Articles by michael-h-price
Sun Jan 13, 2008 — by Michael H. Price
Cloverfield: Big-Monster Flick, or 9/11 Allegory?, by Michael H. Price
Forgotten Horrors #39
Ringed with popular anticipation in view of its producer’s involvement with the hit teleseries Lost, director Matt Reeves’ Cloverfield proves to be something more than the moviegoing customers might have expected.
The film is an American Godzilla, and I don’t mean the bloated Hollywood Godzilla of 1998. A larger-than-life disaster film, Cloverfield addresses the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, in much the same way that Inoshiro Honda’s Gojira, or Godzilla, of 1954, helped Japan to come belatedly to terms with the bombings in 1945 of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And yes, I know: Giant-monster movies are dime-a-dozen fare, and so what do we need with another one? We don’t so much need another one, as we need somebody capable of doing one right – the way Fritz Lang did with Siegfried in 1924, or Honda with the original Godzilla. Cloverfield makes the cut, okay.
Such impossible menaces, after all, have served since ancient times to literalize humanity’s fears of threatening forces beyond reasonable control, from the Tiger Demon mythology of primeval Siam through the Germanic and British legends of Siegfried and Beowulf. (Robert Zemeckis’ 2007 version of Beowulf is more a matter of digital-effects overkill than of mythological resonance.)
Never mind that the American movie-import market had treated the 1954 Godzilla as merely another creature-feature extravaganza, drive-in escapism with trivialized English-language insert-footage and enough re-editing to diminish the myth-making allegory. In its authentic Japanese cut, Godzilla is a national epic on a par with Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai – same year, same studio. It took a while for America to catch on: The fire-breathing creature known as Godzilla is the A-bomb, re-imagined in mythological terms.
Yes, and it takes time for the popular culture to get a grip on a real-world disaster. Hollywood dealt at first with the 9/11 destruction of New York’s World Trade Center by dodging the issue, then gradually addressing the loss in such lifelike dramas as Spike Lee’s 25th Hour (2002), whose allusions to Ground Zero pointed toward an explicit depiction of the crisis in Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center (2006). There have been other such striking examples – but you get the idea.
Continue reading Cloverfield: Big-Monster Flick, or 9/11 Allegory?, by Michael H. Price ›
Sun Jan 6, 2008 — by Michael H. Price
A Deeper Origin of the Asian Horror-Film Phenomenon, by Michael H. Price
Forgotten Horrors #38
Blame it on Bud Pollard, for want of a more readily identifiable scapegoat: Hollywood’s prevailing obsession with remaking scary movies from Japan seems to have caught fire with Hideo Nakata’s Ringu (1998), which led to Gore Verbinski’s The Ring in 2002, with sequels and imitations from either side of the planet.
Continue reading A Deeper Origin of the Asian Horror-Film Phenomenon, by Michael H. Price ›
Sun Dec 16, 2007 — by Michael H. Price
The Posthumous Persistence of George E. Turner, by Michael H. Price
Forgotten Horrors #35
George E. Turner is a familiar name among serious movie buffs – a pivotal figure in the realm of film scholarship, as influential these many years after his death as he was during a lengthy prime of productivity. George’s authorship alone of a book called The Making of King Kong (and known in its newer editions as Spawn of Skull Island) would be sufficient to cinch that credential.
But add to that George’s hitch during the 1980s and ’90s as editor of The American Cinematographer magazine and resident historian of the American Society of Cinematographers, and you come up with a pop-cultural impact of formidable staying power, beyond the reach of trendy distractions.
Where George preferred to limit his interests to the prehistory of filmmaking and the first couple of generations of Old Hollywood, he nonetheless kept a hand in current developments: His last job in a seven-year span of purported retirement was that of storyboard artist and second-unit director on the hit network teleseries Friends. And as a fan, he was as fluent in the continuing story-lines of The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer as he was in the history of RKO-Radio Pictures or the careers of Boris Karloff, Claude Rains, Tod Browning and Val Lewton.
