Japanese Cyborgs and Cuban Revolutionaries: On the Trail of Tobor the 8th Man, part 1

Japanese Cyborgs and Cuban Revolutionaries: 

On the Trail of Tobor the 8^th Man

 

By A.P. Shepherd

 It was 1996 when I picked up the cold, 30 year-old trail left by 8^th Man and the creators who brought him to newsstands and television screens in both hemispheres. With a mountain of bad information in every animation reference book on the market and precious few leads, I began an investigation that led me from the pressure-cooker animation studios of 1960s Japan, to the corporate boardrooms of Gotham, through the boomtown atmosphere of pre-Castro Havana, past rumors of mafia connections and CIA operatives, skittering at the periphery of the JFK assassination and the subsequent Warren Commission investigation, to arrive at a little-known Florida production outfit populated with talented filmmakers, some of whom doubled as gun-packin’ guerilla fighters. With persistence, a little obsession and assistance by friends met along with way, here are the origins of 8^th Man.

 

In 1963, Japanese animation made its debut on U.S. television with Astro Boy [鉄腕アトム] (i.e. Tetsuwan Atomu), courtesy of NBC Films. As a result, Japan’s fledgling television animation industry suddenly found itself being courted by foreign network producers and entrepreneurs alike in a competitive scramble to secure suitable titles for broadcast and theatrical releases in the U.S. and elsewhere. 

By the mid-1960s, the largest of Tokyo’s television animation outfits, Mushi Productions [虫プロダクションホームページへ], Tatsunoko Production Co. [タツノコプロダクション], Nippon Animation [日本アニメーション], Toei Animation [東映アニメーション株式会社] and TCJ [日本テレビジョン株式会社] had been working feverishly to supply Japan’s television networks with animated product in the wake of Mushi Production’s extraordinary success with theTetsuwan Atomu series, and a number of promising titles already “in the can” were being eyed for export, including Eito Man [エイトマン] (i.e. 8-Man), which would eventually become known to U.S. television audiences as 8^th Man.

8-Man was created originally in comic book form by the artist-writer partnership of Jirô Kuwata [桑田二郎] and Kazumasa Hirai [ 平井和正], and follows the adventures of a crime-fighting cyborg, whose being is comprised of the soul and transplanted memories of mortally-wounded police detective Hachirô Azuma [東八郎] and a bionic body designed and manufactured by the brilliant Dr. Houi Tani [谷方位博士], an expatriate scientist working in an American military laboratory. As a result of Tani’s scientific breakthrough, the former Detective Azuma is enabled to continue his existence in artificial human guise with the ability to transform at will into the crime-battling bot, 8-Man.

By day, the resurrected Azuma, whose first name ‘Hachirô’ cleverly contains the Japanese ideograph for ‘8’, operates a private detective agency with the aid of Sachiko Seki [関サチ子], his secretary (whom he rescued from gangsters as 8-Man), and her younger brother, the feisty Ichirô Higaki [桧垣一郎]. As a gumshoe, he closely monitors the city’s criminal elements, and when Police Chief Tanaka calls or the need arises, Azuma morphs into 8-Man and springs into action to battle an assortment of goons and megalomaniacs. 

Initially, 8-Man began as an editorial decision taken in the offices of Shônen Magajin [少年マガジン] (i.e. Boys Magazine), a popular, weekly publication in Japan that contains an assortment of serialized comics for boys. The purpose of the decision was to capitalize on the current manga and animation crazes that were sweeping Japan, ignited by the wild popularity of Mushi’s Atomu series and Mitsuteru Yokoyama’s [横山 光輝] Tetsujin-28 go [鉄人２８号] manga.

In order to continue mining this rich vein, Shônen’s editors concluded they needed their own robot story that could first be serialized as manga in their publication and later produced as an animated series (anime) for television, just as Tetsuwan Atomu had been.

Despite the corporate boardroom origins of this ‘artistic’ endeavor, there was an honest desire to offer the magazine’s readership something more mature and compelling than simply another “boy and his robot” story. It was important that the protagonist be something new and innovative, and one that would potentially appeal to a broad audience. With this rough vision in mind, the magazine editors began holding covert auditions for writers and artists who would create this cash cow.

Industry scribes were asked to submit writing samples for consideration without knowing the exact nature of the potential job. One of the candidates was up-and-coming science-fiction writer Kazumasa Hirai, who had started his career as an author in 1961 by winning a short story contest held by SF Magajin [SF テレビアニメ] (i.e. SF Magazine).

In addition to being a writer, Hirai was an animation enthusiast and a former employee of the Tokyo-based company, Japan Merchandising. This tipped the scales in his favor and he was given the job of penning the new manga, which would prove to be Hirai’s big industry break.

Although the magazine would also consider a number of artists for the job, favor was quickly bestowed upon the hands of rising manga star Jirô Kuwata who had illustrated the popular Gekkô-Kamen [月光仮面] (i.e. Moonlight Mask) manga in prior years. Kuwata got his start as a comic book illustrator at age 13 and was immediately heralded as a genius; a manga artist with unlimited potential. Furthermore, he was already accustomed to the grueling deadlines of a weekly publication.

With both a writer and an artist assigned to the project, the overarching storyline could now be plotted and the details fleshed-out. Kuwata and Hirai labored over their protagonist, narrowing their options and eventually focusing upon the idea of a cyborg: a partially mechanized superhero based upon the Superman archetype that fought crime and put its perpetrators away, sometimes for good; a robot police officer; a robo-cop.

