Comics in Film: Top Guns of the West in The Harder They Come (1972)

Comics in Film: The Harder They Come (1972). Top Guns of the West: Super DC Giant #14, 1970.

Reggae star Jimmy Cliff reads a comic about gunfighters in this movie about a wannabe reggae star who finally has a big hit on the radio and the sales charts when he becomes a gunfighting marijuana dealer. This comic is a reprint collection of classic western stories illustrated by well-known superhero artists like Gil Kane, Carmine Infantino, and Joe Kubert (who drew the cover). Also seen in the film, in a scene where Cliff's jealous preacher boss looks through the car, is another 1970 comic book, Two Gun Kid #95, featuring stories by the Holy Trinity of Marvel Comics westerns, John Severin, Dick Ayers, and Jack Kirby. Cliff's character later become something of a "two gun kid" himself when he embarks on his crime spree, killing a bunch of cops with a pair of pistols and then brazenly posing for a set of glamour shots in a photo studio brandishing the same guns like a comic book cowboy. These imported U.S. comics were part of the cultural mileu that ska and reggae emerged out of, along with crime movies and U.S. top 40 pop and jazz. The desperate life of serial unemployment and low-level drug dealing the film documents had a fantasy flipside in the music that could just as easily reference "James Bond" and "Al Capone" as well as romance or Rastafarianism.

Comics in Film: Apache Kid in Cronenberg's The Dead Zone

by BK Munn

Comics in Film: The Dead Zone (1983). A copy of Apache Kid #53 in a serial killer's bedroom. The comic book appears in the childhood bedroom of Deputy Frank Dodd, the Castle Rock Killer. Dodd (played by Nicholas Campbell) retreats to the seemingly derelict home where he lives with his over-protective mother, pursued by his boss Sheriff George Bannerman (Tom Skerritt) and precog John Smith (Christopher Walken), after Smith correctly identifies Dodd as the man responsible for a series of rapes and murders in a small New England town. The killer's room is littered with many childish features, from its cowboy wallpaper to broken toys to a rocking horse, and is part of the film's obsession with rooms and childhood. The "Cowboys and Indians" theme is repeated in another room later, when Walken's character visits the home of a millionaire with a troubled son who needs tutoring. Apache Kid #53 (really #1) was published in 1950, and is a regular western-hero-with-secret-identity character typical of the period. The cover to this issue is drawn by Joe Maneely, the main artist for Atlas/Marvel during the 1950s before his untimely death in 1958 led to Jack Kirby returning to the company and starting the revival of superheroes. Other stories in the issue are drawn by Syd Shores and Mike Sekowsky. The appearance of the comic in the film is a nice touch, playing with the Wertham-esque idea of comics as junk culture responsible for juvenile delinquency and violent and sexually sadistic tendencies. The dual-identity nature of the Apache Kid (a white boy raised by Apaches after his family was slaughtered only to witness the slaughter of his adoptive family by whites) is also a call out to the way the film plays with its many dualities: cop/killer, villain/hero, adult/child, etc. Both director Cronenberg and Stephen King, the original author of The Dead Zone, were fans of comic books as kids, and Cronenberg has talked about his childhood obsessions, including "E.C. Comics, scary and bizarre and violent and nasty—the ones your mother didn’t want you to have."