MICHAEL H. PRICE: What’s A Fishhead?
Continued from last week …
We had left Robert Bloch hanging in mid-conversation last week, speaking of Irvin S. Cobb as a forerunner of the “bizarre pulp” movement in popular fiction.
Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb (1876–1944) was a crony and occasional collaborator of Will Rogers, and a key influence upon Rogers’ droll sense of humor. He can be seen as an actor in such Rogers-starring films as Judge Priest (1934; deriving from Cobb’s folksier tales) and Steamboat Round the Bend (1935), both directed by John Ford. It was for other works entirely that Robert Bloch remembered Cobb.
“Have you ever read Irvin Cobb’s ‘Fishhead’?” Bloch asked me around 1979-1980. “Well, if it was good enough for Howard Lovecraft to single out as a nightmare-on-paper [in the 1927 essay Supernatural Horror in Fiction], then I was ready and willing to tear into it. Which I did. Changed my entire direction, that one story did.”
I can relate, all right. In 1995, independent publisher Lawrence Adam Shell and I set about to adapt as a graphic novel Cobb’s 1911 tale of righteous vengeance, “Fishhead,” in which a swamp-dwelling hermit of grotesque aspect runs afoul of malicious neighbors. If Irvin Cobb had drawn upon regional folklore to lend his title character a gift of supernatural communion with the wildlife, then our crew reckoned we must treat Cobb’s story itself as folklore – subject to sympathetic re-interpretation and elaboration as a condition of respect.
And otherwise, why adapt at all? Cobb would have done a greater service to scholarship than to popular literature if he had contented himself merely with compiling the various old-time rumors about reclusive souls presumed to possess spiritual bonds with the wastelands. The audacious job that Cobb called “Fishhead” backfired at first, accumulating rejections from one magazine after another on account of its unabashed gruesomeness and its sharp contrast with his gathering reputation as a sure-fire humorist. One editor, Bob Davis, of an adventurous magazine called The Cavalier, wrote to Cobb in 1911: “It is inconceivable how one so saturated with the humors of life can present so appalling a picture.”
But after Davis had relented and published the yarn in 1913, “Fishhead” proved a watershed, helping to trigger the so-called “bizarre pulp” explosion that would gerrymander the boundaries of mass-market fiction during the two-and-a-half decades to follow. By mid-century, when Cobb’s lighthearted and bucolic tales had become by-and-large forgotten, “Fishhead” was still reappearing as a magazine-and-anthology favorite.
Recycling-in-action: Herewith, an encore of a presentation I delivered earlier this month at Tarleton State University’s Langdon Weekend arts-and-farces festival at Granbury, Texas.
Back during the middle 1960s, my newsroom mentor George E. Turner and I became acquainted with the Texas-bred cartoonist Roy Crane (1901–1977), whose daily strip Buz Sawyer – a staple of the local newspaper’s funnies section – had recently landed a Reuben Award from the National Cartoonists Society. Like some Oscar-anointed filmmaker with a current box-office attraction, Crane was visiting his syndicate’s client-papers, one after another, to help promote this touch of newfound momentum for Sawyer as a circulation-builder.
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The songwriter and guitar-builder Greg Jackson, a key music-making cohort of mine since 1981, has taken the occasional hand in the comics racket, as well, as a consequence of the affiliation. Greg is the life-model, for example, for the character of Jackson Walker in Timothy Truman’s Scout books, and Greg supplied the lap-steel guitar riffs for a funnybook-soundtrack recording that accompanies a chapter of the Prowler series, first as an Eva-Tone Soundsheet insert and eventually as a digital file.-100.jpg)
The kinship between science and fantasy runs deep into antiquity – deeper, yet, than the well-aged but comparatively modern notion of science fiction. The filmmaker Ray Harryhausen, in his foreword to my revised edition of the late George E. Turner’s Spawn of Skull Island: The Making of King Kong (2002), invokes the spirit of the alchemist Paraceleus (1494 –1541) in describing the imaginative zeal necessary to bring (seemingly) to life the impossible creatures of cinema.
One of the odder collisions between science-fantasy and credentialed research took place during the spring of 1934, in a University of California research laboratory at Berkeley. Here, Dr. Robert E. Cornish announced that his team had restored life to a dog, Lazarus by name, that had been put to death by clinical means. Cornish bolstered his claim – a purported breakthrough that seems to have led no further – with motion-picture footage. The resulting publicity attracted such attention that the college’s administration booted Cornish off the campus. A June-of-1934 report in Time magazine describes a saddening follow-through:-100.jpg)
Steven Okazaki’s documentary feature White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will arrive August 6 over the HBO premium-cable network, marking the 62nd anniversary of the arrival of thermonuclear warfare. The film’s harrowing impact has been a matter of record since its in-competition run during last January’s Sundance Film Festival in Utah.
White Light/Black Rain finds its more persuasive voice in interviews with survivors of the bombings, illuminated by a gauntlet of harrowing archival footage. Its appreciation requires context, lest White Light/Black Rain be mistaken for an unprecedented re-examination. Its nearer origins lie in the graphic novels of Nakazawa, whose first-hand account of Hiroshima – he professes to have noticed the approach, followed by “a million flashbulbs going off at once” – yielded two Barefoot Gen animated movies of the 1980s. Nakazawa has aligned himself with Steven Okazaki since the 2005 documentary The Mushroom Club, a short-film stage-setter for White Light/Black Rain.
George McManus (1884-1954), once a household name via his long-running domestic-shenanigans comic strip Bringing Up Father, stands as a practical embodiment of the comics’ industry’s cinematic possibilities. The last of his comics-into-movies adaptations, Jiggs and Maggie Out West (Monogram Pictures; 1950), came to hand recently during the excavation process for a fifth volume of novelist John Wooley’s and my Forgotten Horrors film-book series.
Only on occasion nowadays do I revisit at any length the bizarre Southwestern region whose Dominant Culture gave rise to the chronic-to-acute exploits of Konstable Moe Lester. I use the word character facetiously, for in all his years of published misadventures (whether small-press or nearer some nebulous mainstream) and privately circulated gag strips, Moe has never been anything more than a facile caricature, a “type” embodying and exaggerating traits, mannerisms, and attitudes that prevail amongst the denizens of West Texas’ so-called Panhandle region.
The ungainly fellow pictured alongside is a concoction of my grammar-school days, modeled originally after an authoritarian physical-education teacher who took immense delight in reminding us younger kids that soon we would matriculate to the intermediate grades where he held sway. Talk about your incentives for under-achievement!
Not quite nine years of age, and already the author of a Banned Book. Over Mrs. Jenkins’ shrieks of outrage, Principal Howard Amick prevailed with somewhat a saner voice: He found the pages worth a chuckle but, even so, pronounced them a Waste of Talent. Damnation by faint praise, in other words, within a public-school system whose elementary art curriculum consisted of finger-painting and construction-paper cut-outs.-100.jpg)
My home-base city of Fort Worth, Texas, has since the 1950s, complicated its countrified essence with a set of class-and-culture bearings that range from the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition – America’s “So, there!” riposte to Khruschev and/or Tchaikowsky, dating from a peak-period of the Cold War – to four heavy-duty art museums of international appeal and influence. The local-boosterism flacks crow about “Cowboys ’n’ Culture!” at every opportunity, with or without provocation. But apart from the self-evident truths that Old Money (oil ’n’ cattle) fuels the high-cultural impulse and that the cow-honker sector finds chronic solace in the Amon Carter and Sid Richardson museums’ arrays of works by Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell, these communities seldom cross paths with one another.
