Ev'ry Little Bug!

As I've likely said elsewhere, the Spirit has had many homes, but none which cared for the character with the intensity of feeling of Kitchen Sink. When Denis Kitchen's outfit was handed the project from Warren Magazines, they quickly worked to enhance the actual stories with gobs of background information, mostly from Cat Yronwode.

 As the years ticked by Kitchen Sink produced lots of neat non-comics products attached to Will Eisner's famous character. There were collector cards for instance. But the strangest collectable has to be Ev'ry Little Bug, a two-sided picture record album which gives life to the song "Every Little Bug". That song had appeared in bits and pieces until finally Eisner partnered with Bill Harr create a complete song which they then proceeded to get published in 1948. 

This sheet music goes for hundreds of dollars online. But it wasn't until 1987 when Kitchen Sink took the music and produced a full album. The song is produced five times in various styles and is interspersed with supposed elements of an episode of a 1948 "The Adventures of the Spirit" TV by Alan R. Cartoon Associates. I can find no evidence such a show or company ever existed, so these elements were created just as was the music in all likelihood. The Adventures of the Spirit was produced in the early 60's by Don Glut as an amateur movie. It's not connected to this record album in any way. (More on this oddball creation in a few weeks.)

I confess it's the Eisner artwork on the B side of this album that made this something I really wanted to have and to hold. But I have to say the production is interesting in its own right. There is dedicated sleeve cover for this album as far as I can learn. One offbeat detail for pop culture fans is that Bill Mumy plays guitar on certain tracks. To learn more about record check out this link. To give this amazing little album a listen check out this link. 

Now for a tale of my stupidity. I chanced upon this item for a very nice price and jumped at it. Then it dawned on me I no longer own a record player. But thanks to the internet I was able to dig one up before this gem arrived. It played nice. 

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Invincible Iron Man Day!

George Tuska was born on this date in 1916. Tuska was an important artist at Marvel and many companies before that during the Golden Age of Comics. Tuska was one of the reliable workhorses that were required to keep comics on the racks. He was the mainstay artist on Iron Man in those years when I paid attention to the title. 

George Tuska is a pro's pro, one of those rock-solid talents who inform the field in a way which makes waves well beyond their time. As it turns out Tuska's time was pretty large, as he had a career which sprawled from the Golden Age well into the late Bronze Age and well beyond on the comic strip derived from the Justice League and Superman comics. And always his stuff was there, just like it had been before. I first encountered Tuska on Iron Man, and he remains to my eye the best artist the title ever had. I know there many Bob Layton lovers among us, and I pay proper heed to how Layton was able to redefine the look and bring a shiny gloss, but no single artist in my opinion ever drew armor which looked heavier or more like metal. It wasn't shiny, but it had an angularity and heft which didn't communicate fabric, but something else. Tuska drew great thugs, baddies who carried "heaters" and hung out with "dames". If I had to choose one artist to draw my adaptation of The Maltese Falcon, I'd get Tuska.

In my own imagination, when I think of Iron Man the first image was something from the long rich tapestry created by George Tuska.

Above is my first Iron Man comic and my introduction to both Tuska and writer Archie Goodwin. 

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Arbor Day - The Monster From Planet X!

Everybody knows Groot. After his star turn in the Guardians of the Galaxy comic books and big time Hollywood movies, Groot is a household name, likely the most famous of the Kirby monsters. 

But it was not always thus. Originally the cute Groot was merely another alien invader, a monster who fell victim to the enemy of most wooden things -- termites. 

Since then, he's been revised as an ongoing character. As cute as little Groot is, I find a soft spot in my heart for the deadly original.

 Groot and his monstrous allies can be found in the outstanding volume below. What a feast! 

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Starlost - The Novels!

Phoenix Without Ashes was Harlan Ellison's original title for the debut story of The Starlost. It was changed to "Voyage of Discovery" which is not as poetic certainly. And that seems to be Ellison's most potent complaint against this show which was birthed from his ideas, that it loses its way by consistently playing down to its audience. More recent years have proven Ellison right, that TV fans and sci-fi fans in particular might well be receptive to shows that challenge them a might, that require more of them than an hour of their time. 

The novelized version of the script was expanded by Edward Bryant, a capable science fiction writer in his own right and well capable of taking the story of an outcast Amish man who doesn't fit into his society and eventually finds that his whole world is not what anyone thought it was. The is a story about seeking the truth and the novel spends more time inside Devon's head making him a somewhat more complex and consequently more fascinating character. We get to share his doubts, something the TV show almost never does. 

