MYTHCOMICS: 'MY WORD" (BIG APPLE COMIX, 1975)

Last month Flo Steinberg passed away, and as I read the obits, I was surprised to learn that she'd had a very brief career in underground publishing once she left her job with Marvel. For over twenty years I'd owned a copy of her one-shot, BIG APPLE COMIX, and I was more than a little familiar with all of the artist-contributors, such as Neal Adams, Archie Goodwin, and Wally Wood. However, I'd never troubled to look at the magazine's indicia, where Steinberg's name was clearly displayed.

I've not come across any online recollections as to how the project came about, but it's likely that it was done by a bunch of artists who knew one another. The idea shows a "let's put on a show" mentality, as opposed to the demands of working for the Big Two. Steinberg, who had observed Marvel's production methods during her tenure at the company, possibly volunteered her services in that regard, with added help from both Linda Fite and John Verpoorten.

BIG APPLE was, even by 1975 standards, not an especially marketable idea, given that all of its contributions shared one  theme: life in New York City, "the Big Apple." The stories in BIG APPLE run the gamut of underground humor from farce to satire, but only one tale, Wally Wood's "My Word," uses layered symbolic imagery to create a demonic vision of the city. In addition, the three-page story recapitulates. in ironic form, some of the visual setups found in a longer Wood presentation, "My World," published in WEIRD SCIENCE #22 (1953). Scripted by Al Feldstein, the earlier sequence was not really a story as such, but more of an adoring meditation on the wonder-inducing tropes of science fiction. On the last page, the narrator speaks of his world as being "what I choose to make it," and in the last panel he reveals himself to be Wood poised over his drawing-board, identifying himself as "a science fiction artist."

"My Word," however, depicts a world over which the artist has no control, except in the sense that he can exaggerate the already dire reputation of New York City in the 1970s. In the far left of the splash panel, for example, one sees not only a demented version of Batman's villain The Penguin exposing himself to a little girl, while the Shadow stands to one side, apparently willing to let the Penguin do as he wants since the two of them belong to the Cyrano de Bergerac "huge schnozz" club.

But "My Word" is more than a few MAD-style in-jokes; it's a vision of a "sin city" in which sin has lost its ability to titillate. Wood calls New York many things-- "Bagdad on the Hudson," "Sodom on the Gomorrah,"  and "sin capital of the Western world." But by the third panel one of his character's remarks-- playing on the opening of the 1960-63 teleseries THE NAKED CITY-- that "there are ten million stories in the Naked City, and they're all BORING." The artist follows this up with a parody of the religious homily "where there is creation, there must be a creator" by attributing the thought to a pile of dogshit, recently "created" by a passing canine.

For the remainder of the piece, nameless characters are seen gratifying themselves in one way or another, always with the implication that sexual congress is barely distinguishable from any other form of mundane activity. Page two shows a couple locked in copulation, but the woman's also reading a book while the man's reading his newspaper.

"You must love yourself before you can love anyone else, but how many people really can?" This pessimistic appraisal is immediately followed by the old joke about the guy trying to give himself oral sex, but even in the context of satire, the narrator's line suggests that he finds himself not much less tedious than the quotidian nature of New York City, where getting mugged is the most exciting experience one can have. Most fascinating is the image in the fifth panel of Page 3:

Here, amid many other images of soul-dead sex, Wood gives the reader the ultimate recursive fantasy: a bird-like humanoid laying an egg which the creature drops into its own mouth, presumably to be devoured. (Despite this and a couple of other fantasy-images, the dominant phenomenality of the vignette is naturalistic in tone.) The main point of burlesquing the "My World" vignette seems to provide a reversal of the earlier work's boundless enthusiasm for wonder-producing tropes, one in which both professional comics-artists and their fans have no more immunity to the soul-killing influence of modern life than any other modern-day persons, whether they reside in New York City or not.

I mentioned that this is a vignette, but it does, like the examples of short mythcomics covered here and here, possess a clear progression of ideas that roughly parallel a normal-length story's "beginning, middle, and end." And of course, it is an irony in terms of its mythos, one far more acidulous than Wood's ambivalent KING OF THE WORLD.

