This is the fourth in a series of articles that will discuss the cinematic portrayal of Superman—specifically, the franchise beginning with Superman (1978). The subject of today’s entry is Superman IV: the Quest for Peace.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, so they say. If that’s the case, then Superman IV must be the cinematic equivalent of hell. After the directionless mess that was Superman III, Christopher Reeve famously refused to play the title role in another film unless he could personally ensure that the story had some sort of relevance. When the rights to the franchise were picked up by Cannon Films, the new producers made him an offer: participate in Superman IV and have a say in the material. Reeve accepted.

Long after the fact, Reeve would make a telling comment in his autobiography, Still Me: “The less said about Superman IV, the better.”

Reeve’s idea was one that is relevant now, was especially relevant then (it was the twilight of the Cold War), and had untold potential to be spun into a great Superman story. How does Superman confront a problem as universal and unyielding as war? Could ending war really be as simple as getting rid of all of the instruments of war? Surely if any one man is capable of doing so, that man is Superman. So, in a world with a Superman, why is there war? In the looming face of war, could even a being of such limitless power as Superman falter?

As a fan and admirer of the character, these questions capture my imagination. It is unfortunate that Superman IV not only realizes none of its potential, but also takes a tremendous dive in production values due to a mishandled budget and generally poor direction. It confronts war with the ham-fisted storytelling and piss-poor production values of an old sci-fi matinee. Perhaps Superman III is worse for having no potential to tap, but I find IV more disappointing for its failure to deliver on its tremendous promise.

To its credit, the film attempts to address other relevant topics in Superman’s universe as well, things that the previous films—even the excellent first film—did not take into consideration. What happens to the farm Superman grew up on after his adoptive parents are both dead? How is his life affected when the livelihood of his colleagues and his alter-ego, Clark Kent, is threatened? When he’s needed as both Superman and Clark at the same time, what does he do? What happens when Lex Luthor, in his mania for revenge, throws Superman’s goals back into his face by engineering a nuclear-powered monster?

Again, all interesting concepts, but the failure is in the approach. Smallville is dealt in and out of the game within the span of one scene. The Nuclear Man is just another villain for Superman to fight; the more interesting implications of Luthor’s transgression go unexplored. The hostile takeover of the Daily Planet is handled like the B-plot of a television sitcom (in fact, much of the film resembles a bad sitcom). The stealthy maneuvers Superman must execute in order to hold up the façade of his dual identities on their improbable double date are handled without much tension or comedic spark. It’s nothing that hasn’t been done better in other films.

The salt in the wound is the inclusion of John Cryer as Luthor’s obnoxious nephew, Lenny. Luthor’s cohorts in previous films were bumbling idiots over whom he could lord his boundless intelligence, but they were never this annoying.

There is a sequence towards the end of Superman IV that provides a semblance of resolution to the interesting questions it raises. Perhaps Superman can’t personally put a stop to war, and perhaps he shouldn’t. War is a human problem, and as we all learned in the Cold War era, the few most powerful among us might only be worsening things when they attempt to solve the issues of the masses. It’s unfortunate that, as with the rest of the picture, this portion is handled with all the sophistication of one of Aesop’s fables. Without shame, it panders to those among us who don’t understand anything unless it’s shouted in their faces with a bullhorn.

This series on Superman will take a short break, but will return soon. Next week: the first part of a double article, featuring a movie about an anarchist clown and a guy who buys everything in black.

Questions? Comments? Concerns? Use the comment feature, or visit the discussion thread.

This is the third in a series of articles that will discuss the cinematic portrayal of Superman—specifically, the franchise beginning with Superman (1978). The subject of today’s entry is Superman III.

No more Mr. Nice Guy, as the song goes. Sooner or later, everybody gets a little cranky. It happens to Supes in this movie and it probably happened to anybody who paid money to see it. Superman III is a litany of bad ideas on film, and had its potential been better tapped and the weaker material pared down, there would be no need to give it the hatchet job it so very much deserves.