And we get to see aspects of human existence which were weirdly forbidden on television in those days. Not only does Devon love Rachel, but it's evident they have a physical relationship. On the TV show his love is more ethereal, more of the twin-souls variety and in the book it's that and more. One memorable scene when Devon finally leaves his Cypress Corners habitat is that his physical needs, to eat and urinate are considered, giving the sense of a greater span of time. 

The novel shows us what the show might've been in another time and place and it does enhance our understanding of what we're seeing when we watch the show itself. 

But that's not all. 

Ben Bova was as science adviser for the ill-fated sci-fi show The Starlost. This was a series regarded as an epic fail in the genre because those in command refused to pay attention to the experts they hired and like so many TV projects worked purely from the motive of profit and not art. No begrudges the making of profit, but when that profit comes by low-balling all the costs of production as opposed to doing the best job possible then it's understandable that the work might be held in low regard. And that's the case with Bova and this show, so he worked out his angst by creating a delightful satire about the whole affair entitled The Starcrossed.

The story is set in the early twenty-first century future as seen from 1975 and it's a different world in many ways, but in detail. The obsession with fads has quickened and the world is a dirty polluted territory but made bearable by artificial images and scents. In this America is a conniving TV producer who is about to go under and in a desperate gamble contacts "Ron Gabriel", the Harlan Ellison wannabe and in this story a notorious science fiction writer and quixotic personality to create a new sci-fi show. Gabriel is down on his luck too, though always able to find a date with a lithesome beauty, and so goes for it and fashions in a whirl if energy a yarn translating Romeo and Juliet into outer space.

The narrative of The Starcrossed is told from multiple perspectives but our core tale is of a scientist and engineer who has invented a new 3-D technique which is the real selling point of this new show. His naive introduction to the manipulation and dishonesty of Hollywood shapes much of the attitude the story is attempting to communicate. There back-biting executives and a lovely girl who has secrets within secrets. Few are what they seem in this tale and that's the way the world is supposed to be. When the production heads to Canada to cut costs the shenanigans have only begun and a show which was supposed to be great is now intended to fail for the good of the company.

There are good laughs to had in this one, and I even laughed out loud a few times, a real accomplishment for text in my experience. Bova doesn't really let anyone off the hook, and neither does he rob anyone of a fundamental humanity. Even the loathsome figures are motivated in a such a way as to make us understand. Satires are always about the here and now despite the fact they almost always are set in faraway times and places. So it is with The Starcrossed.

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The Starlost - The Television Series!

I've heard about The Starlost for most of my life, but I'd never seen an episode of this notorious science fiction series. My knowledge was most likely a result of reading and reading about Harlan Ellison, the sci-fi writer who concocted the story this series is based on and who wrote the script for the debut episdoe. The Starlost is considered by some to be the worst science fiction series ever and I can vouch that it's not that.

But the guy who first thought it all up was not happy and was so unhappy in fact that he had his named removed and this standby identity of "Cordwainer Bird" punched in to fill the void. Ellison tells the tale of how he was much abused (Ellison is always much abused in his stories) by the folks who wanted to produce this show and how they made promises they either couldn't or had no intention of keeping. I'll take a look at the novel he made with Ed Bryant some time later which presumably puts forth his rendition of this story. But first here's the show.

We meet Devon, an iconoclastic member of an Amish sect which finds its world oddly circumspect. With a limited territory and a limited sky and a limited population the village uses authoritarian techniques to keep the balance. Devon does not fit in, he wants to marry Rachel the girl he loves despite the fact she is promised to another, his friend in fact, a blacksmith named Garth. Devon's confrontations withe powers result in his isolation but he never relents and eventually discovers that all is not what it seems. This Amish clan is floating in space and they don't even know it.

The first episode shows how Devon begins to find the truth and how when he tries to share that truth with his people he is yet again condemned. The three friends end up outside the society and together begin to learn the real truth of their existence. Some of that truth is that they live on a great Ark, a spaceship which was borrowed from the Bruce Dern film Silent Running.

I didn't find The Starlost to be all that bad, a tendency to be dull but certainly possessing special effects typical of the era. Most of the dullness is in the oddball flat way the acting is done. All the actors seem to do it, to demonstrate general lethargy punctuated by moments of furious activity, so I think it must have been intended.  Perhaps they confused ponderous silence with presumed wisdom, but whatever the case it hurts the viewing. As the series tumbles along it does tweak with its look and premise a bit, and toward the end seems to treat our trio of stalwarts as folks more comfortable with technology. That's natural of course, but it felt more like a reboot than an evolution. I've seen worse.

More on The Starlost tomorrow. 

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The Foozle Day!

