Time Essay: THE COMICS ON THE COUCH

HE was someone you could always count on, the savior of the helpless and oppressed, society’s sword against the forces of evil and injustice. He could, among other things, “hurdle skyscrapers, leap an eighth of a mile, run faster than a streamline train—and nothing less than a bursting shell could penetrate his skin.” He was, in short, a good buy for a dime. Even by today’s hyped-up standards, Superman was quite a guy.

Yes, was. The man of steel that many Americans grew up with is not what he used to be. For one thing, his alter ego, Clark Kent, has given up the Daily Planet to become a newscaster for the Galaxy Broadcasting System, getting in and out of blue tights and red cape during commercial breaks. (“Personally, I still prefer Walter Cronkite,” a mini-skirted Lois tells him. She, at least, is unchanged—as obnoxious as ever.) For another, Superman has succumbed to urban jitters; he obviously needs to spend some time on the couch. Just listen to some of his recent complaints: “I’m finished being anybody’s Superman! . . . For years I’ve been dreaming of working and living as a plain man—without the responsibilities, the loneliness of Superman . . . I’ve a right to bitterness. No man has a better right. I’ve denied myself the comforts of home and family to continue helping these ingrates. I thought they admired me—for myself! I’ve lived in a fool’s paradise!”

Superhang-ups for a superhero, but Superman is not the only hero hanging his cape outside Dr. Feelgood’s door. Today almost all comicbook characters have problems. As in many fields, the word is relevance. The trend may have begun a decade ago, but in the socially aware ’70s it has reached full blossom. The comics’ caped crusaders have become as outraged about racial injustice as the congressional Black Caucus and as worried about pollution as the Sierra Club. Archfiends with memorable names like the Hulk and Dr. Doom are still around, but they are often pushed off the page by such new villains as air pollution and social injustice. Sometimes, indeed, the comics read like a New York Times Illustrated.

Recently the comics have discovered yet another field—a mixture of science fiction and the occult that lies somewhere beyond Consciousness III. In a comic book called The New Gods, for example, the forces of the good, the beautiful, under-30s, battle the forces of evil, the ugly militarists of Apokolips, in weird sequences that look and read like nightmares. Whatever they are doing, American comics, both the books and the strips, are full of life. In their 75th year, they are bursting—WUMP, BOMP, OOF! and ZAP!—from the page in a dozen new directions.

-Along with responsibility has come respectability. One of the newest things about the new comics is that more than ever before they are being taken seriously as an art form by critics and as an authentic cultural expression by sociologists. Half a dozen or so learned histories have been written about them, and art galleries give them serious exhibitions. The comics have been included in courses at Brown University, and the creators of the new styles, particularly Marvel Comics’ Stan Lee, who invented the idiom, are mobbed like rock stars on the campuses. So popular is Lee, in fact, that he will give a kind of sound and light show at Carnegie Hall next month.

Not all of the comics are trying to be with it, of course. Blondie, a strip that is syndicated in 1,164 newspapers and is one of the most widely read series in the world, still exists in a timeless never-never land of middle-class cliches where only Daisy the dog seems to have a spark of intel ligence. Despite wrist TVs and spaceships, Dick Tracy continues to chase odd-looking crooks like Retsen Nester, a bald-domed, bespectacled type who hides heroin in volumes of Mother Goose. In the same old way, Little Orphan Annie and Sandy still fight the Red Menace and bleeding-heart liberals, and will probably continue to do so well into the 21st century. In a recent episode Annie was trying to find a poor but honest person who needed only Daddy Warbucks’ “survival kit,” $11,000, to make good. Daddy, a billionaire, is convinced that the “good old-fashioned pioneer spirit that made this country great is not dead” but “just kinda takin’ a nap.”

Many of the other oldtimers, however, have changed just about everything but their costumes. Evil, they are discovering, was much easier to spot when it had a funny name and wore an ugly mask. In a recent comic-book adventure, the Green Lantern collars a kid who has been beating up a fat man. But after being bombarded with garbage by the kid’s ghetto neighbors, the Emerald Crusader learns that the man he has saved is a corrupt slumlord who is about to tear down the block for a parking lot. “I been readin’ about you,” says an old black who is soon to be evicted. “How you work for the blue skins and how on a planet someplace you helped out the orange skins, and you done considerable for the purple skins. Only there’s skins you never bothered with—the black skins! I want to know: How come?

Answer me that, Mr. Green Lantern!”

Now it’s no good just to zap a few uglies either, as of yore. The Green Lantern and his superhero colleagues are constantly being reminded these days that the funny fiends are just front men for some very unfunny social ills. The Green Lantern and his chum, the Green Arrow, are lectured by a youthful victim: “Drugs are a symptom, and you, like the rest of society, attack the symptom, not the disease.” Another big change has been the introduction of black characters, who now appear in such strips as Peanuts, Archie, Li’I Abner and Beetle Bailey; Friday Foster, a swinging soul sister from Harlem, has a strip all her own. Until a few years ago, the color barrier blocked all but a few Negro caricatures from the comics.