As clever as the Japanese creative team were, the notion of a crime-fighting robot is older. In fact, just such a character was introduced as early as 1942 with Superman writer Jerry Siegel’s Robotman in Star Spangled Comics #7, which recounts the story of two scientists who fashion a robot body into which a living brain can be transplanted when the owner’s life cannot be saved.

According to Don Markstein's synopsis of the series, burglars break-in to the laboratory in a thwarted attempt to steal the invention, fatally wounding one of the scientists. The deceased doctor’s brain is then transferred into the robot by his surviving colleague. Robotman goes on to captures his own killers, fashion a secret human identity, maintain a love interest, all while launching himself on a one-man crusade against crime.

Robotman continued to appear in issues of Star Spangled Comics until 1948 after which the title was acquired by DC Comics and published until 1953. Some of artist Leo Nowak’s pencilings of Robotman in action are very similar to how 8-Man would be drawn some 20 years later.

Whether or not the 1960s Japanese creative team at Shônen were aware of this obscure American comic book character from the 1940s is unknown. It’s certainly possible even in a pre-internet world. It may also be as with other inventions and creations, the idea was arrived at independently and any similarities are just coincidences.

During the design phase of the character, Kuwata and the magazine’s editors employed a low-cost, focus group technique by showing several variations of the cyborg to classes of elementary school children and asking for their input. The children were encouraged to tell the Shônen reps what they liked and didn’t like about the prototypes they were shown, and were further encouraged to suggest the addition, removal, and exchange of design elements between the versions until a composite satisfied them.

Although Hirai did the bulk of the writing, others at the magazine pitched in their ideas as well. Future 8-Man scriptwriter Ichirô Kanô [ 加納一朗], who already worked at Shônen Magazine, advanced the idea that the lead character should be a detective and that he should be the eighth man on the squad. The remaining details of who exactly contributed what are unclear. What is evident, however, from these creative sessions is that the story and characters that emerged were clearly designed to appeal to a broad demographic, differentiating 8-Man from its predecessors which were largely aimed at children.

The first installment of the manga sets the saga in motion: during the shootout and arrest of a violent criminals, Detective Azuma is killed. Fortunately, Dr. Tani arrives at the scene and whisks away Azuma’s body to his laboratory. There he successfully transplants the ‘essence’ of the former policeman into a cyborg body, the eighth such creation in a line of similar experiments by the good doctor.

 

Sidebar: Dr. Tani, having perfected his cyborg technology under the auspices of the Republic of Armaco [a thinly veiled reference to America] years earlier, is now determined to keep it from clutches of Yankee warmongers and other unsavory characters. In Japan, he knows he can carry on his life’s work, free from the fear that it will be appropriated by a government for evil purposes.

Here perhaps the writers of 8-Man should be forgiven these biases, many having grown-up in the aftermath of WWII and Japan’s humbling defeat. Even by 1963 there lingered feelings of resentment towards the U.S.; its foreign occupation of Japan, after WWII, a constant, humiliating reminder of the country’s loss. Compounding the situation was the fact that Japan’s citizenry had been kept ignorant about its country’s role in the war, which was often characterized by murderous aggression and brutality. Consequently, this confusing mix of perceived victimization and xenophobia occasionally surfaces in Japanese film and television work, including the first episodes of Tetsujin-28 go and some of the Godzilla [ゴジラ] films.

 

Hachirô Azuma resumes his life, now as a private detective, and as 8-Man thwarts criminality and ensures that justice prevails. Only Dr. Tani and Section Chief Tanaka [田中課長] know that 8-Man and Azuma are one. The love interest is a marginal plot element, embodied by the long-suffering secretary, Sachiko, whose feelings for Hachirô remain unrequited. 

Each installment of the 8-Man serial ran on average 16 pages of black and white panel art, and contained enough violence, futurism and pop-culture coolness to satisfy even the most jaded college student.

The final result of Kuwata and Hirai’s collaboration, 8-Man, began its printed serialized run on May 12, 1963 in Shônen Magazine, garnering the widespread appeal they had hoped for. As a result of its popularity, two months after the 8-Man serial had hit newsstands, its creators were approached by TBS [株式会社東京放送], one of Japan’s major television networks, to create an anime based upon their successful manga. This was just what the Shônen editors had hoped.

8-Man’s creators had been successful infusing both its characters and plots with myriad pop culture references that ranged from the science-fantasy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to the comic strip noir of Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy. With large dollops of Superman and James Bond stirred in as well, TBS felt that 8-Man was ripe for development as a cutting-edge animated series. This would be TBS’s first foray into televised cartoons.

Sidebar: To underscore 8-Man’s adult appeal, the producers retained the original manga scenes of 8-Man puffing on cigarette-like “power boosters” given to him by Dr. Tani to replenish his energy. Even when the series was later adapted for distribution in the U.S., the normally puritanical American censors did not seem to object to scenes of a comic book superhero smoking cigarettes on a cartoon program. This was the prevailing wisdom of the era. Besides, cigarette spots on television wouldn’t be banned in the U.S. until the early 1970s. Some of the more famous examples of promoting vices using popular cartoons characters are Hanna-Barbera’s Flintstones cigarette spot that depicts Fred, Barney and Wilma puffing Winston Cigarettes and enjoying their rich, tobacco flavor and UPA’s Mr. Magoo who served as the pitchman for Stag Beer.

Because of the limited number of Japanese households that had television sets in the early 1960s, each network attempted to mitigate any possible failure of its ‘children’s’ programming by producing only titles that had gained a measure of popularity first in printed form, giving any new animated series a built-in audience. This practice continues today in Japan: first a successful manga then the anime.