Putting it baldly, this is not a Superman movie. This is bad comedy that includes Superman as a supporting character, with the lead role going to (at the time) superstar comedian Richard Pryor. The bad news is that this film is good for neither Superman fans nor Richard Pryor fans. Pyor’s hysterical R-rated personality is declawed and defanged for a PG audience, while Superman’s usual superheroic feats are pushed to the margins. The worse news is that there isn’t much in the way of good news. Superman gets to save the day in a nicely done sequence involving a chemical plant fire. Metropolis is beset by a chain sequence of little disasters in an opening interlude that might have been funnier in a different movie. Good moments like these are in short supply.

Last time around, I discussed how the split personality of Superman II worked to undermine the strong directorial groundwork laid by the first film. It is clear which of the two sides eventually won the battle, since director Richard Lester is back at the helm and his penchant for mindless gags and empty stylistic flourishes has returned with him. One might wonder if Pryor’s inclusion in the cast is a knowing commentary on the direction taken by this production, symbolizing how slapstick and silly stunts would overtake good-natured heroism.

It isn’t as though there is nothing here to chew on, no potential to be tapped. There is a pair of interesting subplots that deserves to be examined, though they are incidental to the overarching story (a bland Lex Luthor wannabe attempts to control the world, aided by Pryor’s computer expertise).

In one scene, an attempt to synthesize kryptonite goes wrong, turning Superman into a jerk rather than a corpse. This is fertile ground for good superhero storytelling. Imagine a Superman with all his great powers, but without his equally great sense of responsibility. What would he be like without his goodness or his dedication to truth and justice? He would be a walking time bomb, unsafe to be around. He could be a world-threatening disaster. However, the filmmakers don’t deliver on the promise of this idea, soft-pedaling the ensuing havoc rather than pursuing the more fascinating implications. Other than unwittingly providing minor aid to the villains, Superman’s evil activities are limited to super-annoyances such as blowing out the Olympic torch and straightening out the famously leaning Tower of Pisa. There is no exploration of the duality of a hero’s personality, nor even an attempt to examine the what-if scenario of a world dominated by a superpowered being with no virtues. For that matter, there is also no explanation for Superman’s drunkenness. What about his super-liver?

The other noteworthy subplot is Clark Kent’s return to his adopted hometown of Smallville, Kansas. For various reasons, Margot Kidder’s presence in the film was minimized, so the all-important thread of Superman’s courtship of Lois Lane is dropped. Instead, Superman III introduces Clark’s high school sweetheart, Lana Lang, and it is here that it exhibits the most resemblance to its superior predecessors. The interaction between Clark and Lana is often sweet, but it ultimately feels inconsequential next to the grander romance of the first two films. Superman III is marginally richer for including material like this, but its overall mediocrity is also emphasized due to the clearly unfulfilled potential.

Examining the main plot, there isn’t a sense that anybody involved in the major action especially cares about what he’s doing. Why does Richard Pryor’s computer wiz want to help Robert Vaughn’s wealthy industrialist take over the world? We don’t know. Why does Superman want to stop them? Why, so they can’t take over the world, of course. Why are they trying to take over the world? Again, we don’t know. The bad guys have no recognizable motivation, and the final confrontation clings weakly to the circular logic. One expects Superman to have all sorts of adventures, so there must be at least some that aren’t exciting or intriguing enough to be worth documentation. This is one of them.

Questions? Comments? Concerns? Use the comment feature, or visit the discussion thread.

I thought I’d pause at the 33.3 yard line of my Superman movie retrospective in order to attend to a more timely Superman-related matter: his 70th birthday. It is now the month of June, and it was June 1938 that Superman made his first appearance in the pages of Action Comics #1. (Actually, though Action Comics #1 was cover-dated June 1938, it was first published in April of that year. But let’s not spend too much time worrying about that.) With this in mind, I figured I’d ramble on about the character for a bit.

