If Not Superheroes, What? Part VI - Humor Books

Critics of modern comics might, with some justification, accuse many pieces of taking themselves far too seriously. While expanding comics into a more adult conceptual territory (generally meaning the non-salacious connotations of the word adult) has done many good things for the form, the scowling humorlessness of many comics pieces ultimately makes such works unreadable in quantity. Art should have an impact on the consumer, but no aesthetic law compels this impact to limit itself to the inducing of misery, pessimism, or nihilism.

For decades, comics in general, across genres, took a lighter approach to their subject matter. Compare, for instance, Jack Cole's Plastic Man stories from Police Comics to (say) latter-day canon pieces such as Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns.

Indeed, until the 1970s (when comics theoretically "grew up"), publishers frequently dabbled in a variety of humorous pieces. Even if specific corners of their product line moved into the grim, other pieces took nothing seriously at all. For their part, they kept alive the traditions which had invested the medium with names to begin with - the terms comics, funnies, and funnybook owed to such origins.

Beginnings

Before the comic book came into being, the comic strip appeared in newspapers. We easily cross two century lines to get to the earliest pieces, such as "The Katzenjammer Kids" from the late 1890s.

The humor comic strip, and the subsequent humor comic book, essentially represented a new format for something that had existed in the nineteenth century and probably earlier. Some political cartoons date from the era of President Andrew Jackson, and enjoyed a considerable tenure before artists like Thomas Nast would become celebrities of the form around the turn of the twentieth century.

This makes finding a particular innovator responsible for the invention of the humorous cartoon rather difficult. In some ways, though, we might see the evolution of the humorous barb into a printed format, then an illustrated format (as print technology solved the various problems surrounding reproduction of images), then a serial illustrated format which could take whatever length a publisher might desire.

The Generalized Satire Book

Tales Calculated to Drive You Mad - generally referred to in shortspeak as Mad Comics - represents the archetype and standard of the generalized satire book. Mad, in its barely twenty-plus issues in the original format, routinely took on movies, television, the occasional politician, a small bushel-load of comics and comic strips. In general, its parodies did much more to entertain than the originals.

The breadth of its subject matter offered the satire book of this form more hooks through which to reach prospective readers; however, the choice of subjects still suggested a common (and, essentially, uniformly recognized) culture of entertainment.

The Genre-Specific Humor Book

One piece represents well the path of a very specialized humor book. Marvel Comics, still in the glow of its heyday, attempted something new for the times: a humor comic that specifically and exclusively on the superhero comics of the day. Not Brand Ecch! appeared as a humorous vehicle mixing self-parody and hype, trying, with the same vehicle, to take down the growing self-importance of superhero comics down a peg while engaging in the pandemic Lee-era Marvel hype. Although the pieces in this title stood up well against the better superhero comics parodies in genre classics like Tales Calculated to Drive You Mad - and, obviously, owed to such pieces on several levels - Not Brand Ecch! did not outlive the sixties. It made one last gasp in the early seventies, as Marvel's next venture into the humor comic, Crazy, gave up on new material and started running Not Brand Ecch! reprints (before going on to become a magazine).

Not Brand Ecch! perhaps failed owing to the overly-specialized character of its satires, pieces generally more meaningful to hard-core comics readers in spite of the general excellence of Marie Severin's artistic treatments of Marvel superheroes in need of need of deflation.

The Four-Color Sitcom

Some humor books revolved around concepts which much resembled situation comedy formulae, albeit in a manner not limited by the logistical concerns of film or television.

Angel and the Ape, for instance, centered on a partnership between a gorgeous young woman and a sentient gorilla (in the process, implicating its era, since the DC comics of the sixties seemed to have a peculiar fetish for gorillas and other simians). But we can note the resemblance to a sitcom formula with the young woman and a cartoonist ape working as private detectives - bizarre, but certainly no more so than well-remembered sitcoms like "Mister Ed."

The Media Tie-in Humor Book

In today's market, something like the Jerry Lewis comic of the sixties might seem rather unprecedented, but that piece managed to endure through a good 120 issues and more in another age of comics. At various times, other entertainers managed to provide the inspiration for other humor comics, of varying success. Bob Hope once enjoyed a DC book in the days when Jerry Lewis could move a comic. One can go back to the Maurer - Kubert Three Stooges comics, or, indeed, to the early days of television, to find other examples.

Slapstick, ridiculous situations, atrocious puns, and affronts to the dignity of the main character(s) provided the appeal of these works.

Harvey's Juvenile Line

Harvey Comics, a long-vanished publisher whose properties evoke recent memories mainly through the occasional film adaptation and through business and lawsuit stories about the ownership of their out-of-print concepts, once sold a large number of books aimed at younger readers.