The Friends storyboarder hitch is significant: Even those who are most familiar with George Turner’s film scholarship – for example, a chronic-to-acute genre-history series that he and I launched in 1979 with a book called Forgotten Horrors – scarcely know of his parallel career as a commercial artist and gallery painter, a comics artist and newspaper illustrator, and overall an accomplished talent in practically any medium one might care to mention. His higher degrees, after all, were in commercial illustration (from the American Academy of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago), and before he re-invented his career in Hollywood during 1978-80 he had spent some 27 years as the editorial art director of a daily newspaper in Northwest Texas.
Continue reading The Posthumous Persistence of George E. Turner, by Michael H. Price ›
Sun Dec 9, 2007 — by Michael H. Price
Tippy Tacker’s Yuletide Travails, by Michael H. Price
Forgotten Horrors #34
December of 1938 saw the arrival of an ad hoc comic strip called Tippy Tacker’s Christmas Adventure, signed by one Robert Pilgrim and distributed to the daily-newspaper trade by the Bell Syndicate.
The feature appears to have run its month-long course with little fanfare and only desultory, though complete, documentation of its passage. The microfilm archive in which I had found Tippy Tacker shows no advance promotion, no front-page come-ons, and no particularly prominent placement. The daily installments appear away from the formally designated Comics Page, plunked down at random amongst the general-news and advertising columns. Just a business-as-usual, matter-of-fact deployment, with no attempts to steer the reader toward a Yuletide-special attraction.
The piece came to light around 1990. I was rummaging through the files of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, my home-base newspaper for a long stretch, in aimless pursuit of who-knows-what. The Depression-era back issues had yielded considerable raw material for my contributions to the original Prowler comic-book series, along with motion-picture advertisements relevant to my Forgotten Horrors series of movie-history books. Robert Pilgrim’s Tippy Tacker cropped up during one such eyestrain marathon at the microfilm station.
Sometimes, obscurity alone is cause for a resurrection, even though many outpourings of the Popular Culture (“history in caricature,” as the novelist and cultural historian James Sallis puts it) will lapse quite deservedly into obscurity. But I happen to have built a career around the defeat of that Old Devil Obscurity -- starting with the Forgotten Horrors books and progressing, or digressing, from there -- and Tippy Tacker’s Christmas Adventure seemed to fit that pattern..
Continue reading Tippy Tacker’s Yuletide Travails, by Michael H. Price ›
Sun Nov 25, 2007 — by Michael H. Price
And Now for Something Completely Honky-Tonk, by Michael H. Price
Forgotten Horrors #32
Some recent installments of this so-called Forgotten Horrors feature – the title suggests a resurrection of obscurities more so than it proclaims any particular shivers – have established the music-making imperative as essential to the standing of Robert Crumb as a Great American Cartoonist. Other such pieces have touched upon the kinship that I have perceived over the long haul amongst comics, movies, and music. This inclusive bias was cinched as early as the moment I noticed, as a grammar-school kid during the 1950s, that a honky-tonking musician neighbor named “Honest Jess” Williams was (unlike most other grown-ups in my orbit) a comic-book enthusiast.
The connection was reinforced around this same time, when I met Fats Domino backstage on a Texas engagement and learned that the great New Orleans pianist included in his traveling gear plenty of issues of Little Lulu, Archie, and Tales from the Crypt. Later on, as a junior high-schooler, I discovered that a stack of newsstand-fresh funnybooks always seemed to exert their thrall more effectively with a hefty stack of 45-r.p.m. phonograph records on the changer. (“Flash of Two Worlds” plus Charlie Blackwell’s Warners-label recording of “None of ’Em Glow like You,” augmented with a wad of Bazooka-brand bubblegum, add up to undiluted pleasure – well, the combination worked for me, anyhow.)
