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It’s the Pictures, Stupid
Not to Mention Bondage and Grecian Urns
One
of the side-effects of the dubious renown that attaches to a chronicler of
comics history comes in the form of phone calls from strangers purporting to be
newspaper reporters who have been assigned to write an article about the
funnies. Among the first questions asked is one that goes something like this:
Why are people so in love with the comics? What is it about them?
I’ve had this question sprung on me
more than once, but it always catches me wholly off-guard, like a naked man in
the headlights of an onrushing deer. Well, that’s a little extreme maybe, but
the question catches me up short and gives me a sinking feeling in the stomach:
unaccustomed as I am to being at a loss for a thought, I can think only that
I’ve never thought of that before. I never have on the tip of my tongue
anything like the sort of penetrating, deep level analytical apothegm that
readers of Rancid Raves have doubtless come to expect hereabouts.
Partly, my dumbfoundedness prevails
because it has always seemed to me self-evident why the comics are so popular.
Asking me why the comics are popular is like asking me why standing under a
summer sun makes one warm. Milton Caniff may have put his finger on it when he
said, once, “Whatever it is that makes a popular art effective—escape, or the
appeal to basic emotions, or ‘audience identification’—the funnies have it, and
they have more of it than any of us ever suspected.”
In other words, he didn’t know
either. Or couldn’t say.
When asked this question, I usually
mutter that we (“people”) like the funnies because, through repeated
visitation, the characters become almost members of our family—old friends, at
least—and we like the easy familiarity of the company of old friends and family
members. And if, by then, I haven’t fallen asleep out of sheer boredom at the
mindless tepid banality of this analysis, I might have collected my wits
sufficiently as I speak to remember, suddenly, that the Big Appeal of the
funnies is that they make us laugh, and we all enjoy laughing—ergo, we turn
eagerly, day after day, to the comics section of the newspaper before it even
occurs to us to consult the editorial page where all the truly important
utterances are taking place. We’d rather laugh than think any day.
Actually, I usually leave out the
last part about the editorial page. No point in annoying my interlocutor by
rubbing his or her nose in journalism’s signal failure—namely, its inability to
make its readers take news seriously enough to displace comic strips at the top
of the hierarchy of their interests in the newspaper.
Nor do I point out, gleefully, that
their question sabotages a fiction to which newspaper editors have subscribed
for generations in willful disregard of the facts. Editors say they think
comics are for children, but that’s not what they really think. They really
think, as I said, that they’ve failed to make their readers take news
seriously, and since news is their business—their profession—they cover up
their bitter disappointment at their own shortcoming by pretending that it
isn’t their readers who ignore the news and read the comics but the children of
their readers. Their readers, they fantasize (completely dismissing the results
of readership surveys), are actually reading the front page of the paper and
studying the editorials and forming adult opinions that they will subsequently
translate into votes at the ballot box come Election Day.
Most readers of daily newspapers
would, if asked, tell these editors that the only reason they stop on the
editorial page as they flip through the paper on their way to the funnies page
is that a large cartoon at the top of the editorial page attracts their
attention momentarily. Editors know this, too, although they don’t like to
admit it. The closest they come to acknowledging the appeal of cartooning is to
try to prevent their editorial cartoonist from drawing cartoons that are too
opinionated, the sort of cartoons that Might Offend one group or another of the
readers that aren’t reading anything else on the editorial page.
By happy coincidence, the undeniable
appeal of the editorial cartoon comes closer to explaining our emotional
attachment to comics than anything else I’ve said so far. One of the best
exegesis of the relationship between humans and pictures was made nearly sixty
years ago by a psychologist, who, at the time he offered his explanation, was
concocting stories for a comic book character he’d created, Wonder Woman.
Writing in The American Scholar (January 1944), William Moulton Marston, with degrees from Harvard, titled his
article “Why 100,000,000 Americans Read Comics.” Among his other accomplishments,
Marston was author of the book Emotions
of Normal People (1928) and discoverer of the lie detector and was
therefore admirably equipped to confront the truth about comics and their
readers.
“Nine humans out of ten react first
with their feelings rather than with their minds,” Marston wrote. “The more
primitive the emotion stimulated, the stronger the reaction. Comics play a
trite but lusty tune on the C natural keys of human nature. They rouse the most
primitive but also the most powerful, reverberations in the noisy cranial
sound-box of consciousness, drowning out more subtle symphonies.” Quite simply,
he goes on, people are enthralled by comics because of the pictures. After a
half-century of television, we no longer require extensive argument to be persuaded
of the truth of this assertion. But in 1944, Marston felt the need to go into
the matter at some length:
“The potency of the picture story is
not a matter of modern theory but of anciently established truth,” he said.
“Before man thought in words, he felt in pictures.” Referring to articles by
M.C. Gaines (“Narrative Illustration” and “Good Triumphs over Evil”), Marston
continues: “The ancients, as numerous historical monuments attest, recorded
their military triumphs as well as their domestic comedies in picture stories.”
