Book Review: Final Cut by Charles Burns

reviewed by Luke C. Jackson

 Charles Burns. Final Cut. Pantheon Books, 2024. 224 pp. US $34.00 (Hardcover). ISBN:  978-0-593-70170-6. https://penguinrandomhouselibrary.com/book/?isbn=9780593701706

I first read Charles Burns’ graphic novel Black Hole in my early twenties. Since then, I – like many people – have considered it to be required reading for those who seek to understand the storytelling potential of the comics medium. First published as a series of twelve comics, Black Hole was collected and published in hardback by Pantheon Books in 2005.

Set in Seattle in the 1970s, Black Hole tells the story of a group of teenagers who contract a sexually transmitted disease, referred to as “the bug” and often read as a metaphor for AIDS. This disease causes sufferers to see hallucinatory, psychedelic visions, before transforming them into nightmarish versions of themselves. As a result, sufferers are ostracised and forced to live in the hills outside town. The haunting images of these grotesque doppelgängers are captured in the book’s end papers, which act as a dark mirror to those in the front papers. In stark black and white, both depict yearbook-style images, their subjects staring at the camera – and the reader – their pre-evolutionary smiles replaced by tumor-like growths and gaping wounds. And yet, the book asks, is it these funhouse mirror-like images that are the true horror, or the plastic smiles of the teenagers within whom these monsters had once lain dormant?

Burns is an eclectic creator. Before the creative and commercial success of Black Hole, he came come to the attention of the comics community as an artist for Françoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman’s RAW Magazine. His cover for Raw #4 is dystopian, disquieting and yet strangely beautiful, the perfect visual encapsulation of that issue’s promise to be ‘The graphix magazine for your bomb shelter’s coffee table.’ Since finding mainstream success with Black Hole, Burns has created covers for Time, The New York Times Sunday Magazine and The New Yorker, while he is both co-founder and cover designer for Believer Magazine. He has also continued to explore the narrative potential of comics through his work on X’ed Out (2010), The Hive (2012), and Sugar Skull (2014), a trilogy of short books that use a disarmingly Tintin-like visual style to convey a characteristically disturbing worldview.  

Like Black Hole, Burns’s latest graphic novel, Final Cut, is a teen drama in which supernatural occurrences are an allegory for social and psychological torment. With their parents either absent or neglectful, budding filmmakers Brian and Jimmy have recruited some of their classmates, including the beautiful and alluring Laurie, to help bring their latest cinematic vision to life. Inspired by the 1960s version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, directed by Don Siegel, the boys' film – which is never titled – tells the story of a group of campers who stumble across an alien invasion and are subsequently replaced with simulacra. In this way, the central conceit is reminiscent, also, of Burns’ previous graphic novel. However, unlike Black Hole, the focus here is on the construction of narrative itself, through the medium of film, and on how creative choices necessarily reflect the desires, biases and limitations of their creators.

While shooting the film, for Brian at least, reality gives way to fantasy, the natural gives way to the supernatural, the terrestrial to the alien. Burns utilizes the medium of comics to reflect this fluidity, switching between different page constructions, artistic styles and colors without warning. A single page begins in a traditional ‘waffle iron’-style, with panels separated by thick black frames and characters presented in muted colors with little shading. Only moments later, this construction breaks down, as a panel – depicting a greyscale still from the 1960s classic film The Last Picture Show - stretches the width of the page. The still itself depicts an almost barren landscape, devoid of people, capturing Brian’s sense of isolation, as well as his spatial and temporal dislocation.

The more attuned we become to Brian’s perspective, the more the book comes to mimic the frames of a movie, which, unlike the panels of a comic, are uniform in size, shape and rhythm. This allows Brian to construct a world that is more predictable, one in which his wishes can be fulfilled. However, the events of the graphic novel are not told exclusively from Brian’s perspective. The reader is also invited, at crucial moments, to see things from Lauren’s point of view. Whereas, for Brian, the events depicted in Final Cut function as an elegy for lost innocence, for Lauren they represent a time of self-discovery – a new beginning. Ultimately, it is up to the reader to decide which of these perspectives they accept as true. In this way, Burns suggests, the ‘final cut’ is not Brian’s, or Lauren’s, but ours.

 

Author Bio:

Dr. Luke C. Jackson is an author, teacher and researcher based in Melbourne, Australia. He has written novels, films, games, and graphic novels, including Two-Week Wait: An IVF Story (Scribe, 2021). His current research focuses on the spatialities of texts, including comics.

 

IJOCA 25:2 Table of Contents

 Photos only at the moment. I'll replace these bad photos with the text when I get it.

Exhibit Review: Gordo by/de Gus Arriola: Depicting Mexico and Modernism

 Reviewed by José Alaniz, University of Washington, Seattle.

Gordo by/de Gus Arriola: Depicting Mexico and Modernism. Nhora Lucía Serrano (curator). Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, Ohio State University. December 13, 2023 to May 5, 2024. https://library.osu.edu/exhibits/depicting-mexico-and-modernism-gordo-by-gus-arriola-representando-mexico-y-el-modernismo

 Some years ago, I had one of those moments when it hits you: you’ve lived long enough to detect a major cultural shift.

I was standing in the order line at Chipotle, a chain which itself did not exist before 1993. Behind me, I heard a nasally voice coming from someone whom I would blithely describe as “central-casting young metrosexual white dude.” He was telling the server what he wanted, which included “some guac and pico.”