TCJ, which was founded in 1952 and began its life selling television sets before moving into commercial film production, was engaged to create the animation under senior TBS television producer Toshimichi Miwa [三輪俊道]. Television animation was relatively new territory for all parties involved, especially for Miwa, who had had no such prior experience. To add to the nervousness of the network heads, TCJ’s animation shop was inadequately staffed and deluged with work as it also prepared simultaneously the Tetsujin-28 go series for broadcast.

To bring 8-Man to the small screen, TCJ assembled a team comprised of young, eager scenario writers including Ryô Hanmura [半村 良], Aritsune Toyota [豊田有恒] and Tsuji Masaki [辻 真先] (alias Masaki Katsura [桂真佐喜], both of whom were scouted from Mushi Productions, Tetsuagi Onuki [大貫哲義] and the aforementioned Ichirô Kanô, TCJ Production Coordinator Masayasu Sagisu [鷺巣政安], TCJ Composition Director Haruyuki Kawashima [ 河島治之], TCJ Technical Director Haruhide Sasaki, TCJ Chief Animation Director Kiyoshi Ônishi [大西清] and First Group Animator Setsuo Monai [毛内節夫]. The Tokyo Broadcasting Effects Group, an ensemble of Foley Artists, was also brought in to handle the myriad gunshots, laser blasts, screeching tires and other sound effects. Auditions for actors to supply the character voices were held and won: the part of Azuma/8-Man went to Sakae Takayama [高山栄]; the role of Sachiko, Azuma’s secretary, was landed by Miyuki Ueda [上田みゆき], the job of voicing the venerable Dr. Tani was given to Takayuki Hara [原孝之]; Shirô Amakusa [天草四郎] won the part of the short-tempered, often befuddled Chief Tanaka; and in true Hollywood cartoon fashion, the role of the adolescent male Ichirô, was given to actress Kazue Tagami [田上和枝].

 

The TCJ staff made considerable efforts to retain the appearance and mood of the original manga, and a suitable opening theme song needed to be composed. It was decided that anything sounding too ‘Japanese’ would be incompatible with the visuals and tone of the story and thus inappropriate. A fighting march was finally agreed upon and tasked to composer Tessho Hagiwara [萩原哲明] and lyricist Takehiko Maeda [ 前田武彦] to write. Pop singer Shigeru Katsumi [克美しげる] was hired to sing the lead on the recording, which would later be released on a record album, known as a sonodisc.

While the production of the anime progressed, Kuwata and Hirai continued to meet their weekly 8-Man deadlines for Shônen Magazine. Kuwata had also been given a second title, Kingu Robo [ キングロボ] (i.e. King Robot), to illustrate, simultaneously. To complicate matters further, Hirai was brought aboard the TCJ production of the 8-Man anime series as head writer and charged with proofing and editing all scripts and script ideas submitted by the writing staff, while being forced to maintain the deadlines for the 8-Man manga.

The sweatshop hours were brutal. Kuwata, in particular, complained about getting only two hours sleep a night. The continual pressure to deliver two popular manga to press on a weekly basis and the perpetual state of sleep deprivation would push the overworked artist to the breaking point.

The TCJ production supervisors planned for 56 monochrome episodes of the anime but soon found itself in a quandary. Not only was the company’s animation staff spread thin, its members, the majority of whom were illustrators and art students, had little or no animation experience at all. When it came time to review the test footage for the first episode, the producers were horrified at the abysmal quality of the animation. Consequently, at least 30% of the animation had to be redrawn and re-shot. Unfortunately, due to the tight production schedule,  there  wasn’t  time  enough  to address everything that was wrong and some of this uneven work ended up in the final cut, much to the embarrassment of the TCJ staff.

For the second episode, the producer and directors adopted a different strategy that appeared to be somewhat successful. Rather than assign an animator to a scene, an animator was now assigned to a character, a method pioneered by the early Disney animators. By the production of fifth episode, an improvement in continuity and overall quality was evident. However, the fact remained that the animators were still novices and some of the animation remained awkward. Attempts were made to hide this crudeness with heavy shading effects. Eventually, more experienced animators were hired and individual production teams were organized and became responsible for various tasks, resulting in a much smoother production. Nevertheless, Hirai was elated when the production of the anime finally ended as he had become increasingly disillusioned with the results.

At the same time that 8-Man was being animated, the production of the Tetsujin-28 go anime was also under way at TCJ and suffering a similar fate at the hands of the inexperienced animators, resulting in the first 25 episodes of the series being labeled as unfit for export.

8-Man premiered on Thursday, November 7, 1963 at 6:00 PM on TBS sponsored by the Marumiya Food Company [丸美屋食品工業]. The first episode, “The Appearance of 8-Man” [エイトマン登場] devastated the competition in that time slot, and for more than a year afterward, 8-Man continued to thrill and entertain viewers every Thursday evening from 6:00 to 6:30 PM, reaching an audience share peak of 35.3%. The first broadcast run of the series ended December 24, 1964 after which it was moved to Sundays and continued to fare well in the ratings. With its appeal at an all-time high in Japan, 8-Man was now positioned for an entrance into foreign markets.

Anxious to enter the potentially lucrative ‘Japanimation’ fray, executive Henry ‘Hank’ Plitt at ABC Films, Inc., the network’s distribution arm for off-network programming since 1953, licensed the series from its Japanese creators through a Japanese liaison company, K Fujita Associates, Inc. [ケイ。フジタ アソシエイツ株式会社], and contracted for a pilot episode to be produced.

