Blog O’ Leaps

In a needlessly generous contribution to my ongoing file of teeth-grindingly irritating instances of popular culture abuse in the mainstream media, New York Times film writer Manohla Dargis has waded in for the proverbial basinful, with her amazing adult fantasy piece about the overwhelming brilliance of Jerry Lewis, prior to his collection of the Humanitarian Award at the Oscars.

While the article isn’t exactly religious about avoiding contentiousness – in particular in the area of arbitrarily-defined “truths” that could conceivably cause spirited debate, if not flat-out belly laughs among both film enthusiasts and regular human beings – it’s the accompanying audio sidebar, in which Ms Dargis attains even more dizzying heights of crackpot romantic whoopsie in eulogising her hero, which really goes for all the marbles and comprehensively loses them.

During this epic pronouncement, we are informed that Jerry Lewis is a “cinematic genius”, that he and Dean Martin first teamed in 1956 and broke up in 1956, and that director Frank Tashlin (who directed some of the Martin & Lewis pictures, and a number of Jerry Lewis’s solo movies) “created” Porky Pig.

Ooooooooohkaaaay.

Err, let’s calm down a little, take a deep, refreshing pill or two, shake the shreds of tattered stratosphere out of our hair, and gently float back down to our Planet Earth for awhile.

(1) JERRY LEWIS THE “CINEMATIC GENIUS”

Well, he wasn’t. Just look at the pictures he directed. While you’re looking, you may well notice that he had a definite, raw talent for making movies, or at least assembling interesting shots, sequences and perspectives from a visual point of view. He came up with stuff that looked and felt different from the typical studio picture approach of the day to similar material. He was ahead of his time in some aspects. In a way, he was an early formula-comedy precursor to Tarantino, in that he was schooled in the movies (albeit comedy ones in Jerry Lewis’s case, and he also had a solid grounding in other forms of entertainment), and he took what interested him from there, but in a way that reacted to (or against) the standard way of presenting those aspects, resulting in a form that was different. *

But it’s a RAW, innate kind of talent, and not one that was ever conspicuously diluted by the diseases of development, progress, or improvement, much less the confidence or ability to subsume a fully achieved style to the cause of telling a story, thus keeping all that style out of the way of the movie.

Look at the movies he directed for yourself and try and decide:
- did he get better at telling a story as he went along?
- did he get better at making the comedy “register” as his career continued?
- or did he just jump giddily from idea to idea and technique to technique like a hyperactive kid (or like his frequent on-screen persona) as the mood took him, on a continual basis?

As a director, his most telling, if not fatal, flaw was his indulgent love of his most frequent (actually, almost exclusive) star, Jerry Lewis. A different director, or even a different editor in charge of final cut, wouldn’t have allowed Lewis-the-star to bring the picture to a crawling halt for minutes on end, mugging and chewing on material that just wasn’t worth the effort. (The scene in The Patsy, with Lewis fumbling around with ice-cubes for what seems like seven or eight lifetimes, while character actors the calibre of Peter Lorre have to stand around looking bored in reaction shots in the background, comes rocketing to mind in this category.) Director Jerry thought that the movies needed everyone to love Star Jerry to “work”, (which may or may not have been right), apparently thought that everyone did love Star Jerry, (which definitely wasn’t right), and, personally, loved Star Jerry so much that he could never shut him down even when he’d traversed all the lines of being simply grotesque rather than remotely funny, and vastly overstaying his welcome in a particular set-up (which would be exactly where the flaw becomes fatal).

I think it’s probably true of comedy that, as an audience member, you love someone a little when they make you laugh. At least at the time. And if they made you laugh a lot of times, after the movie/performance/TV show (or, perhaps, career) maybe you love them then too.

For all the arguments about what French critics, US critics, the general public, you and I, did or didn’t “get” about Jerry Lewis, I think that may have been the one thing he didn’t understand. The important thing was not that the character was pathetic, or sad, or a precursor for Ringo’s on-screen character in the Beatles, or an inheritor of the Chaplin mantle for pathos-in-comedy – the real important thing was for him to make us laugh. And even his most dyed-in-the-wool champions would be hard-pressed to deny that, perhaps outside of The Nutty Professor, there tends to be a lot of stuff – a lot of TIME – in the Lewis-directed Jerry movies, when you have to indulgently forgive or forget a fair old proportion of tiresome exposition, body-clenchingly, cringe-inducing sentiment, and dreary, failed, and obvious comedy attempts, to get to the good stuff. (Let alone come out at the end convinced that that was a rip-roaring movie you just saw.)

