DOUGLAS WOLK

Scare tactics

DOUGLAS WOLK — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 19:17:04 GMT

When comics were too crude for school
A steady ripple of anti-comics sentiment was crystallized in the early ’50s.

The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America | By David Hajdu | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | 348 pages | $26

In the years after World War II, American society was in flux, and its kids were rebelling full-speed ahead. The older generation, looking for something to blame for juvenile delinquency other than, say, bad parenting and schools, zeroed in on an easy target: Crime Does Not Pay, Shock Suspense Stories, Young Love, and their kind — the vivid, gaudy, low-class comic books their children were reading.

That’s the story behind David Hajdu’s The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America. After a few chapters describing the dawn of the American comics industry, he turns his attention to the parallel evolution of the publishers who tried to churn out stuff kids would flock to, the creators who balanced “art” against “product,” and the bluenoses who played on public fear for children’s well-being to make themselves known as defenders of virtue.

A steady ripple of anti-comics sentiment was crystallized in the early ’50s by Fredric Wertham’s book Seduction of the Innocent — there were TV news “exposés,” mass comic-book burnings, local bans on comics, and Senate hearings at which Bill Gaines, who published the legendarily in-your-face EC Comics line, tripped himself up. Gaines’s testimony was built around a contradiction, as Hajdu smartly points out: he argued both that comics were harmless fun that couldn’t really affect their readers at all and that they were morally uplifting, educational tools that could make their readers better people.

He couldn’t have it both ways, and the industry threw itself on its sword, instituting the Comics Code, which stipulated, for instance, that “policemen, judges, government officials, respected institutions shall never be presented in such a way as to create disrespect for established authority.” “Naturally,” an editorial note in the final issues of EC’s most hellraising comics snarked, “with comic magazine censorship now a fact, we at EC look forward to an immediate drop in the crime and juvenile delinquency rate of the United States.”

Hajdu (author of a biography of Billy Strayhorn and the Dylan-and-friends chronicle Positively 4th Street) is a lively, meticulous writer: he based the book on more than 150 interviews with cartoonists and readers who lived through the era, and his delight in describing lurid images is infectious. (About a cover drawing from Crime Does Not Pay, he writes: “Gambling, alcohol, sex, shooting, brawling, knifing — Charles Biro packed in nearly everything that mid-century America considered sinful except jazz and homosexuality, although we can guess what kind of music would have been playing in that bar, and what were those two men doing on the balcony, anyway?”) But he doesn’t have a lot to add to what was already known about the class war he describes.

Sifting the trash heap

DOUGLAS WOLK — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 16:02:44 GMT

Things I love about the gold and the garbage in comics
There’s an image in an old Warlock comic book by Jim Starlin that sums up a lot of the peculiar, shared pleasure of reading comics.

SUMMER BOOKS

Ice and fire: Ice Cream’s cold contemporary art, Burning Man’s hot stuff. By Greg Cook.
Heat waves: Summer reads to cool off with. By John Freeman.
The man who knew too much: Philip K. Dick enters the Library of America. By Peter Keough.

There’s an image in an old Warlock comic book by Jim Starlin that sums up a lot of the peculiar, shared pleasure of reading comics: an enormous tower of rubble and trash — which constantly falls over because someone keeps sneaking diamonds into it. The history of comics is huge, trashy, and totally unstable because it’s studded everywhere with gems — to love comics is to love groping around to find those little glories, sharing them with friends, and sloughing off the grime with a laugh.

A few years ago, a challenge went around the comics blogosphere: “100 Things I Love About Comics.” The examples some people listed were acknowledged classics, famous cartoonists, well-remembered moments. But what’s closest to my own heart are those dirty gems and forgotten wonders — flashes of inspiration that arose from mainstream cartoonists’ desperate drive to make something really entertaining, or art comics’ giddy make-it-new impulses. Here are a few of them, in no particular order:

• The sound effects in Howard Chaykin’s early-’80s science-fiction satire American Flagg! — crowding the borders of every panel in a convincing evocation of sensory overload, not to mention that some of them were pretty hilarious on their own, like the guns that went “PAPAPAPAPAPA-OOOOOO-MOW! MOW! MOW!”