His words momentarily threw me. Then I realized what he meant: guacamole and pico de gallo. That’s the way I had indicated said items my entire life, wherever I resided, from deep South Texas to Northern California to Seattle. I felt a tiny flare of outrage at the casual Newspeaky butchering of “my people’s” language, but then I just shrugged. These words aren’t really “my people’s,” anyway. “Taco” has been English for a long time. We live in a country, after all, where around the year when Mr. “Guac and Pico” was born, salsa’s US sales overtook those of ketchup.¹

For this state of affairs we can thank — more than most cultural figures, and certainly more than any other cartoonist — Gus Arriola and his celebrated comic strip Gordo. For more than four decades, it was the Mexican-American Arriola who most helped a mid-century white USA gain a new appreciation for the language, history, culture and cuisine of its neighbor to the South. 

“By including Spanish words [in his strip], Arriola introduced an American audience to Spanish phrases such as ‘piñata,’ ‘hasta la vista,’ ‘ándale,’ and more,” wrote Nhora Lucía Serrano. “He also included traditional Mexican recipes, holidays and pottery.”

I quote from the introduction to “Gordo by/de Gus Arriola: Depicting Mexico and Modernism,” the first US retrospective on the strip, which Serrano curated. As she further explained, Gordo was syndicated in over 270 publications by United Feature from 1941 to 1985, becoming the “most visible ethnic comic strip” of the 20^th century.

That means Gordo traversed the eras of the Cisco Kid, of Zorro and the Zoot Suit, of Touch of Evil (with Charlton Heston in brownface), of Speedy Gonzalez and Slowpoke Rodriguez, as well as the rise of the United Farm Workers and Chicanismo movements, the Frito Bandito (a 1960s Frito-Lay TV ad campaign featuring a cartoon Mexican brigand who stole your Fritos) and beyond.

How bad did the mainstream representation of Mexican-Americans get in that span of time? Well, how about this little gem: an early 1980s deodorant commercial featuring “an obese, sombrero-wearing mustached figure [who] calls his followers to a screeching stop, reaches into his saddlebag for a small can of Arrid spray deodorant, lifts up his arms and sprays. A voice-over says, ‘If it works for him, it will work for you.” As an encyclopedia of advertising put it, “[T]he campaign was not well received by the Latino community” (McDonough/Egolf, The Advertising: 1059).

A walk through Serrano’s show demonstrated to what an astonishing degree Arriola’s work was swimming against that cultural tide. Drawing from the Billy Ireland’s collections and those of private owners, “Gordo by/de Gus Arriola” presented over 165 items, including 85 comic strips, original drawings, books, photographs, letters, animation by Bret Olsen and even some Gordo merchandise. The exhibit was easily the most scholarly attention paid to this trailblazing 20^th-century figure since Robert C. Harvey’s 2000 book Accidental Ambassador Gordo: The Comic Strip Art of Gus Arriola. Serrano was the perfect person to pull it off, too. Originally from Colombia, she is a Comparative Literature professor and Director of Academic Technology, Teaching and Research at Hamilton College; a founding board member and Treasurer of the Comics Studies Society; and editor of Immigrants and Comics: Graphic Spaces of Remembrance, Transaction and Mimesis (Routledge, 2021).

During my visit one chilly February day, I was especially moved by the fact that Serrano presented all the exhibit literature, including item labels, not only in English but also in crisp, proper Español (no “guac and pico” here). Such a bilingual approach doesn’t just honor its subject’s heritage, it represents a model of inclusivity and outreach to non-Anglophone communities in Ohio and beyond. (I happen to have relatives in the region who would appreciate it.)

Gustavo “Gus” Arriola (1917-2008), born in Arizona, started in animation at Screen Gems, then went on to MGM. Gordo was his first comic strip. Envisioned as the Mexican L’il Abner, the series at first capitalized to an unfortunate degree on North America’s profound ignorance and prejudice regarding Mexico. Over time, though, the artist rethought that stance, and began to instead use the strip as a venue to educate as well as entertain. Gordo became a series where you could have a laugh and learn something about another culture — a fabulously rich culture that long predated Columbus. You might even pick up words like “amigo” and “muchacho.”

      Arriola traveled to Mexico for the first time in 1960. As for many Mexican-Americans, a trip to the mother country greatly impacted his sense of identity, making him even more resistant in his work to the neo-colonialist distortions of Latin America in the US mass media. Around then Gordo also got a lot more experimental, especially on Sundays.

In terms of plot and characterization, the strip is straightforward. We follow the doings of Perfecto “Gordo” Salazar Lopez, his nephew Pepito, and their various pets including Señor Dog and Cochito the pig down Mexico way. The debut, published on November 24, 1941, delivers on the poor English and stereotypes Arriola knew his readers expected. As Pepito declares: “An’ you wanna know somteeng? My uncle Gordo ees the mos’ bes’ bean farmer of the world!”

Gordo (“Fat man” or “Fats”) wears a sombrero, takes a lot of siestas, and lusts after women (some of them white).

      In short: the series, alas, leaned hard into the dehumanizing ethnic humor which was such a pillar of mid-century popular culture. It was the age of Amos ‘n’ Andy, of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (“I don’ have to show you any steenkin’ badges!”), of Fu Manchu and Disney’s The Three Caballeros,² a time when Desi Arnaz, half of the most famous inter-ethnic couple in 1950s television, was breaking ground — but still had to effect an exaggerated, mannered demeanor to match his white audience’s preconceptions of “Cubanness.”