This latest unearthed obscurity has more to do with music – and a peculiar strain of indigenous Texas music, at that – than with any other influence. But the parallel tracks of American roots music, comics, and motion pictures tend to cross spontaneously. There is only one Show Business, and if not for the early revelation that such a fine Western swing guitarist as Jess Williams followed the comic books avidly (his favorites were Tomahawk and Blackhawk, the comics’ great “hawks” after Will Eisner’s Hawk of the Seas), I doubt that conclusion would have struck home with me.
Continue reading And Now for Something Completely Honky-Tonk, by Michael H. Price ›
Sun Nov 18, 2007 — by Michael H. Price
Gene Autry’s Empire – ‘Phantom’ or Otherwise, by Michael H. Price
Forgotten Horrors #31
“So how did I get to be a movie star, anyhow?” Gene Autry (1907–98) asked George E. Turner and me in 1985.
George and I were consulting with Old Hollywood’s preeminent make-believe cowboy about his donation of a large collection of motion-picture footage to the Southwest Film & Video Archive at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. (I had begun working with the SMU film library in 1983 in connection with the preservation of an extensive batch of black-ensemble movies from the 1920s –1950s that had been salvaged from an abandoned warehouse in East Texas. Hence the Tyler, Texas, Black Film Collection, which amounts to a story for another day.)
Anyhow, on this 1985 occasion, Autry had recognized George and me as the authors who had taken him to task a few years earlier – politely, of course – for his having usurped the greater celebrity that had belonged to an authentic cowboy-become-movie star named Ken Maynard.
Now, being admirers of Maynard, George and I had assumed a resentful attitude in a book called Forgotten Horrors. The movie that at once cinched Autry’s stardom and signaled Maynard’s decline is The Phantom Empire (1935). And yes, The Phantom Empire is a horror movie, with nuclear-age science-fictional foreshadowing. And a Western adventure. And a country-music showcase, on top of all that. Only in Hollywood.
Continue reading Gene Autry’s Empire – ‘Phantom’ or Otherwise, by Michael H. Price ›
Sun Nov 11, 2007 — by Michael H. Price
Li’l Abner Lost in Hollywood, by Michael H. Price
Forgotten Horrors #30
Sustained flashback to 1940, and to an early stage of confidence and high promise for Al Capp’s long-running comic strip, Li’l Abner. Conventional wisdom, bolstered by accounts from Capp his ownself, holds that the name Yokum is a combination of “yokel” and “hokum.” That would be Yokum, as in Abner Yokum and his rural Southern lineage.
Such an explanation also might seem to demean the resourceful gumption that Li’l Abner Yokum and his family represent. Capp established a deeper meaning for the name during a series of visits around 1965-1970 with comics historian George E. Turner and Yrs. Trly.
“There are many real-life Yokums around the South,” explained Capp. “Some spell the name like Abner’s, with variations including Yoakam and Yokom, and so forth. It’s phonetic Hebrew – that’s what it is, all right – and that’s what I was getting at with the name Yokum, more so than any attempt to sound hickish. That was a fortunate coincidence, of course, that the name should pack a backwoods connotation.
“But it’s a godly conceit, really, playing off a godly name – Joachim means “God’s determination,” something like that – that also happens to have a rustic ring to it,” Capp added. “When I came up with that ‘yokel-plus-hokum’ bit in some early interviews, I was steering clear of any such damned-fool intellectualism. It helps to keep things looking simple for the massed readership, when you’re trying to be subversive with a cartoon.” (One such “yokel/hokum” reference appears in an article on Capp’s success with Li’l Abner in the November 1942 issue of Coronet magazine.)
A.D. 1940 is a significant point, here, in that the year marked Abner’s first leap from the funnypapers onto the moving-picture screen.
