What if the story of Jekyll and Hyde were based on a real person, a true case? And what if there were someone alive in the present day that had the same horrible curse?
This is the premise of the new BBC mini-series Jekyll, premiering this Saturday at 8 PM on BBC America. The series was envisioned by producer Jeffrey Taylor and Steven Moffat, creator of the British comedy Coupling and writer of several episodes of the new Doctor Who series (such as “[[[The Girl In The Fireplace]]]” and “[[[The Empty Child]]]”). Steven Moffat handles the writing for all episodes.
The six episode mini-series features Doctor Tom Jackman, a man who doesn’t know who his parents were, having been found as an abandoned baby in a railway station. For the past several months, Dr. Jackman has been having black-outs during which another force is inexplicably inhabiting his body. Along with this darker personality that seems to lack any morals, there is a physical change. Jackman’s alter ego is actually younger, thinner, two inches taller, and has borderline superhuman strength and speed. Jackman soon finds out that the famous story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was based on a real person who lived and died in the 19th century. Now Jackman struggles to keep his life in control and his family safe, a family he prays that his own “Mr. Hyde” will never find out about lest he decide to attack them.
Joe Matt is a lazy, pornography-obsessed cartoonist whose main (or possibly only) subject is his own miserable life. If you’ve heard of Matt’s work before, you’re probably wondering why I’m restating the obvious. If you’ve never heard of Matt before, you’re probably wondering how much of a career one can get out of that – well, it’s not a deep well, but he’s been at it for nearly twenty years.
Spent collects four issues of Matt’s comic Peepshow; it’s essentially a sequel to his first full-length graphic novel, The Poor Bastard. Poor Bastard was mostly about his rocky relationship with his girlfriend Trish in the early ‘90s, and Spent’s four issues take place in 1994, 1996, 1998, and 2002, respectively. (And the really sad and pathetic thing is that Matt’s depicted life didn’t change in the slightest between ’94 and ’02; these issues read almost as if they’re four successive days.) Matt is seen either in company with his two cartoonist friends, Seth and Chester Brown, or (generally alone) in his room, obsessing about himself and talking to the reader.
Now, what I say from here on applies to the “Joe Matt” who is the main character of Spent; it may or may not precisely describe the real-world Joe Matt, though, to all appearances, he does document his life quite honestly. (And a tip of the hat to my fellow comics reviewer Jeff VanderMeer, with whom I spent several enjoyable months last year debating such things as how much of the “Bret Easton Ellis” in Lunar Park can be mapped onto the man of the same name who wrote that novel.)
Note: All you need to know is that Popeye is back, on DVD, this Tuesday, July 31. If you’re not getting up to go place your order I guess you can continue reading if you want, but that’s all you really need to know. Otherwise, know that —
The modest and self-effacing Jerry Beck has once again returned from animation’s mountaintop with the real deal in the form of [[[Popeye The Sailor, 1933-1938]]]. Sixty cartoons on four discs, plus plenty bonus features, commentary, the works. To the purist, and why be in pop culture if not to root out the impure, these are the only Popeye cartoons worth the name.
Not since their theatrical release, all those decades ago, have people been able to see these works as they were intended to be seen. This of course assumes you are going to show them in a jammed movie palace on Saturday night filled with everyone in your town from eight to eighty who’ve just seen a newsreel starring Mussolini.
I don’t have to tell you that every studio but Disney thought their cartoons were an embarrassing necessity of the business, like Port-o-Sans at Woodstock. Once the studios didn’t need to program short subjects along with their features they dropped them thisquick.
They lived on in fragile prints, before the age of videotape, picking up scratches and noise each time they were put through your local television station’s film chain. When Hanna-Barbera’s half hour shows became widely available in their second run the broadcasters decided to save themselves a few minutes trouble and ditch the short cartoons for the new, half-hour, self contained shows.
