubbed “scenius,” when people and circumstances come together to produce a flowering of innovation. I was pleased to read in this Comics Worth Reading review that Campbell’s never-named but vital “Man at the Crossroads” is Paul Gravett, recognized for his Graphic Novels: Everything You Need to Know. (I read that last year, too.)

Both Eisner and Campbell depict themselves as well-meaning, befuddled strivers, just trying to make enough money to live off this art thing they like doing. Their colleagues are more colorful; their women mysterious; their successes serendipitous, surprising, and often short-lived.

While Campbell and his crowd have no more money than Eisner’s, they’re focused on art. The stories they tell tend not to be heroic, unless they’re working just for the (American) money. Instead, the heroism in How to Be an Artist comes in pushing against the conventions of the comics business as it had been set up back in the “Golden Age.”

Here’s Campbell’s own review of Life, in Pictures, which focuses on Eisner’s late artistic development rather than his early experiences.

Judge Hand in the Land of Superheroes

I was intrigued by the opening of an essay by Peter Coogan in A Comics Studies Reader, just published by the University Press of Mississippi. The book says this article was excerpted from Coogan's book Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre, which is less widely available--perhaps because it comes from a publisher called Monkeybrain Books. (Just a hunch.)

The essay starts this way (at least as the Reader presents it):

In his 1952 ruling that Wonder Man copied and infringed upon Superman, Judge Learned Hand provided a succinct definition for the superhero. The characteristics of mission, powers, and identity are central to Hand's determination that Wonder Man copied Superman.

Legal scholars often call Hand the greatest American jurist never to serve on the Supreme Court. He was especially influential in defining the law of intellectual property, a topic that came up a lot in his New York circuit. The thought that Hand had a hand in providing a legal definition of a superhero--on the level of circuit-court precedent--was intriguing.

But the date nagged at me; the Wonder Man lawsuit, I recalled, occurred early in the history of superhero comics. And when I looked into this statement further, it turned out to be wrong in other ways. It mixes up two separate suits involving Superman, misstates Hand's role, and reads too much into the pertinent ruling.

The first suit was filed in 1939 by DC Comics soon after Fox Comics published the first Wonder Man story, commissioned from Will Eisner and his studio. DC claimed that the story infringed on its copyrights for the early Superman stories. Fox responded that both characters were based on older, more general heroic archetypes, so there was no copyright. Don Markstein's Toonopedia describes the proceedings this way: "Fox carefully instructed Eisner on how to testify. Instead, Eisner told the truth," which was that Fox had indeed asked him to come up with a hero as much like Superman as possible.

Judge John M. Woolsey ruled in favor of DC, and Fox appealed. In 1940, a panel of three judges upheld the decision. One of those circuit-court judges was Learned Hand. But the judge who wrote that 1940 decision was actually Learned's cousin, Augustus Noble Hand.

Learned Hand returned to the field of superhero law in 1952, at the end of a lawsuit between DC and Fawcett over whether a more successful comic-book hero, Captain Marvel, infringed on the Superman copyright. A lower court had ruled that the Big Cheese would have done so except that DC had made a legal blunder in not registering some Superman comic strips with the US Copyright Office. Hand reversed that decision to declare that Captain Marvel was a copyright infringement anyway.

So, to return to the quotation above, the Wonder Man suit was in 1939-40, not 1952, and Learned Hand didn't write the decision. Which brings me to the final point: that decision really didn't address what defines a superhero.

The judges were ruling on a narrow question: Was the Wonder Man story in Wonder Comics, #1, an infringement on DC's copyrights for Action Comics, #1-12, featuring the Man of Steel? They saw several points of similarity:

The attributes and antics of "Superman" and "Wonderman" are closely similar. Each at times conceals his strength beneath ordinary clothing but after removing his cloak stands revealed in full panoply in a skintight acrobatic costume. The only real difference between them is that "Superman" wears a blue uniform and "Wonderman" a red one.

Each is termed the champion of the oppressed. Each is shown running toward a full moon "off into the night", and each is shown crushing a gun in his powerful hands. "Superman" is pictured as stopping a bullet with his person and "Wonderman" as arresting and throwing back shells. Each is depicted as shot at by three men, yet as wholly impervious to the missiles that strike him.

"Superman" is shown as leaping over a twenty story building, and "Wonderman" as leaping from building to building. "Superman" and "Wonderman" are each endowed with sufficient strength to rip open a steel door. Each is described as being the strongest man in the world and each as battling against "evil and injustice."

If those traits actually defined a superhero, then comic-book heroes who don't run toward a full moon, who are shot at by more or less than three men, or who have powers other than being the strongest man in the world wouldn't qualify. And the ruling didn't touch on other qualities Coogan's essay says are distinctive ingredients of a superhero, such as a "codename and iconic costume, which typically express his biography, characters, powers, or origin."

So the essay opening that intrigued me instead reinforced my feeling that research in this field needs to be more rigorous and less wishful. Learned Hand's contribution to the definition of a superhero is as much a myth as Elvis Presley's imitation of Captain Marvel, Jr., or DC planning to cancel Batman in the early 1960s.