As to whether he’s funny or not, that’s a separate issue, and a difficult one to discuss on any sort of rational basis anyway, because the appeal of comedy is not rational in the first place – it speaks to instinct and individual personality, or at least mind-set. If taste in movies, music or any other part of mass entertainment/popular culture is a highly individual matter, “taste” in comedy is even more fraught from the point of view of rational comparison or evaluative discussion, because it’s not really about taste. It’s about what makes you laugh, and there are probably few things more individualistic than that. **

On the surface of things, it’s not really relevant to a discussion about whether Jerry Lewis was a “cinematic genius”, but, more realistically, it’s the whole ball game. Manohla Blahnik Whatserface from the New York Times wouldn’t be writing an entire article about what a maverick artistic tearaway Jerry Lewis is/was if she didn’t laugh like a drain at his pictures. Obviously. Plenty of people don’t find Jerry Lewis funny at all. They won’t be queuing up to write doctoral dissertations on the brilliance of Jerry Lewis’s directorial career. Obviously.

For the ones who fall in between those two poles of appreciation, I suppose the key question on the issue of whether Jerry Lewis was a “cinematic genius”, would be, that, as he was engaged in the production of comedy movies, and the aim of comedy movies is to get people to laugh, did his application of his directing techniques result in better comedy value from his routines, and more laughs.

This is the other area where I think the claims of “Jerry Lewis – Cinematic Super-Genius” fall down in a screaming heap. The most interesting exhibitions of technique in the Lewis-directed movies are usually, if not always, expended on non-comedy material, and the funniest instances of comedy are often in spite of the technique, or just plain “shot flat”.

In the best work of Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin, Laurel & Hardy, or their strange colourful lineal descendents, the Hollywood cartoons, the camera unambiguously served the comedy. In the pictures Lewis directed, the camera serves the whim of the director, and the comedy has to fend for itself. If he wasn’t a great comedy director, then as a maker of comedy films, he wasn’t a great director.

In the really great comedy movies – and I mean “to you”, not even some sort of even vaguely general “consensus choice” – you probably don’t even notice directorial technique, partly because the whole thing just “works” and partly because you’re probably laughing too hard. The last thing you’d think about is that some other director could have done a better job. In Jerry Lewis’s movies, it is possible, if not probable to notice the director’s technique, and not remotely difficult to imagine a less wilful and fanciful, more selfless, impartial, and perhaps even journeyman technician of a director doing as good or a better job of making a comedy movie with the same material, sets and stars. Was Jerry Lewis the best director Jerry Lewis ever had, or was it Frank Tashlin? (The latter a definite non-journeyman, by the way.) Or were some of the many other Hollywood long-termers who fronted Lewis movies not at least as effective in directing such films as Lewis was?

Not to attempt to deny even one person one solitary moment of genuine joy they’ve honestly derived from those movies, (including me), but there’s your answer, as near as there could ever be an empirical one, about “Jerry Lewis – cinematic genius”. He wasn’t one.

As a comedian? He’s got stronger claims there, you’d still get plenty of argument, but, at the end of the day, that IS a separate issue.

If you were game, you could further research such claims by looking at the couple of movies he directed in which he didn’t star. Or you could check contemporary movies in which he was the star, directed by other hands. It all comes out the same in the wash, I think. His movies were individualistic, different, and he had some flair and plenty of ideas behind the camera. A Hitchcock he wasn’t. A Chuck Jones or Friz Freleng he wasn’t either.

(2) DEAN AND JERRY

Our Manohla clearly misspoke in saying that Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis first teamed in 1956. That’s when they broke up. There’s no point suggesting that they had a career both as brief and as memorable as most of Australia’s delightful and stentorian run of “quirky” comedy TV series, particularly as produced by the ABC and pay television. But a slip of the tongue is, as the poet hath it, no big whoop. They got together some time in the 40s, and Leonard Maltin’s Movie Comedy Teams book suggests they first met in 1946, and frequently appeared on the same shows before teaming officially, so you can work it from there.

However to discuss at length Jerry Lewis’s career and not to substantially discuss the non-movie exploits of Dean’n’Jerry leaves the kind of gaping hole that even Australia’s #1 Motor Sport Hero/Lunatic, Robbie Maddison, would think twice about trying to jump a motorcycle over. Movie critic Andrew Sarris commented (in his book The American Cinema): “Martin and Lewis at their best – and that means not in any of their movies – had a marvellous tension between them.”

Leaving the ‘marvellous tension’ in the hands of a convenient masseur for a moment, the key suggestion there, and Sarris is not Robinson Crusoe in raising it – is that to see the essence of both them as a team, and Lewis as an unfettered comedy performer, you had to see them outside the movies.

Apparently they were amazing on stage. Well, despite the best efforts of General Motors, CSIRO, and Triple-M FM’s astonishing dedication down the years to a handful of songs by Midnight Oil, Hunters and Collectors and “Great Southern Land” (etc) no-one has succeeded to this point in manufacturing a working-model time machine to bring the past into the present, or, alternatively, to sling us pell-mell into the past. If you weren’t born in the right time or place to see Dean and Jerry on-stage, in their element – and most of us weren’t – then there’s no way of checking such claims.