It is some testimony to their naïve sense of duty to their customers that most TV stations had one of their employees put on a yachting hat or an engineer’s cap and pretend to be Sailor Sam or Casey Jones for an hour or so to keep the cartoons from bumping into the commercials. The half hour TV era cartoon shows let the stations save the money on the host segments (the host was the least of it; they had to light a set and staff the studio: a couple of cameramen, a floor director, a director and an engineer).
But what we tuned in for were the cartoons. And we could tell the old Hollywood cartoons were the gold standard. First of all, they were obscure. We didn’t get all the jokes, didn’t understand all the references, just like when we observed the grown-ups. There were jokes we got the first time, and we came back because we could instinctively tell from the timing that there were more laughs to be had, and even more precious, insights into the adult world not to be had in any other way.
Olive, for example, at one point sang that she would only consider a “clean shaven man,” a new idea to second grade boys. Bluto’s beard and Popeye’s stubble were random phenomena to us, like rabbits having long ears. We weren’t aware of the idle pleasures of beard husbandry or the agony of a daily shave. But the knowledge of Olive’s preference (and the goddam song) stay with you a lifetime.
Warners and Columbia were glad to get a few bucks for the rights to their now useless films from television distributors in the late 1940s. The ubiquitous a.a.p. company marketed hundreds of cartoons to greedy television stations. These cartoons, made by adults for a general audience, were now thought to be perfect children’s programming. Of course they weren’t. Children loved them, but so did everyone else. Adults didn’t watch them because they were working or grabbing breakfast when the cartoons were on. And the children of the ‘50s dined on a rich diet of adult cartoons, adult comedy shorts and re-runs of even earlier television programs, such as the history of vaudeville and burlesque sketch comedy contained in the Abbot and Costello.
The SDCC panel on the subject featured a couple of guys in the Popeye business today, a darling young couple, in the animation biz, who were, in a stretch of the term, brought together by the one-eyed sailor. There was Jerry Beck to assure us the restoration was every bit as surreal and scarily sharp as the job done on the Looney Tunes sets. And there was Tom Hatten.
If you haven’t gotten the idea yet, I love the now almost entirely gone, once ubiquitous children’s television hosts. Sometimes incredibly gifted, gravitating to the major markets, sometimes Krusty on a Krutch, stuck inside of Springfield.
Tom Hatten was Popeye’s man in Los Angeles and so, even though I’d never before laid eyes on the man, I can vouch for his talent and love for his craft. Part of the job was doing personal appearances around town. If it was anything like the one’s I went to in Cleveland, Ohio (Jungle Larry) and on Long Island (Soupy Sales) they were probably mob scenes. Though not an animator, he had to draw sketches of the Popeye characters by the countless dozens.
I had to ask Hatten if he was aware of [[[The Simpson’s]]] Krusty the Clown, and whether he found him funny. To my surprise, and sort of admiration, he said he found the limited, stylized animation so off-putting he can’t watch it. He also singled out [[[Bullwinkle]]] for inclusion in that category. So he didn’t know or wouldn’t say if he found insight or insult in their rendering of his professional fellows.
They played one of the documentary features, on the several people who’ve been the voice of Popeye, including, what I would call a surprise, even for San Diego, that Mae Questel, the voice of Olive Oyl, did a stint as Popeye, too, and was maybe second to the great Jack Mercer. Mercer brought the character to life with his inspired ad lib comments, rising to brilliance when he would contribute scat fills between the phrases when Popeye would sing a song.
The set is peerless entertainment, higher education and made by my good friend Jerry Beck, whose web site, Cartoonbrew.com is a must visit for all cartoon freaks everywhere. But don’t worry about some buddy-buddy thing going on here. If you like Popeye, if you miss those great black and white cartoons (and the couple of color shorts they did) this is for you. I’ll be the guy ahead of you in line Tuesday morning. Just don’t blow me down.
Popeye the Sailor: 1933-1938, Vol. 1; Warner Home Video.