NULL-MYTHS: TRASHMAN LIVES (1997)

I became re-acquainted with this old Gary Groth quote when I re-read my early essay POMO AND PLURALISM:

academic lintheads and popcult apologists display their usual confusion of values by mistaking something of social interest for something of artistic significance

Not long after, in my ceaseless quest to the Heart of the Collective Myth-Conscious, I happened to reread Fantagraphics' 1997 collection of what I assume to be all of the extant TRASHMAN stories of the late underground cartoonist Spain Rodriguez. I had read the collection years ago, and frankly didn't remember much about it, aside from the mildly enjoyable woodcut-like art-style and a lot of maundering Marxist politics.

But, upon re-reading the collection with an eye to seeing anything of symbolic depth-- wow, talk about something that has no "artistic significance" and is only relevant for "social interest!"

The TRASHMAN stories are little more than "men's adventure fiction" comics given a smattering of Marxist rhetoric about opposing oppression. Trashman, a revolutionary with a big gun and some inconsistent super-powers, fights the good fight against a vague assortment of bad guys who are supposed to represent the American political hierarchy. The first stories came out in 1968 and predicted a total social breakdown in the latter half of the 20th century, which allowed Trashman to motor around to different enclaves of tyranny and kick a lot of ass.

All of which would be fine, except that Trashman's adventures lack even the rudimentary imagination of the lesser kids' comics of the time. Trashman's opponents are largely faceless bureaucrats, whom readers of the 1960s and 1970s would see as representatives of "The Man." But Rodriguez shows no awareness of why these villains perpetrate their evil deeds-- including a little cannibalism-- except insofar as they are villains. Frankly, Mickey Spillane invested even his dime-a-dozen killers with more conviction.

There are brief touches of insight. In one story, two of Trashman's rebel-colleagues continuously insult each other in racial terms, but by story's end it's obvious that both of them are just using race to rag on each other, in typical "guy" fashion. In another tale, even more "socially significant" though no more "artistic," Trashman and another colleague are taken prisoner by a gang of female rebels: "Nasty Elaine and her She-Devils." This was at least not your typical guy-on-guy battle, though I've the impression that men's adventure mags frequently featured heroes getting captured by modern-day Amazons and the like.

It's a shame, because the minimalist design of Trashman bears some comparison with that of Gould's Dick Tracy, and it would have been interesting to see Gould's conservatism inverted by a charismatic "hero of the masses." But there's no flash in this trash, man.

MYTHCOMICS: "A MEXICAN ODYSSEY" (FREAK BROTHERS #4, 1975)

Since I commented here that I didn't think that "the influence of confessional dramas" had been salutary for the development of artcomics, it behooves me now to state that I have sometimes wished that Gilbert Shelton had been more influential on the underground than Robert Crumb.

Back in some 1990s CEREBUS letters-page I commented that I deemed Shelton the "comic book version of Mark Twain," or words to that effect. Effusive though this might be, I still believe that Shelton's freewheeling mastery of both comic and ironic modes far exceeds that of his more ideologically minded contemporaries, such as Crumb, Jaxon, Skip Williamson, and, of course, the hyper-confessional Justin Green. Some of these artists attempted to work with the character-type called the "American naif," as represented by self-portraits like Binky Brown or fictional types like Flakey Foont and Snappy Sammy Smoot, but on the whole I found their attempts on this score superficial and phony.

The non-siblings known as the "Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers"-- intellectual Phineas, practical Franklin and chronic chowhound Fat Freddy-- were not deep characters, nor were they intended to be so. They had nearly no desires to do anything in life except to stay high on one set of drugs or another, but precisely because they were almost all "id," they became perfect mirrors to the many ways in which the "straight" members of  American society told lies to themselves, whether they were cops, revolutionaries, politicians or other "freaks" and fellow members of the "hippie" community.

Over the years I've seen a fair number of references to Carl Barks in the FREAK BROTHERS oeuvre. Without oversimplifying the matter of influences, I'm tempted to believe that Shelton simply inverted the pattern of Barks' duck-adventures, wherein Barks, like Twain before him, sent naive Americans out into a weird and mysterious world-- though, to be sure, neither Twain nor Shelton creates a regular character comparable to Uncle Scrooge, that daring yet comical imperialist.

