Sarasota Arts & Culture Magazine - September/October 2007 - (Page 59)

T he flash, boom, bang of comic strip culture has ripped across most of our imaginations at some point in our lives. Who can resist the visual splendor of Superman saving Lois Lane, Batman and Robin fighting crime and swinging through the air above Gotham, and Captain America pummeling terrorists after 9/11? These heroes born of dire circumstances have profoundly influenced television, film and popular culture in general. At times setting styles for an entire era in clothes, hair, food and manners, they are superhuman avengers flying out of the ink and cinematic light of great draftsmen. Comics began for two reasons: a basic human need for catharsis, a desire to sublimate a sense of adolescent inferiority through strength and violence, and to comment on contemporary social and political issues, best demonstrated in the California underground comics of the 1960s. Artists such as Robert Crumb and Spain Rodriguez raised issues of free speech in their subversive comics; so did the political comic strip art of G. B. Trudeau’s Doonesbury and Gerald Scarfe’s designs and direction for Pink Floyd’s The Wall concerts and film in 1978. But where did it all begin? How far back should the history of comics be traced? One tradition would track the lineage to Paleolithic cave paintings in Altamira, Spain, or the military propaganda art of ancient Rome, best illustrated in Trajan’s Column of AD 113 where the scenes unfold like a scroll and contain 2,500 painted and gilded figures. The Bayeux Tapestry of 1080 sequentially presents the conquest of England by the Normans under William the Conqueror, created in the early Middle Ages. Modern mass media comics, however, serve more diverse and complex purposes and have certain common characteristics. They appear at regular intervals with recurring characters that have predictable ranges of behavior and usually wear costumes. These characters appear within distinct genres among other characters of the same kind, involved in similar actions and events. Comics have accumulated a great number of conventions, which allow still frames to represent an enormous range of things: speech, movement, relationships, emotions, cause and effect, reader involvement, and the fictional nature of the comic itself. Behind their masks, Batman, Wonder Woman, Captain America, Spiderman, and Superman, have come to perform one of literature’s most important functions: examination of our mores, morals and illusions. In the golden age of comics during WWII, Captain America personified American democracy. He fought with great gusto a foreign Asian nation seven months before Pearl Harbor. Later comics, along with cigarettes and chocolate, were in the care packets sent to GI’s at the front. Another telling prediction in dealing with the realities of the day: Superman, in a special issue of Look Magazine, February 1940, grabs Hitler and Stalin and drops them off at the League of Nations—end of story, end of war. In March of 1941, on the first cover of Captain America, our hero is delivering a smashing right cross against the face of Hitler. Comics began as entertainment in the daily newspapers at the end of the nineteenth century. Publishers realized the profits to be made in repackaging their comic strips, and began selling them as books for 10 cents at newsstands. The first true comic book character was the jug-eared waif Yellow Kid, drawn by Richard F. Outcault. The Yellow Kid and his gang of mischief-makers first appeared on May 5, 1895, in At the Circus in Hogan’s Alley. But it was two poor Jewish kids from Cleveland, writer Jerry Siegel and cartoonist Joe Shuster, that created the greatest comic icon of all time—Superman. In the 1930s, a new trend in adventure comics reflected the need for escapism from the arduous times of the Great Depression. Unlike most superheroes that preceded him, Superman lived in the real world, with human weaknesses arts and culture magazine : : 59

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Sarasota Arts & Culture Magazine - September/October 2007

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