Batman as Capitalist Security Guard by Zach Weinersmith

by BK Munn

I've often written about superheroes as the enemies of the working class and the paucity of actual "working class heroes" in the history of comic books. The working class characters in comics are most often pegged as villains, or, if they are particularly troublesome, "supervillains":

"We search in vain for examples of the working class superhero. With few exceptions, he is nowhere to be found. In his place, everywhere we find the figure of the superhero working on the side of the bosses, whether as an ideological footsoldier in the armies of the mass media (the Daily Planets and Bugles, WHIZ's and WXYZ's), as a representative of the Repressive State Apparatus (the police and armed forces), or even as the boss himself: we need not enumerate how many capitalists seem to moonlight as masked vigilantes, erstwhile Robin Hoods reduced to acting as night watchmen over the money bins of their fellow billionaires.

Ah, but who do they guard against? Who appears to play the role of Beagle Boy opposite the concerted efforts of these super-powered Scrooge McDucks? The superhero's triumphalist rhetoric of truth, justice, and the American Way must not remain unchallenged --nor can the use of force continue to be monopolized by a single comic book class. At last, a dim figure steps forward to take up its historic role of class antagonism.

Enter the supervillain, shambling leftward onto the world-historic stage. As an expression of class anxiety, he is unparalleled in art. From his secret origins as the stepchild of the mustache-twirling Oil Can Harry of melodrama and the grand-guignol grotesques of Dick Tracy, the comic book villain embodies all of the perceived threats to the capitalist utopias envisioned by the comic book creator, a world of shiny metropolises, lorded over by masonic fraternities of top-hatted magicians, fetishistic playboys, and patriarchal circus strongmen."

Cartoonist Zach Weinersmith has made the observation explicit with this humourous rant from billionaire Bruce Wayne aka Batman, who enlightens his ward Robin the Boy Wonder about true role of the superhero. Weinersmith's webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is very funny and (dare I say it?) highly intellectually stimulating.

Notes on Guelph Comics History, Part Two: Tales of a Guelphite

Well, here's Tales of a Guelphite #1, which publisher David J Knight tells me he is planning to turn into a continuing comics anthology. The first issue has no comics but covers some aspects of comics culture in Guelph, and includes my article detailing the secret history of Tragedy Strikes Press. I'm happy that some of this history is now in print, and mostly in the words of some of my favourite cartoonists (thank you: Nick Craine, Jay Stephens, and Dylan Horrocks). It was quite a thrill to be a comic book nerd living in Guelph when these cool underground comics were being published here, and even more of a thrill to talk with the creators who published them, all these years later. A much longer version of this history may appear online in the future, as I had to do quite a bit of trimming to fit the wordcount, and several other interviews didn't make it into the article, but for now you can pick up a copy of the zine at Royal Cat Records.

Little Lulu Billboard in Times Square (with Tubby!)

I was wondering why Tubby, the second-greatest American comic book character of all time after Little Lulu, didn't have his own Wikipedia page, when I stumbled over the following amazing fact on Lulu's page. I have many examples of Kleenex advertising featuring Lulu, but somehow was unaware of this: "Little Lulu was widely merchandised, and was the first mascot for Kleenex tissues; from 1952 to 1965 the character appeared in an elaborate animated billboard in Times Square in New York City."

Dick Siegel,1955-2018

by BK Munn

The writer and cartoonist Dick Siegel died June 22 in Manhattan after a short illness.

Richard "Dick" Siegel was born May 27, 1955 in Los Angeles and attended Parsons School of Design in New York. A lifelong fan of comics and science fiction, some of his earliest work was as a writer and designer of several books packaged by Push Pin Studios. These include Alien Creatures and Fantastic Planets, illustrated with stills and posters from classic science fiction films and tv shows. He wrote and drew a comic strip parodying classic film called "The 4:30 Movie" for The SoHo Weekly News and was the author of two satirical works of fiction. He was for many years a chief contributing writer to the Weekly World News, where he also created the comics features Spy Cat (with artist Ernie Colon) and Matthew Daemon, Seeker of Obscure Supernaturals (with artist Mike Collins). Siegel had an extensive low-budget filmography as an indy cinematographer and director, produced and directed interviews for The National Enquirer, and wrote the screenplay for Shadow: Dead Riot, among others. He was the creator of the webseries, Smash Moron, Intergalactic Dolt.

Besides freelance work for a number of outlets as a journalist, humour writer, and pop culture historian, Siegel worked as a senior writer and the online editor for The National Enquirer from 2008 until 2015. 