Except-- sort of-- in 1975's "Mexican Odyssey," credited to Gilbert Shelton and Dave Sheridan. In one of the Freaks' usual no-brainer inspirations, the three goofballs decide to emigrate to Mexico to avoid their landlady, Franklin knows the way already, though he makes a weird Verne-ian reference at the start of the jaunt, telling Phineas and Freddy that they're driving "directly above the center of the Earth."

In contrast to some of the Freaks' adventures that follow the format of comic books, "Odyssey" is constructed like a series of Sunday comic-strip pages, even with the addition of a separate one-tier feature about  "Fat Freddy's Cat." This means that the story is set up as a series of joke-setups, many of which concern the three gringos encountering such south-of-the-border menaces as corrupt cops, Montezuma's revenge, and "the dreaded Mexican bus." That said, their main enemy is home-grown: a transplanted U.S. military man, Douglas D. Zaster, who initially pursues the threesome simply because he hates hippies. Later, it's revealed that Zaster is busily engaged in growing a crop of poppies for the opium market, and that he's working hand in glove with the American government in the heroin trade.

However, the three Americanos are befriended by the closest Shelton ever comes to an Uncle Scrooge figure: a mysterious shaman named Don Longjuan:

There's no question that the name is a spoof of the shaman Don Juan from the contemporaneous Carlos Castaneda books, but for once, the character is more than just a MAD-style play on words (though I confess that I did find myself wondering if Shelton was thinking of either Long John Silver or the "longjohns" worn by superheroes).  While most comics-farces would simply make Longjuan some sort of contemporary charlatan-- say, having him trying to sell the Freaks his books on shamanic enlightenment-- Shelton's magician remains an "enigma wrapped in a mystery." His penchant for helping the Freaks out of trouble and then leaving them to get into more is played for humor, as when he enchants Freddy to think that he's a pig.

And yet, the humor is not unleavened with mystery. During one sequence, when the Freaks have been unjustly condemned to the hell of Mexico's jails, Longjuan frees the hippies by taking them into vast subterranean caverns far beneath the modern city, making references to past civilizations of "giants" and "small people." Much like the better adventures of Barks' duck-heroes, Shelton achieves a maximum degree of mythic suggestion via minimal suggestion.

The entire "Odyssey" consists of just one splash page and 23 story-pages, not counting the minimally related accompanying strip about Fat Freddy's Cat. I would guess that the pages were meant to be serialized in underground newspapers before they were collected into comic-book format. But the sequence is much tighter than anything one finds in most of the commercial newspaper-strips of the "Classic Era." This is another aspect of Shelton's work that I could wish artcomics had assimilated to better effect-- the ability to tell linear stories, no matter how far afield they might choose to go thereafter. Perhaps linear stories reminded most of the underground cartoonists of the "sellouts" of mainstream comics, and so they tended to focus less on art and more upon the effects of "the arty."

NULL-MYTHS: BINKY BROWN MEETS THE HOLY VIRGIN MARY (1972)

                                       

Cited as one of THE COMICS JOURNAL’s top 100 English-language comics, Justin Green’s “Binky Brown” story—originally published as a stand-alone comic of 44 pages—remains one of the representative works of the “underground comix” movement. I never read the work in its original form, but only in Last Gasp’s 1995 reprint, which also included sundry other related short works and a fulsome foreword by Art Spiegelman. In said foreword, Spiegelman credits Green with launching the subgenre of “confessional autobiographical comix.” This may well be true—I’m far from an expert on the underground movement—but I don’t know how much I’d trust the acumen of someone who credits the Bronte sisters with inventing “Gothic romance” and Tolkien with inventing “sword and sorcery.” 

Over-ambitious compliments aside, Spiegelnan makes clear that he considers Green a genius from whom he Spiegelman took no small inspiration in his own confessional work. He also scorns the many inferior autobio comics that implicitly don’t do credit to the subgenre. I, however, find that Green’s BINKY BROWN is guilty of many of the sins of the underground movement as a whole: both a lack of free-flowing imagination and a lack of ordered intellectual discourse.

