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Opus 145: Opus
145 (September 12, 2004). Featured
this time are a review of the graphic novel, Birth of a Nation, and an essay examining the pros and cons surrounding
the prolonged lives enjoyed by "legacy strips," those perpetuated
after the death or retirement of the creator. Between here and there,
though, we have some fun with Stan Lee's bunnies, Hugh Hefner's pronouncement,
"Father of the Pride," announcing the fourth Presidential
Candidate, and doing a little Bushwhacking and Outfoxing. Without further
adieu- Nous R Us The kidnaped and then murdered Italian journalist Enzo Baldoni was only a part-time journalist,
in Iraq to report for the news magazine Diario. His regular occupation was as an advertising copy writer.
And he translated Doonesbury for
the Italian market. ... Finishing up an off-Broadway run September 19
is "Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead," a palindromically-titled
take-off by Bert V. Royal, inspired by (yup) Charles Schulz's Peanuts.
This unauthorized parody, according to Ernio Hernandez in Playbill.com,
reveals "what happens when America's favorite blockhead discovers
that his beloved beagle has terminal rabies. A missing pen pal, an abused
pianist, a pyromaniac ex-girlfriend, two drunk cheerleaders, a homophobic
quarterback, a burnt-out Buddhist and a drama queen sister" also
populate the stage. It was inevitable, of course. This is what happens
to cultural icons: they get parodied and jeered at as much as they get
cheered on. ... I neglected to report the outcome of the Winnie suit,
an action brought against Disney by the Stephen Slesinger, Inc., the
company that once had exclusive rights to Winnie the Pooh merchandise in this country
but that, apparently, signed some of those rights over to the Mouse
House. A judge threw out the Slesinger case last spring because the
plaintiff, according to Disney, had stolen, withheld or possibly manufactured
Disney documents, thus "tampering with the administration of justice"
in a manner both "egregious and inexcusable." The SSI people
had argued that Disney reneged on promises to pay certain royalties;
Disney denied it. And now we'll never know. SSI is a family firm founded
by Stephen Slesinger, whose widow, Shirley, eventually married Fred
Lasswell, proprietor of Snuffy Smith, now deceased. "Father
of the Pride," the new animated tv show for adults, debuted a Tuesday
or so ago, and I must agree with others that it's fairly lousy. Tom
Shales at the Washington Post called it "the worst
idea for a tv show-doubled." A "diseased cartoon," Shales
said, invented by "vulgar Jeffrey Zucker, president of NBC Universal
TV, as a result of studying the success of DreamWorks' theatrical film,
'Shrek.'" (Note, Shales says, Zucker didn't study the film: he
studied the "success" of the film.) Mark Dawidziak at the
Cleveland Plain Dealer called "Pride" an "amazingly
crude prime-time parade of below-the-belt sex jokes." Yes, it was
all of that, but it was even more. Or less. The characters didn't move.
They lumbered. They all looked like they were trying hard to be realistic
in motion. What's the point of that in an animated film? An animated
film should defy gravity, exceed realism. It should be energetic beyond
the ordinary, lively. Fun. None of that here. In
another animation effort likely to assault civilized sensibilities,
MTV has ordered a pilot for "Hef's Superbunnies," which is
about Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner's fight against crime as revealed by Stan Lee. Said Hef: "Stan and I go
back a long ways, and he simply felt it was time for me to reveal my
secret identity. You all know me as the editor-in-chief and publisher
of Playboy. But late at night when everyone
assumes I'm in the grotto living the good life, I'm out there with the
Superbunnies fighting evil-doers." Lee tried to get into the Playboy
universe soon after he arrived in Hollywood in 1975 with a soft-core
porn comic strip called Thomas
Swift, which, judging from the description of Lee's proposal in Stan Lee by Tom Spurgeon and Jordan Raphael, was pretty awful adolescent
sexual so-called humor. The sample splash page for the first adventure
depicts "a futuristic Ming the Merciless-style throne room adorned
with a bevy of naked big-breasted women lounging in various states of
sexual arousal. A brawny, evil-looking man with a head shaped like the
tip of a penis sits on a throne that resembles two giant testicles."