After noting that “the visual form must be simplified to essentials, the
emotional response evoked must be instant and universal,” Marston careens away
in the direction of explaining the fundamental appeal of superhero comic books.
He begins by tracing, briefly, the history of pictorial narrative and divides
the “evolution of comics” into three periods: in the first, 1900-1920, comics
were almost entirely meant to be funny; but in the second period, 1920-1938,
comics introduced “pathos and human interest” into stories that continued from
day-to-day, ceasing, eventually, to be funny and becoming adventure stories.
The third period began in 1938 with
the debut of Superman, whose arrival “constitutes a radical departure from all
previously accepted standards of storytelling and drama. Comics continuities
[i.e., comic books] of the present period are not mean to be humorous, nor are
they primarily concerned with dramatic adventure. Their emotional appeal is
wish fulfillment. There is no drama in the ordinary sense because Superman is
invincible, invulnerable. ... Superman never risks danger; he is always, and by
definition, superior to all menace. Superman and his innumerable followers
satisfy the universal human longing to be stronger than all opposing obstacles
and the equally universal desire to see good overcome evil, to see wrongs
righted, underdogs nip the pants of their oppressors, and, withal, to
experience vicariously the supreme gratification of the deus ex machina who accomplishes these monthly miracles of right
triumphing over not-so-mighty might. Here we find the Homeric tradition
rampant—the Achilles with or without a vulnerable heel, the Hector who defends
his home town from foreign invaders, wronged Agamemnon who pursues his
righteous vengeance with relentless fury, and the wily Ulysses who cleverly
accomplishes the downfall of attractive if culpable enemies by the exercise of
superhuman wisdom. M.C. Gaines ... perceived the Homeric inheritance of Siegel
and Shuster and ... turned the comics magazine into an illuminated vehicle for
their drama-less but wish-fulfilling Superman tales.”
Having established the
wish-fulfillment nature of four-color superheroicism, Marston next asserts the
morality of the medium. “What life-desires do you wish to stimulate in your
child?” he asks.
Surely youngsters should be
encouraged to “wish for power along constructive lines. ... The wish to be
super-strong is a healthy wish, a vital, compelling, power-producing desire”
involving “the child’s natural longing to battle and overcome obstacles,
particularly evil ones. ... Certainly, there can be no argument about the
advisability of strengthening the fundamental human desire, too often buried
beneath stultifying divertissements and disguises, to see good overcome evil.
‘Happy’ endings are shown in the new comics as products of superhuman efforts
to help others—not as mere happenstances mysteriously obeying the ‘Pollyanna’
rule that ‘everything always comes out all right in the end.’ The moral force
of this new type of story teaching is stronger by far than the older appeal to
self-interest. ... The Superman-Wonder Woman school of picture-story telling
emphatically insists upon heroism in the altruistic pattern.”
That Marston’s essay veers off into
a defense of comic books—then, as ever since their beginning, under attack by
“concerned citizens” and “parents groups”—is not surprising. Not only was he
writing one of the titles, he had, for some years, been on DC’s advisory board
of educators, a roll call of distinguished personages in professorial garb
charged with analyzing “the shortcomings of monthly picture magazines and
recommending improvements,” which resulted, Marston goes on, in raising
“considerably the standards of English, legibility, art work, and story content
in some twenty comics magazines, totaling a monthly circulation of more than
six million.”
The only flaw in the array of
newsstand comics before 1942, the year Wonder Woman debuted, is, Marston says,
“their blood-curdling masculinity. A male hero, at best, lacks the qualities of
maternal love and tenderness which are as essential to a normal child as the
breath of life.” To rectify this oversight, Marston proposed that a superwoman
be invented “with all the strength of a Superman plus all the allure of a good
and beautiful woman.”
Marston’s advocacy for the feminine
mystique was not entirely philosophical, as we learn in Les Daniels’ Wonder Woman: The Complete History (2000).
The good doctor believed, as early as the interview he gave November 11, 1937,
to The New York Times, that “the next
one hundred years will see the beginning of an American matriarchy—a nation of
Amazons in the psychological rather than physical sense” and that eventually
“women would take over the rule of the country, politically and economically.”
Marston later elaborated: women would rule the world because “there isn’t love
enough in the male organism to run this planet peacefully. Women’s body
contains twice as many love generating organs and endocrine mechanisms as the
male. What woman lacks is the dominance or self assertive power to put over and
enforce her love desires.” Earlier, he theorized that woman would achieve
dominance over man because “her body and personality offer men greater pleasure
than they could obtain in any other experience. Man therefore yields to this
attraction and control voluntarily and seeks to be thus captivated.” In short,
women would achieve power through simple sexual enslavement. That Marston was
the sort of professional to whom heed must be paid on such matters is evident
in his own life. He lived with two women, one, his wife Elizabeth, and the
other, a former student named Olive Byrne who was subsequently Marston’s
assistant and colleague, and he had children with each of them. According to
one of Olive’s sons, Byrne Marston, interviewed by Daniels, they all lived
together “fairly harmoniously.” Olive never married, and Byrne and his brother
were eventually formally adopted by the Marstons. Elizabeth once claimed that
she suggested the notion of a superwoman to Marston. Byrne believes that his
mother, Olive, was the physical model for artist Harry Peter’s rendition of
Wonder Woman; Olive, it seems, also affected a wardrobe accessory that
influenced the conception of the heroine—big silver bracelets, one on each
wrist. Given Marston’s theory about the dominance of the female personality, I
was amused to learn, from Daniels’ quoting Marston’s editor Sheldon Mayer, that
the Marston household was “male-dominated” even though Marston himself was
clearly out-numbered.