However, their television appearances (especially on the Colgate Comedy Hour, which they frequently fronted) DO survive, and give – both on their own evidence, and the testimony of others who saw them live and on TV – some feel for how their act might have differed on stage, and certainly a different, broader and wilder perspective on the nature, extent and abilities of Martin & Lewis as a team, and as individual performers.

Boiled down, there’s plenty of weight behind the contention of Sarris (and others). The movies trimmed, diluted, and constricted the extent of what Martin and Lewis did on television, and by likely extension, on stage. They had other priorities, like plot, love interest, imposing characters on Dean and Jerry that had nothing to do with their “natural” stage characterisations, production numbers, and what-have-you. It was a watered-down version. Trying to learn about Lewis’s capabilities and range as a comedian from movies – even a lot (if not all) of the solo ones and certainly the “team” movies with Dean Martin – works about about the same to trying to watch a widescreen movie on a standard ratio TV screen in the days before letterboxing: you only get to see part of the picture. It’s just the same as trying to assess the extent of various key Saturday Night Live alumni’s talents – you actually get a much better idea of their range from watching them stretching their talents (even if sometimes ill-advisedly) week to week on the old TV shows than you do, at least in most cases, from seeing them shoe-horned, if willingly, into restrictive movie characterisations with even more restrictive “things get to their absolute worst for our hero, but then he prevails” standard Hollywood plotting. (See pretty much any Will Ferrell movie by way of example. Or pretty much any Saturday Night Live cast-member’s movie turns, with a very few honourable exceptions.)

The point is, the Lewis & Martin TV stuff is available, and cheap, on DVD, and readily accessible. It shows the knowing, improvisational showbiz side of the performers, (what someone, I think Andrew Sarris, referred to as Lewis’s “Borscht belt hipsterism”) and is immensely aided by the men peeking playfully around the edges of their characters, and sometimes flat-out bolting into the spotlight, if momentarily. It’s something they rarely, if ever, got to do in the movies (although something like Martin’s performance in Kiss Me Stupid and Lewis’s as “Buddy Love” in The Nutty Professor – both arguably as Dean Martin parody figures, interestingly - give at least something of an inkling) and it gives a different perspective on their talents and abilities.

To substantially ignore this area is to distort any discussion of Martin & Lewis, and Dargis NY Times article skated over the entire stage/TV period of Martin & Lewis like she was double-parked. As a comic talent, you can’t discuss Lewis without having seen some of this material. From the article, I’d have no idea whether she has. ***

(3) FRANK TASHLIN “CREATED PORKY PIG”

This is isn’t a little slip of the tongue whoopsie. This is your classic mainstream media “Blow up the libraries, kids!” Stalinist revision, located right on the corner of No Research St and Couldn’t Give A Flying Fudgesicle Blvd.

It’s just wrong. Tashlin was an important figure in the ongoing codification, or definition of the Porky Pig character, and made some extremely stylish pictures with him. A character first identified as Porky Pig appeared in the Friz Freleng (mostly) musical cartoon I Haven’t Got a Hat in 1935. The pig looked different and was not as streamlined in design as the better-known later version, but already had the stutter (voiced by a vaudeville veteran named Joe Dougherty at this stage, before Mel Blanc later took over and refined the vocal characterisation). Over the next few years, a number of Warners directors, including Tex Avery, Jack King, Frank Tashlin and Robert Clampett, featured the character in cartoons, in both the more unwieldy earlier version, and gradually, the cuter, shorter, more familiar version still recognisable today, with transition stages in between. (Elmer Fudd went through analogous changes a little later on.) Frank Tashlin came in around halfway through 1936 (well, thereabouts, his first Porky cartoon was released in August 1936) and doubtless made his contributions to the Porky character as well, along with many memorable cartoons. But he didn’t originate the character, for starters.

The Jerry Beck/Will Friedwald book Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies sez, re Tex Avery’s 1936 cartoon The Blow Out: “The first real Porky Pig cartoon.” Since, in the introduction to that book, they casually mention that they saw every single one of the Warners cartoons in researching it, I’m probably going to go with their estimation, over the casual trouser-scratch type guess of Ms Dargis.

Avery first presented Daffy Duck in a 1937 Porky cartoon, and presented what is generally recognised as the first “finished” Bugs Bunny appearance, in the Bugs/Elmer cartoon A Wild Hare. **** He “had form” as they say, on both refining existing characters, and defining new ones to produce a working template that could be profitably mined for years (and decades) to come.

