Comic Books 101

by Chris Ryall

  SILVER SURFER

  The Surfer has occasionally appeared on television over the years, primarily in the various Fantastic Four animated series. There was one appearance in the 1967 ABC Saturday morning series, and several in the 1994 syndicated series. As discussed earlier, the first season of the 1994 FF series was horrendous, and the Galactus/Surfer episodes were no exception. The second-season appearances were better. “When Calls Galactus” makes use of an excellent John Byrne story involving Galactus and his new herald Terrax, while “Doomsday” adapts the classic Lee/Kirby story about Doctor Doom stealing the Surfer's Power Cosmic.

  The Silver Surfer got his own animated series in 1998 on Fox. The scripts, shepherded by head writer Larry Brody, were intelligent and faithful to the source material while taking the characters in new directions. The animation was also first-rate, utilizing a combination of traditional cel animation for the primary characters, with a distinct Kirby influence, and 3-D CGI effects for Galactus and the outer-space imagery. The Silver Surfer series was hampered by production delays, which kept it from finding a steady audience. Eventually disagreements between Marvel and the production house Saban Entertainment caused the cancellation of the series, and problems between Fox and Marvel stemming from Marvel's then-precarious financial situation resulted in the series' being pulled from all repeats, rebroadcasts and any video release. We're hopeful the series will find its way through the legal morass and hit DVD — it deserves more viewers than it got.

  Like a streak of light, this DVD set arrived just in time.

  SPIDER-MAN: THE ‘67 COLLECTION © BUENA VISTA HOME ENTERTAINMENT, INC.

  SPIDER-MAN

  Marvel's trademark character, Spider-Man, burst onto TV screens in 1967 on ABC. Spider Man became an instant TV sensation, with an insidiously catchy theme song that carved itself in the minds of generations of viewers. The score was cool, jazzy, and head-bopping, but the animation was at best average, and often worse than that, with certain web-swinging sequences repeated ad nauseum to save money. Frequently the only thing that salvaged the mediocre scripts was the hilarious delivery and timing of the voice actors.

  The first twenty episodes of the series, produced by Grantray-Lawrence, have a sleek, streamlined design, particularly in the character models for Peter Parker and J. Jonah Jameson. Some shots look to be directly lifted from the original Steve Ditko artwork, particularly in close-ups of the Green Goblin. As for the stories themselves, they're faithful to the comics, utilizing many of Spidey's classic villains. Even when they venture out into new villains and threats, the tone of the series stays close to the comic's sensibilities.

  When Krantz Films took over in the second and third seasons, under the supervision of Ralph Bakshi, the show's mood became darker. Most of the episodes put Spidey in completely out-of-character battles with monsters, aliens, demons or subterranean cave dwellers, and sloppy action sequences and sometimes bewildering character poses made Peter Parker look more constipated than concerned. Furthermore, it was obvious that animation bits were reused to pad out the episodes, sometimes breaking out into the opening theme song in the middle of the episode over yet another web-slinging montage. Still, even when it's bad, it's pretty good, the kind of quaint cartoon show that's dated but still satisfies.

  Spidey returned to the airwaves in 1978, in live-action prime time, with the CBS TV movie The Amazing Spider-Man, followed by a weekly series in 1978. The series starred Nicholas Hammond as Peter Parker/Spider-Man and Robert F. Simon as J. Jonah Jameson and ran for fourteen episodes before being canceled despite decent ratings. It was just as well; other than the two or three brief appearances per episode of Spidey climbing up a skyscraper (often the same reused stock footage) or throwing an improbably woven webbed net over a couple of bad guys, there wasn't much difference between this and any other mediocre action/cop series airing at the time. The technology simply wasn't there to portray either Spider-Man's powers or any supervillains in any sort of realistic fashion.

  The wallcrawler returned to animation in 1981 with two separate series, the syndicated Spider-Man and the more popular Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, which aired Saturday mornings on NBC. The latter featured Spidey teaming up with fellow teen heroes Iceman and Firestar, and is more fondly remembered than it deserves to be.

  Following the success of Batman: The Animated Series, Fox brought Spidey back to animation in 1994 with Spider-Man: The Animated Series. While it struggled with a troubled production in its early episodes, it premiered to a generally positive reception and strong ratings, lasting for five seasons and a respectable sixty-five episodes. With all kinds of Spider Man villains making their first appearance on television, from big leaguers like Venom and the Hobgoblin to third-stringers like the Rocket Racer and the Spot, the series provied the most thorough translation of the Spidey mythology to TV. After it ended in 1998, an attempt was made the following year to carry over its success to a new series, Spider-Man Unlimited, which catapulted Spidey to a weird parallel Earth. Audiences weren't buying it, and the series was cancelled after thirteen episodes.