Steve Englehart was born on this date in 1947. Englehart dropped onto the comics landscape at Marvel and left a huge impression with his stories that developed elaborate back histories for some of Marvel's forgotten characters. he co-created Mantis in the Avengers and Coyote for the Epic line.  Englehart was not a writer to suffer too much editorial fussing about and if a story he "wrote" appeared that had been too altered for his tastes he used the pseudonym "John Harkness". Englehart's generosity when it came creation is revealed in tale of The Foozle. 

Here's one of those secret origin type tales that I find fascinating in the comics world. It seems that back in the day, Steve Englehart, something of an itinerant comic book writer had a falling out with DC about his remuneration on an already submitted story. He had it seems already written a DC Presents story starring Superman and featuring The Creeper as the guest star. Since he felt stiffed by the company, he refused at that time to do more work for them, so what to do with the completed script.

I'll let Steve tell the story himself.

(Steve Ditko)
"I had no plan - what was I going to do with DC-specific stories if I didn't sell them to DC? - but that very afternoon, Jan and Dean Mullaney bought them to start their new magazine line (for the price DC had promised).

So, Marshall Rogers, who was going to draw the Superman-Creeper story, sat down and riffed on it. He turned Superman into a little girl and the Creeper into the Foozle, and I rewrote dialogue as needed. Marshall later spun the Foozle into his own series, which he wrote himself, and since it was pretty much his creation, I renounced my rights to him...er, it..."

So The Foozle was born. He debuted in Eclipse Magazine in the story "The Slab". Here's a link to Steve's full account.

Later Konsbon the Foozle showed up in the debut issue of Eclipse Comics running for a few issues.

Later still there appeared two issues of Captain Quick and A Foozle from Eclipse.

For those of us who remember the Foozle, and his eventual companion Captain Quick, it was fun stuff, emerging from an exceedingly fertile time for comics. The Foozle didn't have all that many adventures at Eclipse, but he did make a big impression on my memory at least. I'm tickled to discover that he was inspired by Steve Ditko's wacky giggling superhero.

Thanks DC for always being there for us fans. We owe their corporate incompetence and short-sightedness more than we can imagine I'd suspect.

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Of Maus And Meta-Maus!

Yesterday was a certain lunatic dictator's birthday. To commemorate this asshole's entry into the world, I give you Art Spiegelman's Maus, one of the most powerful examinations and indictments of the Holocaust in comics form. I've re-read Maus, but this time with insights gleaned from reading MetaMaus, a tome which gathers together sundry interviews and other materials pertinent to the creation. 

This time I read the collected Maus. MetaMaus is keyed to this volume and page numbers are specific to this collection book. It's only been a few years since I read and commented on this story, but current events push me to engage with it again. I wonder how my feelings will change when the oppressions depicted in the story are similar to those we might feel today. 

Art Spiegelman's Maus - A Survivor's Tale is one of the most brutally frank comics I've ever read. Spiegelman is not only intent on relating the dreadful details of his father's survival of the Nazi regime's attempt to exterminate the Jews in Hungary and elsewhere in Europe, but he shows what effect that bloody campaign had on the survivors of the genocide. His father was one such survivor and the man Vladek Spiegelman is presented as a fully rounded character, a man with grit and capacity for love, but a man who is overwhelmed by his need to be prepared for the next time the Jews come under assault. This need expresses itself in his miserly approach to life which makes him a challenging person to live with. Spiegelman does not attribute all of Vadek's stingy ways on his war experience, but increasingly as the story unfolds before us in chapter after chapter, we see that had Vladek been someone else, he and his wife might not have lived through the horror of Auschwitz. And we also can tell that the survival has also had a toll on Vladek 's spirit. The story follows Vladek's and Anja's story as they see the rise of the Nazi regime and attempt to survive and later hide from the predations. They are ultimately unsuccessful, and the story leaves off as they are both ultimately captured and sent to join their people in Hitler's death camps. 

Maus was originally produced in six chapters spread over six issues of the comic magazine RAW. RAW produced a new issue annually for the most part and so the saga of Maus was begun by Spiegelman in issue number two of RAW in 1980. And each issue and year after that until the final installment of what became part one of the saga was published in RAW#7 in 1985. The story was then collected and published by Pantheon Books as Maus - A Survivor's Tale in 1986. When a sequel was finished some years later the title was lengthened to Maus - A Survivor's Tale Part I My Father Bleeds History. (We'll get around to Part II next week.) 