The story of Binky Brown—an alter ego for Green himself— follows Binky from grade-school to adulthood with emphasis upon one aspect of his life: the conflict between the Catholic faith in which he is reared and his natural, budding sexuality. There’s a minor reference to Binky’s obsessive-compulsive tendencies, but on the whole it’s all about Binky’s problems with the strictures of the Catholic Church. The Virgin Mary isn’t so much a character in Binky’s dreams and fantasies as a leitmotif. She pops in and out of Binky’s fevered consciousness, sometimes tasking him with his sins, sometimes becoming the subject of his tormented sexual imaginings.

Given that I subscribe to Bataille’s idea that all transgressions are capable of completing-- rather than simply contravening-- the taboos that they violate, I don’t have any moral qualms against Green’s blasphemous fantasies. My qualms are aesthetic, for on the whole I find most of Green;s fantasies superficial and dull. Through grade school and high school, Binky seems a pretty ordinary kid. Once or twice he questions his religious preceptors, the nuns who teach the classes and the priests who take confession, but his questions are routine ones: “What happens to people outside the Church who live moral lives,” and so on. The religious authorities don’t come off well in these encounters, but Binky doesn’t seem like sharpest tack in the drawer either.

I don’t deny that BINKY BROWN is a lot livelier than most autobio comics; certainly I’d rather reread his work than the pretentious “just the facts, ma’am” works of Harvey Pekar. His fantasies about nuns and the Virgin Mary may be par for the course among tormented adolescents, but how many confessional comics show a young boy achieving his first orgasm by accidentally “scalping” a toy rubber pig? Later, Binky starts seeing penises in everything around him, and finally he’s shooting “penis-rays” out of various areas of his body. Finally, as a young man he leaves the Catholic Church, trying a variety of distractions to drive away his early religious influences, including drugs, the novels of Herman Hesse, and “gambolling.” But nothing works until he walks by the status of a Spanish Madonna and manages to avoid his syndromic feelings of guilt by singing “Lady of Spain.”  This fires him up enough to exorcise the Virgin from his soul by buying a dozen cheap replicas of Mary and smashing almost all of them. One of  the statues accidentally survives, but because the icon no longer holds power over Binky, he places it in his window and remarks, “Guess I’ll build up some new associations around you now.”

As with most if not all of the works that I’ve judged to be inconsummate, BINKY BROWN has a lot of potential, but it’s underdeveloped and sometimes incoherent. Prior to his icon-smashing ritual, he castigates Mary for making the birth process a big mystery (“It doesn’t matter—it’s only matter!”)  He also reels forth a knee-jerk Freudian interpretation of Mary’s appeal: “What I did was to transfer a healthy dread of incest onto you—until every step I take is a perverse act.” But there’s not a lot of evidence of incestuous urges in the chronicle of Binky’s life. As a reader I don’t care whether or not the real-life Green experienced such urges, but incest here is the equivalent of Chekhov’s gun: if you bring it on stage, you should be ready to use it. Perhaps Green’s reticence on the subject indicates a weakness in the confessional form, in that actual fiction may allow the author more freedom than the inevitable self-editing of the confessional.

There’s also a distinct limitation in Green’c conception of the “well-meaning institution” of the Catholic Church. Binky never tries to sort out what’s good and what’s bad about his religion, or about religion generally: all he knows is that its strictures make him crazy about sex. Still, since nearly every adolescent gets hormone-crazy at some point, it’s difficult to imagine Binky’s life being all that different had he been raised without religion. At least when Robert Crumb wrote his confessional essays, he was unflinching in admitting that his quirks came from his own messed-up psychology. Binky’s religious journey verges on solipsism—which in a sense made it perfect for the underground comix movement. Religion, like government, was The Great Satan to iconoclasts, and readers of underground comix certainly would not have faulted BINKY BROWN for talking more about his own neuroses than about any Big Picture. But this is the sort of purblind oppositional thinking that has kept the majority of so-called "art-comics" from rating alongside the best "thematic realism" art, and relegates the imagination to nothing more than a hormone-addled consciousness.