For many years a resident of Staten Island, Siegel is survived by two sisters.

___

A 2010 GQ profile of the magazine's staff, from around the time the Enquirer was seriously being considered for a Pulitzer for its coverage of the John Edwards political scandal, focused on Siegel and his boss Barry Levine, and establishes Siegel's comic book fan bona fides:

Edwards was the first major story the Enquirer broke online. "We're the last of the Mohicans in terms of discovering our Web site," Levine says. They caught Edwards at the Beverly Hilton after that week's paper locked; worried that Edwards would attempt to spin the story before next week's edition, they posted the story on the Web site on Tuesday morning.The Enquirer's full-time Web staff consists of one guy. Dick Siegel is in his fifties, works out of a cubicle decorated with colored comic-book covers from the '60s; the fact that he's an obvious pop-culture junkie ("I was able to write Fess Parker's obit, or 90 percent of it, off the top of my head, which is scary") makes him the ideal man to run the Enquirer's Web site, where Old Hollywood types—Natalie Wood, Ingrid Bergman—tend to get more hits than Justin Bieber and the Jersey Shore kids. (By way of illustration, he pulls up a recent blog post, sourced to Carrie Fisher's Twitter, about speed fiend eddie fisher.)

"My forte is not journalism," Siegel says. "I'd be fired. I had been working at the late, lamented Weekly World News. That was after my film jobs—I'd been an independent-film cinematographer. Really bad horror movies. Including one that I wrote, about zombies at a women's prison."

He tells me that the Weekly World News gig was good training for what he does now. You learned to write short stories, in AP style, even if they concerned the travails of Bat Boy, "and present them in a serious manner, even if the punch line was a joke."

But it makes sense that someone with Siegel's background wound up at the Enquirer. The tabs are a form of rogue pop culture. They're vehicles for celebrity adoration, but they burrow, termitelike, into the sanctioned narratives of American fame. They're camp—a form of fantasy that revels and resists. They're a comic-book, zombie-movie draft of Hollywood history, right down to the zingy sobriquets.

"It's like professional wrestling," Siegel says. "When we wrote about Tiger Woods's wife, we always described her as 'livid,' so now she's always 'livid Elin.' And Rielle Hunter is 'the New-Age Temptress.'"

"Heroes and villains, in primary colors. That's what separates the giant scandals from the everyday scandals," Levine says, explaining to me why Tiger Woods and Edwards, stepping out on his cancer-stricken wife, were tabloid rocket fuel. "If somebody is a hero and they do something unthinkable, something unconscionable, if the betrayal is so overwhelmingly dirty and sickening, that's what makes what we do."

Investigating Comic Books in Canada: Maclean's Magazine, 1948

I finally picked up a physical copy of this Maclean's Magazine article from 1948. The 5-page article "What About the Comics?" by Sidney Katz appeared in the December 1st issue and for its time was a quite thorough look at the moral panic over so-called "crime comics". For the article, Katz corresponded with the New York psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, author of the anti-comics diatribe Seduction of the Innocent, and quotes an armload of other thinkers on early childhood education including Dr. Spock. The article also touches on the crusade to have the sale of crime comics criminalized, and looks at the use of religious and educational comics in the classroom, mentioning many of the then-popular U.S. comic book titles and features along the way. The article is one of the earliest published in the international "mainstream" media to treat with this subject, and comes across as fairly balanced (Katz went on to specialize in award-winning journalism with a focus on psychology and mental illness). The article is well-documented and often-cited in the study of anti-comics literature, and is even still available on the Maclean's site to subscribers, but it's nice to have my own original copy. The best part is the staged photo of the kids reading the comics in front of a Maclean's newsstand. I like to imagine this was photographed in the lobby of the Maclean's building at 481 University Ave in Toronto, perhaps using the well-dressed children of the photographer. The sale of crime comics was criminalized in Canada in 1949 as a result of The Fulton Bill.

Notes on Guelph Comics History, Part One

I'm starting to do a little bit of research into my hometown's hidden comics history as preparation for writing about our homegrown comic book company, the late, lamented, Tragedy Strikes Press.  Below we have two images from the Guelph Mercury newspaper archives, housed at the Guelph Public Library. The first is a gathering of kids trading (mostly coverless?) comics at the library in 1976. It looks like that may be a Superboy comic face up on the table, but I can't identify anything else. The second photo was taken at the first comic shop I remember going to in town, Card N Comics (located on the same street I have a business on today!), and one of the principles in Tragedy Strikes Press, co-owner Fiona Kenny. What a wonderful random sampling of the early-80s comics culture on display in that shop!