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Sun Nov 4, 2007 — by Michael H. Price
R. Crumb’s Music Madness – part two, by Michael H. Price
Forgotten Horrors #29
Continued from last week:
Robert Crumb and I began early in 1985 to develop a musical accompaniment for the first stage production of R. Crumb Comix at Fort Worth, Texas’ Hip Pocket Theatre. We consulted by telephone between my digs in Fort Worth and his home near Winters, California, and Robert prepared numerous reference dubs from his collection of 78-R.P.M. phonograph records. These, I augmented with musical sources from my own library, plus scattered original compositions. I recruited an orchestra from within guitarist Slim Richey’s and my jazz trio, Diddy Wah Diddy, and from our affiliated string band, the Salt Lick Foundation, with which I had recently completed a string of record albums for Slim’s Ridge Runner/Tex Grass labels.
Band rehearsals commenced in May of 1985, with all concerned forewarned to buck up for a three-hour show scored with what Crumb wanted to be “constant music – just like in those ol’ Hal Roach comedy films.” Yes, and never mind that the Roach pictures (including the Depression years’ Laurel & Hardy and Our Gang series) ran to just 20 or 30 minutes apiece in length. Well, at least there would be an intermission.
So Robert reached Texas on schedule, got settled in, and found the progress agreeable. He warmed especially to the women (consistent with Crumb’s vision) whom director Johnny Simons had cast. Robert took issue with some of the music as sounding “too modernistic – that ’forties swing stuff” (no accounting for taste) but found the score workable overall, enjoying the sound well enough to commandeer a plectrum banjo from Salt Lick’s Lee Thomas and perform as a member of the orchestra on the opening weekend that June. Crumb’s banjo-playing fit right in, evoking memories of Eddie Peabody and the Light Crust Doughboys’ Marvin “Smokey” Montgomery. I had composed one of the show’s tunes, “Save Me a Slice of That,” as a Doughboys pastiche.
Continue reading R. Crumb’s Music Madness – part two, by Michael H. Price ›
Sun Oct 28, 2007 — by Michael H. Price
R. Crumb’s Music Madness and Me, by Michael H. Price
Forgotten Horrors #28
The life and times of R. Crumb, a mensch among men and one of the more steadfastly brilliant practitioners of American (resident or expatriate) cartooning, have been sufficiently well covered in Terry Zwigoff’s documentary film, Crumb (1994), and in Peter Poplaski’s The R. Crumb Handbook (M.Q. Publications; 2005) and innumerable column-inches of The Comics Journal, that I feel no particular need to pursue any generalized biographical tack here.
In a recent letter, Crumb brings things somewhat up to date: “I’m in the middle of a big project – comic-book version of the Book of Genesis, approx. 200 pages when finished.” This involvement had prevented his traveling to Texas in 2006 to take part in a new experimental-theatre staging of R. Crumb Comix with director Johnny Simons and Yrs. Trly. Simons’ Fort Worth-based Hip Pocket Theatre troupe has adapted Crumb’s stories on several occasions since 1985.
Robert Crumb’s larger career might reasonably find itself crystallized in two warring viewpoints: The authoritative critic Robert Hughes’ earnest likening of Crumb to Pieter Brueghel the Elder, greatest of the Sixteenth Century’s Flemish painters, vs. this published declaration from Crumb his ownself: ‘Broigul I ain’t... let’s face it.’
Continue reading R. Crumb’s Music Madness and Me, by Michael H. Price ›
Sun Oct 21, 2007 — by Michael H. Price
The Perils and Pleasures of Moviola, by Michael H. Price
Forgotten Horrors #27
I’ve been sorting through the newspaper-cartoon backlog lately, beefing up the digital-image archive while determining whether anything from a busy stretch at the drawing board during the 1990s might bear resurrecting for fresh publication. Much of this material involves a Hollywood-lampoon strip called Moviola, which originated as a weekly feature for the Star-Telegram of Fort Worth, Texas, during its last years as a higher-minded publication.
The first movie parody I ever encountered – and thus, a building-block of my long-stretch involvement in cartooning and film scholarship – came from my Uncle Grady L. Wilson, a theatre-chain manager. Grady could concoct the damnedest jolly nonsense from the flimsiest of material, and keep a straight face in the bargain. He announced to me one day in 1954 that he had booked a picture called "The Preacher from the Black Lagoon."