According to Astro Boy producer Fred Ladd, “Plitt saw what was happening with Astro Boy and Gigantor and viewed 8-Man as a way to get in on the action. So, Plitt handed over one of the 8-Man shows and asked for a pilot to be created.” Seasoned writer, actor and director Peter Fernandez was hired to write and direct the dub of the pilot, which according to Fernandez, “probably came [to me] through editors Pablo Zavala and Shelly Riss…” rather than Plitt, directly.

Fernandez went to work Anglicizing the names of the 8-Man characters. For the name of the resurrected cyborg in human form “…Peter came up with the name ‘Tobor’ which was ‘robot’ spelled backwards. Fernandez also recalls that the proper name of 8-Man needed to be modified slightly because “…it sounded too much like 8 Ball.” Since Fernandez had worked on the Astro Boy and Gigantor series for Fred Ladd, dubbing voices and ghost-writing episodes, the names of ‘Doctor Genius’ and ‘Chief Fumblethumbs’  were  presumably  easy  reaches from Gigantor’s ‘Bob Brilliant’ and ‘Inspector Blooper’. Human protagonist Hachirô Azuma was changed to Special Agent Brady, Sachiko became Jenny Heartsweet, Mr. Tobor’s secretary, and Ichirô was now known as Skip Pepper.

Sidebar: Many reference books and articles claim that the series’ protagonist (pre-8^th Man transformation) is ‘Peter Brady’. In fact, at no time in the series is he ever referred to as ‘Peter Brady’. He is merely referred as ‘Special Agent Brady’. It is unknown how this confusion first arose. It can be speculated, however, that a previous author conflated the names of the Special Agent Brady character from 8^th Man and the character of Peter Brady from the popular British series, The Invisible Man, which aired originally from 1958 to 1960, and chronicled the adventures of the invisibility-prone scientist. Whatever the reason for the confusion, this along with so many other non-facts about the series, has been perpetuated across multiple sources.

 

Fernandez turned to the familiar ensemble of actors used in previous dubs, including Billie Lou Watt, the voice of Astro Boy, her husband Hal Studer, Gilbert Mack and Cliff ‘Ray’ Owens. Owens was given the role of Tobor and the new audio was recorded at the Titra Studios (a.k.a. Titra Sound) located at 1600 Broadway in Manhattan. However, according to Ladd, had the remainder of the series been dubbed in New York, Owens would probably have been replaced by actor Jack Curtis who would later achieve recognition as the voice of ‘Pops’ in Speed Racer [マッハＧoＧoＧo] (i.e. Mahha gô gô). Ladd gave no specific reason or evidence to support this claim, and given his rather limited participation in the 8^th Man pilot production, it shouldn’t be given too much weight.

“The ABC group, led by Plitt, applauded the pilot!” exclaimed Ladd. “Their plan was to go to WPIX…” a non-affiliated television station in New York, owned by the Daily News, and sell Henry Booraem on the series.

Booraem was the new Vice President of Programming at WPIX and had bought Ladd’s Gigantor series based on the strength of Astro Boy. Booraem recalls, “…the animation of these cartoons was so crude, we were amazed that it didn’t seem to matter (to viewers). These programs were very successful for us.”

Based upon the pilot he was shown, Booraem committed to the purchase of the 8^th Man series for his station. With this initial sale, ABC Films could now move forward and dub the remaining episodes. However, Plitt suddenly decided that his company couldn’t afford to dub the series at Titra and began searching for a less costly alternative to tailor 52 of the original 56 episodes that had been licensed for U.S. syndication.

Eventually, Copri International Films, Inc. in Miami, Florida was tapped to script, edit, and dub the series for an English language release.Copri International Films was established in 1961 by Eugene “Gene” Prinz, a Cleveland-born entrepreneur who had dabbled in everything from wholesale cars in Ohio to building and land development in Cuba in the 1950s. He had become involved with dubbing films during his stay in Cuba, helping to adapt an anti-Communist propaganda film about the Hungarian Freedom Fighter movement and its battles against the red incursion, originally titled Rhapsody in Blood. During the work, he began to entertain notions of starting a similar film dubbing operation in the U.S.

The fall of Havana to communist rebel forces on January 1, 1959 prompted Prinz’s return to the U.S. In preparation for his new stateside venture, he assisted the studio’s key personnel in acquiring U.S. visas and they in turn helped to smuggle the studio’s equipment out of the country by plane and boat. Among the group of Cubans following Prinz were Rene Gutierrez known as “El Guajiro Luminoso” (i.e. “The Farmer Who Sheds Light”), a burly farmer and counter-revolutionary, Raul Corvison, a brilliant electronics technician who would become the head of Copri’s sound department, and Jose “Pepe” Diaz de Villegas, an artist and animator who would lead Copri’s animation department with Carlos Mestres, his right hand man.

Initially locating the new facilities near the beach in Miami, Florida, Prinz quickly found and purchased another building downtown that would house Copri’s operations for the next decade. Located at 984 West Flagler Street in a Cuban section of Miami’s business district, Copri quickly became one of the entertainment industry’s major production-post-production facilities.

As Copri’s bread and butter work was adapting product for Latin American distribution, the outfit employed a large number of expatriate Cuban artists, technicians and actors such as Luis Oquendo and Olswaldo Calvo, who dubbed Hollywood film and television libraries for the Spanish-speaking markets. “We did a jillion western series like The Rifleman,” recalled Prinz. “We also did some stuff for the CIA. They had a radio broadcasting facility on Swan Island, off the southern coast of Cuba, and we produced anti-communist programming for them.” Copri also produced daily programming for the Voice of America (a.k.a. VOA). “We did about two hours each day for them. We were also the in-house producers for Standard Oil (now Exxon) and Pan American Airways, contacts that we’d made in Cuba.” 