Caption: "Comic Swap Serious Business"
Notaton: "This photograph shows Sean McCarthy, Sean Hayes, Dafydd Waters, and Derek Booth taking part in a comic book trade at the Guelph Public Library."
Guelph Mercury, November 24, 1976

Caption: "Spidey, Old Buddy"
Notation: "This picture shows Fiona Kenny of Card N Comics, putting an affectionate arm around Spider Man."
Guelph Mercury, January 7, 1984.

The Completely Bonkers Story of How Uncle Scrooge Creator Carl Barks Also Created Lost in Space

It may be entirely apocryphal, but fan lore has it that Carl Barks pitched a Space Family Robinson comic to Gold Key editor Chase Craig around 1960, based on the then popular Disney film adaptation of Swiss Family Robinson. Barks' duck stories were full of science fiction elements and the Disney connection is a no-brainer. The actual comic debuted in 1962, written by Del Connell and designed and drawn by Dan Spiegle. When a tv series called Lost in Space featuring a family of marooned-in-the-stars Robinsons started in 1965 on CBS, the publisher and network came to an agreement that the comic book could use the Lost in Space title, since it seemed there was a clear case of influence, if not outright plagiarism involved. So now there is a new Lost in Space on Netflix. Do we owe it all to Carl Barks?

Seth Profile in Toque Magazine

From "Seth's Art of Preservation" in Toque #3, Winter 2018. Text and photos by Chris Tiessen.

toquemagazine.com

R.I.P. Mark E. Smith

by BK Munn

Mark E. Smith 1957-2018.

Marvel Team-Up #41-44, by Bill Mantlo and Sal Buscema (Marvel Comics, 1976). 

In this 4-issue series of stories, the sorcerous super-villain Dark Rider uses Cotton Mather to transport Spider-Man and the Scarlet WItch to the Salem Witch Trials in 1692 in order to lure Dr. Doom and siphon his mystic powers. The story is referenced in The Fall song, "Various Times," the B-Side to the band's second single, "It's the New Thing" (1978). Fall singer and chief song-writer Mark E. Smith was a comic book reader and made many comics references in his art, including nods to Jack Kirby, Brian Talbot, Viz Comics, and, most famously, to the work of Jack Cole in his song "How I Wrote Elastic Man." Smith was something of a prole-art visionary, obsessed with time-travel, the Holocaust, rockabilly, Arthur Machen, H.P. Lovecraft, 60s Motown, Philip K. Dick, Rasputin, the Witch Trials, and other arcane aspects of U.S. and UK pop culture and history. 

Mark E. Smith died today at age 60. 

The relevant lyrics from "Various Times" are as follows (the lyric also references a novel by science fiction writer Ursula K. LeGuin, whose death is also being widely mourned today). The song examines racism and ideological extremism during three different points in human history (The Salem Wich Trials, World War II Germany, and modern-day Britain) and ponders how seemingly normal people could become complicit in mass hysteria and horrible historical atrocities.

"Future:
1980
Black windows
And smokey holes
My head is full of lead
And the beer is so weak
Since they got rid of time around here

Dr. Doom
Fresh from Salem
And the witch trials
The Lathe of Heaven
Time mistaken
Three places at once
Human [race]
Don't think, ask him
Ask him
Ask him”

Jack Kirby on Unions and Efforts to Organize Comic Book Artists

Kirby was very much of his times in the post-War world. Although many of his heroes seek solutions in collective action, many of his early characters were individualists and his themes tended towards the little guy against vast conspiracies... 

From the Comics Journal interview with Gary Groth...

GROTH: Who did you deal with at DC? Did you have an editor that you dealt with directly?

KIRBY: They had several editors. I dealt with Mort Weisinger, Julie Schwartz, and Murray Boltinoff.

GROTH: Can you distinguish between the editors? Did they have different approaches?

KIRBY: They were different personalities certainly, but they were all great to get along with. We’re still good friends. Mort Weisinger is gone. When we first moved to California, Mort Weisinger came to visit us.

GROTH: What kind of man was he? I understand he was a tough taskmaster.

KIRBY: Everybody was a tough taskmaster. Mort Weisinger wasn’t a particularly tough taskmaster. He was trying to do an editor’s job. Comics have a caste system — an editor has to act in a certain way, an artist has to be humble, right? An artist has to be humble, an editor must be officious, and a publisher must be somewhere out in the galaxy enjoying godhood. It was a caste system, pure and simple. And it was accepted that way. Nobody thought of contracts, nobody thought of insisting on better deals.