Well, that's enough, surely. Little
Annie Fanny it wasn't. And if Lee's Stripperella effusion a year
ago is any indication, "Hef's Superbunnies," in which a silk-pj
clad superhero with Hef's voice sends buxom bunnies out to impersonate
Charlie's Angels but in skimpier attire, won't be much fun either. Hef
insists, though, that "it's going to be more than just an action
show. It's going to be very satirical with a lot of cutting-edge aspects
to it." Maybe if they avoid villains with penis-shaped heads.... NBM
has sprouted a subdivision, Papercutz, headed by Jim Salicrup. Its first efforts will be to turn the Hardy Boys and
Nancy Drew into comics. The Hardy Boys, written by Scott Lobdell and drawn by Lea
Hernandez, will assume the usual four-color pamphlet guise in November;
Drew will take place in February in a pocket-sized graphic novel format,
also in full color, written by Stefan
Petrucha and drawn by Sho
Murase. This endeavor will probably succeed. It has the magic ingredients:
established teenage protagonists (all of whom also continue to appear
in prose novels) rendered in a variation of manga style, which, we are
assured, is all the rage among teenage girls and boys. How can it miss?
I hope it goes. But I must also confess that manga's mannered visuals
of refined gossamer usually turn me off, and what I've seen here is
no exception. This is a quirk of mine-perhaps even a failing-not a critical
evaluation. The artwork appears to be entirely competent and, for those
tuned in to manga, probably appealing. Hence, the success I predict.
The Hardy brothers and the Drew daughter are a perfect fit for the Papercutz
plan. The idea, Salicrup explained to Newsarama, is "to create
original graphic novels for the tween market featuring popular established
characters. When the opportunity presented itself for Papercutz to obtain
the graphic novel rights to the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, we jumped
on it. We've got a few other properties in development and hope to announce
them in the months ahead." The "tween market"? It's been
around for a couple generations now, albeit under another name. I'm
waiting for the "peevish geezer" market myself, something
tailored precisely to the tastes of those in their dotage like me. Robert Crumb, long lying fallow in the
playgrounds of France, has signed up for a major work at W.W. Norton.
The book, which no one is permitted to discuss in detail, may be a treatment
of the Book of Genesis. Crumb's agent, Denis
Kitchen, said he'd seen the idea before when Crumb brought it to
him at the now defunct Kitchen Sink Press. "We couldn't do it because
it was late in the day there," Kitchen said; the company was foundering
around in those days, searching for a way out of its financial doldrums.
"But it was an idea that I loved," Kitchen continued, "and
I never forgot about it." The project will presumably keep Crumb
at the drawingboard for at least two years. A major opus. But when the
book is finally published, don't look to see Crumb on Letterman or Leno.
"He's made it perfectly clear that he will not do things that are
usually expected of authors," Kitchen said; "he will not do
an author tour, and probably would never appear on a tv show, with the
possible exception of Charlie Rose." Crumb will probably stay in
France. Where his drawingboard is. LEGACY STRIPS Michael Jantze wadded up the proverbial towel and tossed
it on September 12. The Norm ceased
its syndicated run on that date. Sad. It's a great little strip, well-drawn
and uniquely comedic. No other comic strip achieves its humor like The Norm by breaking the fourth wall as
a matter of routine. The strip is, in effect, Norm's diary or daily
journal, and we, the readers, are witnesses to the daily doings as well
as the reports of those doings themselves. Apart from engaging in this
novelty, Jantze plays with the format of the comic strip, with its sequential
nature and, on Sundays, with the layout. Few comic strips exploit the
medium as deftly. In
the cartooning profession, there are just two sides on the issue: those
who curse the continuation of legacy strips (generally, the cartoonists
who've created new strips and can't get into enough papers to make a
living) and those who make their livings doing legacy strips. The position
taken by the latter is that if an eager audience exists for their work,
then that work ought to be prolonged. For a long time, I've agreed with
them. Moreover, I once said that if giving up Dick
Tracy meant getting Cathybert
or Spot the Frog into the paper, I'd rather have Dick Tracy. Dropping old strips just because they're old in order
to make room for lousy new ones doesn't seem to me to mark an advancement
in civilization. But now-now that I've "lost" two of my favorites,
The Norm and Liberty Meadows, just because they couldn't find homes in more than
50-60 newspapers-now, I'm beginning to have second thoughts. By
way of emphasizing the dimensions of the problem, Jantze suggested,
when we talked, that the difficulty resides in the medium-sized newspapers.