My earliest memories go back to when I was three years old. As with most people at that age, my literacy was not impressive, so I wasn’t interested in comic books. I was, however, already a fan of Superman. Through a combination of generous grandparents and grocery store bargain bin videos, I had acquired all of the 1940s short films animated by Fleischer Studios (famous as well for their productions of Betty Boop and the early Popeye cartoons), and my father had recorded the first Superman movie off of HBO. I’m not sure my family knew what they were doing when they introduced me to the Man of Steel at such an early age, but I pinpoint that time in my life as the beginning of my appreciation for the character. It is worth mentioning that I could hand-draw the iconic “S” emblem before I could spell words with the letter “s” in them.

I never liked the Superman comics growing up. When I was old enough to read them, Superman was bogged down in a run of editorial decisions that could charitably be described as idiotic, stemming from a radical reboot of the series in 1986. The Superman in the comics identified himself chiefly as human, paying only lip service to his alien heritage. He never seemed very powerful. Krypton was depicted as a sterile scientific dystopia. Pa Kent’s death never happened, bereaving Superman of a crucial guidepost in his development as a heroic character. And there were so many other differences between the real deal and this weak impostor.

Fortunately, I happened to come into comics in a time when there was a growing interest in old back issues, and compilations containing reprints of classic titles would become increasingly common. (No, we didn’t always have omnibuses full of the old stories; those are a relatively recent luxury. Believe it or not, kids used to have no access whatsoever to the history of their favorite characters outside of combing comic book stores for moldy back issues. Eventually, someone figured out that there was a demand for new reprints of classic titles, and that someone is probably very rich today.)

I eventually found the real Superman primarily in the 1960s era comic books edited by Mort Weisinger, whose grand, fantastical vision is largely responsible for the quintessential elements of the character. This was the real Superman: the guy with a fortress full of wonders, who came from an even more wondrous technologically advanced planet, and whose straight-laced heroism was tempered by the kind of anxieties you’d expect from someone with the powers of a god and the terrible responsibility of using them wisely. Furthermore, the storytellers were audacious, always taking chances that would be deemed outlandish by current standards.

Superman is many things, depending on how you look at him. In terms of modern mythology, he is our Hercules, our Samson, our John Henry. In personal terms, he has both the authority and approachability of an older brother figure. In action terms, he’s the one superhero who cannot be trifled with—badly written schlock stories to the contrary, there is no greater challenge to the fraternity of supervillains than the Man of Steel. In cultural terms, he is our metaphor for what we have become as a society in our modern age: gifted with the power to have it all or smash it all, and cursed with the responsibility to exercise that power with wisdom and restraint. Superman sets an example to strive towards, both as a real person in his fictional universe and as a fictional character in our real universe. And he himself doesn’t always get it right, which has proven to be fertile ground for telling stories about him and ourselves.

Questions? Comments? Concerns? Use the comment feature, or visit the discussion thread.

Recommended Reading:

This is the second in a series of articles that will discuss the cinematic portrayal of Superman—specifically, the franchise beginning with Superman (1978). The subject of today’s entry is Superman II.

Superman (1978) was made with the intention of being the first half of a two-part project, and both films were intended to be filmed simultaneously. Due to budget and time constraints, the second half had to be shelved before it was finished so the full attention of the production could be focused on the first half, and director Richard Donner was fired once that film was completed. The producers then put director Richard Lester in the saddle midstream to save the troubled Superman II.

Many of the key elements that made Superman: the Movie work return in Superman II, chief among them the principal actors. The film continues the thread of Superman and Lois, which blossoms from a courtship into a full-blown romance. Regrettably, the balance of the material is shifted; the romance is shuffled to the side in favor of the pyrotechnics caused by the arrival of a trio of Kryptonian supervillains. Though it seems like logical storytelling to up the stakes and throw a true challenge at the Man of Steel, Superman: the Movie was ultimately not about the villains. Superman II is, and it suffers for it.

When a film is about villainy, the objective of the story is to reveal how the villain either meets his demise or, at the very least, is driven off to menace the characters another day. Films like this lend themselves to formula; the idea represents the shallows of the storytelling pool. By making the hero the focus of Superman: the Movie, Donner willingly relinquished the opportunity to repeatedly mine the territory of the villain story, forgoing the possibility of plugging new villains into the same tale for multiple films. The difficulty of this approach is in figuring out where else to take the story in the next installment, since the answer is not obvious. The initial goal of Superman II was to further the love story, but during the turmoil of the production, the subplot of the villains who menace the Earth—initially serving the noble purpose of restoring the hero’s sense of responsibility to mankind—became the main reason for the film to exist.