• The short period in the Norse mythology/superhero series Thor when Stan Lee was convinced it would be more dramatic to end every word balloon without punctuation — and was correct.

• “Son of the Sun,” the first Uncle Scrooge story by Don Rosa, drawn on spec as an audition and an homage to the decades-earlier Scrooge stories by Carl Barks — Rosa, who ended up as a full-time Scrooge artist, spends the length of the story trying so hard to be funny and impressive and true to the Barks tradition that his panel borders practically shake — but it totally works.

• Dishman, John MacLeod’s minicomics superhero, whose entirely useless power is to clean and put away dirty dishes by waving his hand at them (he got it from radioactive Fiestaware) and who feels compelled to try fighting crime with it anyway.

Over the top

DOUGLAS WOLK — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 19:05:15 GMT

Rick Veitch sends Sgt. Rock to ‘Afbaghistan’
“Your life. Your war.”

WAR IS HECK: If this sounds tasteless, it is, and that’s the point.

“Your life. Your war.” — that’s the slogan on the cover of the first issue of Rick Veitch’s Army@Love (Vertigo). The man and woman are cuddling post-coitally, amid rubble, as a building goes up in flames behind them. They’re wearing unbuttoned military fatigues, dog tags dangling on their chests, staring seductively at the camera. It looks like a fashion ad.

Veitch’s new comic book is the blackest satire the American war in the Middle East has yet produced. Army@Love is set in the near future, when the US military, desperate for troops to fight in its endless war in “Afbaghistan,” has called on middle managers from globalization-friendly companies to rebrand the war as a thrilling, sexy experience for young adrenaline junkies: “spring break on steroids.” The “ultimate peak experience” they’re offering is the “Hot Zone Club”: sex in the middle of a firefight.

If this sounds tasteless, it is, and that’s the point. Veitch has noted that war is always a sacred cow when it’s ongoing and that comedies about war don’t usually appear until years after the conflict has ended; he’s just jumped the gun to put together a big, brutal, bludgeoning joke that’s about a greed-driven war with no exit strategy and about the worst excesses of culture on the home front.

In satirizing something as touchy as an in-progress war, there’s always the question of how far over the top to go. Army@Love goes all the way. An American soldier uses her majestic naked physique to distract Afbaghi “insurgents” so her partner can shoot them. Smiling American officers hand out candy to eager local kids: “Remember — haha — without globalization there won’t be chocolate bars!” A team of National Guardsmen open fire in a shopping mall while gossiping about their love lives. A stage magician adapts an Abu Ghraib–style torture device into an on-stage escape act. The army’s “creative consultant” coordinates a bombing raid using an electric guitar plugged into a laptop.

There’s a long tradition of war comics that’s fodder for Veitch’s grinder here — until the early ’80s, titles like Sgt. Rock and Unknown Soldier and Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos appeared regularly on newsstands. And he strips and humiliates their conventions one by one. Instead of the sentient weapons of old war comics — the “Haunted Tank” occupied by the ghost of a Civil War general, the talking gun and helmet Rogue Trooper carried — we get Roy the Robot, a useless, pint-sized tank that ends every one of its sentences with a smily or frowny face. Even the title of Army@Love is a riff on the long-running ’50s-era series Our Army at War, which introduced Sgt. Rock.

Storyboarding

DOUGLAS WOLK — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 22:48:06 GMT

Brian K. Vaughan’s world of comics
Brian K. Vaughan is one of the highest-profile writers in American comics right now, a hyper-prolific idea man whose projects are driven by crisp, suspenseful pacing and built around resonant metaphors.

ANIMAL FARM ? Pride of Baghdad is a talking-animal story but a muted, despairing one.