It’s been twenty years since Geary’s original A Treasury of Victorian Murder was published – and who would have thought, then, that a slim book of arch graphic short stories about little-known murders in Victorian England would be the beginning of the comics Geary would spend most of the decades to come creating? The first of the smaller-format, single-case volumes, Jack the Ripper, followed in 1995, with a new book every other year through 2005’s The Murder of Abraham Lincoln. Then 2006 saw The Case of Madeleine Smith, and this year yet another new Geary murder case.
Except for the first volume, each “Treasury of Victorian Murder” is a small book – about 5½ “ x 8¼” with roughly eighty pages of comics – about a particular, somewhat famous murder case from 19th century England or the USA. He’s covered the deaths of two Presidents – Lincoln and Garfield – and the cases "H.H. Holmes," Lizzie Borden, and Jack the Ripper. The remaining two books – about Mary Rogers and Madeleine Smith – are about famous sensational cases, crimes of passion.
The Bender “family” – there’s some doubt as to whether they were actually related, as they claimed to be – of Labette County, Kansas are not quite as famous as most of those cases (though I hadn’t heard of Madeleine Smith before, either). But they were certainly actively murderous and impressively mysterious, so their story gives Geary quite a bit to dig into. The Benders arrived in that raw, rural area of Kansas in 1870, very soon after the Civil War and not much longer after Kansas became a state in 1861. They set up a single-room (divided by a hanging canvas) inn and grocery on the major trail through the area, and settled into the community – considered eccentric, certainly, but basically accepted.
The Black Diamond Detective Agency is a bit of an anomaly for Eddie Campbell – it’s a book he wrote and illustrated alone that nevertheless is not concerned with stories or storytelling in any way. Campbell’s probably best-known for illustrating From Hell from Alan Moore’s famously copious scripts, but most of his work has been writing and drawing his own stories, sometimes with help from a loose band of local Australian cartoonists.
His two long-running sequences are both deeply about story: Bacchus consists of the tales of the few remaining Greek gods in the modern world, and contains many tales-within-tales, retold stories, and other storytelling conceits. The “Alec MacGarry” stories are even more entwined with stories, since they’re Campbell’s thinly-veiled autobiography about his own life as a comics creator, and are, at their heart, about the process of creating art and stories.
So it’s a bit odd to find that Black Diamond is a conventional detective story – a murder mystery, to be precise – set at the turn of the 20th century in the American Midwest. (That last is also surprising since Campbell is a Scot long resident in Australia – middle America isn’t his part of the world at all.) The story begins with a mysterious man in Lebanon, Missouri witnessing the explosion of a train during a demonstration and then helping to pull the wounded from the wreckage. He’s soon arrested and questioned, since the boxes of nitro used to blow up the train have his name on them.
It gets more complicated from there, but the focus is on that man of several names and on the investigation run by the Black Diamond Agency (which stands in for the real-life Pinkertons) of the explosion and related events. And, showing its origin as a screenplay, there’s a Big Secret at the end, which will be familiar to many – we’ve seen a story much like this many times before.
Imaginative literature thrives on the “what if?” story. What if aliens invaded Earth? What if vampires were real? What if a superpowered infant was rocketed to Earth from a doomed planet?
Or, in this case: what if Frank Lloyd Wright were an insane evil druid whose wrath extended years after his death?
OK, the architect in this graphic novel isn’t precisely Wright. He’s a prickly, arrogant, obnoxious know-it-all (so far, that doesn’t just describe Wright, but all architects) building his dream home (with some Fallingwater-esque elements) in 1969 Wisconsin. He’s running low on money, but that never stops arrogant, visionary architects in imaginative fiction – he just runs off to do some lectures to raise some money. Which leaves his young, city-jaded, hot-to-trot wife alone, and bored, in the company of the young, dashing, level-headed construction foreman. Do I need to draw you a diagram?
I draw a veil over what happens next, except to say that the bulk of this graphic novel (which has seventy pages of story, for those counting at home) takes place in the present day, among a group of young people cleaning up and restoring the aforementioned dream home.