Adding to the split personality of the film is the difference in style between Donner’s and Lester’s scenes. To Lester’s credit, there are times when the differences aren’t obvious, but they’re sometimes jarring. Donner’s production was lavish, spared no expense, and was shot in an elegant fashion befitting its subject matter. Lester’s approach is thriftier and somewhat showier. The orchestra is smaller. The shots have lost their richness. Lester throws in tacky zooms, sight gags, and protracted sequences of rampaging violence, which makes me wonder if he’s aware of how cheapened the production values of his contributions are in comparison to Donner’s and is attempting to misdirect the audience with sound and fury. Donner had confidence in his material and in his production, and the style showed it. There is no doubting that Lester is a competent filmmaker, but he does not gain mastery of Superman II.

In a way, the division of the focus of the film and the disconnected styles complement one another. In the material that is most faithful to the groundwork laid by the first film, things progress as the audience might hope. Superman and Lois still light up the screen together and win the audience over. As for the rest of the material, it only lays the groundwork of a shallower future for the series.

Before closing this installment, I would like to mention something that I had no room to include in my previous entry. For anyone who wishes to watch Superman: the Movie on DVD, I strongly recommend watching the theatrical cut and using the Dolby 2.0 stereo audio mix, rather than the Dolby Digital 5.1 audio mix. The disc that contains these features is available in two box sets: the Ultimate Collection and the Christopher Reeve Collection, both released in 2006. Unfortunately, neither the theatrical cut nor the 2.0 audio mix are available on the 2001 DVD, which reinserts deleted scenes into the film (incidentally, these scenes are amusing enough, but are ultimately pointless and detract from the pacing of the film). To compound the problem, the 2.0 mix was accidentally omitted from some early pressings of the 2006 disc.

If your version of Superman: the Movie has the option for Dolby 2.0, I strongly recommend using it, as it is the only way to experience the film in its original form. In order to create the 5.1 mix, the studio scrapped the original audio effects and replaced them with new ones, resulting in a jarring collision of 2001-era sound effects and 1978-era dialogue and visuals. The 2.0 version is a more seamless viewing experience and maintains the integrity of the original production.

Reggie White Jr. has linked me on his blog, so I would be remiss if I did not plug him here. He’s a good writer and the interests of his blog share some eerie similarities with mine, so visit his site at reggieblogged.blogspot.com and check his stuff out.

Questions? Comments? Concerns? Use the comment feature, or visit the discussion thread.

This is the first in a series of articles that will discuss the cinematic portrayal of Superman—specifically, the franchise beginning with Superman (1978). That film is the subject of today’s entry.

“Magic” is a word often heard in conversations about the classic era of Hollywood moviemaking, but I wonder if many moviegoers still understand what it means. I don’t believe “magic” applies to just any movie. It conjures up visions of innocent and charming storytelling, high wattage smiles, and endearing naïveté (viewed, of course, by today’s by no means permanent cynical standards). Perhaps movies lost their magic with the increasingly distrustful cultural climate of the 1960s and 70s, or maybe it was when high dollar special effects became commonplace. Whatever the case may be, it has become increasingly difficult to find that quality of magic in movies over the decades.

When director Richard Donner was offered the chance to direct Superman in 1976, he approached the project with the goal of respecting the character as a fundamental cultural icon. In doing so, the cast and crew invested Superman: the Movie with a sense of old time Hollywood magic.

The film opens appropriately enough as grand, ethereal sci-fi, but it begins to show its true colors once the setting changes from Krypton to Smallville. The Kansas of Superman: the Movie is a living Norman Rockwell painting, a gently glowing landscape of wheat that stretches almost uninterrupted by modern technology. The material here is so simply written, yet so rich. Glenn Ford feels right at home as Jon Kent, essaying the kind of portrayal that Henry Fonda might have delivered with a twinkle in his eye. Kent’s last words of advice to his adopted son Clark (Jeff East) are laced with portent: “One thing I do know is that you are here for a reason.”