Sidebar: Several of the U.S.-born actors who were employed at Copri in the 1960s expressed opinions that there was something “shady” going on at Copri; that it was either a front for organized crime, the C.I.A., or both, given the number of shifty characters who visited the offices. They were right to be suspicious.  Kind of.

In the year that the 8^th Man series was being dubbed at Copri, the company’s owner Gene Prinz brought aboard a new partner in the person of Michael J. McLaney, known by everybody as “Mickey”. Mike McLaney, was commonly described as ruggedly handsome and gregarious. He was also a semi-professional tennis and golf player, whose mob ties seem to have been something of an open secret, and who was, like Prinz, an old Cuba Hand from the pre-Castro days.

He was also a seasoned casino boss. McLaney’s business holdings had included a share of the infamous Hotel Nacional de Cuba in Havana, where he and his brother, William, managed its casino, built by organized crime boss Meyer Lansky.

Just months prior to the JFK Assassination in 1963, there are indications that the McLaney brothers were mixed up with anti-Castro Cubans, who were training with assorted mercenaries, including mob associate and future Watergate burglar Frank Sturgis, near Lake Pontchartrain, Louisiana, on land owned by the McLaneys, for the overthrow and assassination of Fidel Castro. It is on July 31, 1963, at the nearby home of brother William McLaney, that F.B.I. agents find a large cache of explosives and military weapons during a raid.

Subsequently, both brothers’ names surface in the conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination of President John Kennedy in attempts to unravel the ties between the C.I.A., anti-Castro groups and the mafia.

 

In 1973, Mike McLaney was accused during a U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI) hearing of plotting to kill the first black Premier of the Bahamas, Lynden Pindling, after having had his Bahamian casino license application denied. Reportedly, McLaney and then partner Elliot Roosevelt, the son of former U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, were involved in all sorts of illegal mischief, and had donated a cool $60,000 and the use of a helicopter to Lynden and the PLP Party during the contentious 1966/67 general election campaign in return for some future, favorable treatment. What McLaney, in particular, got instead, after applying a little gentle pressure to have his casino license approved, was an unceremonious deportation from the Bahamas under armed guard. McLaney denied all allegations and charges. So did Roosevelt.

In 1969, McLaney was indicated in New York City on conspiracy, mail and wire fraud, and perjury charges. He moved to Haiti in 1970 just in time to escape a federal prison sentence for a conspiracy conviction. In Haiti, he lived and operated casinos under the protection of Haitian dictator Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier. He died in 1994 in Bal Harbor, Florida, where he maintained a residence and owned a hotel and restaurant. His son, Michael Junior, who also went by the nickname “Mickey”, was murdered four years later in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, according to his obituary. No additional details  were  uncovered  at  the  time  of  this  writing.

 

Former Copri partner, Gene Prinz, when interviewed for this article, declined to elaborate, stating only that McLaney was a great guy, whose connections and charm had helped Copri land a deal with Seven Arts for an ill-fated, animated satire that featured John and Robert Kennedy as frontier brats in a family heading west in wagons. The project was dropped for obvious reasons after JFK’s assassination in 1963.

 

When asked if he, himself, had any C.I.A. affiliations, Prinz is predictably silent.

Copri began adapting foreign film packages for U.S. distribution, of which Spanish and Italian westerns and German espionage films were a staple. “The packages of feature films were distributed by Seven Arts, Four Star, and Roberts & Barry. We even bought some films ourselves and dubbed them,” recalls Prinz. Consequently, when the wave of Japanese television cartoons and animated theatrical features began to break on U.S. shores in the early 1960s, Copri was already positioned and primed for the work, when approached by ABC Films in 1964 to adapt TCJ’s 8-Man for broadcast in America.

continued in part 2  

 

Editor's note: Some minor stylistic changes were made 11 hours after the original posting, but they do not affect the content of the article. Please use the updated version when citing the article.

Book Review - Filial Lines: Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel, and Comics Form

reviewed by Marie Dücker, Assistant Professor (University of Graz)

Emmy Waldman. Filial Lines: Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel, and Comics Form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (Cambridge Studies in Graphic Narratives), 2026. 260 pp. ISBN: 978-1-009-54883-0 (Hardback). https://www.cambridge.org/9781009548830

Filial Lines opens with two passages that, as Emmy Waldman writes, stayed with her throughout the writing of this book: the “scribble game” at the start of Art Spiegelman’s Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&!*, in which mother and son take turns making random marks for the other to transform into a recognizable picture; and the moment in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home in which Bechdel’s father hands her a funeral director’s wall calendar to write in, his own neat script already filling the first line. Both scenes, Waldman observes, make “lines on paper”—whether figurative or autobiographical—a relational rather than a solitary act. Both are also grimly shadowed by the suicide of the parent involved. This pairing of opening images is a canny and affecting way into the book’s central argument: that the comics form is uniquely suited to the visual working and reworking of familial inheritance, trauma, and creative filiation.