Now, I was six years old at the time and as impressionable as Silly Putty, and so I found it necessary to witness the arrival of Jack Arnold’s Creature from the Black Lagoon on the big screen before it dawned on me that my uncle had been just woofing.
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Sun Oct 14, 2007 — by Michael H. Price
Cowpuncher cartoonist J.R. Williams, by Michael H. Price
Forgotten Horrors #26
Great cultures yield great artists, and I’m not talking necessarily about Ancient Rome or the Renaissance periods of either Italy or Harlem. The cowboy culture of the Southwestern Frontier has spawned its share of artistry, from poets and musicians to painters and, yes, cartoonists.
Conventional wisdom holds that Charles M. Russell (1864-1926), was the most gifted of the Western cartoonists. Russell’s illustrated correspondence, as preserved at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, helps to shore up this belief. But Russell’s leanings toward the presumably finer arts prevented him from pursuing cartooning as a career.
A near-contemporary of Russell’s, James R. Williams (1888-1957), took a different tack, becoming a working cartoonist who based a long-running daily newspaper feature upon his younger days as a ranchhand.
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Sun May 27, 2007 — by Michael H. Price
MICHAEL H. PRICE: Dick Tracy, from Strip to Screen
Forgotten Horrors #4
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Much as the crime melodrama had helped to define the course of cinema – especially so, from the start of the talking-picture era during the late 1920s – so Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy proved a huge influence upon the comic-strip industry, beginning in 1931. It was something of a foregone conclusion that the paths of Tracy and the movies should intersect, and none too soon.
It took some time for both the talking screen and Dick Tracy to find their truer momentum. Bryan Foy’s Lights of New York (1928), as the first all-talking picture, marked a huge, awkward leap from the part-talking extravagances of 1927’s The Jazz Singer. And Lights of New York proved impressive enough (despite its clunky staging and the artists’ discomfort with the primitive soundtrack-recording technology) to snag a million-dollar box-office take and demonstrate a popular demand for underworld yarns with plenty of snarling dialogue and violent sound effects. Gould launched Tracy with a passionate contempt for the criminal element but made do with fairly commonplace miscreants until his weird-menace muse began asserting itself decisively during 1932-1933.
Chet Gould’s fascination with such subject matter, as seen from a crime-busting vantage as opposed to the viewpoint of outlawry, appears to have influenced Hollywood as early as 1935 – when William Keighley’s “G” Men and Sam Wood’s Let ’Em Have It arrived as trailblazing heroic procedurals. These watershed titles posed a stark contrast against such antiheroic sensations as Roland West’s Alibi and The Bat Whispers (1929-1930), William Wellman’s The Public Enemy (1931), and Mervin LeRoy’s Little Caesar (1931). It bears wondering whether Edward Small, producer of Let ’Em Have It, may have taken a cue from Tracy, for the film pits an FBI contingent against a disfigured human monster (played by King Kong’s Bruce Cabot) whose scarred face and vile disposition seem of a piece with the grotesques whom Gould would array against Dick Tracy.
I’ve been on a renewed Tracy kick since the arrival last year of IDW Publishing’s The Complete Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy, a debut volume covering 1931-1933 (the second volume, going up to 1935, was released earlier this month). The interest extends to a re-watching of the Tracy movies that began in 1937 with Republic Pictures’ Dick Tracy serial. Cable-teevee’s Turner Classic Movies has staged recent revivals of the (considerably later) Tracy feature-films from RKO-Radio Pictures, and various off-brand DVD labels have issued dollar-a-disc samplers of the (still later) live-action Tracy teleseries. An audio-streaming Website has come through with two Tracy-spinoff record albums from the post-WWII years; one, The Case of the Midnight Marauder, involves a ferocious encounter with Gould’s most memorable bad guy, Flattop. (The less said, the better, about UPA Studios’ animated Tracy series of 1961. And likewise for Warren Beatty’s 1990 Dick Tracy, which commits the sin of “cartooning the cartoon,” its live-action basis notwithstanding.)