He asked his folks, who live in Fargo, ND, to count the number of strips
in the paper that are less than 20 years old. They found one. One! In
Jantze's view, that's a big part of the trouble: the papers in medium-size
towns seldom add anything new. Big city papers do; but not the smaller
ones. In medium-size towns, the old strips hold onto their slots in
the paper. Maybe. Maybe not. My hometown, Champaign-Urbana, Illinois,
is populated by about 100,000 vs. 86,000 in Fargo. The local News-Gazette
added 7 new strips last summer: Get
Fuzzy, Between Friends, Tina's Groover, Rose Is Rose, Pickles, The Norm,
The Boondocks. Almost no strips were dropped (Cathy
was, though; I remember that); the paper added a quarter page of comics
to its line-up. All but one of the newly added strips are less than
20 years old. Of the total of 30 strips, almost half-that is, 14-are
less than 20 years old. The others, in addition to the newcomers:
Heart of the City, FoxTrot, Baby Blues, Non-Sequitur, Zits, Dilbert,
Sherman's Lagoon. But eight of the remaining strips (half of them)
are legacy strips: Peanuts, Blondie,
Born Loser, Rex Morgan, Judge Parker, Mary Worth, Hagar, Hi and Lois.
Makes me feel pretty good about the local paper: it seems to embrace
a healthy balance of old standbys and fresh young blood. But it undercuts
Jantze's contention a little. Another
of the new crowd, Stephen Pastis (who draws, if you'll pardon the expression,
the stick-figure strip, Pearls
before Swine) reportedly said he once toted up over 5,000 possible
openings that were occupied by "legacy" strips. Peanuts,
for instance, is filling 2,600 "holes" -that is, if Peanuts were discontinued, there'd be 2,600
openings into which the newer strips could be fitted. Assuming, for
the sake of this argument, that a strip needs 100 client papers to produce
a reasonable living for its creator, Peanuts
is preventing 26 new strips from emerging. With that as a measure,
it's easy to see how 5,000 openings is not an outlandish number. Complicating
the situation is the stampede syndrome. Once feature editors hear that
a particular new strip is popular, they all grab for it. No one wants
to miss "the next Calvin
and Hobbes," as one of those editors told me a few years ago.
And syndicates, eager to hook onto any such phenomena, play into this
situation. When Zits started, papers signed up by the droves. And King Features, the
Zits syndicate, understandably
emphasized the rush that the strip was getting. Most of the rest of
the King line-up, particularly other strips that came along right about
then, looking for client papers, suffered somewhat in consequence. (Even
if the salesmen didn't make a conscious attempt to sell their hottest
number-and it would be hard to imagine them doing otherwise-the market
itself, the feature editors looking for "the next Calvin
and Hobbes," jumped on Zits.)
The Norm, by the way, came along right
about the time the Zits stampede
was in full feather. And so did Liberty
Meadows. I enjoy
Zits. It's not just funny:
it's also a superb example of the cartooning arts. I enjoy seeing Peanuts, too. And some of my friends are
producing legacy strips. But there's no denying that legacy strips take
up space, and by doing so, they foreclose on the futures of other, newer
strips. But if I lean in the direction of discontinuing legacy strips,
I run up against the mantra of those who produce them: if the reading
public loves these strips, it's our obligation to continue to produce
them. Well, fine. But on the other side of the aisle are those who say
people will never get the chance to fall in love with The
Norm. Or 9 Chickweed Lane. Or-... The
great difficulty for anyone opting to discontinue legacy strips is how
to determine which of them to kiss off. The cleanest solution to this
dilemma is the universal death knell: any comic strip whose originator
has died or retired should be discontinued. Easy. Nope: 'fraid not.
Blondie, for instance-which, today, may be but an anemic shadow of
its former self-was still in its heyday in the 1950s. Its originator,
Chic Young, hadn't died, but he had, for
all practical purposes, retired except for, perhaps, occasional supervision
or construction of gags. The strip was being drawn entirely by Jim Raymond (and, probably, his assistant).
Raymond, in fact, had been doing most of the drawing on the strip since
1937-and much of the writing, too. So when, exactly, did Young "retire"?
How can we tell? About death, there's no dispute. But about retirement-especially
in a field in which the liberal use of assistants masks the slow withdrawal
of the master's hand from the work-we can be less certain. If the universal
death knell is operative, when would Blondie have disappeared off the comics pages of the world's newspapers?