Yet even in this period Arriola was educating his readers. In a December 12, 1948 Sunday strip, Gordo shows his old friend Santa Clos (i.e. Santa Claus) how to make a piñata to meet new demand, spurred by a previous strip on Mexican holidays, for the children’s game. That same year, so many people wrote to request Gordo’s “Beans Weeth Cheese” recipe that a ceramic Gordo Bean Pot embossed with the strip’s characters appeared in stores. (The exhibit had one under glass.)   

Then came Arriola’s 1960 pivot from material that tended to reinforce Mexican stereotypes to his embracing the role of ambassador to south-of-the-border culture, mores and language. For one thing, Gordo dropped the bean farming career and became a sort of itinerant tour guide, ferrying visitors in his colectivo (public bus), dubbed Halley’s Comet, to various interesting country locales. And where else on the comics page were you going to learn so much about the Day of the Dead? The October 29, 1967 Sunday strip presented a lovely exploration of the holiday, featuring sugar skulls, an altar and zempasuchitl, a type of marigold, the traditional flower of the dead. (The stylized, skull-laden title and creator credit to “Góstova Chanss” testifies to Arriola’s playful side.)

Even as he moved away from the more egregious ethnic humor, though, the artist retained much of the visual typage. As he told Harvey, “You needed them to establish certain things … For instance, Gordo would wear his big sombrero only as a sort of costume: if he went to play in his little orchestra or if was going courting, he would put on his charro suit. His costume established this activity as a special occasion. Any other time, he wore his bus driver’s cap. But the symbols had to be there, I guess, for quick recognition of what I was trying to say or do” (Accidental: 189).

Serrano arranged the show more or less chronologically, with areas devoted to various aspects of the strip. I especially enjoyed the part on Gordo’s animals, since these furred and feathered companions often had as much agency and importance as the humans. Another section dealt with homages to Arriola, including a 2008 strip by Alcaraz from his La Cucaracha (1992) and a 2001 tribute by Cantú and Carlos Castellanos, from Baldo (2000).

Among many other pleasures, seeing large-sized Gordo originals gave me a new appreciation for how Arriola’s work anticipates that of the Hernandez Bros, especially Beto’s Palomar stories. The use of silhouettes, the Latin American settings and architecture, the texturing on walls, the characters’ expressions, all point to the future comic art Gordo was shaping, which included Love & Rockets. You can see this especially clearly in the May 28, 1944 Sunday page (which Arriola produced while serving in the army!), in which our hero and his associates, on their way to explore the ancient Mayan ruins of Chichen-Itza, take a side trip to check out a cenote. As a caption explained: “The greatest part of the state of Yucatan is composed of limestone. The annual rainfall drains through the porous ground and forms subterranean streams! Because of high caverns, sections of surface layer collapse, causing deep pits with water 70 or 80 feet below the surface! – These are called cenótes!!” [sic].

      Apart from Gordo’s ethnographic value, Serrano subtitled the show “Depicting Mexico and Modernism” for a reason. Especially after 1960, no strip since Krazy Kat and Gasoline Alley evinced such a modernist ethos — at times ecstatically so.

      Of course, as M. Thomas Inge in his “Krazy Kat as American Dada Art” chapter in Comics as Culture (1990) and more recently Jonathan Najarian remind us, comics and modernism were never really that far apart in their sensibilities: “the divisions between high and low forms of art were never as strong as conventional accounts of modernism made them seem” (Najarian, “Comics”: 5). Gordo, with its strong influences from Frank King and George Herriman, was an instance of film scholar Miriam Hansen’s vernacular modernism, characterized by what Glenn Willmott describes as “its paradoxical yet seamless fusion of overtly abstract and mimetic effects in cartoon style” (“Entanglements”: 29).

      I’m thinking here of a September 6, 1959 strip in which noisy kids prevent Gordo from enjoying his beloved siesta. Different panels explode with garish colors and abstract shapes denoting their racket. It makes for an intense evocation of sound in a silent medium. Once Gordo finally gets the rowdy youngsters to leave, the final panel glows a bright yellow, with the balloonless declaration: “Silence is golden.” (The lexia in this strip also bear mention for their unconventional proportions, anticipating Chris Ware’s work.) The episode recalls Hillary Chute’s observation that “There’s an excess about comics that makes people uncomfortable, like too much visuality, a plentitude. And this is almost always centered on the expression or representation of the body” (“Afterward”: 305, emphasis in original).     

Not only that; like Picasso, Arriola filtered the ancient through a modern idiom. See for example an extraordinary series of July/August, 1968 Gordo Sunday pages recounting the tragic romance of Iztaccíhuatl and Popocatépetl from Aztec mythology in a style which fuses comics and pre-Columbian iconography. Another Sunday strip, from June 18, 1950, tells its story through character silhouettes on vases-cum-panels, while at still other times the artist evoked Mexican folk art (artesanía), pottery, and Egyptian ideograms.

Arriola could even give Ernie Bushmiller a run for his dinero. In a November 20, 1955 Sunday strip, Gordo finds himself on fire. Pepito quickly puts out the blaze, but in the aftermath they realize that the fire has burned a hole through the newspaper itself. Through it they can see the page underneath — which has a Nancy strip.  

Such bold visual gambits made Gordo among the most experimental mainstream series of its era, which, as Serrano put it, “permitted the Mexican character, and Mexico by extension, to be seen as a more accepted resident of a modernist ethnic America.”

There was another way Arriola sought to affirm his modern bona fides: through depictions of the counterculture. Case in point: Bug Rogers, the always “with it” Beatnik spider. 

