MOVIE COMICS - Featuring Movie Comics #1, 1939

In my new book Movie Comics: Page to Screen/Screen to Page I cover the early history of how films adapted comics along with how comics themselves regularly adapted films (and television too!). The biggest example that I came across some years back, which really inspired me to write this book, was Movie Comics #1.

Published by All-American Publications (which a few years later was part of merger that formed what would become known as DC Comics), the series only ran for six issues in 1939, but remains a fascinating example of how comics remediated the movies and offered a souvenir of the film for eager fans. While home video would allow viewers to go back to a film once it left theatres, in the Classical Hollywood era you had only your memories of a film's imagery once it was gone from your local theatre.

In their opening editorial, Movie Comics #1 stated how they hoped the book will “serve as a permanent record of the pictures you have enjoyed, which you can refer to again and again with pleasure and entertainment.” Similarly, the second issue’s introduction states, “we want to make Movie Comics a permanent record of the outstanding pictures you have seen or will see in your neighborhood theatre, so you can enjoy them over and over again.”

The third issues describes how "we hope you will enjoy reading it before you see these pictures and again, after you see them in your neighborhood theatre,” while the fifth suggests, “We hope you will read Movie Comics, before and after you see the pictures, so you can get triple the enjoyment out of them!"

The six-issue run of Movie Comics from 1939 is an important example of how film and comics intersected in this era. For a full overview of the series, please see Movie Comics: Page to Screen/Screen to Page. 

The Blacker the Ink Wins an Eisner Award

Congratulations to editors Frances Gateward and John Jennings on winning the 2016 Eisner award for Best Academic/Scholarly Work for their anthology The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art:        

I'm very proud to have my essay, "Bare Chests, Removable Afros and Silver Tiaras: The Visual Design of Black Comic Book Superheroes" included in this important book.

MOVIE COMICS - 1940s Comic Book Adaptations

While there had been numerous adaptations of comic strips in the 1930s, the comic book boom of the late 1930s soon had film studios seeking to bring superheroes to the screen. Paramount was the first to thrill audiences with the animated adventures of Superman, but the Man of Steel almost arrived in theaters in the flesh in 1940. Republic Pictures was in negotiations with Harry Donenfeld's Superman Inc. to make a cliffhanger serial, even going so far as to write a draft of the screenplay. When Republic tried to counter Donenfeld's terms, he took the film rights to Max Fleisher Studios instead. Republic, not wanting their screenplay to go to waste, changed the character names and produced The Mysterious Doctor Satan, with the heroic Copperhead fighting against the title villain (alongside a woman named Lois!).

 

 Seeing that Republic Pictures lost out on Superman, Fawcett Comics quickly approached the studio about making a serial with their leading character, Captain Marvel. Given how Captain Marvel was so similar to Superman (with his super-strength, ability to fly etc.), Republic jumped at the offer (Donenfeld noticed the similarities, and a lawsuit eventually ended with Fawcett no longer publishing Captain Marvel comics - and soon after, *any* comics at all - in the early 1950s). Adventures of Captain Marvel arrived in theatres in 1941, and remains one of the best cliffhangers of the Classical Hollywood era. The hero was played by Tom Tyler (with Frank Coghlan Jr as Billy Batson), with flying scenes using a paper mache dummy propelled along a wire high above the ground. While the effect sounds ridiculous by modern standards, critics and audiences were thrilled by it. If 1978's Superman film promised viewers that they would believe a man can fly, then audiences in 1941 were just happy that a film tried to make a man fly in any way they could, believable or not.

 

In 1943, Columbia offered viewers a Batman serial which has been much maligned in recent years, despite offering audiences a perfectly serviceable version of the caped crusader. It was marked by a racist portrayal of its Japanese villain, Dr. Daka, given that it was produced during World-War II, but the film presents viewers with a relatively faithful version of its main hero. Bob Kane would go on to mock actor Lewis Wilson's weight, yet reviews of the time referred to him as handsome and appealing. The costume resembles that worn by Adam West two decades later, and the film is the first time that the Bat Cave is named in any form... soon appearing in comics as a result.

 

 There were a few lesser-known characters like The Vigilante and Congo Bill who got their own serials later in the decade, and a Batman sequel followed in 1948 with Batman and Robin. In 1948, Superman finally received a live-action serial from Columbia. While it starred Kirk Alyn as Clark Kent/Superman, Alyn was not allowed to be formally recognized as playing the Man of Steel. Producer Sam Katzman insisted that children believe that it really was Superman in the film, not an actor playing him, so the credits list only "Superman" as starring in the film. While Katzman tested out some flying shots with Alyn in a harness, Superman was ultimately made to fly in the film by way of animation. Whenever he needed to take flight, Alyn was replaced by his animated doppelganger. The same was true with stunts requiring great physical strength, with an animated Superman smashing through a rock wall to rescue Lois Lane.

 

 Special effects, of course, were not as advanced as they would become in later decades, and since serials were produced on smaller budgets at part of general B-filmmaking patterns at Poverty Row stalwarts like Republic and the smaller major studios like Columbia and Universal, we can't expect to find highly realistic looking effects work in these films. But audiences were delighted nonetheless by these comic book adaptations, no matter that were sometimes less than faithful to their source material, or that their effects were limited by their budget.

New B-movie article: The role of small talk...

Here's a fascinating article about the role of small talk in recent American B-movies like The Room and Birdemic:

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/07/the-room-birdemic-anyway-hows-your-sex-life/490019/



 


 ...I'd never considered this before, but I like the argument!