GROTH: Did you assume when you did a book — any one of the many books you’ve done — did you assume that the publisher owned it? Or did you think about it a little later and think, wait a minute, I did this and I didn’t have a contract, and I don’t see why he should own it 100 percent.

KIRBY: No, I was growing up and becoming aware of those things. Joe Simon knew about those things.

GROTH: At the time you just assumed that the publisher owned it?

KIRBY: Yes. I assumed that he took it, OK? [Laughter.] I assumed that he took it, and I didn’t have the means to get it back. In other words, I didn’t save my money for a lawyer. I was a very young man, and saved my money for having a good time.

GROTH: I understand that sometime in the mid-’50s Bernie Krigstein tried to start a union among comic book creators. Were you aware of that?

KIRBY: I was aware of it. It was something that I knew would fail.

GROTH: But you didn’t go to any meetings?

KIRBY: No, no. Unions almost had the connotation of communism.

GROTH: You were wary?

KIRBY: Everybody was wary. Remember, this was a time when communists marched through the streets, waving flags and shouting. The unions did the same thing so you began to associate them. I’m speaking now as a human being, not as a businessman — the unions are great. The unions are great for the working people because they protect you, but I didn’t see them that way as a young man. First of all, the papers would connect them with thee communists — labor unions were communists.

And Joe Simon on Fighting American, from Wikipedia and the intro to a 1989 Marvel collection: 

Simon said in 1989 that he felt the anti-Communist fervor of the era would provide antagonists who, like the Nazis who fought Captain America during World War II, would be "colorful, outrageous and perfect foils for our hero." He went on to say,

The first stories were deadly serious. Fighting American was the first [C]ommie-basher in comics. We were all caught up in Senator McCarthy's vendetta against the 'red menace.' But soon it became evident that McCarthy ... had gone too far, damaging innocent Americans.... Then, the turnaround, [as] his side became talked of as the lunatic fringe.... Jack and I quickly became uncomfortable with Fighting American's cold war. Instead, we relaxed and had fun with the characters

Working Class Heroes: Humphrey Bogart and the Steel Fist

I have to thank Humphrey Bogart for helping me find out about another working class superhero. Here's Bogey reading a copy of Blue Circle Comics #3, published in the Summer of 1944. It is cover dated September and has a great image of the mermaid superhero Aquamarie punching an octopus who looks like Hitler. 

At the time, Bogey had just met Lauren Bacall on the set of To Have and Have Not and was starting his whirlwind affair with her. The movie came out in October 1944 and Bogey & Bacall were married in the Spring of '45. I'm assuming the photo was taken sometime around then, but I haven't been able to find a source or date for it. 

It's a great comic, published by one of the smaller comics publishers of the time, and only lasting for a handful of issues. The main draw for me today is a strip by HC  Kiefer featuring The Steel Fist, a crime-fighting factory worker . His secret origin is that Nazis try to blow up the steel plant where he works and when he gets in their way, they stick his hand in a vat of molten slag. The spirit of Justice appears (she looks like the Statue of Liberty) and magically makes his steel hand fully useable. Naturally, he puts on a dumb costume and goes around smashing spy rings and beating up saboteurs, and in this issue he gets a taxi driver side-kick who hits people with a thermos.

As I've discussed before, actual working class superheroes are pretty rare. Most superheroes are millionaires or royalty or work for the government. But not Tim Slade, the Steel Fist! Thanks Bogey!

Read the whole comic Bogart is reading here.

Read The Steel Fist's origin here.

The Future of (Digital) Collecting?

by BK Munn

The future of collecting? As a marxist grad student in the 90s I was obsessed with comics/the commodification of art and wrote a bit about simulacra and the then-new phenomenon of eBay and slabbing (encasing old comic books in plastic to protect their condition and "grade"). As I recall, Baudrillard had something to do with it all., but the point was that people had really stopped collecting actual physical objects and were instead bidding on the "idea" of the object, virtual alienated labour, or some such. I was not then and am not now very good at expressing these ideas... Most non-rich, non-artist people still don't collect capital 'A' art, and even the kind of industrial production culture I like to collect, like original comic book art, may soon disappear as cartoonists make more and more of their work digitally and not on paper with ink and pencils. Instead of buying antiques and collectibles, most of us are content to curate photos of them on Pinterest and Instagram. Can we now say that collecting has entered a new phase?  