“Gordo by/de Gus Arriola: Depicting Mexico and Modernism” was a marvelous experience. I wish it would tour the world. It more than validates the trend of academics curating public-facing comic art exhibits (e.g. Ben Saunders, Charles Hatfield, Sarah Lightman, Jared Gardner). It’s a brilliant model to draw in (so to speak) as wide a public as possible to, I daresay, (re)learn what makes America America.

Arriola, through his humble Mexican everyman, taught valuable lessons to a nation that at the time knew next to nothing about its Southern neighbor — and most of what it did “know” was wrong and harmful. I wish I could say we’ve long moved past that issue in 2024. Instead, as I type this a candidate for president boasts about how, when elected, he will undertake the largest deportations of “illegals” in US history. To which I can only say, “Chinga tu MAGA, pendejo.” On the other hand, we do live in the age of guac and pico, which gives me some measure of hope.  

In any case, if we as a nation are ever to overcome retrograde Trumpian thinking, educational opportunities like Serrano’s exhibit will be part of the solution. That the Arriola show took place in the perfect setting of our nation’s premiere comic art repository, well, that’s just the cereza on top.

To Serrano and the Billy Ireland: “¡Muchísimas gracias!”

And pass me some guac and pico, please.

 

¹ And it wasn’t even close; that year US salsa sales beat ketchup by over $40 million (O’Neill, “Apple”: 49). That said, 1992 was also around the time when someone I dated in college (white) told me she thought pico de gallo meant “pick of the garden.” 

²This was part of the Good Neighbor policy, a US government initiative to blunt Nazi Germany’s influence on Central America during WWII. The film has its heart in the right place, but híjole it sure leaves no Latino stereotype unturned.

 

Bibliography

Chute, Hillary. “Afterword: Graphic Modernisms.” Comics and Modernism: History, Form, and Culture. Ed. Jonathan Najarian. University Press of Mississippi, 2024: 301-309.

     Harvey, Robert. C. Accidental Ambassador Gordo: The Comic Strip Art of Gus Arriola. University Press of Mississippi, 2000.

 Inge, M. Thomas. Comics as Culture. University Press of Mississippi, 1990.

McDonough, John & Karen Egolf. The Advertising Age: Encyclopedia of Advertising. Vol. 1. Routledge, 2002.

Najarian, Jonathan. Comics and Modernism: History, Form, and Culture. University Press of Mississippi, 2024.

O’Neill, Molly. “New Mainstream: Hot Dogs, Apple Pie and Salsa.” The New York Times (March 11, 1992): 49, 54. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1992/03/11/550992.html?pageNumber=49. 

  Willmott, Glenn. "Entanglements” in Comics and Modernism: History, Form, and Culture. Ed. Jonathan Najarian. University Press of Mississippi, 2024: 15-32.

Book Review: The Complete Betty Brown, Ph.G. edited by Tom Heintjes

reviewed by David Beard, Professor of Rhetoric, University of Minnesota Duluth

Tom Heintjes (ed.) The Complete Betty Brown, Ph.G. Bull Moose Publishing, 2024. $24.99 (Paperback). Available at

https://www.lulu.com/shop/tom-heintjes/the-complete-betty-brown-phg/paperback/product-zm82g7d.html

The field of comics studies stands on the same foundations, now, as other academic disciplines: scholarly rigor and, where possible, objectivity. To study comics really isn’t all that different from studying art, literature, film, mass communication, or other domains of human creative or literate activity.

And yet, there are differences, deep within our disciplinary DNA. For example, where connoisseurship, in art history, is built upon institutional records and practices in museums, in comics studies, the early connoisseurship was engaged by fans, eager to track down the artists on their favorite, unsigned strips. Biographical criticism of comics art often began, in some cases, in interviews conducted at conventions or by fanzines. Beneath the foundation of work in comics studies, in other words, is a layer of sediment created by passion.

The Complete Betty Brown, Ph.G., by Tom Heintjes, is an example of such a passion project. (So, too, is Heintjes excellent Hogan’s Alley magazine, which celebrates (and sometimes excavates) the medium in interesting ways. See the website at <https://www.hoganmag.com/>

Betty Brown holds a Ph.G., a now-obsolete pharmacy degree which enables her to be both pharmacist and small businesswoman.¹ The pharmacy profession has changed a lot since the trade publication Drug Topics ran these strips, during the Depression and through the second World War (1934-1948). Betty Brown’s life (dispensing medication, working as the town’s unofficial healthcare provider, while also running a small business faced with cutthroat competitors) is filled with challenges, humor and some larger-than life, almost movie-serial style adventure.

Assembled in part as a passion project during the pandemic lockdown, The Complete Betty Brown appears to be an unlikely subject for a collection. While publishers have collected a lot of comic strips since the paperback’s creation (and more recently in the Library of American Comics series, and, less respectfully, in the quirky anthologies assembled by Yoe Books), no one was clamoring for Betty Brown. It took the Heintjes’ passion to demonstrate that we should have wanted this work. The Complete Betty Brown, Ph.G. completes a picture of the work of its creators, it completes a picture of the medium of comics, and it completes a picture of one of the most important areas of healthcare, itself often overlooked. I mean “Completing the picture” in the sense of:

Completing the picture of the work of its creators, Zack Mosley and Boody Rogers

The creators are some of the most popular in golden-age comica history. Zack Mosley was a comic strip artist best known for the aviation adventures in The Adventures of Smilin' Jack, which ran in 300 newspapers at its height and was a transmedia phenomenon (starring in comic strips, books, radio, and movie serials). Betty Brown gives us a small window into an artist establishing his craft, alongside his early career colleague, Boody Rogers. (Rogers was the subject of a collection by Fantagraphics in 2009, Craig Yoe’s Boody: The Bizarre Comics of Boody Rogers, and a section of The Comics Journal in 2006.) As such, this work fills gaps in their biography.