When it comes to politics, Li’I Abner and Pogo, which have satirized it for years, are at least as up to date as the men in Washington. Two characters that bear a remarkable resemblance to Senators Hubert Humphrey and Hugh Scott were recently dispatched to Li’l Abner’s Dogpatch to learn why it is the one pollution-free spot in the U.S. Reason: the Gobbleglops, which look like pigs with bunny tails, gobble up, in the words of Mammy Yokum, “all glop, irregardless . . . They’s natcheral-born incinerators. Thass why glop goes in ’em an’ none comes out!!” Pogo has been invaded in recent months by an odd beast, half Great Dane and half hyena, that looks and alliterates like Spiro T. Agnew, by a bulldog that might be taken for J. Edgar Hoover, and by a pipe-smoking, improbable baby eagle that might fool even Martha Mitchell into thinking she had seen John. This trio of animal crackers spends most of its time trying to decipher messages from an unseen chief who chooses to communicate by means of undecipherable paper dolls. “Dashing deep-digging thought dominates his delectable display,” asserts the Spiroesque Great Dane-hyena, who wears the uniform—or half the uniform—of a Greek colonel.

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While the political spectrum of the regular comic strips ranges from the moderately liberal (Pogo) to the arch-conservative (Little Orphan Annie), a relatively new phenomenon, underground comics, is pursuing radical political and sexual themes that their aboveground brothers would never dare to touch. Begun in the mid-’60s, the undergrounds, or head comic books, such as Zap and Despair and strips in papers like the Berkeley Barb and Manhattan’s East Village Other, speak for the counterculture in a zany, raunchy and often obscene idiom. In one issue of the East Village Other, a strip depicts an Army company in Viet Nam. The sergeant’s command “Present arms!” literally brings out the arms of the men in his company, heroin addicts all. Later, when all of the men are dead of overdoses —including the sergeant, whose name is, of course, Smack—it turns out that the CIA is the ultimate pusher.

“Put it this way,” says the agency’s spook in charge, “we consider this something of an investment.”

Like the movies, comics are in many ways a now art form.

Perhaps because they grew up together, they have certain styles and techniques in common. Cinematic techniques like montage, the dissolve of one scene into another, appeared in the comics well before they were seen on the screen or perfected by Eisenstein. At the same time, the movies were ahead of the comics in developing the continuing adventure serial. Any influence that one form may have had on the other should not be exaggerated. Some directors insist, however, that there was a certain amount of give and take. “There was a connection between Happy Hooligan and Chaplin,” says Italian

Director Federico Fellini, “and there were aspects of Popeye and Wimpy in Buster Keaton.” Fellini, who began his career in the ’30s as a writer of adventure and science-fiction comics, has been an appassionato of the fumetti,*Italy’s comic books, ever since he was a ragazzino, and admits that the comics probably gave something to his own moviemaking. Says he: “A sense of the comic and the humorous in my films, wonder, and a feeling for the fantastic—maybe these came from the comics I read as a little boy.”

With a few exceptions—Wonder Woman was into Women’s Lib 20 years before Betty Friedan—the comics have always appealed to men more than women, to little boys more than little girls. One reason is the inevitable boy companion that the ten-year-old could identify with—Batman’s Boy Wonder Robin, the Sandman’s Sandy, the Shield’s Rusty, to name only a few. Even when the ten-year-old identified too closely with that clever brat on paper as a rival, it was good for sales. Cartoonist Jules Feiffer, who has lately turned to writing for the theater and the movies (Carnal Knowledge), was both repelled and drawn to the Boy Wonder. “One need only look at him,” Feiffer writes, “to see he could fight better, swing from a rope better, play ball better, eat better, and live better. For while I lived in the East Bronx, Robin lived in a mansion, and while I was trying somehow to please my mother—and getting it all wrong—Robin was rescuing Batman and getting the gold medals. You can imagine how pleased I was when, years later, I heard he was a fag.”

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Feiffer’s was a love-hate relationship that the comic books lost for a while in the ’50s and early ’60s, when sales dropped and the industry appeared headed for extinction. In a world where almost anything was possible and usually visible on a 21-in. screen, outracing a locomotive or buzzing around like an ugly bug in drag seemed somehow tame and tedious. Young readers today, the comic men soon discovered, are more interested in their own problems and the problems they see around them. It is possible, indeed, to see the comics as an art of the people, offering clues to the national unconscious. Superman’s enormous popularity might be looked upon as signaling the beginning of the end for the Horatio Alger myth of the self-made man. In the modern world, he seems to say, only the man with superpowers can survive and prosper. Still, though comics are indeed a popular art form, it is going a bit far to compare, as Critic Maurice Horn does, Gasoline Alley to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister and Little Orphan Annie to the works of Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo. As Mammy Yokum might say: “Some folks don’t know when to stop.”

Walt Kelly, still one of the best cartoonists, is a more solid expert on the genre. “A comic strip is like a dream,” Turtle tells Bear in Pogo. “A tissue of paper reveries. It gloms an’ glimmers its way thru unreality, fancy an’ fantasy.” To which Bear naturally responds: “Sho’ ’nuff?” Sho’ ’nuff. · Gerald Clarke

-Literally “little smokes,” a reference to the word balloons that show what the characters are saying.