Flash forward 12 years and one journey to the arctic later, Clark Kent arrives in Metropolis—and fortunately so. It is only later that night when his new colleague, spirited girl reporter Lois Lane, becomes the victim of a helicopter flight gone awry. In the nick of time, a mysterious caped stranger gracefully flies in to pluck her from the jaws of death and neatly places the helicopter on its landing pad, having effortlessly held it aloft with one hand, thus beginning one of the most enduring fictional courtships in our popular culture. The helicopter sequence is marvelously executed; the heroism of the scene and the chemistry between the actors make it work. It establishes the film as the story of Superman and Lois, further cemented when he takes her for an impromptu flight over the Metropolis skyline.

The movie pays lip service to the perfunctory convention of the supervillain, but the filmmakers understand that there is little old school magic to be had there and wisely relegate Lex Luthor’s evil scheme to a subplot. Gene Hackman’s Luthor is narcissistic and long-suffering, surrounding himself with cronies less intelligent than himself in order to indulge his ego. Luthor may not be as physically imposing or as overtly dangerous as most villains in films today—his villainy is more of the dastardly mustache-tweaking variety. Luthor is there for the audience to sneer at, rather than be frightened of. Again, the filmmakers have garnished their disarming take on Superman with a classic Hollywood touch. It all meshes together with clockwork precision—the magic, the fantasy, and the sincerity of the heroic values.

When the antihero was introduced into comic book storytelling, it was a revolutionary alternative to the traditional hero, but scribes did not realize the long term implications of their choice. The concept of the antihero has since lost its novelty; the alternative has become the standard. Superman is one of the last vestiges of the old guard, wearing his moral aspirations and his good intentions as plainly as his outlandish costume. He is the last stand of the socially responsible, morally upright superhero, and he is so disarming in this film that his sincerity is never in question. There is not a hint of irony here, no ham-fisted attempts at deconstruction. This is a traditional hero’s tale, though Superman is by no means perfect (his stoicism falters in a key sequence towards the end, providing emotional grounding to a scene that otherwise absurdly defies logic and physics).

Christopher Reeve’s performance is often regarded as definitive, and for many good reasons. The flight sequences work because he makes them work. Perhaps his greatest contribution to the role is his in-flight body language, which is convincing enough to make us believe that he’s really banking and swooping around instead of merely dangling from wires. The special effects (laughable by today’s standards) don’t do the job on their own, so Reeve makes himself the greatest special effect of all. Also to his credit is that Superman and Clark are palpably different. It doesn’t matter that they superficially resemble one another; the sense is that the two identities are separate enough to enable the suspension of disbelief. Both Clark and Superman are endearing in their own way, and it is interesting to observe the way each one acts around Lois Lane—different enough to be convincing, yet same enough that they just might harbor the same feelings for her. It is also interesting, to actress Margot Kidder’s credit, to observe the differences in the way she acts around each of them.

Reeve plays Superman as the classical leading male, a modern day Prince Charming. His portrayal of Clark also draws upon the classical, emulating Cary Grant’s performance in Bringing Up Baby. Drawing upon vintage Hollywood, resurrecting its magic—they don’t make them like this anymore.

Questions? Comments? Concerns? Use the comment feature, or visit the discussion thread.

My first essay, Action – Mystery – Adventure, has concluded. How successful it was, both in terms of the content and its readership, I have yet to discover, but I am confident in saying that I have achieved what I set out to do in a very limited capacity. Insightful, wrongheaded, or both, I wanted to frame comics in the context of art and I did. I wanted to persuade others to think the same way I do and I’m not sure if I’ve done that or not.

My last words before leaving Action – Mystery – Adventure behind are these: 1. If you have never opened a comic book in your life and have never taken comics seriously, I hope you are now intrigued enough to give the medium a fair shake. 2. If you have spent enough of your time reading bad comics that it has grown into a part of your lifestyle, I hope you will consider expanding your palate with something a little more tasteful. 3. If you are already initiated into the world populated by Eisners, Moores, Spiegelmans, Crumbs, and the like, I hope you didn’t find this essay too embarrassing. Haphazard though it may be, the sentiments it contains are one hundred percent sincere.