Mosley worked on early Buck Rogers, and that should give a sense of the art style – the figures are built of undulating lines, curves, and swooshes. Built to live entirely in black and white, the strips use wells of black ink to pull the eye forward and back, left to right, in a way that makes the strips a joy to read – and an important part of our understanding of the developing style of their creators.

Completing the picture of the medium of comics

Our picture of comics, as a medium, tends to drift in two directions – the mass medium, aimed at broad audiences, printed in hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of copies, distributed across vast geographies, and the art comic, aimed at a more intimate audience. The Complete Betty Brown, Ph.G. served a different need.

Printed in Drug Topics, Betty Brown was read only by pharmacists and related professionals inside a pharmacy practice. The series, then, looks like its mass media counterparts, and bears superficial genre markers (oscillating between an empowered woman and a damsel in distress), but fundamentally, the strip was there to echo and to reinforce the ideas the trade magazine wanted to advance. When Betty discusses the best location for her pharmacy, she is parroting the points that Drug Topics makes about proper location for retail pharmacy.

At the same time as it is a marketing and education tool, the strip attempts to generate pathos and excitement and even a few cliffhangers, matching the energy of its mass media contemporaries. The compromises Mosley and Rogers made resulted in an unusual example of the medium, worth a look by any historian of comics.

Completing the picture of pharmacy in the Modern era

Finally, this volume should appeal to historians of medicine and perhaps even graphic medicine. Neither of these two fields focus on pharmacy, which is ostensibly one of the most intriguing professions in modern health care in the United States.

Retail pharmacists are among the only health care professionals who can be accessed without any insurance, anytime. In communities where poverty is high and underinsurance rates are higher, the pharmacist is a first responder, in many ways. The series of strips in 1942, in which Betty Brown helps take care of residents of her small town after a fire, reflects this – pharmacists are healers. (This is even more true today, when pharmacists hold not the antiquated Ph.G. but a Pharm.D. degree.)

And yet, retail pharmacists are also the most invisible in popular culture. While medical dramas are a staple of television and have been a staple of comics (from Ben Casey to the Night Nurse), the pharmacist does their work unseen. Betty Brown fills that gap. As Robert A. Buerki noted in his essay in Pharmacy in History,

Drawing its inspiration from the pages of Drug Topics, radio soap operas, and the pervasive fascination with sensational crime in the 1930s, Betty Brown, Ph.G. presents an unusual, even unique picture of the practice of pharmacy in America during the mid- 1930s and early 1940s.

Tom Heintjes has offered the community of scholars in comics studies, in graphic medicine, and in the history of medicine a gift of immeasurable value. I recommend this book for library purchase for scholarly purposes.²

^[1] “The Graduate of Pharmacy (Ph.G.)” was superseded by the Bachelor of Pharmacy degree (B.Pharm.) in the early part of the 20th century.  The B.Pharm. was itself superseded by the R.Ph. (Registered Pharmacist), which has been more or less superseded by the Pharm. D., though some pharmacists still practice with the R.Ph.

^[2] There are, as Heintjes notes, problematic representations of women and of people of color in this text which limit its usefulness to scholarly purposes. I could not give this book to a friend as a good read, but I could offer it to a researcher as an important source. And that is the spirit within which I offer it to readers of IJOCA.

 Citations

Buerki, Robert A. "The Saga of Betty Brown, Ph. G." Pharmacy in history 30.3 (1988): 163-167.

 

Book Review: Superheroes Smash the Box Office: A Cinema History from the Serials to 21st Century Blockbusters by Shawn Conner

 reviewed by Edward Whatley, Georgia College & State University

Shawn Conner. Superheroes Smash the Box Office: A Cinema History from the Serials to 21^st Century Blockbusters. McFarland & Company, 2023. 238 pages, $39.95 (Paperback), ISBN 9781476676661. https://mcfarlandbooks.com/product/superheroes-smash-the-box-office/

In contemporary cinema, superhero films have become a monolithic genre, capturing audiences and box office revenues with unprecedented fervor; however, when superheroes first made the leap from their native comic books onto the big screen, their early appearances were not in feature films but in Saturday serials.  In hindsight, the transition seems logical given the similarities between comic books and serials.  Both formats were aimed at younger audiences.  Both featured episodic storytelling and cliffhanger endings.  In Superheroes Smash the Box Office, author Shawn Conner provides a rather breezy 238-page journey along the long and winding path from cheaply produced 1940s Saturday afternoon superhero serials to the 21^st century blockbuster superhero feature films.

Covering almost nine decades of cinema history is an ambitious undertaking, and Conner explains in his introduction that he found it necessary to restrict the book’s scope to “live-action American movies.” (2)  Chapter one begins in 1941 with the first superhero to appear in a live-action production: Captain Marvel (Shazam to later readers), soon followed by Batman and Captain America. This chapter is easily one of the most interesting in the entire book, as it covers territory that will be unfamiliar to many readers.

Moving on from the serials, Conner expands the scope of the book by spending the next two chapters discussing superhero television shows, namely: Superman starring George Reeves, Batman starring Adam West and Burt Ward, and Wonder Woman starring Lynda Carter. He also covers the 1970s Marvel television shows and movies featuring the Hulk, Spider-Man, Captain America, and Doctor Strange.