The book is organized into two main parts and an epilogue. Part I traverses five decades of Spiegelman’s output—from his underground Arcade strips to his post-Maus retrospective projects and his New Yorker work—through three formal tropes derived from comics’ own visual grammar: boxes, spirals, and tic-tac-toe. Chapter 1 reads Maus as a Jewish text in formal as well as thematic terms, tracing congruences between Spiegelman’s panel-boxes, the architected space of the Mishkan, and the practice of Midrash. Chapter 2 turns to Breakdowns and the figure of the spiral, arguing, via Edward Said’s theory of the dialectic between filiation and affiliation, that the filial ghosts Spiegelman cannot quite exorcise are precisely what authorize his modernist ambitions. Chapter 3 excavates a previously underexamined autobiographical character, “OXO,” and reads Spiegelman’s one-page New Yorker piece “Lost” (2016) as a return to the unresolved questions of Maus through the lens of a children’s game. Part II turns to Bechdel’s lesser-discussed memoirs, Are You My Mother? (2012) and The Secret to Superhuman Strength (2021), through two further formal figures: mirrors (as a way into mimesis, the mother-daughter bond, and the question of whether imitation can be enabling rather than merely replicative) and webs (as a figure for the bodily, material work of putting lines on paper, and for the possibilities of queer kinship and feminist community). An epilogue on Tessa Hulls’ Pulitzer Prize-winning Feeding Ghosts (2024) extends the book’s arguments to a new generation of graphic memoirists, proposing the braided river as a final formal figure for comics' negotiation of heterogeneous, transnational, and matrilineal histories.

What distinguishes Filial Lines from other scholarly monographs on Spiegelman and Bechdel, which has become a crowded field, is the sophisticated and elevated playfulness of Waldman’s formal methodology. Waldman is explicit that she does not offer her five figures (boxes, spirals, tic-tac-toe, mirrors, webs) as a strict taxonomy of the comics form, but rather as a “theatrical ensemble”: a cast of metaphors that help us encounter these works rather than simply classify them. This is a productive and intellectually honest distinction, and one that allows Waldman to bring psychoanalytic, feminist, and formalist frameworks to bear without forcing them into a false coherence. Her prose is consistently clear and vivid, and her close readings—whether of a single panel, a page layout, or the weight of a recurring motif—are among the sharpest I have read about in recent comics scholarship. The chapter on tic-tac-toe is especially pleasurable, yoking the grid of the gameboard to the grid of the comics page and using the mobile interplay of X and O to read the complexities of inherited trauma in Spiegelman’s largely neglected short work.

The book also makes a convincing case for rebalancing the scholarly attention devoted to Spiegelman and Bechdel’s most celebrated works. With only Maus and Fun Home to go on, Waldman notes, one might conclude that both cartoonists primarily come to voice through their fathers. Filial Lines demonstrates, by attending carefully to the fuller arc of each artist’s career, that it is the mother who looms largest across both corpuses—a reorientation that opens fresh critical ground. The juxtaposition of the two cartoonists is, moreover, consistently illuminating rather than merely comparative: Waldman traces a direct line of influence from Spiegelman to Bechdel while also mapping the significant differences in how each engages with modernism—Spiegelman through defamiliarizing formal experiment, Bechdel through a more ambivalent, affective working-through of the modernist canon as filial inheritance.

Filial Lines is highly recommended for scholars and students of comics studies, graphic memoir, feminist literature, Jewish American literature, and contemporary formalism. It is also, to a degree unusual in academic monographs on the medium, a pleasure to read: erudite, precise, and genuinely alive to what makes the comics form strange, beautiful, and necessary.

Book Review - Crossing Lines: Comics About Human Migration

 reviewed by Alberto López Martín, Occidental College

Antje Ellermann, Frederik Kohlert, Sarah Leavitt, and Mireille Paquet, eds. Crossing Lines: Comics About Human Migration. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2025. $26.95 CAN. ISBN 9781049801223. https://utpdistribution.com/9781487533359/crossing-lines/

 

Scholarship on the representation of migration in comics has produced a substantial body of monographs and critical studies, while recent graphic narratives—whether autobiographical or working through genres such as comics journalism and dystopian fiction—abound with stories of diasporas, climate refugees, and the everyday challenges faced by migrants and migrant communities in their countries of destination. Crossing Lines joins this growing body of work examining migration, its causes, and its consequences through the medium of comics. What distinguishes the project is its collaborative premise: by bringing together academic researchers and comics creators, it puts the medium's capacity to tell migration stories to the test. As the editors observe in the introduction, emphasizing comics' potential to foster social change, the medium “can facilitate dialogue, fight disinformation, and generate empathy, thereby providing citizens with a more nuanced view of human immigration through narratives” (4).

Crossing Lines originated in a workshop organized by the editors in 2022 at the Centre for Migration Studies at the University of British Columbia. The event brought together nine Vancouver-based comics artists, community practitioners, and nearly forty scholars from UBC, Concordia University, and the University of Victoria. During the workshop, participants formed nine working groups, each led by a comics artist, to explore a specific dimension of migration and displacement that would ultimately take shape as a comic narrative. From the outset, each group was asked to ground its project in peer-reviewed research and to examine migration in all its complexity, avoiding simplistic or stereotypical representations. Interdisciplinarity lies at the heart of both the workshop and the resulting volume: contributors represent fields as diverse as anthropology, occupational therapy and social work, law, media studies, and Asian studies, complementing the editors' expertise in political science and English. Through this collaborative process and the subsequent editorial work, Crossing Lines ultimately took the form of eight comics, each created by a comics artist working with a team of three or four co-authoring scholars—a total of twenty-eight contributors, in addition to the eight artists and four editors. The result is a genuinely polyphonic collection that benefits from a diversity of perspectives and, importantly, includes a significant representation of migrant authors.