A similar question infects the fate of Bringing Up Father: its originator, George McManus, was ably assisted for 20 years by Zeke Zekley, who, by the time McManus
died in 1954, had been drawing the strip solo for months. And for years
before that, he and McManus so shared the drawing chores that even they
couldn't tell who had drawn what. So when should Bringing
Up Father be killed? The question rears its head about many stalwarts
on the comics page-so many that the death knell approach, seemingly
so easy to apply, wouldn't work. If it had been applied as rigorously
as its formulation implies it should be, we'd never have had Dick Moores'
unique treatment of Gasoline Alley; ditto Jim Scancarelli's.
And Al Scaduto's They'll Do It
Every Time. If
we can't, reasonably, apply the death knell criterion-death or retirement
of the originator-what criterion works? Is it age? Once a strip is,
say, 40 years old, should it be retired, more-or-less automatically?
If so, The Phantom dies (the Ghost Who Walks takes
a seat). And it is one of the most widely published comic strips in
the world (although not, maybe, in the U.S.). Is the crucial factor
the circulation of the strip? If a strip drops below, say, 50 papers,
should it die? If so, we'd have lost some of the best years of Krazy
Kat, which, for much of its last decade or so, ran in fewer than
two dozen papers. If a strip is produced by a team of writers and artists
taking the place of the single creative consciousness that originated
the feature, does that qualify the strip for cancellation? If so, Rex Morgan would never have started. Ditto Mary Worth. Or does this criterion apply only if the team replaces
a single creative consciousness? Then we're driven back to Blondie, whose production team eased into existence over the years;
so how could we know when, exactly, the team took over from Young? The
best reason for banishing a comic strip is that it ceases to be as good
as it once was. Legacy strips, according to this logic, are more prone
to deteriorate than other kinds of strips. After all, the geniuses that
devised them are gone, and with their departure, the special magic spark
that inspired the strip disappears. Perhaps. Perhaps not. I don't think
that the people who eventually continued
Bringing Up Father were the genius that McManus was (or that Zekley,
having apprenticed with the creator, was; and he wasn't given the chance
to continue his boss's work). And the strip wasn't at all the same.
The difference may have been an inferiority. Nobody, really, could follow
E.C. Segar's act on Popeye
(Thimble Theatre) either.
But some successors, while not replicating the genius of the originator,
devise a genius of their own and re-create the strip in their own image,
so to speak. Yes, the strip is not the same; but the new strip is, in
its own terms, its new guise, at least as good (and sometimes better)
than its antecedent. To resort only to the deceased by way of example,
Dick Moores' Gasoline Alley
wasn't Frank King's;
but it was distinctly Moores', and it was at least as satisfying a work
as the original. (And sometimes, it was better-at least, more attuned
to its times.) Ditto Leslie Turner's version of Roy Crane's Captain Easy. When Fred Lasswell
took over Barney Google and
Snuffy Smith after the death of Billy
DeBeck, its originator, he completed the transformation of the strip
from its race-track days with Barney to its hillbilly milieu with Snuffy;
and the "new" strip was at least as good as its predecessor.
In short, although we may be able to find more inferior legacy strips
than legacy strips that equal or better their antecedents, there are
enough exceptions to this rule to invalidate "legacy" as a
signal of quality or the lack thereof. Just because it's a legacy strip
doesn't mean it's an inferior one. We
are left, then, with the only valid criterion for retiring a strip.
Is it any good? And that, as a starting place, is nowhere. Who is to
be the ultimate judge of quality? The syndicate? Syndicates probably
think all their strips are good ones-after all, they picked 'em over
dozens, hundreds, of submissions. Newspaper editors? Newspaper editors
have no particular expertise in the visual artform that the comic strip
partakes of. Newspaper editors are verbal creatures, not visual ones,
and their judgement about the visual arts is, perforce, deeply flawed.
(How else to account for the emergence of such visual catastrophes is
Cathybert if not to assume that newspaper
editors can't tell the difference between Peanuts and Spot the Frog?)