With chapter 4, Conner returns his focus to the big screen to discuss the 1978 film Superman starring Christopher Reeve.   From this point on, the book sticks with feature films through its concluding discussion of 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home.

Conner explores how each adaptation—be it a serial, television show, or feature film—contributed to the evolution of superhero cinema. The discussion includes the influence of specific characters and storylines on the genre's development, as well as the impact of technological advancements on special effects and storytelling techniques. Fans of the original comics will also enjoy his discussions of how the screen adaptations adhered to or diverged from the comics source material. 

How successful Conner is in his telling will depend largely on the expectations of the reader.  His writing style is engaging and entertaining.  His deadpan plot synopses are often laugh-out-loud funny. But readers should not expect a very deep dive into any specific films. As I stated earlier, this is a rather breezy reading experience despite the enormity of the topic.  While early chapters offer more (relatively) extensive discussions of their subjects, the pace seems to quicken and the amount of space devoted to specific films seems to dwindle as the number of films grows in more recent years. As the narrative progresses, it feels like Conner is increasingly rushing toward the finish line.

And the finish line approaches rather abruptly. In his two-page epilogue (written in the summer of 2023), Conner mentions eleven recent films that had been released by that time but are not discussed elsewhere in the book.  He cites most of the films’ mixed reviews and lower than expected box office performance as evidence that the superhero film is “at a crossroads, or perhaps at a portal.” (189) Making such a claim but offering so little elaboration on what possibly lies beyond the crossroads/portal makes for a frankly less than satisfying conclusion.

Conner cobbled his narrative together “through books, articles, editorials, audio commentaries, podcasts, reviews and the movies and comics themselves.” (2)  And his bibliography is indeed impressive, although some original interviews might have added to the book’s value. While the book may lack depth, it succeeds in condensing almost a century of film and television history into an engaging and humorous narrative that should appeal to both longtime fans of the genre and general audiences.

Book Review: Data and Doctor Doom: An Empirical Approach to Transmedia Characters by Mark Hibbett

 reviewed by Chris York

Mark Hibbett. Data and Doctor Doom: An Empirical Approach to Transmedia Characters. Palgrave Macmillan, 2024. $110 (Hardcover). https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-45173-7

Mark Hibbett’s book is the most recent installment of the Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels series edited by Roger Sabin. The series has a broad, international focus, with a mission to explore “all aspects of the comic strip, comic book, and graphic novel, […] through clear and informative texts offering expansive coverage and theoretical sophistication,” (ii) and Hibbett’s empirical study delivers on that mission.

Hibbett’s purpose, as he states in his introduction, is “to define a straightforward methodology for empirically analyzing transmedia characters” (1). By identifying and collecting character data in a number of categories from a corpus of texts, researchers should be able to, among other things, analyze character development over time, recognize shifts across media, and empirically identify the core signifiers of a character.

As such, the largest section of the study is the methodology which addresses both the design and implementation of his model for transmedia characters. Though Doctor Doom features in the title of the book, he is simply the primary case study Hibbett uses to illustrate the usefulness of the tool; a thorough analysis of the character is secondary to the explication of the model.

Data-driven analysis is trending within Comics Studies and Hibbett’s intention is to contribute to “database-led methods of corpus analysis” is two ways. First, he is trying to develop a system of identifying and analyzing character-specific signifiers that is adaptable across Comics Studies, and not merely applicable to a single character or storyworld (i.e. a fictional universe in which a story exists, such as the Marvel Universe or Marvel Cinematic Universe). Second, and perhaps more challenging, he is trying to develop a system that is effective for collecting data that is not text specific and, therefore, can draw data effectively for characters and story worlds that exist across different media.

To these ends, the model for transmedia characters records thirteen different kinds of information related to a character, each of which falls into one of four categories: character, behavior, storyworld, and authorship. Character components include appearance, names and titles, physical actions, and dialogue. Behavioral components include perceived behavior, personality traits, and motivations. Storyworld components that were recorded consist of locations, other characters, objects, and previous events. Finally, he identifies references to both textual authors and market authors within the texts.

In creating these components and categories, the author draws from previous attempts to identify essential signifiers for characters and storyworlds. He cites as foundational to his own model the work of Matthew Freeman, Marie Laurie Ryan, Paolo Bertetti, and Roberta Pearson and William Uricchio. In combining elements from all of them, Hibbett believes he has a model that is both practical and comprehensive.

Hibbett is thoughtful in his assignations and provides explanations for how and why he selected the thirteen dimensions for his model. He describes at length, for example, his thought process in constructing his Behavior category. Simply documenting descriptions of a character’s behavior based on language within the text (whether that language comes from the narrator, the featured character, or other characters) is, in his estimation, both inadequate and misleading. Yet, he continues, even a simple description of character behavior by the researcher would risk being neither empirical nor reproducible. He settled, finally, on three components within the Behavior category. “Perceived behavior” and “motivation” rely on language drawn directly from the text. However, the data for “personality traits” is gathered using the 10 Item Short Version of the Big Five Personality Inventory (BFI). The three, in combination, provide a meaningful and objective measurement of character behavior.

The case study he uses to test his model is Marvel’s Doctor Doom from 1961-1987. Hibbett selects Doctor Doom for several reasons; since he is generally not the titular character and appeared in a variety of titles, he “would function as a way of sampling the different Marvel storyworlds over time” (54). Furthermore, since Doctor Doom rarely had his own series, Hibbett argues, there was no specific author or authors who ‘owned’ him, which could provide interesting information regarding what creators saw as the essential signifiers for the character.