As one might expect, some comics are more effective than others, although all the stories carry considerable emotional weight. They also display a remarkable diversity of formal approaches and artistic styles. Kathleen Gros's "To/From" is among the collection's strongest contributions. Through a series of full-page illustrations, it explores the prejudice and exclusion embedded in the seemingly innocuous question "Where are you from?," juxtaposing the journey of an Afghan refugee and her family with the history of colonialism on the ancestral lands of what is now British Columbia. Jonathon Dalton's "Crossing Lines," the comic that lends the volume its title, presents six parallel storylines following six groups of travelers whose radically different experiences of crossing the Canadian border are determined by their legal status. Doug Savage's "Migratory Birds," in turn, reflects on the notion of citizenship through the naturalization ceremony of two characters in a world populated by anthropomorphic birds, including xenophobic Canadian geese and an Indigenous bird that reminds the newly naturalized citizens of the nation's silenced colonial past. In Hannah Myers's "Greener Grass?," the premise of a video game centered on the experiences of highly skilled migrants allows two friends to recognize both the obstacles migrants face—including barriers to employment and housing—and the privileges they themselves enjoy as Canadian citizens.

Emily Chou's "In Search of Bruce Lee" departs from the preceding stories by relying almost entirely on visual storytelling. It focuses on a migrant's intercultural and intergenerational connections through his admiration for the iconic actor and martial artist, reserving text for onomatopoeia and unintelligible speech balloons that convey the protagonist's struggle to navigate an unfamiliar language and culture. Scarlet Wings Kaili's "The Waiting Room" adopts a more somber tone, foregrounding the physical and psychological toll of migration by emphasizing the protagonist's stress, insomnia, and involuntary loneliness. Jess Pollard's "Butterfly," meanwhile, explores the shift in social status experienced by two migrants in relation to the lives they left behind in their countries of origin, their aspirations—whether for freedom or economic opportunity—and the sacrifices they have made to build a new life. Finally, Alyssa Hirose's "Belonging" offers an original exercise in abstraction, representing belonging and integration through a shape-shifting form that alternately blends with and stands apart from its surroundings, using synesthetic effects to evoke emotion. Each of the eight comics is followed by a brief discussion of its central theme, five discussion questions addressing issues ranging from content to formal choices, and an annotated bibliography of five additional sources for readers wishing to explore the topic further. Although the explanatory sections are occasionally overly explicit and may constrain the interpretive openness of the comics they accompany, they are, overall, an excellent addition that makes the collection particularly well suited for use in humanities or social sciences courses on migration at either the undergraduate or graduate level.

Indeed, the format of Crossing Lines—with the discussion questions and suggested avenues for further exploration accompanying each comic, together with the richness of possible interpretations and the complexity of the issues they address—makes it an exceptionally valuable pedagogical resource. Yet the collection's strengths extend beyond its rich and compelling stories. The workshop that gave rise to the volume offers a replicable model of collaborative practice, one that could be implemented with relative ease in groups of four or five students as a semester-long project. In such a setting, students would not only read comics but also create their own, drawing inspiration from ecosocial issues and causes they care about. Ultimately, Crossing Lines is a commendable project that brings together a remarkable range of voices while bridging the gap between scholars, activists, and comics creators. Although the individual contributions are inevitably uneven in quality, the volume as a whole is an impressive and worthwhile achievement.

Remembering John A. Lent 15: At the Mangasia exhibit in Rome with Paul Gravett

 From Paul:

I unearthed this group photo from the Mangasia exhibition opening party in Rome in 2017, where John and I were joined by, among others, this Mongolian comics creator, Erdenebayar Nambaral.

 

He was part of the Mongolian delegation, the first time their comics profession had ever presented their history and current creation in the Wesr afaik.

 

 Taken at the Palazzo Delle Esposizioni in Rome on October 6th 2017.

Here’s the poster by Chinese artist Zao Dao: 

Resume of Dr. John A. Lent (2025)

 John's wife, Xu Ying, provided this to me tonight, writing, "This is the one Dr. Lent proofed and edited by himself ... in 2025."

Dr. John A. Lent, born September 8, 1936, taught journalism and mass communication from 1960 to 2011 in universities across the United States (West Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming, Pennsylvania); in the Philippines in 1964-1965, where he initiated the first journalism courses at De La Salle College; in Malaysia, from 1972-1974, as founder and director of, and lecturer in, the nation's inaugural academic program at Universiti Sains Malaysia; in Canada, in 2000, as holder of the first Rogers Distinguished Professorship at the University of Western Ontario; in China, since  2005, as doctoral supervisor in the School of Animation at Communication University of China, and in Malaysia and China, where he has held visiting professor posts at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Shanghai University, Jilin Animation Institute, Nanjing University of Finance and Economics, Qingdao Film Academy, among others. He is professor emeritus at Temple University.

Professor Lent's graduate students hold university and other professional posts worldwide, in South Korea, Japan, China, Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia, Turkey, Lebanon, India, Yemen, Kenya, etc. Although they hail from different countries and regions, they have one thing in common: Professor Lent is the person they respect the most. He not only teaches them how to do research and study, but more importantly, how to be a good person. Throughout his teaching career, Professor Lent has changed the lives of many students and helped countless students be employed and promoted. However, no matter how many people have benefited from him, he has always been so simple and humble.

Dr. Lent's educational background includes a PhD in mass communication from the University of Iowa (1972), a bachelor's degree (1958) and a master's degree (1960) in journalism from Ohio University. He has studied for extended periods at Syracuse University, Guadalajara Summer School in Mexico, University of Oslo, and Sofia University in Tokyo, Japan. As an advisor to various educational and governmental organizations, he also served as a judge and chair of juries for international comics and animation competitions held in the United States, South Korea, Cuba, Slovakia, Brazil, Ukraine, Mexico, Serbia, Cyprus, Italy, Poland, Iran, Canada, Thailand, and China. He has given hundreds of speeches and lectures to various academic groups and colleges and universities in at least 72 countries around the world, been the editor of book series with Westview, Hampton, and Palgrave presses, author of many book chapters and about 800 plus articles.