To change course a bit, my next project for this blog will concern cinematic adaptations of comics. More specifically, I will take on one long-running (and sometimes dormant) film franchise and offer criticism of it, one blog entry per film, for a total of six entries. I will attempt to stick to a one-installment-per-week schedule, but again, I make no promises. And though it would hardly be any fun to give away the name of the property I have in mind before next week, those of my readers who are familiar with my tastes have likely guessed what it is already.

If I may be permitted a momentary digression: film is dying. It will survive after a fashion, contributing its genes to new media that will be both like and unlike film in many ways. The traditional movie going experience as we know it will be gone before too long, and filmmakers will be plying their talents in these new arenas. This is as foregone a conclusion as they come—film, the dominant mass medium of the 20th century, is now at the mercy of 21st century technology and democracy.

Where this leaves film criticism is anybody’s guess—will the critics turn their eyes to the increasingly elaborate and sophisticated videos posted by users on YouTube? Will audiovisual experiences that are both cinematic and interactive (several modern video games spring to mind) necessitate a broadening of the definition of art? I don’t know. Suffice it to say that, as it stands now, film criticism is withering. It is now less analytical and less mindful of film as art. With movies being thought of more and more as commodities, film criticism has evolved into consumer reports for the movies. The critic has gone from critiquing to reviewing, from providing cultural context to assigning numerical ratings in an attempt to quantify the entertainment value of a movie. Again, nothing gold can stay, and film criticism has tarnished perhaps even more than film itself.

By indulging in film criticism at this point, I am surely boarding a slowly sinking ship… but I can’t help myself. As a former film student and a current writing student, it seems to be mandated by kismet, and the comic book theme of the project seals the deal.

A word of warning: by film criticism, I do not mean film review. I won’t be writing articles on movies with the intention of merely advertising their quality or lack of, and I don’t want them to be taken as such. I intend to evaluate them in depth and detail. There may and probably will be spoilers throughout the series, so the articles may be of more interest after you’ve seen the respective films that they’re about. More journalistic film reviews that do not give things away are widely available elsewhere on the Internet. Suffice it to say that I think each of these films is worth seeing for one reason or another, or I probably would not be writing about them.* One may be a can’t-miss classic and another might be unintentional comedy worthy of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment, but all of them have a place on my DVD shelf.

(*Please do not hold me to this statement. It will likely not hold up under rigorous scrutiny, but it is at least true in this case. Perhaps I’ll think it through a bit further when I have more time.)

Questions? Comments? Concerns? Use the comment feature, or visit the discussion thread.

Due to job pressure and college finals, there will be no entry for I Evolved Into This?! this week. To anyone who was looking forward to my next rambling screed, I apologize, but I assure you that I do have something new in the pipeline. More information on that next week, plus a reflection on Action - Mystery - Adventure and a brief word about the current state of film criticism (!). Stay tuned.

We are operating under the assumption that medium alone is not useful in distinguishing between art and non-art. We have also devised working definitions for art and comics, which accommodate one another. Armed with those definitions, we have taken a look at a few points in our vast history that led the way to comics as we know it today. The problem that concerns us now, and which drives this entire writing, is that comics is something that many people still refuse to accept as artistically legitimate. We may be close to revealing the roots of that problem, but we are still just short of a good answer. If a rational case can be made in advocacy of the medium, then just why is it that misconceptions about it persist?

When art left the hands of the elite and fell into the arms of the masses, it became accessible to everyone. Indubitably, this had its positive effects, but there is (as with everything) a tradeoff. Elitism brings with it elitist standards, and the lack of elitism necessarily means a lack of those standards. Without the watchdog of elitism to keep it on the straight and narrow, art wandered from its path. Art still exists in popular media, surely, but it is buried amidst the trash. The current triumph of democracy over elitism is illustrative of the bittersweet taste of victory.