Historian/critics like me? That may be the best option yet, but it's
not at all a practical one. I'd be happy to do it, but I'd have to admit
that I can be bribed. In the last analysis, the only practical means
of evaluating a strip is the one offered by those who defend their manufacture
of legacy strips-the popularity of the feature. As Dennis
LeBrun, currently drawing Blondie,
says: "Blondie is carried
in more than 2,000 newspapers, and it runs in about 55 countries. And
it would be a bad move to walk away from 300 million readers throughout
the world." Hard to argue with that. But
that leaves us precisely where we started, and I was hoping I could
arrive at a somewhat different destination-at a place where new strips
had a chance to make fans of readers, a chance they don't have with
legacy strips taking virtually all the available space. Having "lost"
two of my favorite new strips in the last few years, I'm loath to witness
a repetition of this shut-out debacle. Still, Calvin
and Hobbes made it. So did Zits.
They made it over the hurdle, so to speak, despite the lack of "vacancies,"
despite the prevalence of legacy strips in newspaper comics sections.
I suppose one could still maintain a posture in the middle of this road.
That's about where I am, having leaned first one way and then the other.
My present stance is-limited support for legacies. I support legacy
strips as long as I get to pick the ones that get to stay; by the same
token, I get to pick the new strips that replace discontinued legacies.
Brenda Starr can go, but she
won't be replaced by Cathybert.
Another
solution would be for newspapers to expand their comics sections. LeBrun
speaks for many in his situation when he said: "Instead of getting
rid of strips that are still viable-as Blondie
and Hagar are, according to readership surveys-I
would like to see the newspapers expand the space they allot to comic
strips because from what I've seen in readership polls, comics are the
third-highest reason people buy the newspaper. Comic strips have always
been a competition of the better strips surviving. So if a new strip
comes out, it has equal opportunity to make it onto the comics page
against all other strips, and if the readers are there, it will keep
its space on the comics page-and grow, as some of the more popular comic
strips have." No fan of comics would object to more comics in the
newspaper. But expanding a given comics section would ultimately bring
us back to the same predicament. Unless the comics sections were infinitely
expandable, eventually, something would have to be dropped if anything
new were to be added. In
the last analysis, we seem to have lurched back to Square One, having
collected no two-hundred dollar bonus or anything even remotely similar
for having run all around the board. Back at the beginning again, the
best we can hope for is that newspaper editors will strive for a balance
on their comics pages-something old, something new, a legacy here and
a novelty there-just as they look for different strips to please different
segments of their reading public-something for married couples, something
for young people, something for working single mothers, and so on, in
the perpetual quest for the perfect spread of demographic appeals. In
other words, newspaper editors will continue to do what they're already
doing. And
Michael Jantze? He says he'll continue The
Norm magazine, a periodical that reprints the strip accompanied
by the "journal entries" that appeared on the website. That'll
go on for some time yet, a place for old friends to visit (and maybe
generating a few new friends, too). And in the rest of his spare time,
he'll return to the film industry from whence he came. Before
leaving the legacy subject for the nonce, here's a note that appears
at the end of a syndicated column in most newspapers: "Dear Abby
is written by Abigail Van Buren, also known as Jeanne Phillips, and
was founded by her mother, Pauline Phillips." Who's that again?
Where is the beginning of this legacy? THE FOURTH CANDIDATE
Presidential
Race Heats Up with the Emergence of a Fourth Candidate for the Office The most experienced candidate for President of the
U.S. was nominated in a little-heralded convention in Waycross, Georgia,
last March, following what was described as "furious electioneering
and ballot-box stuffing." "The
voting," our anonymous reporter reported, "was so heavy that
the official poll-watcher had to clear the opening of the ballot box
when it became so stuffed that new ballots couldn't be added." As
usual, Pogo, the comic strip "possum by trade," won handily.
It will be Pogo's 14th candidature" for the "presidensity,"
hence the validity of his claim to being the most experienced candidate.
With the retirement (not to say death in 2001) of Harold Stassen, no
other American has run more often for the office. (Stassen ran nine
times, first in 1948; last, in 1992 at the age of 85.) Although unsuccessful
in his quest for the White House, Pogo, for those of you with short
memories, was hugely successful as the star of an eponymous comic strip
created by Walt Kelly, about whom you can read at great length in our
Hindsight department by clicking here. In the meantime, for those disposed to cast their vote for the perennial possum, a visit to one of the Pogo websites might be instructive: www.pogopossum.com, his home town (so to speak), or www.pogo-fan-club.org, where you can learn about the Fort Mudge Most, the club's monthly newsletter, owned and operated by the perpetual prez of the Club, Steve Thompson.