  In an attempt to ride the wave of Sam Raimi's film version of the webslinger, MTV aired Spider-Man: The New Animated Series in 2003, which roughly followed the continuity of the film. However, with its poor scripts, uninspired character designs and murky, stiff CGI animation, it too failed to catch on and quickly vanished after thirteen installments.

  The most recent adaptation of Spider-Man to animation premiered in 2008, with The Spectacular Spider-Man on the CW Network. A nice mix of the classic comics, the movies and the “Ultimate” revision books, The Spectacular Spider-Man sets its stage in Peter Parker's high school days, not long after Pete's debut as Spider-Man. The series switches things up in its supporting cast, featuring Gwen Stacy and Harry Osborne as Pete's high school buddies and Eddie Brock as Dr. Curt Connors's college-age lab assistant. It also features a contemporary, less frail Aunt May and a virtually unchanged J. Jonah Jameson, who seems to survive intact whatever media Spider-Man is translated into. The scripts are engaging and intelligent, if slightly kiddie-directed, and the character designs by Sean “Cheeks” Galloway give the series a modern, vibrant look without straying too far into anime territory.

  One of the most welcome sights? In the show's title sequence, right up front: “Created by Stan Lee & Steve Ditko.” Nice.

  THE TICK

  Ben Edlund's absurdist gem The Tick made its animated premiere in Fox's Saturday morning television lineup in September 1994. That rare example of an adaptation that actually exceeds its source material both in execution and intent, The Tick was a hilarious send-up of the superhero genre, chronicling the adventures of its endlessly cheerful and super-strong protagonist The Tick and his nebbishy mothman sidekick Arthur as they protect The City from fiends like Chairface Chippendale, an urbane supervillain with a chair for a head. The real strength of the series lay in its hilarious scripting by Edlund, and Townsend Coleman's outrageously over-the-top performance as the Tick didn't hurt, either. Fox tried again with a live-action sitcom version in 2001, but it failed to capture that same spark and only lasted nine episodes.

  TEEN TITANS

  Although the Titans had premiered on television in 1967 with their brief, three-episode stint on The Superman/Aquaman Hour of Adventure, it wasn't until 2003 that they really received the spotlight in their hit animated series Teen Titans on Cartoon Network. Heavily anime-influenced, the show took its lead from the 1980s Marv Wolfman/George Pérez comics run, featuring Robin, Cyborg, Beast Boy, Starfire and Raven. While it took some criticism from fans of the previous Warner Animation series because of its clear and obvious targeting of younger viewers and exaggerated Japanese style, Teen Titans was a clever, fun translation of the comics for an all-new audience. And it was a strong commercial success, airing for five seasons and sixty-five episodes.

  WONDER WOMAN

  Wonder Woman's biggest bit of mass-media exposure was her hit 1970s TV series, starring Lynda Carter a
s Diana Prince/Wonder Woman. Premiering in 1975 as a pilot movie entitled The New Original Wonder Woman (to avoid confusion with an earlier and unsuccessful 1974 attempt entitled simply Wonder Woman, starring a blonde Cathy Lee Crosby) the ABC TV movie scored high enough ratings to warrant a weekly series, which first aired April 21, 1976.

  The series' initial run, on ABC from 1976 to 1977, was a period piece, with Wonder Woman in World War II fighting Nazis and the like. In 1977, the series moved to CBS and modernized the plot away from the war. The immortal Diana returns to Paradise Island for thirty years, until she meets Steve Trevor Jr., who just happens to look exactly like his father, Steve Trevor Sr. (Lyle Waggoner in both roles). She decides to return to Man's World and work with Steve Jr. at the spy agency IADC. While the first season had more of a comic-book flavor, between the World War II setting and Wonder Woman doing battle with foes such as Fausta, the Nazi Wonder Woman and Gargan-tua, the last two seasons were more typical of 1970s TV. In other words, Wonder Woman fights a lot of goons sporting black turtlenecks under brown sport blazers.

  Lynda Carter's embodiment of the title character was enough to make you overlook the show's many faults and keep coming back for more.

  WONDER WOMAN: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON © 1976 WARNER BROS. ENTERTAINMENT, INC. WONDER WOMAN™ © DC COMICS.

  The main reason for the show's success was the tall, charming and drop-dead gorgeous Lynda Carter. Carter's charisma carried the show because, let's face it, people weren't tuning in for the spellbinding plots. Unlike the Adam West Batman series, which was silly, but with a self-reflexive wink to the audience, the ABC Wonder Woman was just goofy, with bad scripts, bad acting, and poor production values. Any show that expects you to take Lyle Waggoner seriously as a leading man has its work cut out for it. So why does it work? Lovely Lynda Carter sells it — smiling, running, jumping, and kicking ass. With anyone else, it never would have worked.