Spiegelman is attempting some complex things in this story. He simultaneously wants to detail the horrors of the Holocaust as seen first-hand through his father's eyes. In addition, he wants to show the relationship between himself and his father which is rocky at best. Spiegelman's mother Anja had committed suicide some years before and his father had remarried to a woman named Mala. Spiegelman also had a brother who was killed during the Holocaust, and he seems to suffer from having been compared all his life to this ideal brother who never grew up. It's clear that guilt and angst are wide and deep inside the family and getting an understanding of that dysfunction seems to be Spiegelman's ultimate goal in pushing his father for details of the WWII atrocities. 

Maus also makes an interesting choice, one which I'm sure has made for its long-lasting reputation and that is to use the tried-and-true comic book convention of using intelligent animals to stand in for human beings. Whether it's Mickey Mouse or Bugs Bunny or Huckleberry Hound, we respond to this idea with eagerness, and it allows for the crimes and horrors to be shown with a degree of separation which oddly allows them to bypass our defense mechanisms to no see horror. It seems we understand immediately that certain animals can represent certain kinds of people, perhaps too easily. Spiegelman has drawn criticism for using pigs to represent non-Jewish Poles and cats to represent the Nazis. But it only makes sense in a universe in which the oppressed Jews are seen as Mice. The seeming slow but steady progress by the Nazis to eradicate the Jews is presented at one level in the story as literally a "cat-and-mouse" game. 

Given this trope, it's easy to understand why some folks who are careless in their thinking and lazy in their reading might jump to a conclusion that the treatment is inappropriate for kids. Funny animal comics are the very essence of kid's stuff, but this is a different animal story which ain't all that funny after all. The Tennessee school board which banned Maus from its classrooms only succeeded in making sure that more people were aware of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize winning work and that sales flew through the roof. Their objections to the work are laughable and it seems clear that these folks want their children to grow up free of the moral dilemma the Holocaust presents to all modern peoples. They are derelict in their responsibility both to the students under their care and to history itself which requires that we remember the evil which is done, so that the chances of that evil reviving is minimized. 

The publication of Maus - A Survivor's Tale in 1986 was one of the markers that comics had grown up into a fully mature narrative form. The splendid creativity and diversity sparked by the advances of the direct sales market meant that while comic books diminished as a mass market entertainment they had in place become fully realized art. Art Spiegelman had hit a home run in the field, book that defied the conventional attempts to categorize it and which functioned equally well as both biographical and autobiographical and which used outsized metaphor to drive home themes that much of a broad audience might reject in a less user-friendly format. 

 

But Spiegelman was not finished. The first chapter of the second volume of the story which would become known as Maus - A Survivor's Tale II - And Here My Troubles Began was first published in the eighth and final issue of RAW magazine where the first part had been serialized. There is a jump in the framing narrative which we'd been following about Spiegelman trying to get the story of his father Vladek's survival of the Holocaust when we learn that Vladek has died. Part of the angst seen in Maus is that of Spiegelman himself who was tortured by his demanding father and the suicide of his mother in 1968. He made it quite clear in the story that he blamed her death on his father and his unyielding pressure about money and other details of daily life. Working through this anger with the help of his wife Francoise Mouly is part of the story we must also consider. 

This story has Vladek and his wife Anja captured at last after many long months of avoiding the Nazis. They are sent to the death camps, and we follow Vladek as we lose touch with Anja's story. There is intense frustration on Spiegelman's part about this aspect of the story since his father had destroyed his wife's diaries about the events of the Holocaust. So, we are left with only Vladek's story, and we see that he survived the camps by good fortune and savvy working of personalities and resources. The Jews in the camps are beaten and killed and summarily marched to their deaths by a regime that seemed all too intent on this singular proposition. From the perspective of this story WWII seems much less about tactical decisions on the battlefield and all about the singular mania which demanded that Jews everywhere be put to death, that all things Jewish be absorbed or obliterated. There was little distinction between man and woman or adult and child, all were subject to perhaps the most organized and banal genocide in human history. 

While we follow Vladek's journey in the camps and then out again where the danger is no less intense it seems, we see the horrors of Nazi regime and the war it perpetrated reflected in individuals and their losses. They might be mice and cats and pigs and dogs as rendered by Spiegelman but never does the forget that these are people suffering in stunningly brutal ways. Sudden violent death was a commonplace and only relentless effort and luck could stave it off.  By the end of this second tale, we have followed Vladek not only from Auschwitz to Sweden to New York to Florida and to New York again, we have seen one old and tortured soul who longs for connection with his son but cannot give of himself long enough to find it. There is no happy ending in Maus - Survivor's Tale, just an ending of sorts. Survival is a story that never ends and travels from generation to generation for all time as tragically we are learning again today. 

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