It’s a good time to be a comics fan of my age – someone in his thirties who started reading comics in the late 1980s – since there’s been a continuing wave of reprints of the better comics of those days in more permanent form. A lot of things that I hadn’t read in a decade or more, because the original issues are bagged up in longboxes now buried under other things in a messy basement, are coming back into print on slick paper with square covers. It’s very nice to have these things in a form that fits on a shelf, but I do sometimes worry that some things that I loved at eighteen won’t be as compelling to me at thirty-eight.
I think I was on board for Scout when Eclipse started publishing it in 1987; I’d been following comics for a year or so then, and I knew Truman’s work from GrimJack, which he illustrated over John Ostrander’s scripts. I know I loved it immediately, and have been known to grouse, in the years since, about wanting all of the sequel series that Truman had sketched out, way back then. (Scout: Marauder and Scout: Blue Leader, which I’m still waiting for…but I’m also waiting for Ty Templeton to return to Stig’s Inferno and Zander Cannon to pick The Replacement God back up, so I may just not know when to give up on things.)
I was a bit apprehensive to go back to Scout after twenty years. On the one hand, I was pretty sure I’d still be happy with Truman’s art, since the recent GrimJack reprints (on much nicer paper than back in the day) showed off all of the little details of his line work, and that still thrilled me. But I remembered that Scout was a post-apocalyptic story, and I’ve developed an allergy to those since having kids. (It’s just one of those things – if a book is set in the near future, I work out how old my sons would be in that world, or how old I might be, if I’m not dead yet, and try to figure out what I or they might be doing. Stories that slaughter my family and I, especially as part of megadeaths off-stage for cheap pathos, aren’t things I’m as interested in any more.)
Like Ode to Kirihito, this is a major graphic novel by Osamu Tezuka, creator of Astro Boy and “godfather of manga,” translated and published in English by Vertical Publishing. I won’t repeat the background here, but you click to the earlier review if you like.
(I’ll just wait for you to get back.)
Apollo’s Song is from the same era as Ode to Kirihito – it was serialized in Shukan Shoen Kingu in 1970 (Kirihito ran during 70-71) – and has similar concerns and motifs, though it seems to be less aggressively counter-cultural than Kirihito was. There’s a strong medical drama element in Apollo, and even more mystical/religious ideas than in Kirihito, including an on-stage pagan goddess who I believe is meant to be taken as real.
Tezuka clearly doesn’t fear anyone’s scorn; Apollo opens with a ten-page sequence about impregnation from the point of view of sperm, characterized as a vast army of identical men, all seeking one woman, the ova. The story proper begins immediately afterward, as a boy – apparently meant to be about fifteen or so – is brought to a psychiatric hospital for treatment after having been caught attacking and killing animals. The boy, Shogo, explains that he is the unwanted son of a prostitute (or perhaps just a kept woman…kept by a long series of different men) who hates love, romance, and all manifestations of “tenderness.”
Will Eisner is one of the giants of 20th century comics; a figure whom reviewers always say “needs no introduction,” but then gets an extended explanation anyway. I’ll be brief: Eisner founded what became a major packaging studio in 1936, at the very beginning of the comic-book business, then launched the unique Spirit newspaper insert section in 1940. Starting in the ‘50s, he ran his own company, American Visuals Corporation, which created instructional materials in comics form, mostly for the government. In the late ‘70s – in his sixties, when most men are retiring – he started writing and drawing long-form stories that are now often called the first graphic novels, starting with A Contract With God in 1978. He died in 2005 in Florida, where he’d lived for the previous twenty years.
Will Eisner’s New York is the second omnibus volume of Eisner’s stories from W.W. Norton, a highly respected publisher of mostly non-fiction, after 2006’s The Contract With God Trilogy, collecting that original graphic novel and two related works. New York itself collects four separate books – New York, The Building, City People Notebook, and Invisible People – which are loosely related to each other and also vaguely set in the same city as the Contract With God stories. The “Contract With God” stories were set in a fictional Bronx neighborhood, but the stories in New York range more widely – a lot of them feel like the Bronx, but some are more Manhattanesque. (There’s not a whole lot of Brooklyn or Queens in here, though, and no detectible Staten Island. Eisner’s New York, like everybody’s, is specific and parochial.)