Continue reading MICHAEL H. PRICE: Dick Tracy, from Strip to Screen ›
Sun May 20, 2007 — by Michael H. Price
MICHAEL H. PRICE: Alley Oop’s Stagebound Texas Homecoming
Forgotten Horrors #3
He’s got a chauffeur that’s a genuine dinosaur…And he can knuckle yo’ head before you count to four.
– Dallas Frazier
“Alley Oop” (1960)
The formidable dinosaur-replica standing guard at the entrance to the Museum of Science & History in Fort Worth, Texas is a native Southwesterner in more ways than one. The creature goes by the academic name of Acrocanthosaurus atokensis, and as such it was not discovered until around 1950.
But a Fort Worth cartoonist named Vincent T. Hamlin had in fact discovered that unknown monster in the fertile substrata of his imagination – almost a generation’s span before the first Real World unearthing of any fossil remains. Hamlin called the creature by less of a mouthful of a name, and he made Dinny the Dinosaur a prominent player in a rip-snorting comic strip called Alley Oop, about a prehistoric Everyman. Dinny’s resemblance to the Acrocanthosaurus, or high-spined lizard, is uncannily prophetic.
This tidbit of provincial history took on a manifold relevance a couple of years ago with a smart accident of timing. No sooner had the Museum of Science & History opened its epic-caliber Lone Star Dinosaurs gallery, than Fort Worth’s Hip Pocket Theatre launched a stage adaptation of Alley Oop, in August of 2005. The bold juxtaposition of provocative science-fact with adventurous science-fantasy is one of those nowhere-but-Texas coincidences that would leave Vince Hamlin beaming with pride. If he were still around to do any beaming, that is.
In the interest of B.F.D. (Belated Full Disclosure), I should mention that I hold a stake in all these developments. I composed the musical score for Hip Pocket’s Alley Oop. My own book of prehistorical lore, a restoration of the late George E. Turner’s 1950s dinosaur comic strip The Ancient Southwest (TCU Press), had its rollout at the Science & History Museum. And V.T. Hamlin (1900-1993) was my first major-league mentor in the cartooning profession. Sooner or later, everything comes full-circle.
After all, it was the West Texas landscape, with its outcroppings of prehistoric remains and its air of primeval antiquity, that had given the Iowa-born Hamlin an inspiration for Alley Oop, ’way back during the 1920s. He was working as a newsroom cartoonist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram at the time, producing a comics-panel series called The Panther Kitten, a chronicle of the ups and downs of a tenacious baseball team called the Fort Worth Cats. And Hamlin’s nearness to the natural history of West Texas became a springboard to Alley Oop.
“Y’know, I really created the blueprint for Alley Oop there at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram,” Hamlin told me in 1990. The occasion involved Frank Stack’s and my efforts to compile and annotate a set of Alley Oop reprints at Kitchen Sink Press. Hamlin added: “Well, I suppose I had been drawing the guy who would become Oop ever since I was a kid.
Continue reading MICHAEL H. PRICE: Alley Oop’s Stagebound Texas Homecoming ›
Sun May 13, 2007 — by Michael H. Price
MICHAEL H. PRICE: Movies Is Comics and Comics Is Movies
Forgotten Horrors #2
I’ve gone into some detail elsewhere about how my Forgotten Horrors series of movie encyclopedias (1979 and onward) dovetails with my collaborative comic-book efforts with Timothy Truman and John K. Snyder III. More about all that as things develop at ComicMix. This new batch of Forgotten Horrors commentaries will have more to do with the overall relationship between movies and the comics and, off-and-on, with the self-contained appeal of motion pictures. I have yet to meet the comics enthusiast who lacks an appreciation of film.
Although it is especially plain nowadays that comics exert a significant bearing upon the moviemaking business – with fresh evidence in marquee-value outcroppings for the Spider-Man and TMNT franchises and 300 – the greater historical perspective finds the relationship to be quite the other way around.