Brian K. Vaughan is one of the highest-profile writers in American comics right now, a hyper-prolific idea man whose projects are driven by crisp, suspenseful pacing and built around resonant metaphors. The one he’s gotten the most attention for recently is Pride of Baghdad (Vertigo), a graphic novel (with exquisitely colorful art by Niko Henrichon) based on the story of the lions who escaped from the Baghdad zoo during the American bombing. It’s a talking-animal story, but a muted, despairing one — these lions stand in for the civilians affected by the clash of nations, forced to wonder whether the liberty they’ve longed for is worth the loss of their homes and perhaps their lives.

Vaughan is wrapping up his work on Runaways (Marvel), a superhero series with a fervent cult following that includes Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon, who’s taking it over when Vaughan leaves in a few months. On top of that, he’s the co-creator and writer of two ongoing comic-book series, Y: The Last Man (Vertigo) andEx Machina (Wildstorm), and he’s writing two comics mini-series: The Escapists (Dark Horse), which is a sequel of sorts to Michael Chabon’s novel The AmazingAdventures of Kavalier & Clay, and Dr. Strange: The Oath (Marvel). He’s also working on scripts for a not-yet-announced TV project and three movies that include potential film versions of Y and Ex Machina.

“People always think they shouldn’t let writers adapt their own stuff because they’re too close to it, but re-readingY, all I see is the mistakes I made,” Vaughan tells me when we meet in New York. “And so the film script is a completely new plot — the same characters, the same ideas, but it’s a movie and not a comic book.” He argues that it’s a bad idea for a film adapted from a comic book to try to tell the same story. “I don’t think the translation of [Frank Miller’s comic book] Sin City to film made it any better, for instance. I’d rather re-read the comic, or get a whole new experience.”

Polite and brave and honest?

DOUGLAS WOLK — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 16:11:33 GMT

DC’s hit-and-miss attempt to make its superheroes inspiring again
Monthly comic-book sales have been dribbling downward for years, as the economy of the comics industry shifts to book collections and manga.

Monthly comic-book sales have been dribbling downward for years, as the economy of the comics industry shifts to book collections and manga. So DC Comics’ latest plan to give its periodicals line a shot in the arm is pretty audacious. As of last month’s issues of the 22 ongoing superhero comic-book series DC currently publishes, the story line abruptly jumps one year forward. (Battlestar Galactica did the same thing recently, although the similarity is coincidental.)

The whole One Year Later project, or OYL, as it’s sometimes called, spins out of Infinite Crisis, the immense, frantic, space-operatic non-fanatics-need-not-apply crossover that’s been running for the past six months. Beginning May 10, a weekly, 52-issue miniseries, 24-ishly called 52, will explain what happened, week by week, during the missing year. I’d attempt to explain the plot of Infinite Crisis, but a master’s degree (at least) in DC continuity is required to make sense of it (it’s supposed to be a huge shock that the Superboy of Earth-Prime is wearing the Anti-Monitor’s armor, if that gives you any idea).

The subtext of Infinite Crisis, though, is much clearer, and writer Geoff Johns has been hammering it in good and hard: something has gone terribly wrong with superhero comics in the past twenty years; their heroes are grimly twisted or ineffectual — or both; they’re no longer capable of being as exciting and inspiring as they once were; we need to go back to first principles and core values. Johns knows that that idea has some flaws: “We’re going to have good heroes again!” one character declares in the most recent issue as he beats another one to a pulp. “Heroes who are polite and brave and honest!” But the point of the series is, inescapably, to hit some sort of big reset button (so much so that we learn in OYL that Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman have been out of action for a year).

The point of OYL itself is twofold, and almost contradictory. On the one hand, it’s meant to be a convenient jumping-on point for new readers; on the other, it’s meant to provide an intriguing hook for people who’ve already been reading each series for years. It’s generally much better at the latter than at the former — and it’s not too great at either.