Under the Spreading
Pundtry One of the chief objectives of the recently concluded
Republican Coronation in New York was to affirm that Gee Dubya is a
decisive leader, decisiveness being the main ingredient, apparently,
in leadership. Bush is decisive all right. He decided while vacationing
on his ranchero in Crawford, Texas, in August 2001 not to pay any real
attention to the reports warning that Osma bin Laden was planning to
hit something big in the U.S. If, by virtue of his occupying the White
House at the time the Soviet Union collapsed, Dubya's father can get
credit for winning the cold war, then whatever happens during a president's
term is properly to be attributed to him (or her). So the 9/11 atrocity
is Bush's fault-even more so because he, as he himself says, is charged
with making Americans safe. So he blew it. And we're going to re-elect
this bungler? But
what if-. What if the 9/11 attack, or perhaps some slightly less disastrous
version of it, was actually hoped for by the Bush League? They were
looking, after all, for an excuse to invade Iraq. When they decided
(there's that word again) early on to ignore the terrorist threat brewing
in the Middle East in favor of concentrating on tax cuts for the wealthy
while they "studied" the terrorist threat, could they not
have been hoping, secretly, that by turning their backs for a while,
something could happen? Something that would give America the backbone
to invade Iraq? FDR was accused of arranging for Pearl Harbor-largely
by failing to do anything to stop it, not actually planning the event-so
why not the Bush League, by willful neglect of a threat, "arranging"
for the 9/11 tragedy? Stranger things have happened, kimo sabe. Any
bunch of hoorahs capable of coining such double-talk as "catastrophic
success" to describe the ineptitude of the Iraq invasion can be
imagined capable of just about any level of deception and misdirection.
I spent a portion of the week watching parts of the Republican Coronation
in New York and listening to numerous gasbags saying that Dubya must
say in his acceptance speech what his plans are for the future of America.
Right. But the real question here is not what he says he envisions for
America but what he'll actually do. If we are to judge from his record,
he won't be doing very many of the things he promises. George W. ("Warlord")
Bush is great for saying one thing and doing something else-sometimes,
the very opposite thing. He was opposed to nation-building; now, we're
nation-building. He said we should as a nation act humbly; when it came
time for him to act on the international stage, he acted arrogantly-"My
way or the highway." He was opposed to forming a department of
Homeland Security; now we have one (and the Bush League is behaving
as if the whole scheme were its idea instead of the Democrats in Congress).
He opposed the formation of the 9/11 Commission; then he was for it.
He said he wouldn't store nuclear waste in Nevada's Yucca Mountain unless
it was proved scientifically safe; then he announced he would go ahead
with the Yucca Mountain project even though scientists said it was a
bad idea. My point is: I don't care what George W. ("Whopper")
Bush says his plans for the country are-you can't believe what he says.
His acceptance speech is, therefore, an irrelevance. Patrolling the
Fair and Balanced John Kerry addressed the American Legion convention
on Wednesday, September 1, and I watched the coverage on Fox-TV (which
I frequently watch in order to spy on the enemy). I missed the beginning
of the broadcast, but it seems that his entire address was broadcast.
At the end, the FoxNews guy came on and said, immediately, "Well,
there you have it-John Kerry's speech to the American Legion where President
Bush spoke two days ago. And if anyone was expecting Kerry to apologize
for his post-Vietnam testimony before Congress about how U.S. troops
behaved in Vietnam, they'd be disappointed. He made no reference to
it and slithered by the accusations of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth,
too." On any news network worthy of the name, the post-speech remarks
by the news guy usually begins with a summary of the major points made
by the speaker, and the summary is usually fairly objective. This "summary,"
as anyone can plainly see, was so far from objective as to be slanted:
the point was not to summarize what Kerry had said but to remind people
of his critical comments before Congress thirty years ago and the difficulty
those remarks were giving the candidate with groups of veterans. And
that reminder, in turn, was intended to stoke the resentments that might
be presumed to lurk in the bosoms of Fox-TViewers who hate Kerry for
his anti-war sentiments in the 1970s. The reporter concluded his brief
assessment of Kerry's speech with the usual Fox mantra-something like,
"We broadcast President Bush's speech Monday, and now we're broadcasting
Kerry's. Fair and balanced." Right after that, he interviewed two
politicians about Kerry's speech-one Democrat, one Republican. Fair
and balanced, right? The news guy asked the Democrat what he thought
of the speech, and the Democrat said he thought it was pretty good,
hard-hitting and specific (Kerry outlined, item by item, how the Bush
League had gone wrong in Iraq and then said how he'd have done it differently-and
then said what he'd do from now on). The reporter then turned to the
Republican and asked: "And what do you think? Do you think anyone
was disappointed not to hear an apology from Kerry about his testimony
before Congress after his Vietnam service?" Or words to that effect.