In his few, but significant years at Warners, Tashlin made probably as many Porky’s as anyone at that time, although Avery made plenty, and Clampett probably made at least as many, although his directing career started a little later on. Both of those would have had influence on Porky Pig’s development, not to mention others (animators/storymen) at the studio, and Ub Iwerks (Disney’s animator/director who some suggest contributed at least equally if not more to the credited Walt Disney on the early Mickey Mouse cartoons) also directed a fair amount of the early Porky cartoons. Tashlin would have been a significant part of that process as well, not only in defining the character, but in making arguably the most significant run of Porky Pig starring one-reelers in his brief mid-late ‘30s heyday as Warners’ unchallenged star character.

But Friz Freleng first presented the character, before Tashlin was even at the Warners cartoon studio (aka Termite Terrace) and Avery had already defined him on screen, possibly before Tashlin had produced so much as a single frame there.

In the actual article, (as opposed to her audio comments, which I’m mostly writing about) Manohla Dargis notes of US critics and audiences, “It doesn’t help that comedies, cartoons and children’s movies rarely receive the respect they deserve here.” Yeah, I know exactly how she feels. Some folks can’t even be bothered to look up a history book before writing about that stuff.

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* [Entirely parenthetically, this is the exact same approach that the Ramones (or the Cramps) took to music in the 70s. They took the elements that interested them from the past, ‘reacted’ to/against the more conventional presentation of that past, and expressed them in a fundamentally different way, which you could make a grandstand claim “suited the temper of the times”, and it might even be true, but the truth is, it probably suited their own temper. Actually, you could say the same thing about Sam Phillips and Sun Records 20 years or so earlier, except that Greil Marcus already did, in the book Mystery Train.]

** [I guess I deliberately avoided pulling the trigger in the main body of this piece/response/thingo on the obvious subject of whether I find Jerry Lewis funny, because I thought whatever I said would distort the main issue, and lead off to various side-tracks. Now I guess I’ll prove that.

“Sometimes” is the true, if wishy-washy, answer to the question. I’m neither a dyed-in-the-wool fan, nor someone who never-eh-eh-EVER finds him funny. In terms of extremely obvious comedy, I find someone like Curly from the Three Stooges, or Lou Costello (of Abbott fame) more “naturalistic” for want of any better word, because to me their mugging feels more like a natural outgrowth of their on-screen character. Lewis was more versatile than those guys, which is both an advantage and a curse. You can’t really imagine Curly or Costello as anything but those characters. That’s limiting, I guess you could say, but it means everything they do “feels right” for the characters, which within the area they’re working, means they have total conviction on their side. (And whether or not you find their respective kind of schtick funny, the one thing beyond dispute is their total immersion into the character.) Lewis you can sometimes, if not often, see “trying”. (“Don’t…try…so…hard!” is something the very funny Kathleen Freeman repeatedly hisses at him between clenched teeth in The Disorderly Orderly – a motto the real life Jerry could have arguably profitably adopted.) What he’s doing is often so infantile, there is an inescapable, very recognisable divide between the character he’s trying to portray and the 30-something professional comedian/director who’s playing it. He’s often funnier, to me, doing vaudeville “bits” like his punchdrunk fighter routine, or the occasional shrewd-eyed, parodic, showbiz in-stuff, than he is doing the physical comedy that was his supposed stock-in-trade. To me he’s not one of those guys who’s “just funny” like Peter Sellers, Chevy Chase, Stan Laurel, where I’m already laughing before they even do anything. He had a whole scene to mug and carry-on and be Jerry Lewis in the comedy-movie-about-comedy Mr Saturday Night, and it was wild, but I thought Billy Crystal’s one underplayed killer line in that scene was way funnier than all of what Lewis did. I think he’s spent a lot of his career coming determinedly from the “More is Less” school of comedy. But you’d have to be an idiot, or at least venomously partisan on the issue, to say he wasn’t a funny man. There’s plenty of stuff in the films, and certainly on the TV tapes, to show he was funny. And if he wasn’t a Chaplin, or a Keaton, or a Groucho or a Harpo, or a W.C. Fields, well, outside of those guys, who was?

*** [My best guess would be she hasn’t. How could you have seen that stuff and not commented on it? Again, as time wears on, and the standards get lower and lower, you increasingly find people writing whatever they want about the movies/television/music/whatever of the past and getting away with it, because their readers don’t know any better (which is understandable), the writer him- or herself doesn’t know any better (which is inexcusable), and the people/publications who employ them don’t know and don’t care, because it’s popular culture, and, unlike finance, general news, politics, sport or anything else in a newspaper, it’s all opinion and nobody cares if you get that stuff right or not (the exact nature of the problem, and a cast-iron guarantee of uselessness.) A prime example of all the above is the audio sidebar to the article which prompted this rant by me, not to mention the article itself – largely a pile of hosanna-festooned, insubstantial horse-hockey, often miles off the point and deeply in need of a long taxi-ride back to reality, which is largely an extremely indulgent attempt by a Jerry Lewis fan to turn work she enjoys into some sort of monument to creative, iconoclastic, ground-breaking cinemaaaaah. Which it isn’t. She’s working harder for less return than he used to.]