It helps to remember a couple of things: Both movies and comics, pretty much as we know them today, began developing late in the 19th century. And an outmoded term for comics is movies; its popular usage as such dates from comparatively recent times. The notion of movies-on-paper took a decisive shape during the 1910s, when a newspaper illustrator named Ed Wheelan began spoofing the moving pictures (also known among the shirtsleeves audience as “moom pitchers” and “fillums”), with cinema-like visual grammar, in a loose-knit series for William Randolph Hearst’s New York American.
Christened Midget Movies in 1918, Wheelan’s series evolved from quick-sketch parodies of cinematic topics to sustained narratives, running for days at a stretch and combining melodramatic plot-and-character developments with cartoonish exaggerations. Wheelan’s move to the Adams Syndicate in 1921 prompted a change of title, to Minute Movies. (Don Markstein’s Web-based Toonopedia points out that the term is “mine-yute,” as in tiny, rather than “minnit,” as in a measure of time. No doubt an intended sense of connection with the Hearst trademark Midget Movies.) Chester Gould showed up in 1924 with a Wheelan takeoff called Fillum Fables – seven years before Gould’s more distinctive breakthrough with Dick Tracy.
Continue reading MICHAEL H. PRICE: Movies Is Comics and Comics Is Movies ›
Sun May 6, 2007 — by Michael H. Price
MICHAEL H. PRICE: Spider-Man 3's spectacular overkill
Forgotten Horrors #1
It helps to remember, now that a third Spider-Man epic has arrived to herald the school’s-out season at the box office, that the title character had started out as the comic-book industry’s least likely recruit to the ranks of super-heroism.
The idea of a human being with the proportionate strength of a spider had been kicking around since the 1950s. Comic-book pioneers Joe Simon and Jack Kirby seem to have arrived there first, with an undeveloped concept known as the Silver Spider. The inspiration ran afoul of a publishers’ bias against spiders and other such crawly creatures, the bankable success of Batman notwithstanding. But Simon and Kirby steered the basic notion into print in 1959 with a change-of-species Archie Comics series called The Fly – capitalizing upon an unrelated but like-titled hit movie of 1958.
By the early 1960s, Kirby was slumming at a low-rent publishing company that was soon to become the influential Marvel Comics. Kirby and writer Stan Lee had recently found competitive leverage with a band-of-heroes comic called The Fantastic Four – grimmer and edgier than the fare offered by big-time DC Comics. DC’s Superman and Batman franchises anchored a line of costumed heroes who got along well enough to have formed a super-heroes’ club.
Lee and Kirby’s retort to DC Comics’ Justice League magazine had been a Fantastic Four whose members quarreled and exchanged threats and insults. After Kirby had raised the Silver Spider as a prospect, Lee and Steve Ditko envisioned Spider-Man as a teen-age nebbish, afflicted with superhuman abilities by a bite from a radioactive spider. Artists Kirby and Ditko combined qualities of strength and neurosis in the character design: Superman’s alter-ego, Clark Kent, wore eyeglasses and feigned social withdrawal as a disguise; Spider-Man’s alter-ego, Peter Parker, wore eyeglasses because he was a nearsighted dweeb.
The embryonic Marvel Comics, having little to lose and plenty to prove, launched Spider-Man in a failing magazine and hoped that somebody might notice. Sales figures spiked against expectations. Lee’s unsophisticated attempts at philosophical depth struck comic-book readers of the day as comparatively profound. Spider-Man’s début in his own title involved a violent misunderstanding with the members of the Fantastic Four.
Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies date from times more recent (2002-and-counting), but they recapture well that early stage of 45 years ago in which Peter B. Parker, alias Spider-Man, marks time between altercations by wondering whether he deserves to be saddled with such responsibility. Raimi’s Spider-Man 2 (2004) is generally regarded as one of the more mature-minded comic-book films, reconciling sensationalism with provocative ideas.
Editor's Note: SPOILERS after the jump...
Continue reading MICHAEL H. PRICE: Spider-Man 3's spectacular overkill ›