From an article by McKenzie Wark:

 To think about digital objects as collectable, it may help to start by asking what it is that is actually collected. We tend to think that what is collected is a rare object. But what makes it rare? Perhaps there is more than one way to make an object rare. To make a digital object rare, it can be “locked” in various ways. Take for example The Clock (2010) by Christian Marclay. It is only supposed to be seen in specially designed installations where it runs for twenty-four hours, although apparently the artist’s wishes about that did not stop the hedge-fund manager Steven A. Cohen from using his copy as a screen saver or his gallerist Jay Jopling from screening it for a party.1

Attempting to lock the information in the digital work to some material form or situation may create more problems than it solves. As Cory Doctorow has argued, relying on digital locks does not really empower the artist or the owner. It empowers the makers of digital locks. And in any case it takes away some of the special qualities of a digital object if its form merely imitates the kind of objects that collections already collect.

What might be more interesting is to consider how the very properties of spreadability that characterize digital objects can be turned to advantage to make them collectable as well.2 Paradoxically, an object whose image is very widely spread is a rare object, in the sense that few objects have their images spread widely. This can be exploited to create value in art objects that are not in the traditional sense rare and singular. The future of collecting may be less in owning the thing that nobody else has, and more in owning the thing that everybody else has.

The artwork is not what it used to be. Perhaps one could think of three stages in the evolution of the artwork, each of which has its own kind of rarity and collectability. The first stage we now think of as that of the old masters. The second stage is that of modern art. The third stage begins with what we call contemporary art, but is perhaps only now starting to reveal its true form.

[...]

The third stage is something else. It corresponds to the period in which information becomes the key to value in both the wider economy and also in art.3 The artwork is no longer a special kind of commodity as it was in the modern-art period. The artwork is now a special kind of financial instrument. The artwork is now a special kind of derivative.4 The collectable artwork is now less about being an object that stores value because of its special qualities as a rare thing made by a special kind of worker, the artist. The artwork is now collectible because it is a financial instrument in a portfolio that manages and hedges risk.

The key is the role of information about the artwork. The information about the artwork is actually the most important thing about it. What establishes the value of the work is that people talk about it, write about it, circulate (unauthorized) pictures of it. The more it circulates, the more value it has. The actual work is a derivative of the value of its simulations.

Comic Fan Project: Don Heck era Avengers

A new entry in the Comic Fan Project, the search for early Canadian comic book fans!

This entry brings us a letter printed in Marvel's Avengers #31 from August 1966. The letter is a comment on the character and plot developments in the run of Avengers co-plotted and illustrated by cartoonist Don Heck who replaced Avengers co-creator Jack Kirby on the feature and was the other primary visual chronicler of the era before Big John Buscema and Neal Adams made their mark later in the "Silver Age":

Dear Stan and Don, 
No! No! You can't do this! You can't leave Henry Pym a ten-foot-tall freak!.You'll be rouing one of the most beautiful romances in comicdom. We Marvelites will never tolerate this man's being deprived of what he has needed most in life since the loss of his first wife --the love of Janet Van Dyne. On this we all stand firm. As a matter of fact I'm still amazed that he and the Wasp are not already married. They had plenty of time in which to be wed during their recent period of inactivity. Except for this weakness, the come-back of Giant-Man was rather spectacular. His new costume finally adds that last basic color that has been missing in the new Avengers, and that is yellow. Two things still puzzle me --one is his size. The 25-foot version is too big and too clumsy, as we frantic fans noticed as he struggled to squeeze through the corridors of the Collector's castle. In this state he more of a hindrance than a help to the Avengers. The ten-foot height is slightly undersized. Giant-Man always was and will ever be at his peak in mobility, strength, and power at his standard 12-foot combat height which is the height he displayed on the cover of issue #28. This is the way I and many other old-time Marvelites remember him and will always remember him. The other thing I find hard to accept is his new name. Somehow the name Goliath will never overshadow the glory tha was once in the name of he who we called Giant-Man, for this was how we grew to admire him. The old name sticks close to the heart of many of us. Should these few flaws be remedied, I am sure the new Avengers would reach a peak that might even surpass the glory of the old Avengers.
Claude Paquet5834 Molson St.Montreal 36Quebec, Canada

A great letter full of early fan entitlement and some size puns devoted to perennial nobody's favourite Hank Pym aka Ant-Man aka Giant-Man aka Goliath aka Yellowjacket. At this point in Marvel's development, it's interesting to read a reader self-identify as both a Giant-Man fan and as an "old-time Marvelite" --the Marvel U is at this point only 4 or 5 years old and the letter is written in response to Avengers #28! Also interesting that at this point, the Avengers was basically "The Adventures of Giant-Man"...

Thanks to Claude Paquet of Montreal!