**** [As with many animated cartoon characters from around that time, the genesis of Bugs Bunny (and Porky Pig for that matter) is not as clear-cut as the late-comer, tin-pot, “I’m a film expert, so it must be true”, tenderfoot types would tell you. A prototype for what kind of became Bugs Bunny appeared in a cartoon called Porky’s Hare Hunt (1938). There’s a Bugs-type mock-death scene and the weird little white rabbit in it even says the trademark “Of course you know this means war!” line in it, apparently. (I can’t recall ever seeing it.) In voice and characterisation it’s apparently a fair way from even the earlier “finished” version of Bugs Bunny. That cartoon was directed by Ben Hardaway, whose nickname was “Bugs”, hence the studio description “Bugs’s Bunny”. (Not particularly difficult to see how the name evolved from there.) Hardaway co-directed a 1939 cartoon with Cal Dalton, called Hare-um Scare-um, which also featured a hunting theme, and this time, a two-toned goofy-looking little mad rabbit, and already included a scene of the rabbit mock-begging the hunter not to shoot him, and another where the rabbit cross-dresses as a female dog to confuse the hunter’s male dog. Early 1940 saw the release of Elmer’s Candid Camera (directed by Chuck Jones), which had a recognisable Elmer Fudd, in an unusually non-bloodthirsty switch, pursuing a rabbit with a camera. The rabbit looks a lot like the pre-War Bugs Bunny design they were soon to arrive at, is more of a wise-acre and wise-cracker than the completely lunatic (and more Daffy Duck-derived) earlier versions, but probably doesn’t have quite the same speech patterns and delivery as what was to come, nor is there quite the definition of the roles of the two main characters. But it’s a recognisable prototype of Bugs Bunny, and the Bugs and Elmer cartoons. Later that year (still 1940) brings us A Wild Hare, the Tex Avery version of similar material, and the one that everyone hangs the shingle on as the official first Bugs Bunny cartoon. (The Beck/Friedwalder book sez: “The classic cartoon that solidified the personalities of Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd and became the blueprint for their future encounters.”)

About the only thing we do know for sure after all that is that Frank Tashlin didn’t create Porky Pig.
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As someone who grew up reading comics, I’ve enjoyed the run of superhero movies ram-raiding the megaplex box-offices over the last ten years or so. *

Well, I’ve enjoyed the idea of it, at any rate. I don’t go and see every last attempt to bring the Marvel and DC comics legacy of the past to a broader audience.

(a) I don’t need to, because I already read the comics the first time around (or for older, mostly 1960s ones, in reprint) and the impact of those combined stories and images worked just fine for me on low-grade paper and four-colour printing. Adding in big money name actors, millions of dollars of sets, the latest hi-octane computer-scribbled effects etc etc doesn’t necessarily “bring them to life” for me, it’s just more of a pleasant reiteration, at least when it is a pleasant one.

(b) Some of those comics weren’t that great **, and/or some of the movie adaptations of them sent out a clear warning odour that kept me well clear of the danger of actually spending money – and more critically, the time – on seeing them.

One would think at some point, this cycle of superhero movies will come to an end. For one thing, that’s what cycles inherently do. The suspicion lingers that there will always be the occasional superhero movie regardless, because “comic-book superheroes” *** have now been subsumed into the mass culture, as yet another genre, or sub-genre, that movies can readily sell to the general public. And, if this cycle does die away, probably assisted into oblivion by the proliferation of less careful, more rote, and generally underwhelming superhero movies amidst the fewer solid ones, there will probably be another run of similar movies somewhere down the track.

Hollywood rarely completely discards previously successful genres, regardless of how anachronistic they might seem at a given time. We’ve had a run of successful pirate swashbucklers in the recent past, and the odd western (such as 3:10 to Yuma) still pops up from time to time. What the unshakably media-clueless now insist on basically defaming as “Sci-Fi” had quiet times after separate runs in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, but always seems to come back, and is probably established as being about as mainstream as any other genre now.

What we learn from the present superhero picture cycle, if anything, is that the comic book creators and fans of the past were right, and the mainstream (of entertainment, and its largely and happily comics-ignorant consumers of the time) were wrong – i.e. this style and content of storytelling, concerning super-powered (or at least “preternaturally-abled”) heroic adventurers saving the world while wearing elaborately designed underwear – WAS viable as a mass entertainment. There was nothing inherently limiting it to a particular audience, usually if not invariably caricatured as pimply pre-pubescent males, loner teen wallflowers, and, in the 60s and 70s, bong-addled US college students. Whether the appeal of this kind of material works on a level of appealing to the pimply pre-pubescent male within all of us, is a heady strain of deep thought I’ll leave to attention-seeking TV psychologist types. (And it’s something I don’t really buy for a minute, incidentally.)