The Republican, picking up his cue, agreed that multitudes with that
expectation were certain to be disappointed. In short, despite the appearance
of "balance," the reporter was loading the coverage of the
speaker to give it the political thrust that had, apparently, been decided
on for the day: remind everyone that, regardless of what Kerry might
say, he's never apologized for besmirching the reputation of American
soldiers in Vietnam. The "news" as Fox manufactured it was
designed to continue to paint Kerry as a long-haired war protester (not
the fella you'd want running a war from the White House) and to remind
the Bush Base of why they didn't like Kerry. The "news," in
other words, was not what Kerry said but what Fox wanted to crucify
him for. Fair and balanced? Sure-and it never gets dark when the sun
goes down either. Another Birth,
Another Nation "Birth of a Nation" was the title of D.W.
Griffith's 1915 hour-and-a-half landmark movie (the first feature-length
flick) about two families during the Civil War and Reconstruction. The
Ku Klux Klan was a highly visible presence in the movie, often in an
apparently heroic role, which made the production highly controversial
even in its own time. (Some souls even credited the movie with the rebirth
of the Klan in the ensuing years.) The new graphic novel Birth
of a Nation (144 8x10-inch color pages, hardback; $25) has only
the vaguest relationship to its Griffith namesake: the graphic novel
began as an idea for a motion picture. Beyond that circumstance, any
resemblance must be entirely satirical, a sort of sly wink at the Klan
as the "new nation" being born in the novel precludes forever
the re-emergence of the cowardly cloakmen of yore. But the graphic novel
has another connection to movies in general: in its present incarnation,
it reads like a storyboard for the film it might have been. It even
looks like a storyboard-rows of pictures pinned on a display board to
outline a narrative in visual terms. Drawn by Kyle Baker (currently producing Plastic
Man Comics for DC and author of such graphic novels as You Are There, King David, and The
Cowboy Wally Show), the narrative deploys his customary modification
of the traditional comic strip format. Baker eschews speech balloons,
the hallmark of the medium, because he thinks they're confusing to read
and, besides, they blot out parts of the pictures. Instead of inflating
speech balloons within his pictures, he confines all the verbal content
to blocks of type below the pictures, clustering the words spoken by
the characters under the characters who speak them. One of the incidental
byproducts of this maneuver is an airier page layout: between rows of
pictures, generous swatches of white space accommodate the typeset dialogue.
The drawing style Baker adopts for this occasion continues to evoke
a storyboard kinship: his comedic bigfoot caricatural linear renderings
embellished with nuanced color look remarkably like the individual cells
of an animated cartoon. Birth had its genesis at the San Diego
Comic Convention a couple years ago: movie producer-director Reginald Hudlin ("House Party," Boomerang") tells us
in his Introduction that he and cartoonist Aaron
McGruder (The Boondocks)
were batting around ideas for a movie "that was funny and easy
to sell." Their initial notion became an "obsession"
that took a year to play out. "Aaron and I share many of the same
interests," Hudlin says, "-the global realignment of black
people, alternative fuel sources, late '80s hip-hop. Anyway, passions,
dreams and personal experiences were poured into the draft. Aaron's
gift for writing socio-political comedy haikus made full use of the
large canvas of a movie script, but when we finished, we had a project
that fans of our work would love, but no movie studio would make."