What strikes a new reader first is the question of dates; the stories in New York were originally published from 1981 through 1992, but the New York they depict is mostly that of the 1930s, with occasional bits from later decades. The “Dropsie Avenue” stories, like A Contract With God, are deliberately set in Eisner’s youth, but the tales in New York appear to be aimed at contemporaniety, but don’t feel any more modern than about 1966. It’s possibly too much to ask that a man in his sixties and seventies, living in Florida, be completely up-to-date with a city he already knows very well, but Eisner’s New York wasn’t a contemporary city even in 1981. This was the city he remembered, and recreated in ink from those memories.
O.K. I’ve got to admit this: I can’t remember the last time I’ve had so much fun with something I’ve pulled out of my weekly Diamond Distributing box., Betty Boop blow-up dolls notwithstanding.
At first glance, The Marvel Vaultmight appear to be just another well-designed history book. And who better to write such a tome than master comics writer and former longtime Marvel editor-in-chief Roy Thomas and noted comics historian Peter Sanderson? Well, Roy’s a noted comics historian too, but I’ve got a thing for the "editor-in-chief" title. Whereas there have been somewhat more comprehensive histories of Marvel (more-or-less including "corporate-approved" volumes), everything you need to know to understand and appreciate the publishing house is here, along with a great deal of inside information and well-informed observation that other books are lacking.
Nope. What makes The Marvel Vault amazing fun is the surplus of bells-and-whistles. It’s subtitled "A Museum-in-a-Book with rare collectibles from the World of Marvel" for a reason: it’s got tons of removable reproductions of all kinds of cool stuff produced by Marvel and its predecessor imprints Timely and Atlas over the past 70 years. To name but a few: original sketches of the early 1940s Sub-Mariner and Human Torch by Carl Pfeufer, including work from the history-making 50 page crossover from Human Torch #8; Bil Everett’s illustrated postcards to his daughter; a John Severin color piece denoting himself and fellow Atlas artists Bill Everett and Joe Maneely; the plot synopsis to Fantastic Four #1, a ton Merry Marvel Marching Society stuff; the program book to the 1975 Mighty Marvel Convention, Bernie Wrightson’s Howard The Duck For President art; Marvel Value Stamps from 1974; the Marvel No-Prize Book; a Marvel stock certificate from 1993; Andy Kubert’s Wolverine sketches from Origin… and, as the saying goes, a lot more.
The spiral-bound Marvel Vault was designed by Megan Noller Holt, and she deserves notation and praise. The Marvel Vault makes for a wonderful gift, particularly to yourself. It’s available at comic book stores (either in-stock or by special order), online retailers and better big box outlets. When it comes to being a Marvel fan, if, on a one-to-ten scale, you are anything north a "2" you’ll love this book.
The Marvel Vault, by Roy Thomas and Peter Sanderson
US $49.95, CAN $60.00, UK £29.99
ISBN: 9780762428441
ISBN-10: 0762428449
Published by Running Press
What if the story of Jekyll and Hyde were based on a real person, a true case? And what if there were someone alive in the present day that had the same horrible curse?
Note: All you need to know is that Popeye is back, on DVD, this Tuesday, July 31. If you’re not getting up to go place your order I guess you can continue reading if you want, but that’s all you really need to know. Otherwise, know that —
Tom Hatten was Popeye’s man in Los Angeles and so, even though I’d never before laid eyes on the man, I can vouch for his talent and love for his craft. Part of the job was doing personal appearances around town. If it was anything like the one’s I went to in Cleveland, Ohio (Jungle Larry) and on Long Island (Soupy Sales) they were probably mob scenes. Though not an animator, he had to draw sketches of the Popeye characters by the countless dozens.
It’s been twenty years since Geary’s original 
O.K. I’ve got to admit this: I can’t remember the last time I’ve had so much fun with something I’ve pulled out of my weekly Diamond Distributing box., Betty Boop blow-up dolls notwithstanding.