The key point is that what artist/writer Steve Ditko (and perhaps editor/packager/publisher/dialogue editor-adjustor Stan Lee, to a degree ****) conceived as concepts, stories and approach for the early 60s revisionist superhero Spider-Man was proved to still be perfectly viable to appeal to a general audience when the characters, story arcs and inherent tensions he/they generated way back when, were strip-mined (along with the work of others ++) for the three Spider-Man movies of the 2000s.

The entertainment mainstream was slow on the pick-up. Perhaps it could also be said that this genre more than many others needed the special effects capabilities of movies to catch up with the imaginations of its original creators.

That’s one thing we learn from the last ten years (or so) of superhero movies.

One that we perhaps don’t exactly learn from this cycle – although it’s a perception that this run of movies has heightened, at least for me – is that the mainstream of entertainment in general, and movies in particular, finally tapped/drained/subsumed the last genre “native” to comics that hadn’t already been exploited.

Within its own mainstream, comics had largely followed genres popular in the movies. Going back in time to when comics (and I’m mostly talking comic books, rather than comic strips – the latter by dint of the nature of their publication, i.e. in newspapers, always being inherently “more mainstream”) were read by a larger proportion of the population, they included pirates, cowboys, science-fiction (generally of the space-opera variety probably familiar to most via the Star Wars pictures from many years later), crime, romance, etc etc – all genres which were familiar via the movies, television, and going far enough back, radio serials.

The things comics had to themselves, or at least generated to be aped by other media, were basically “funny animals” (i.e. humour-oriented strips or books featuring anthropomorphised animals), and superheroes.

They didn’t have funny animals to themselves very long. “Krazy Kat” by George Herriman may have set a template as far back as the 1910s – an undeniable precursor to Tom & Jerry, the Roadrunner and Coyote and so many others of the same ilk, not to mention being paid dutiful, direct homage in Itchy & Scratchy from The Simpsons – but almost as soon as there were animated cartoons, there were funny animals there, and realistically that was the mainspring of the genre after that. (Comic strips are, again, a somewhat different case. Also, there were some very talented people – Carl Barks’ work at Disney on Donald Duck titles being as obvious an example as any (he invented the character of Unca Scrooge, among others) – who created memorable, worthwhile work for comics in this genre. However the reality is that nobody thinks of Donald Duck as a comic book character FIRST. It’s an animated character from the Disney movie shorts. Actually, these days, it’s a highly profitable design that appears on babies’ plates and drinking utensils.)

The great comic strip creator Winsor McCay already saw animated cartoons as the perfect vehicle for his Gertie the Dinosaur character as early as 1914.

The funny animals continued to be a popular and viable genre for comics for decades, if not most of a century afterwards, but it was no longer “comics’ own”. The time when it was pretty much boils down to a decade and a half near the start of the 20th Century.

Speaking of genres, it’s difficult to “type” the early comic strip series, which go back to the turn of the previous century. (Although this is simplifying, comic books per se weren’t really established as a successful publishing vehicle until the mid-1930s.) Many of them were effectively the precursors of what became, in movies and television, situation comedy. Wilder, perhaps, and less restricted in terms of content by the limitations of the medium, but recognisable templates nonetheless. This was not a genre that comics ever really had to itself, at least not for any length of time.

Others were certainly wild and fanciful, and as inherently “of their medium” as any done since, but even something as off-the-charts and flat-out amazing as Winsor McCay’s “Little Nemo in Slumberland” has its precursors in illustrated children’s books, particularly in the fantasy genre. In subject matter and even to an extent, approach it’s not something that was unique to comics. (McCay’s particular expression of it was, absolutely, but not the raw – or, if you like “canonical” content, considered in purely generic terms.)

This pretty much left superheroes. +++

What became the generic comic book superheroes were born of the pulp magazines, some of fantasy/science-fiction pulps, (Superman’s creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster were SF pulp readers) and others of the crime pulps (Bill Finger and Bob Kane’s Batman is the obvious comics prototype here). Characters like “Doc Savage” and “The Shadow” were obvious influential precursors of the (initially comic strip and then…) comic book superheroes.

It’s a historical thread that you can no doubt read about elsewhere in copious, and multiple, detail on the electromophonic interweb, and would take up far too much space to go into here, not to mention that it’s been far more thoroughly delineated by other hands. (There’s also the whole Buck Rodgers/Flash Gordon stripe of primal superhero types, which I tend to regard as a juvenile – in a publishing designation sense, not a pejorative one – science-fiction outgrowth, rather than the comics superhero mainstream per se, but both undeniably came to fame as comic strip entertainments, prior to their movie serial immortalisations, and I’m sure they were influential, at least to a degree.)