Hibbett’s model is largely successful, and the case study of Doctor Doom makes it clear how useful of a tool it can be.  He notes that a primary value of this kind of empirical research is providing some quantitative evidence for some of the conclusions that comics scholars tend to intuit. For instance, scholars of the Marvel Universe would generally conclude that Doctor Doom’s character is, to a large degree, consistent over time; Hibbett’s model provides the data to support that assumption in a number of ways.

However, the model can also reveal inconsistencies and changes in character development. For example, Hibbett observes that Doctor Doom’s use of derogatory exclamations like “Dolt!” and “Clod!” were very common in early representations of the character and a feature that many of the people he surveyed identified as central to Doom’s character. However, Hibbett’s data shows that this kind of language diminished over the decades. He speculates; “[i]t could be that such words were used more often in the earlier period because writers then tended to use dialogue as a way to define character more than those in later periods, where other methods such as appearance and actions became more important. It could also indicate a change in writing style…“ (130). While this is an interesting line of inquiry and one worthy of being pursued, Hibbett does not elaborate further. His purpose is not to argue why certain elements of Doom’s character change or do not change. Rather, the goal of this project is to illustrate the effectiveness of his model by identifying these shifts in character.

There are some shortcomings to his case study, which he readily recognizes. One problem is related to the sample size. Because he was working independently and without funding for the project, he catalogued neither the entirety of Doctor Doom’s appearances during this era, nor did he manage a statistically significant sample size. Rather, he looked only at a “representative” sample of texts, chosen randomly from Doctor Doom’s appearances during the Silver and Bronze ages. These problems of time and cost are likely to persist for anyone wanting to use Hibbett’s model. Furthermore, Doctor Doom’s appearances in media other than comic books are very limited during this era, and so the efficacy of this tool across media is unclear.

In an attempt to illustrate the adaptability of the model, Hibbett includes a chapter in which he uses his character model to compare British and American versions of Denis the Menace. The inclusion of this chapter is my only real criticism of the book. The chapter itself is interesting but would have worked better as a separate document. Here, it seems extraneous, given the almost exclusive attention to Doctor Doom throughout the rest of the book. Hibbett, in fact, pays almost no attention to this chapter in either his discussion or conclusion.

That criticism aside, Hibbett has done some very good work. He also shares his data readily. Through appendices he provides both the corpus he used for Doctor Doom and the survey he used for generating his signifier set. Furthermore, he provides full digital access to the complete data for the Doctor Doom study. I very much recommend this book. The model is a useful analytical tool and Hibbett’s thorough explanation of his process will be invaluable for anyone considering data-driven analysis.

A Hulkologist’s Lament - Book Review of The Incredible Hulk: Worldbreaker, Hero, Icon.

reviewed by José Alaniz, University of Washington, Seattle

 Johnson, Rich. The Incredible Hulk: Worldbreaker, Hero, Icon. Universe, 2022. https://www.rizzoliusa.com/book/9780789341242/

 A Hulkologist’s Lament

The cover of The Incredible Hulk number 1 (May, 1962) by Stan Lee/Jack Kirby famously puts forth the question: “Is he man or monster or … is he both?”

Rich Johnson’s slapdash ramshackle of a book The Incredible Hulk: Worldbreaker, Hero, Icon (2022) prompts a different query: “Is it a cynical marketing ploy, a poorly-written/edited rush job … or is it both?”

Johnson is a former DC Comics VP, writer for The Beat and founder of the manga imprint Yen Press. Unfortunately, those industry insider credentials don’t translate into a very informative, incisive or fresh take on the Hulk. The heavy, 225-page tome (which retails at $50) is certainly handsome. It has good production values, quality paper, crisp images and vibrant colors for its copious reproductions of comics pages, panels and covers. The endpapers function as Hulk wallpaper in a color scheme suggestive of our hero’s pants. Cute. But again, good presentation only gets you so far.

The opening pages greet you with full page art by Frank Cho (Red Hulk), Tim Sale (Gray Hulk) and Bill Sienkiewicz (old-fashioned green Hulk). It turns out that these choices signal what to expect in the book as a whole: an almost complete neglect of ¾ of the Hulk’s actual history and especially of the artists most associated with the foundational phases of the character — Kirby, Steve Ditko, Gil Kane, Marie Severin, Herb Trimpe, Sal Buscema, Todd McFarlane, Dale Keown — in favor of very recent (like, mostly 21^st-century) creators. With all due respect, that’s really skewed.

How skewed? Well, let’s see: Kirby gets six pages, mostly from the origin story. Ditko gets one. Meanwhile, Al Ewing’s horror-fied run on the character, The Immortal Hulk (mostly with artist Joe Bennett, from 2018 to 2021), clocks in at 31 pages.

So, yeah, skewed to the point of doing a disservice to both the earlier creators and the character. It’s particularly galling, since a full appreciation of Ewing’s nostalgia-heavy run demands a familiarity with the long sweep of Hulk history, i.e. the works of said Silver and Bronze-age creators (including writers Len Wein, Bill Mantlo and Peter David).

I realize it’s pointless to argue with this book’s selections of what to cover (most likely Johnson had to bend to the will of his bottom-line Marvel corporate overlords anyway), but it must be said: the Hulk has over 60 years of continuity, and while some of those thousands of stories resonate more than others, it’s hard to credit a history that leaves out or gives exceedingly short shrift to the Hulk as a founding member of the Avengers and as a founding member of the Defenders. We don’t even see a single panel from those stories.

