COMICS IN FILM: GOLDEN EIGHTIES (1986) BY CHANTAL AKERMAN

Comics in Film: Golden Eighties (1986).

by BK Munn

The French poster for the rerelease of the 1966 Batman movie starring Adam West appears in the background of several scenes in this frothy, delightful musical by Chantal Akerman about the romantic lives of employees in a Brussels shopping mall. While tackling serious themes of class war and feminism, the film is a comedy and has some charming song and dance numbers featuring characters played by French pop stars and well-known actors. There is a repertory cinema in the mall and the changing posters in the mise-en-scène play into Akerman’s satire of the heightened, artificial landscape of American cultural hegemony the characters passively consume or inhabit. Early on, a poster for the 1950 noir Gun Crazy is shown, and later a poster for the 1981 heist thriller Green Ice ironically comments on the lowkey shenanigans of the hairdressers and retail clerks in the mall. At the climax of the film, barista Sylvie (Miriam Boyer) updates clothing store owner Mme Schwartz (Delphine Seyrig) about her boyfriend who has gone to seek his fortune in Labrador before talking about the main plot of the film, the love triangle between Mme Schwartz’s son and the two hairdressers from the salon next door. The violent pop art poster by Franco-Russian designer Boris Grinsson of Batman and Catwoman stands sentinel over this cartoonish conversation about the riches of America and the news of the return of Lili, the owner of the hair salon who is fond of leopard prints. However, the final act will not be a cat fight but instead a philosophical diffusion of conflict in a climactic MGM-style dance number featuring the entire cast, as befits a romantic comedy.

SMALL TYPES: "THE MAGAZINE FOR YOUNG CANADIANS"

 

SMALL TYPES Magazine, Volume 2, #3 (May 1955). Small Types Club was a CBC radio and tv lunchtime kids show in the 1950s that was hosted by Byng Whitteker. The bi-monthly magazine, founded and edited by Stella Craig, served as a complement to the show and was sort of like a Canadian version of Highlights Magazine, with stories and activities and, shockingly, multiple pages of comics! It looks like every issue during this period had a comics insert bound in, and this issue reprints full-colour stories from Felix the Cat # 55, published a few months earlier in the USA (by Toby PRESS, September 1954). There were Canadian editions of Felix published in the 1950s by Superior Publication, so maybe Small Types, printed in comic book size, was associated with Superior in some way, or perhaps was printed by Superior on their presses. The reprinted Felix material is by Otto Mesmer and Joe Oriola.

COMICS IN FILM: PROJECT HAIL MARY (2026), DIRECTED BY PHIL LORD & CHRISTOPHER MILLER

Comics in Film: Project Hail Mary (2026), directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller 

by BK Munn

Ryan Gosling sports a vintage B. Kliban cat t-shirt in this fun heart-warmer of a sci-fi movie about a reluctant scientist hero who travels to another solar system to try to save the earth from a solar apocalypse. Gosling's vintage wardrobe is on point throughout the film (that Mary Maxim wolf sweater!), and this t-shirt, seen throughout the film, encapsulates his disheveled hippy aesthetic and, in a sense, his entire personality: The astronaut is chosen for the interstellar suicide mission in part because he has no-one to love in his life, not even a pet, but is inexplicably attached to the cat-themed tourist t-shirt from his hometown San Francisco. Cartoonist B. Kliban (1935 – 1990) lived in the Bay Area himself and his world-renowned surrealist cartoons and cats are still popular today and, apparently, in the future.