The last relevant vestige of the elite in our era of mass media is the oft-lamented critic. The rise of intelligent film criticism helped spur movies along during their apotheosis in the 1960s and 70s. Critics set the artistic standards, and lent legitimacy to the good films of the day. Film was able to flower in the balance between the demands of the public and the tastes of the elite. It is therefore telling that comics, the other principal artistic medium of the 20th century, was never subjected to such criticism. Movies were more technologically innovative, more glamorous, more visible. Comics featured crude hand-drawn figures, and took up resident on the newsstand rather than under the lights of the nickelodeon. Those who made movies were stars; those who made comics were often Jews who were shut out of the advertising and graphic design business. It was inevitable that the elite would embrace film, the medium that gained the larger share of the public’s attention, and leave comics to rot on the vine.

So it is revealed to us: neglect at the hands of the critic, the modern elite, is the culprit with the lion’s share of the responsibility. Bereft of the legitimacy granted by learned criticism, comics remained a ghetto medium in the 20th century, and without certain principles for it to satisfy, lowbrow entertainment came to typify its content. Our question all along has been, “Why don’t the people view comics with the same enthusiasm and respect as other media?” Now we have a new question: “How can we blame them?” We can prove that comics have artistic potential all we want, but it is to no avail if comics appears outwardly to be built entirely on trash. Indeed, with the dearth of criticism, one might expect that comics would be devoid of artistic content entirely, but this is miraculously not so.

In the absence of the critic, it fell to the artists and the readers to define critical standards for themselves. The readers rarely complained (not in the way that matters; from the 10 cents paid by children during the Depression to the three dollars paid by nerds of varying ages now, trash comics found ready support). Some artists were content to allow the medium to languish, seeing their trade as more craft than art, but others continually pushed the envelope in an effort to reveal comics for its true artistic potential. Who are they, and what works of theirs can provide evidence for the artistic side of comics?

It would be an absurd task to devise a canon of literary comics in the rapidly waning length of this essay, so I will instead attempt to single out one important work that serves as a supportive example. The method is simple: first, I’ll select the one artist whose influence, more so than any other artist’s, is so great that it fundamentally shaped the language of the medium as we know it. The artist I have selected is Will Eisner, whose dogged belief in the artistic potential of comics predated the invention of the superhero. It was Eisner, before anyone else, who strove for a higher quality standard of comics, and whose consistently experimental storytelling wrote much of the visual vocabulary.

Next, I will select the work of his that stands above the rest in its significance to the history of the medium. Here, the task grows a bit dicier. Eisner’s early work on the crime serial The Spirit featured wildly inventive and varied storytelling, ranging from hard-boiled drama to humor and humanism. Many of the tricks up his sleeve were devised during the post-World War II days of the series, which was featured in newspapers in a comics section titled “Action – Mystery – Adventure.” There is some difficulty in singling out The Spirit as a definitive work, as its considerable length is not easily read as a unified whole. The series is more remembered for its best moments than for the entirety of its content. Eisner’s use of ghost artists also presents a problem—though the invention is entirely his, the work as a whole is not.

A Contract With God, the 1978 graphic novel that heralded Eisner’s return to comics storytelling, does not showcase the same mania for invention, but features a mature unification of the stylistic elements that he developed during his time on The Spirit. Furthermore, it is a collection of discrete short stories, joined by the common thread of urban Jewish life in the 1930s. Though The Spirit often showcased humanistic stories, they were necessarily told within the rather loose crime story conventions mandated by Eisner’s publishers. A Contract With God was hampered by no such restrictions; it was a high profile comic book that unabashedly featured simple, personal dramas, without utilizing the action tropes that are typically included to justify the existence of a comic. In this respect, it is one of his first pure works.

Without Eisner’s guiding influence, comics as we know it today would not exist, and his defining artistic work is A Contract With God. Which of Eisner’s projects is his best is arguable, but it is difficult to deny the impact of this particular collection of stories. Any serious debate regarding comics as art cannot properly be conducted without discussing it, and most such debates would not be wrong for starting with it and branching out from there. For anybody who has read this essay all the way through to the end (and I applaud you for your immense efforts), reading A Contract With God should erase the last of your lingering doubts. Its simple, stylized drawings and dialogue belie a deep understanding of the downtrodden man, and its stories are ably portrayed in the way that only comics can do.