BRONZE AGE THOUGHTS

I recently came across this Roy Thomas observation from DRACULA LIVES #1 (1973):

"It's our firm conviction that at least a sizable portion of the future of comics lies in a larger, more expensive, even more mature product than today's color-comics market is structured to allow. In a day when Playboy and other magazines sell for a buck (and more, on such gala holidays as Christmas, New Year, and Hugh Hefner's birthday)--in a day when a forty- or fifty cent cover price is possible only to a magazine of tremendous initial circulation--in short, in a time of creeping inflation, rampant overcrowding of the newsstands--we felt that, even though Marvel's popularity is at an all-time high, we'd be fools and klutzes not to experiment with other prices, other sizes, other formats."

It's my theory that what Thomas was saying in '73 was by then common wisdom for Marvel since about 1970-71. I've always considered the Bronze Age-- which I place in 1970-- to be a new era because that's when the Big Two took their first faltering steps toward "adult entertainment," as represented by Marvel's CONAN and DC's GREEN LANTERN. I must admit that there's a big marketing difference in the two, since the former was aiming for success based on the popularity of the paperback Howard reprints while the latter was a gamble aimed at keeping a failing book alive.  Still, both are predicated on appealing to non-juvenile interests.

That Thomas was thinking in this wise long before 1973 is evinced in the 1971 premiere of SAVAGE TALES, for which Roy is billed as "associate editor." The idea of appealing to an older market would be a logical step since it's commonly asserted that sales in the late 1960s went way down, as the superhero bubble, prompted in part by the BATMAN teleseries, went kerblooey.

Marvel-- which also attempted to corner the underground market with the 1974-76 COMIX BOOK-- seems to have been more heavily invested in developing this market than DC, or even Warren. I've read very little of Silver Age Warren, so I don't know if its horror and war stories were on a par with the more mature stories of EC Comics, nor do I know whether or not the Warren audience skewed older than that of Marvel and DC. Warren did begin VAMPIRELLA in 1969, so that would seem to be a more overt courting of an adult audience by Warren, using sex-and-violence in much the same way Marvel used Conan. 

On a side-note, I'd opine that the Marvel guys never seemed to get a handle on adult horror: most of the b&w horror stuff had the same tone as the color comics.  

In 1973 it probably made all the sense in the world to assume that magazines would be a secure foundation on which a comics-company could build. For one thing, the company could expect to raise prices when other magazines did, and not lose out, as DC allegedly did when they tried to maintain 25-cent comics against Marvel's 20-centers.  But then, who could have predicted that the digital revolution would come close to making all magazine entertainment irrelevant?

NO FEUD LIKE AN OLD FEUD, PART 2

So here's the exchange that prompted Tom Spurgeon's unveiling of his elitist tendencies, despite an earlier denial of same on THE BEAT.

Rich Johnson, seeking to choose the top comics-oriented story for 2010, chose the management changes at DC Comics. In truth, it was less a writeup of the particular changes from 2010 than a general summing-up of the company's past 20 years. This is roughly when the Vertigo imprint was created, which earns Johnson's restrained praise: "[DC] launched imprints like Vertigo to expand what comics storytelling could achieve."

After sketching a number of examples of DC's expansion-- Vertigo, Wildstorm, Paradox, and assorted merchandising efforts-- Johnson asks the questions:

Will the new DC Entertainment be as experimental and have a vision? Is the vision mining the existing characters for new movies and TV franchises?

Maybe other publishers will pick up the mantle of publishing innovation. There are certainly more out there now, more willing to take a chance on a new artist or author and take a chance on that new story.

Tom Spurgeon's response was to label this a "DC Comics blowjob." He devoted the rest of a rather confused paragraph to a harangue about DC's "shameful" ripoff of the Superman property, which for some reason he associates with 1978 rather than 1938. Then we get him accusing Johnson of having regurgitating DC's PR statements:

"Vertigo expanding what comics storytelling could do 40 years after EC comics did better comics in the same genres and 30 years into the underground/alternative comics revolution is pure boilerplate PR. I don’t begrudge DC being smart enough to put some of their hot comics of that time into a line and make more of them, and I quite enjoy many of their titles, and many of their creators are excellent and Karen Berger is a peach, but this view of Vertigo as a boundaries-pusher outside of anything but the most made-up, self-serving conception of comics is PR horseshit and needs to die."