Intermittent, fitful, and sometimes highly successful adaptations of comic book superhero material to radio, movies and, ultimately, television go back almost as far as the superheroes themselves. But in terms of a consistent, sustained and successful approach to exploiting the comic book vision of the superhero genre to the widest possible mass audience by another medium, the current ten-year cycle of superhero movies is pretty much “It”.

Comics, as in what we now know as the comic book, will doubtless continue as long as there are still entertainment media, and whether they do so on increasingly ritzy paper, soaked in eyeball-bending (and to be honest, not always that appetising) 3D-modelled colour and visual effects which weren’t even a publisher’s most insane dream in either the Golden (‘30s/40s) or Silver (60s) Ages, or whether they do exactly the same thing exclusively via computer monitor and/or portable electromophonic reading devices, they will still be comic books.

But unless someone comes up with another one in the future, ++++ they won’t have a genre that they “own”. Desperate wannabe pop culture “pundits” in the newspaper arts sections might not have realised yet, but everybody else does – comic book superheroes have long-since flown off to join the mainstream now. It may also be the case that the last medium-specific 20th Century genre hold-out in existence has finally come in from the cold.

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* [The 70s/80s Superman movies and the 80s/90s Batman ones don’t count as part of the current cycle, by my reckoning. Not only due to chronology and creative approach (although I think both of those provisos are probably true as well), but because these weren’t part of a general trend of bringing a genre previously somewhat cloistered from the entertainment mainstream to a mass audience, as Spider-Man, X-Men, Iron Man and the later, “new era” Batman movies were. Superman and Batman are both characters which long-since transcended their medium and genre to enter the mass consciousness. They are, and were, the perennial strongest survivors among the original comic book superheroes, with a time-tested mass appeal that others had not manifested. (For example, Captain America dates nearly as far back as both, being a Joe Simon/Jack Kirby creation of the late 1930s, but failed to ever make a similar impression on either movies or television to Superman/Batman, and at times has not been viable as a success in comic book form, which was certainly not true of Superman and Batman.)

In other words, the 70s/80s Superman and 80s/90s Batman movies were exploitations of an already proven commodity, in a manner in which viable comic book properties were “improved”, bent, adapted, warped, to fit the accepted mainstream adventure movie format of the time. (i.e. “Plus or minus so many degrees ‘Roger Moore James Bond movie’”, as us movie meteorologists like to put it.) They weren’t adaptations, in the sense that, say, Sam Raimi & Co. attempted to get the essence of the Spider-Man comics they’d clearly read and understood from one medium to another without compromising the inherent appeal of the original work. They were exploitations of commercially viable character/s that, if they’d even read any of the key comics medium works, were basically interested in extracting a few bits and pieces of ready-made business to incorporate in their Hollywoodization (and “improvement” as they no doubt saw it) of the product. Admittedly this is probably more true of the Batman movies than the Superman ones. But the later cycle of movies is patently more comics-centric than these ever were.]

** [The 70s “Incredible Hulk” comics, featuring our “ever so loveable, favourite monster-clown” endlessly bounding around the desert and bouncing US Army tanks off various cactus plants was, by and large, screamingly dull to start with, and never seemingly offered bounteous and unlimited entertainment as a movie concept. I’ve been unable to force myself to watch either recent adaptation. Ghost Rider never seemed to promise undiluted pure gold as a movie concept either. Daredevil and Elektra both had solid comics source material, but you didn’t have to look beyond a trailer (and casting) to see that they’d comprehensively “80s Batmanned” those, and, just to rub Affleck into the wound, apparently done so on the cheap as well.]

*** [This is also mentioned later in the main article, but characters drawn from comics sources, even heroic ones, appearing in movies or other non-comics media, is absolutely nothing new. Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers appeared in movie serials, and certainly entered the mainstream consciousness of another era. There were 1940s movies made featuring Dick Tracy, a huge comic strip hit character of the time. Other movie serial protagonists were either genuine comic book superheroes (Superman, Batman and Robin, Captain America) or featured heroes and/or supervillains that seemingly owed a debt to comics. But these were, again, attempts to exploit aspects of the comics characters within a much more conventional movie framework. What the 2000s run of superhero movies brought to the table was an attempt to present the comic book superheroes AS they’d been presented in the comics – it’s a fundamental difference of approach.]

**** [Regarding the superhero comics of yore, “Who did what” is an ongoing and blizzardly poop-storm of contradictory apocrypha which perhaps may not make the task of researching the “truth” behind the gospels of the New Testament pale into insignificance by comparison, but it will eat up a lot of living time if you let it. In this case, Steve Ditko both drew and “plotted” (provided all story detail) for the character-defining, and at least somewhat genre-redefining, first 39 issues of the original “Amazing Spider-Man” comic, and some if not all material in other titles which predated the advent of Spider-Man appearing in his own dedicated comic book. At that point, the “Marvel-style” of creating comics (as it became known in the later 60s and in particular 1970s), in which the basic plot for an issue was provided by the writer, the story was then broken down into panels by the pencil artist (or sometimes a layout guy, and then completed by a penciller, but let’s not even get into that), and then dialogued by the writer – may not have been put in place, and I certainly doubt it was for “Amazing Spider-Man” and “Fantastic Four” back then.