Richie Rich, Baby Huey, Casper, Spooky, Hot Stuff, and connected spin-offs represented the backbone of their line. These pieces usually centered around characters one might understand to belong to a prepubescent age group (at least, anatomical conventions, particularly those of head-size-to-body-ratios, imply as much). Even the brogdignagian Baby Huey, a 200-pound duckling, fits this emphasis on very young protagonists. By using young heroes, Harvey targeted young readers, something which crosses contemporary comics taboos. Consider, for instance, the pejorative statement claiming a comic aims at "babies" (yes, used as an insult term rather than literally). One often hears a piece accused of pandering to "babies" for offenses like failing to contain profanity, enough graphic violence, or enough implied or explicit sex. That much louder we can expect critics to bellow when a piece specifically aims at younger readers rather than an all-ages crowd or thirtysomething adolescents.

Generally inoffensive by design, and featuring a mild slapstick humor and humor of situation, such pieces paid no homage to the idols that would come to drive comics in later decades: the cult of cool, the fad of the moment, and the dubious process of demonstrating "relevance" by morbidly dwelling on the ugly side of human nature did not, as a rule, intrude into these pieces. They never intended to disturb, and a later generation, much given to aesthetic theories that condemn anything that doesn't offend, frequently targeted Harvey pieces for an unkind and sometimes unfair derision.

The Harvey formula, more or less, owed to perhaps a generation of funny-animal comics (although pieces like Richie Rich technically dealt with human characters) and not from some conspiratorial rejection of mainstream comics values. Changing tastes and an increasingly draconian lock of a single editorial model on all comics, across genre and publisher, pushed these pieces to a peripheral place in the industry, and, eventually, like other non-superhero pieces, the line expired.

Archie, Et Al

Appearing in the forties and coalescing into a fixed formula by the fifties, Archie comics once played a seminal role in humorous comics about teenagers directed toward younger readers.

In some ways, Archie and derivative works owed to a vision of youth found in earlier pieces such as the Andy Hardy movies of the 1930s.

Executed by second-rate talent, the teen comics of the forties, fifties, and beyond could become trite and tiresome fairly rapidly. However, Archie (and related variants by the same publisher) managed to endure through creating pieces featuring the quirky personalities of the principals and driven by the possible consequences of the clashing of these quirks.

The Talent

Though many talents who worked in "serious" comics also did time working in humorous ones, humor comics frequently demand some specialized talents not necessary for linear comics in general. We should include as principal among these talents as a feel for humor, something that technical training that would serve a cartoonist well in other aspects can't really inculcate.

Some names excelled in such material. Will Elder, Harvey Kurtzman, Wally Wood, Jack Davis, and Marie Severin from EC all did humor work at their artistic peaks that few talents today have the ability to match. Some talents reached the hearts of fans better through in humor work - such as Bob Oskner. Other talents generally associated with more serious material spent time in the occasional humor project, such as Mike Sekowsky (artist for Justice League and Inferior Five), Roy Thomas (too many comics to count, but including Not Brand Ecch), or Neal Adams (whose tendencies towards realistic depiction made his humorous works in books like Jerry Lewis more anatomically plausible than the serious depictions of his contemporaries).

However, unlike today's comics market, the first generation of comics since the appearance of Superman teemed with talents who crossed the line from animation studios (especially Disney) to comics, a vector that had provided the world with figures like Walt Kelly and Jack Kirby.

The Fate of the Form

With comedy enduring well in other media, such as television and movies, we might wonder at the general failure of humor comics both in the short and long term views of the medium.

Humor still exists, embedded in a few of the titles of the superhero comics monolith. Peter David's Captain Marvel and the Giffen / DeMatteis Justice League of America end to come up towards the beginning of listings of humor-heavy superhero pieces.

Criticisms of such pieces by disgruntled (one might even use the terms "sour" and "mirthless") comics fans suggest a change in opinions by comics consumers over the decades. Humor pieces, one could glean from the critics, occur to some comics fans as attempts to demean fans or the medium, or as vehicles for performing a number of aesthetic crimes that essentially amount to failing to properly respect the dignity of the form. Such critics accuse such pieces of immaturity and triviality.

This complex of complaints, to my ear, suggests more about the complainers than the material. One sees in these objections a series of pleas not to do anything further to diminish the affected dignity of comics readers already troubled by the blow to their dignity that reading comics involves.

Here we see not an aesthetic reaction but a social one, borne of fears of receiving snubs from elitist peers. While social consequences of failing to establish the proper (if artificial or even relentlessly phony) credentials can involve severe punishments - including loss of access to the gene pool - in general, we can dispense with arguments that attempt to disguise social self-promotion as legitimate aesthetic analysis.

If you pick what you read out of fear of the consequences from a peer group that watches you like a hawk, in other words, you have problems that scowling and humorless editorial models of comics will not cure. Rather than putting an art form in a straightjacket, you might consider investing in less pretentious peers.

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Column 225. Completed 11-FEB-2001.