I've always reprinted my first response in part 1. It was a bit supercilious but it contained a valid point: that EC stories also were not reinventing the wheel. I didn't address undergrounds as I was trying to keep the argument focused on a one-to-one comparison, but I would be happy to extend the same principle to the undergrounds. I would also note that there's really only *one* genre that Vertigo, EC and SOME underground comics all attempted-- and that's the horror genre. Where are the equivalents of Crumb's confessional comics at Vertigo? How many undergrounds devoted themselves to science fiction in the EC mold? Either there weren't that many, or I must've missed all those SF-issues of HORNY BIKER SLUTS.

Spurgeon's response to this argument was a restatement of what he'd already said, sans any justification but personal opinion:

I think the fact that EC did work at a lot like Vertigo of a similar if not superior quality 50 years earlier, and that all sorts of taboos as to genre and content in the alt-undground world were being broken in the 30 years leading up to Vertigo’s founding, kind of makes Vertigo less of the awesomely groundbreaking imprint than is frequently and broadly asserted on its behalf.

My response, to which TS declined to respond by saying he didn't understand it:

Is Moore’s SWAMP THING (admittedly a belated V-offering) not an expansion? Is SANDMAN not an expansion? Were Moore and Gaiman supposed to bow their heads in reverence before the Idol-Head of R. Crumb, for even daring to think they could add more to comics than he already had?

Vertigo is certainly not immune to fair criticism, but claiming that it isn't as good because it wasn't first to break all those taboos is hardly fair. Johnson does not actually claim that Vertigo reinvented the wheel, even the wheel labelled "great comic-book taboos." All he says is that Vertigo expanded "what comic book storytelling could achieve," which is simple truth. SWAMP THING and SANDMAN did expand the horizons, just as EC and the undergrounds had, albeit not the exact same horizons.

This is why pluralism as a critical discipline proves valuable. Though Spurgeon says he has enjoyed some Vertigo products, clearly he enjoyed the EC titles and at least some undergrounds more. This is his privilege. But it's a poor (and elitist) critique that asserts that any taste that finds SANDMAN more of a breakthrough than WEIRD SCIENCE-FANTASY must be the result of the author's desire to keep his tongue firmly applied to the boots of DC Comics.

As a side-note, it's significant that both EC and the undergrounds, like most other comic books of their respective periods, predominantly featured short stories. Many of these were good, many were bad. But in other media aside from comic books, the model of the short story has pretty much given way to extended continuities. The progress of the television medium displays this increasing focus on the long story, going from the never-ending soap opera to the punchily-syncopated overlapping arcs of HILL STREET BLUES to the metatextual epic of LOST. And no matter what one thinks of the tastes of the direct-market comics-audience, this audience also has moved toward long stories rather than short stories. Thus one might fairly conclude that the boundary-expansions of SANDMAN and SWAMP THING (for all that Alan Moore borrows a helluva lot from EC Comics) may be, for this time, greater breakthroughs than those of bygone eras.

Of course a true pluralist attitude doesn't assume that one type of fiction is better than another because the former breaks more taboos than the other. An elitist one does, however, as elitism reifies itself by claiming that it pursues what Theodor Adorno fallaciously called "ideas," as against popular literature, which is only about the sensual. But it may be that any elitism that champions taboo-breaking as an absolute good in itself is not really interested in "ideas" as such, for "ideas" are not universally tied to the breaking of taboos, and I for one can find more interesting "ideas" in a decades' worth of DC Comics-- any decade one cares to name-- than in any decades' worth of undergrounds.

As William James noted, the true answer to any question depends on the terms by which the question is stated. And if the short version of this essay might be rendered, "Is a respect for Vertigo Comics' achievements an automatic 'blowjob' for DC Comics?", then I think I've made my answer more than clear.