As a moderator of their less customer-friendly excesses he may have had a telling impact in honing their work. Some later solo work written by both Kirby and Ditko suggests that this may have been the case, at least to an extent. Whether it was as true at this early stage (early 60s), I have no real idea, but my sneaking suspicion is that, in the Spider-Man/Fantastic Four cases, Ditko and Kirby were the primary creators of the work, and in sporting terms, Lee was perhaps more the coach or club president than the player. Incidentally, and not entirely germane to this issue, Kirby did an early cover illustration of the Spider-Man character (the first?), and I believe I’ve read it suggested that he may have done the first visual designs of the character. It’s not out of the question. Anyway, it became Ditko’s character.]

++ [70s Spider-Man writer, and later creative editor and multi-teleplay-writer for Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Gerry Conway conceived the Gwen Stacy character arc, and I think the character itself, as seen in the third Spider-Man movie. The Venom character featured in Spider-Man 3 was a later creation, from the mid-1980s. (Wikipedia credits David Micheline (writer) and artists Mike Zeck and Todd McFarlane.) I was vaguely aware of that development, but wasn’t reading Spider-Man by that stage. I don’t believe the character of Robbie Robertson (the “Daily Bugle” editor, not the guitar player/songwriter from The Band) was a “Ditko original”. Wikipedia sez he was a Stan Lee/John Romita Sr creation, which sounds about right. (Romita took over the artwork after Ditko left.) I presume there are other examples as well.]

+++ [The Underground comix of the 60s really changed the game, as far as what comics could include, both in satirical intent, in terms of content (in what you might call a “censorship classification” kind of way), in terms of visual approach, and also, it could be said, in a generic sense. However, it could also be said that they tended to reject or refute the notion of genre, at least as that was conventionally understood in a comics sense. Equally, you could say that they opened the doors for the development of new comics genres. Eventually some of the comix’ values were subsumed into the more mainstream comics world, and they also were a strong creative influence on a more idiosyncratic personal kind of comics storytelling that emerged, along with an explosion of “independent” publishers (basically originally meaning not Marvel, DC, or other smaller conventional comics publishers) in the 1980s. In generic terms some of these later developments have been incorporated into movies, at least on a widespread arthouse level. The adaptation of Dan Clowes’ Ghost World is an obvious example. Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor straddles both the 60s Underground era and survived as a progenitor and exemplar of the later style, and of course it was also successfully adapted as a movie. Whether you’d “type” the 60s/70s undergrounds (which contained multitudes in terms of styles and approaches by wildly different, if vaguely like-minded artists) or the 80s-and-beyond “personals” as genres in a conventional sense is kind of a borderline area. I don’t know whether what, say, Peter Bagge (“Hate”) or Dan Clowes did in comics could be described as a genre, exactly, as say “horror” is a genre. And yet there was a definable similarity in approach to some of the indie material which emerged in the 80s in comics, and there were plenty of people doing it. I think it was really a case of taking a different approach to storytelling (and story content) in the medium. It’s perhaps more accurately characterised as a reaction or a movement, rather than a genre.]

++++ [Tastes change over time, and you read it here last. The look and content of superhero material in comic books now is a lot different, in some immediate ways, from what it was in the 70s and 80s. Some might dispute that in terms of essential content, but just looking at the comics now as opposed to then tells a story.

Comics have provided the fodder before which ultimately altered the constitution of the mainstream of entertainment in other media. It’s a unique medium which in some ways is as immediate and impactful than any other, if not moreso. Whatever a writer’s mind can conceive or an artist’s pen can create is right there on the printed page, full-blown (and admittedly sometimes fly-blown) uninhibited and unhampered by 736 television or movie executives’ watering-down/”improvement” processes, not to mention passing through the hands of 1137 technicians/actors/directors/key grips/etc before reaching an audience, or the inherent limitations (whether budgetary, logistical or technical) of those media to physically represent such creativity. Boiling this hi-falutin’ navel-lint hockey right down, if there’s going to be an existing entertainment medium which spawns a new approach to storytelling, or genre, it’s inherently as likely to be comics as any other, if not moreso. Comics are built that way. As a medium they have less issues which block the creation of a fundamentally new approach. I’ve already read material from, say the last ten years, and including right now, which seems on the verge of getting somewhere new. Actually, for all I know, it’s already been done. If the superhero example is anything to go by, I guess we’ll be seeing whatever that new genre or direction is on movie screens sometime in the next forty years.]
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