Dr. Lent has written and edited more than 90 books, some of which have won awards, such as the Pat and Ray Browne Popular Culture Book Award, IIAS Art Award, Broadcast Industry Conference Awards, Southwest Popular Culture Association Best Book Award, three Eisner Award nominations, etc. His most recent books include, Comics Art of the Caribbean, Asian Political Cartoons, Comics Art of China (with Xu Ying), Asian Comics, Cartooning in Latin America, Cartooning in Africa, Animation in Asia and the Pacific, and 10 volumes of Global Comic Art Bibliography. His works have been the first books published on topics such as: Asian broadcasting, Asian newspapers, Asian film industry, Asian popular culture, Asian animation, Asian comics, Caribbean mass communications, Caribbean popular culture, Caribbean comics art, and Oceania comics art. His works cover many other areas, such as the division of labor in media and international labor studies, transnational communication, women and mass communication, the world video industry and so on.

Professor Lent has interviewed many hundreds of animators and cartoonists in more than 50 countries on five continents, and has collected many valuable first-hand research materials. Over the years, many of the artist friends he interviewed have passed away, and he has written many memorial articles. His interview materials have become a rare historical record. He has been interviewing Chinese cartoonists and animators since the 1990s [with Xu Ying since 2000] and has made many famous master friends, such as Liao Bingxiong, Te Wei, Zhang Ding, and Mai Fei, who were active in the anti-Japanese Salvation Cartoon Propaganda Brigade in the 1930s; Hua Junwu, Ding Cong, Chen Huiling, Jiang Yousheng, and Han Shangyi, who fought with comics during the War of Resistance against Japanese aggression and the War of Liberation in the 1930s and 1940s; cartoonists and animators active at the time of the founding of the People's Republic of China: Fang Cheng, Wang Fuyang, He Wei, Bi Keguan, Huang Yuanlin, Zhu Genhua, Chen Yuli, Li Qing 'ai, Zhang Songlin, Zhan Tong, Qian Yunda, Chang Guangxi, Yan Dingxian, Lin Wenxiao, Ma Kexuan, Qu Jianfang, Hu Jinqing, Chen Jianyu, Hu Yihong, Cao Xiaohui, and the young and middle-aged cartoonists Zheng Xinyao, Xu Pengfei, Zheng Huagai, Xia Dachuan, and so on. Fortunately, Mr. Lent has introduced Chinese animation masters and their masterpieces to the world through his articles. He has published many articles in journals that he founded, published, and edited (International Journal of Comic Art and Asian Cinema), introducing the history of Chinese animation, the Wan brothers, the leading figure of New China's animation, Te Wei, the golden age of Chinese animation, as well as a comprehensive account of Chinese female cartoonists, comics from the "Cultural Revolution," the War of Resistance against Japanese aggression, Chinese peasant comics and the "Frog Comics Group," Chinese workers' comics, and the comics edition of Workers' Daily.

He has given speeches at many international conferences introducing Chinese cartoonists and Chinese comics. In October 2005, he invited the renowned cartoonist, Fang Cheng, to the United States to give lectures and introduce Chinese comics and their works at the International Comics Art Festival in Washington, D.C. and two universities in Philadelphia, and in 2006, Fang Cheng went to Singapore and Malaysia to participate in comic week events hosted by Mr. Lent. In October 2010, at a symposium in Washington, D.C., to commemorate Chinese cartoonist, Ding Cong, Mr. Lent made an important speech based on his interviews with him. He was not only passionate about the promotion of Chinese culture, but also spared no effort.

In addition, Professor John A. Lent is actively involved in various academic activities around the world that initiate or enhance the level of professional research. In addtion of the International Journal of Comic Art, founded in 1998, and Asian Cinema, started in 1994, he founded the Malaysia/Singapore/Brunei Studies Group in 1976 and its periodical Berita in 1975, which he published/edited for 26 years; co-founded and served as managing editor of WittyWorld International Cartoon Magazine from 1987 to 2001; co-founded and chaired Asian Cinema Studies Society, from 1994-2011; founded and chaired the Asian Popular Culture section of the Popular Culture Association (PCA), from 1996 to present; founded and chaired the Comic Art Working Group of the International Association of Media and Communication Research, 1984-2016, and is one of the longest-serving members of the board of Cartoonists Rights Network International. He was the co-organizers of three International Silver Fly Animation Week events in Lviv, Ukraine and Florence, Italy; co-founder and co-chair of the Asian Youth Animation and Comic Contest in Guiyang, China, 2007-2017,and chairman and co-founder of the Asia-Pacific Animation and Comics Association; he served as a judge for the Pulitzer Prize for political cartoons two consecutive terms, 2007-2008.

Professor Lent has been rewarded for his service with awards from Colombia (Calicomix "Diplome de Humor"), Cyprus (Golden Olive Humor Service Award), Peru (Premio "SIMEON"), Spain (Premio John Buscema Amar el Comic), Singapore (AMIC Asian Communication Award), and China (AYACC Award); a festschrift; books dedicated to him published in India and the U.S.; sections in books and periodicals detailing his career (in Netherlands, Bangladesh, U.S., Hong Kong); the Lynn Bartholome Eminent Scholar Award; and prizes in his name with the Popular Culture Association Comics Section, the International Comics Art Forum, and Malaysia/Singapore/Brunei Studies Group.