Wonder Woman, for all her appeal,
never quite lived up to Marston’s visions for female dominance of the known
world. And she has always, from the very first, been a difficult character for
comic books. The audaciousness of Marston’s proposal for a superheroine “was
met by a storm of mingled protests and guffaws.” Heroines, Marston was told,
had been tried before and had failed to attract readers. Yes, but, Marston
reposited, those female heroes hadn’t been superpowered.
Despite the seeming impracticality
of the idea, Gaines, Marston says, “listened to our arguments for a while. Then
he said:
“‘Well, Doc, I picked Superman after
every syndicate in America turned it down. I’ll take a chance on your Wonder
Woman! But you’ll have to write the strip yourself. After six months’
publication, we’ll submit your woman hero to a vote of our comics readers. If
they don’t like her, I can’t do any more about it.’”
“Fair enough,” Marston said to
himself, and he then “found” an artist—“Harry Peter, an old-time cartoonist who
began with Bud Fisher on the San
Francisco Chronicle and who knows what life is about, and with Gaines’
helpful cooperation we created the first successful woman character in comics
magazines.”
At first, she bore the awe-inspiring
name “Suprema,” which, as Daniels remarks, got swiftly and mercifully lost on
the way to her first published appearance in All Star Comics, No. 8 (cover-dated January 1942).
Peter, I hadn’t realized, was
probably in his sixties when all this transpired. He’d been dabbling in comic
book illustration somewhat, but his early post-Fisher career had been in gag
cartoons for periodicals like the humor magazine Judge. His drawing style, for the comic book medium, was unusual:
at a time when house styles were overpowering individual mannerisms, Peter’s
style was distinctive. And it remained so throughout his tour on Wonder Woman.
To a bold linear treatment, he affixed a fussy preoccupation with
details—eyeballs and eyelashes, and the curlicue of hair-dos—and a rather vague
understanding of female anatomy, including a conspicuous affection for
collarbone delineation and a tendency to model forms in places where there were
no places in real life. He perfected a way of drawing women’s lips, however,
and having got it right once, he did it in the same way forever thereafter.
And as any reader of the
Marston-Peters canon can attest, Marston (writing as Charles Moulton, his
middle name and Gaines’) added to the “allure of a good and beautiful woman”
plenty of “sly but imaginative psychological themes, especially those dealing
with domination and subservience” (as Gerard Jones puts it in Ron Goulart’s Encyclopedia of American Comics). In
addition to bondage, Marston also “played with some noble philosophic themes,
especially the conflict between ‘the cruel despotism of masculine
aggressiveness’ and the humane ways of women.” But the prevailing impression of
Wonder Woman’s escapades is “a heady brew,” Goulart says, “of whips, chains,
and cockeyed mythology.”
Oddly—considering the mythological
bent of Marston’s tales—the result of Peter’s effort was an imagery that
conjured up memories of the kind of painting we can see on ancient Greek vases.
(I say “oddly” because I hope no one takes this stylistic quirk to heart and
subsequently manufactures a vast new thematic import for the Marston-Peter
team-up on the Amazon in the spangled foundation garment. A more pertinent and
productive line of reasoning would concentrate on the foundation garment.)
All of which is somewhat beside my
present point—which is, lest you’ve forgotten, to elucidate the reason for
newspaper readers’ enthrallment by comics. And I don’t think we can improve
much upon Marston’s contention that we are captivated by pictures. They appeal
to a primitive aspect of our fundamental nature, taking us, momentarily, back
to the age of primordial ooze when a sense of sight was the most acute of our
senses and kept us alive as well as entertained. We can’t escape—nor should we
try—our basic natures.
And if I had a better memory, I
could have summoned this interpretation to respond to the reporters’ queries
without resorting to Marston. The first book I ever read on the comics was
1947's The Comics, by Coulton Waugh,
who, right near the beginning of the book, says, “[Comics] have taken advantage
of the ancient fact that a picture carries a thought faster than a group of
words, and this is the reason why they have been so enormously successful. Man
has always resisted the labor of thought, and the strips take a short cut to
the mind of the reader without much effort on his part. Since cave men drew
pictographs on bone and on cave walls, this new language is based on one of the
oldest means of communication in the world.”
True, no doubt, but there’s also
laughter and old friends.
Footnit: A slightly
shorter version of this essay appeared in The Comics Journal.
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