Questions? Comments? Concerns? Use the comment feature, or visit the discussion thread.

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It is a common supposition that comics is a medium for children and geeks; an exclusive storytelling playground for mutants with exaggerated muscles and a spandex fetish. As is often the case with assumptions, a small kernel of truth has been overstated into a large misconception. Yes, the presence of a superhero is often the imprimatur for a mainstream comic. Yes, if you walk into a comic book store, chances are good that you’ll see Captain America on the wall rather than Sydney Carton. However, this is no validation of the perception of comics as childish and shallow, and the roots of these assumptions must be discovered so that they may be debunked.

Though it would not be recognizable as such by the commonly accepted standards of today, comics—as delineated by McCloud and Eisner—has existed for as long as recorded history. Indeed, some of our history IS recorded as comics. From sequential funerary scenes painted on the walls of ancient Egyptian tombs to the Bayeux Tapestry’s depiction of the 1066 Norman invasion of England, countless archaic illustrations fit snugly within our working definition of comics—and, for that matter, our patchwork definition of art. However, this merely provides us with some of the ancestry of contemporary comics. It fails to answer our question as to why the medium is generally not accepted as artistic nowadays.

The introduction of print technology and its subsequent incorporation into art brought about a major catalyst for change. William Hogarth (1697-1764) was one of the first prominent artists to unite sequential art with printmaking, producing painted comics (again, in the historical sense of the word) such as A Harlot’s Progress, A Rake’s Progress, and Marriage A-la-Mode. These works were then converted to engravings, printed, and disseminated. Though such distribution of artwork is utterly commonplace today, the publication of copies of Hogarth’s comics was part of a larger gradual shift in the way art was produced and consumed. It was the time of reproducible artwork, the primary guidepost in art’s journey from behind the velvet rope of the elite out to the streets of the public.

This is true not only of comics, but also of music (popular music burgeoned with the invention of recording technology) literature (consider the historical effects of Gutenberg’s printing press, or the introduction of cheap newsprint), and other media. The technology of reproduction served to democratize art—meaning that the opinions of the people on the street became the measuring stick that validated the work, while the blessing of the learned experts declined in value. What once was art was evolving into mass entertainment, making it necessary to please an increasingly large audience, but there was also newfound freedom from the steep critical standards of the establishment. In the hands of the many, it was entirely logical that comics would metamorphose from the likes of Hogarth’s engravings to the more mainstream material that eventually came to typify the medium.

The first artist to demonstrate comics as it is now thought of was Rodolphe Topffer (1799-1846), whose “picture stories” contained many key hallmarks of the medium today. His hand-drawn illustrations, done in pencil, were compartmentalized by panel borders and accompanied by text, either written in word balloons or at the bottom of each panel. Perhaps most importantly, Topffer’s work was featured in newspapers and magazines, which were themselves becoming increasingly popularized. In the advent of the 19th century Industrial Revolution, low-cost printing technology was spreading and literacy was following suit. While it was described at the time as “cartoons” rather than “comics,” the common traits between Topffer’s work and the comics medium of today are unmistakable. Perhaps his utmost contribution to the culture of comics is his story, Histoire de M. Vieux Bois, which was published as a supplemental insert in New York newspapers as The Adventures of Mr. Obadiah Oldbuck in 1842. It is not difficult to trace a relatively straight path between Topffer and the emergence of comics as a mass medium in the 20th century—Mr. Obadiah Oldbuck was arguably the first comic book published in America, and Action Comics #1 would reach newsstands less than 100 years later.

While Topffer was respected for his paintings, his hand-drawn stories were intended by him strictly for amusement, so his work is as good a demarcation as any between the historical era of comics and the modern era. Along with solidifying the conventions of the medium as we know it, Topffer’s attitude towards his own work also planted a seed for the prejudice that plagues comics. The blame, however, cannot be placed squarely on his shoulders. A large share of the responsibility lies elsewhere.

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