It's easy to see why. At
its conception, the story was clearly a political satire of revenge
and triumph springboarding from the Florida Fiasco that concluded the
2000 Presidential Election. Set in East St. Louis ("the inner city
without an outer city" and Hudlin's hometown), the tale gets underway
when hundreds of citizens, mostly African-American, are disenfranchised
at the polls: when they go to vote, they discover their names have turned
up on lists of convicted felons, an echo of 2000 too explicit to be
missed. None of them are felons, but the error cannot be corrected in
time to permit them to cast their ballots. The case goes to the Supreme
Court, which agrees that a mistake has been made but rules that a re-vote
would threaten national stability so the results are permitted to stand,
putting into the White House a man who, had the East St. Louis voters
been allowed to vote, would have lost the contest. In
protest, the citizens of East St. Louis follow the advice of their idealistic
mayor, Fred Fredericks, who invokes that part of the Declaration of
Independence that says "when the government no longer respects
the freedoms of the people, the people have an obligation not to let
it slide; it's not your choice or even your privilege-it's your duty
to fight back." He then announces the secession of East St. Louis
from the United States, and the city declares itself a separate nation,
which its citizens eventually christen "Blackland." The response
of the federal government, now led by a former governor of Texas named
Caldwell who looks notably like another former governor of Texas, is
a clumsy re-enactment of the Civil War: if East St. Louis is permitted
to secede, other cities might do the same, so the federal government
cannot allow it. The U.S. military is mustered at the border-er, the
city limits-to invade. Given
the premise, this much is probably predictable. The satirical jab at
the heart of this conceit doubtless took its authors about this far,
and then they faced the hard choices-how to turn a joke into a story.
They did it by facing up to certain inevitable circumstances that might
surface if a city actually did secede. A nation needs a currency. It
needs security. It needs jobs for its citizens. Hudlin and McGruder
chose to overcome these dilemmas not by returning East St. Louis to
a pastoral economy, a legitimate and possibly workable alternative,
but by embracing and subverting the mechanisms of a modern high-tech
society. In
the East St. Louis of this fable, providing a living to the citizenry
is complicated by the extensive welfare rolls: 75 percent of the residents
draw a government check. The funding, until secession, has been from
the U.S. government. Where will the money come from now? Fredericks
and his cohorts leap this hurdle by setting up an "off-shore"
bank with numbered accounts like the storied Swiss banks. People who
make millions but don't want their governments to know-arms dealers,
drug lords, wealthy divorcees-deposit their dubious earnings in this
bank, and from these piled up hundreds of billions, the bank earns a
modest percentage that quickly multiplies into billions, sufficient
to sustain the populace of East St. Louis. What may have started as
a plot device thus becomes another satiric dart: the very plausibility
of this maneuver strenuously implies that the governments of modern
nation states are funded by questionable means if not ill-gotten gains. In
solving other plot problems, Hudlin and McGruder broaden the satire
of their story. To provide security for his "country," Fredericks
turns to a local gang lord named Roscoe. "We'll need someone to
keep the peace," he says. "Do you know any men who would like
to get paid to stand around a hold guns all day?" Baker's pen limns
Roscoe's telltale smirk as the thug says, "I may know of such men
..." In syntax and diction, the language slyly conjures up the
underworld, and, at the same time, the plot device supplies the story's
satiric quiver with another shaft: from the perspective of many African-American
communities, the police force is little more than a licensed band of
thugs. In
somewhat the same fashion, Hudlin and McGruder bring their story to
bear on other societal issues. When East St. Louis loses electrical
power, Fredericks turns to a throng of militant idealists who produce
a young genius who knows how to generate energy with solar fusion hybrid
engines, a technology that already exists but is kept secret by the
powerful oil industry in collusion with governments world-wide. This
stratagem establishes a balance of power that eventually resolves the
novel's central conflict-how to extract East St. Louis whole from the
impending battlefield confrontation with the powerful U.S. military. As
the crisis builds, Fredericks emerges as a popular culture hero: all
across the country, t-shirts immortalize his effort. The final resolution
involves Arab assassins and Mideast oil barons and an audacious act
of international blackmail, all bristling with satiric implications.
What begins as condemnation of the racist usurpation of the 2000 Presidential
Election evolves into a portrait of commerce-based government in a consumer-crazed
society that runs according to dubious rules that idealists must learn
to play by in order to survive-and to win. The
telling of this story reflects the movie-maker's sensibility, not the
cartoonist's. The opening sequence with Mayor Fredericks collecting
the city's garbage because trash workers are on strike is pure movie
theater: we come upon the Mayor in
medias res, and we learn about him as he goes about his errand,
listening to his assistant's complaint about his, the assistant's, love
life. Throughout, the pacing and storytelling devices are cinematic-scene
shifts and moments of comic relief and romantic interludes and humorous
scene punctuations, all betray the motion picture that this opus was
intended to be. But in Baker's caricatural style, the cartoonist supplants
the cinematographer, and the two kindred media blend to make a memorable
graphic novel, freighted with social as well as political satire. Metaphors be with you.
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