But that’s just for starters. There’s no serious attention paid to the crucial matter of the Hulk’s psychological divide and how it originated (under Mantlo and David in the 1970s/80s) and how it relates to Banner’s abuse as a child by his father. There’s also virtually nothing on the character’s gray “Joe Fixit” persona, a fruitful era under David and (at first) Jeff Purves. But what the hey, at least we do get several pages devoted to Hulk & Thing: Hard Knocks (2004), a less distinguished and pretty much forgotten effort by writer Bruce Jones and artist Jae Lee.

Oh well, at least Johnson’s writing is penetrating, edifying and fresh. Just kidding, it’s a hack job! It’s all plot synopses, platitudes like “Being a superhero is never easy” and pat takes such as “Maybe the reason the Hulk has been so popular for so long is that he reminds us of the strength we all have inside us.” Actually, I think something like the opposite is true: the Hulk as conceived represented the monster inside all of us, threatening to burst out. Shelley’s Frankenstein and Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde were primary influences. Lee/Kirby’s genius lay in how (like Shelley) they humanized the monster, evoking sympathy, even compassion.

That feels like another big missed opportunity: if only Johnson had interviewed some of the creators and editors involved, or heck, even if he’d just quoted from Lee’s Origins of Marvel Comics, we might have had some genuine insights into the Jade Giant, what makes him tick.

Instead, we get the most cursory factoids from Hulk’s early stories, like he was originally gray and changed to green with the second issue, or that at first Bruce Banner would undergo his transformations only when night fell, sort of like a werewolf. “Can’t we all relate to the struggle for control?” Johnson muses.

More disappointment: the book treats things like the character’s catch-phrase “Hulk smash!” as givens, in place of illuminating the reader as to how the phrase emerged, when it was first uttered. Banner’s “You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry” also gets a shout-out — but why not then tell the reader that it came not from the comics but from the 1970s TV show with Bill Bixby and Lou Ferigno? At times this book seems afraid to hit the reader with that sort of multi-media complexity. It doesn’t shy from talking about the movies, though. But again, in a weirdly selective way: no mention at all of Ang Lee’s flawed but interesting 2003 film, with Eric Bana. If all you had was this book to go on, you’d think the first cinematic Hulk was Ed Norton in 2008.

Yes, yes, I know, they didn’t make this for Hulkologists, but for a mainstream public unfamiliar with the history of the character. But then why leave out so much of that history and lean into those aspects of the Jade Giant with which mainstream readers (presumably those who’ve only watched the movies/TV shows) are already familiar? Why not challenge their view of the Hulk a bit? Johnson takes the opposite tack: devoting short chapters which synopsize the Hulk storylines which most resemble the movies, mostly from recent action-heavy comics which aesthetically resemble movies: World War Hulk, Totally Awesome Hulk, Future Imperfect, Red Hulk, Ultimate Wolverine vs. Hulk, Indestructible Hulk, the aforementioned Immortal Hulk.

Jade Jaws is so much richer than that. Like, decades richer.

One other disconcerting facet of The Incredible Hulk: Worldbreaker, Hero, Icon deserves mention. This book is pretty but sloppy. It arranges material out of chronological order for no good reason. We are introduced to John Byrne’s obnoxious fourth-wall-breaking Sensational She-Hulk long before the original version of that character by Lee and John Buscema. The only justification I can think of is that Byrne’s version is the more famous, and the one that became a Marvel TV show about the time of the book’s release.

In discussing the love of Hulk’s life, Jarella (Betty Ross is Banner’s), we see covers and panels from issues that present the high points: Hulk’s journey to her microscopic home world, K’ai, the profound grief our hero experiences after she’s killed, his eventual return of her body to her people. But the text (more plot synopsis) doesn’t line up with the illustrations. The text in fact doesn’t make it past the first part of the storyline; it discusses neither the death of Jarella in #205 (November, 1976), nor the return of her body in #248 (June, 1980) — as if Johnson simply ran out of room, or some editor butchered his chapter to free up space for more pictures.

When I say sloppy, I mean sloppy.

They twice (on 29 and 105) rerun the same page of our heroine and the Toad Men from Sensational She-Hulk #2 (June, 1989), itself a parody of Hulk #2 (July, 1962). Not that they tell you that.

Johnson’s text ends suddenly on 219 in the middle of a discussion/plot synopsis of the 2007 World War Hulk storyline by Greg Pak and John Romita, Jr. It stops cold. The book’s last words are “… will he be able to have the control to stand down and end the war?” No clumsy conclusion, no silly outro or quippy “Go out and smash, folks!” Nothing. Again, you get the feeling that they met their quota and just said, “Okay, cut it here.”

Reader, they couldn’t even get the name of the book straight. The cover, with a portrait of Jade Jaws by Adi Granov, gives Hulk: Worldbreaker, Hero, Icon, but the title page throws in the article and adjective.

Things like that show you the book was poorly edited and hastily put together by a right hand that didn’t know what the left hand was doing — in short by folks who don’t seem to know or care much about the subject.

Do I have anything nice to say besides the production values? Well, after mostly ignoring the creators of all these stories, the book does provide credits for them at the very end. And here and there, you get some worthwhile discussion of how the comics inspired/influenced the TVs/movies. It’s thin gruel, however.

In sum: I was expecting little, and that’s just what I got.

 

8/11/2024: updated with copy edits at the request of the author.