  X-MEN

  The X-Men made a few guest appearances in the 1980s Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends series, and even had a pilot for their own show in 1989, Pryde of the X-Men, which aired numerous times in syndication but never generated a full series order. It wasn't until 1992 that the X-Men broke wide open in a blockbuster way, with the premiere of X-Men on the Fox Network. A smash hit upon its premiere and a ratings champion for the next six years, X-Men was based primarily on the team roster of the mid-1990s — Cyclops, Beast, Rogue, Storm, Jean Grey, Jubilee, Gambit, Wolverine and Professor Xavier. However, this didn't stop the series' writers from adapting nearly every significant storyline from the X-Men's comic-bookhistory, from “Rise of the Phoenix,” to “The Dark Phoenix Saga” to “Days of Future Past,” with dozens of X-characters making guest appearances over the course of its seventy-six episode run. Not only that, the writers of X-Men weren't afraid to make their audience pay attention, with frequent four- and five-episode storylines, as well as long-running story arcs that spanned the course of a season. The X-Men series cemented the characters' perception within the pop-culture zeitgeist as something everyone should know about, and most definitely paved the way for Bryan Singer's blockbuster films. Shamefully, there's no complete box set of the series available on DVD. For a series this influential, it's a must.

  The success of Singer's film spawned another animated series, X-Men: Evolution (2000), which focused more on the characters as teenagers and the notion of Xavier's School, as opposed to the more adult versions on the previous series. X-Men: Evolution was popular and successful in its own right, airing on the WB for four seasons and fifty-two episodes. While it doesn't have the depth and scope of the original Fox X-Men series, it still stands on it own merits and is well worth watching.

  SUPPLEMENTAL READING

  Origins of Marvel Comics by Stan Lee

  Son of Origins of Marvel Comics by Stan Lee

  Bring on the Bad Guys by Stan Lee

  The Superhero Women by Stan Lee

  The World Encyclopedia of Comics by Maurice Horn

  The Great Comic Book Heroes by Jules Feiffer

  Marvel: Five Fabulous Decades of the World's Greatest Comics by Les Daniels

  DC Comics: Sixty Years of the World's Favorite Comic Book Heroes by Les Daniels

  Superman: The Complete History by Les Daniels

  Batman: The Complete History by Les Daniels

  Wonder Woman: The Complete History by Les Daniels

  Comics: Between the Panels by Mike Richardson and Steve Duin

  Kirby: King of Comics by Mark Evanier

  Comics and Sequential Art by Will Eisner

  Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud

  Tales to Astonish: Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, and the American Comic Book Revolution by Ronin Ro

  The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America by David Hajdu

  Will Eisner's Shop Talk by Will Eisner

  Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code by Amy Kiste Nyberg

  Superheroes and Philosophy edited by Tom and Matt Morris

  The Comic Book Heroes by Gerard Jones and Will Jacobs

  The Marvel Vault by Roy Thomas and Peter Sanderson

  Excelsior! The Amazing Life of Stan Lee by Stan Lee and George Mair

  A Smithsonian Book of comic-book Comics by J. Michael Barrier and Martin T. Williams

  The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics edited by Bill Blackbeard and Martin Williams

  The comic-book Book edited by Don Thompson and Dick Lupoff

  Writing for Comics with Peter David by Peter David

  The Comic Book Makers by Joe Simon and Jim Simon

  SWEET DREAMS BY HARLAN ELLISON ®

  Probably not the first black man I'd ever seen, but certainly the first one I remember. It had to be 1940; I was born in '34, so I was no older than six or seven. If I could remember what month it was — though it was the summertime, absolutely — I'd know down to the pinpoint.

  My mom and dad were taking a breather from me, as they tried to do every summer, and this time they didn't shanghai me off to some goddamn Camp HaHa or its ilk: they sent me to my Uncle Martin and Aunt Maxine in Shelby, North Carolina, (1939 and 1940 were the years of the legendary New York World's Fair).The day before this day I am about to recount, I bought, or was given, what I've always stored in the memory bank as the first comic book I ever owned. It was the 1940 NewYork World's Fair Comics, published by DC at 15¢, a very heavy cost in the barely-post-Depression days of summer, 1940. This comic book with its cardboard covers featured Superman and Batman and Sandman and a full 96 pages of the sort of stuff a kid in those days, pre-American Idol, pre-gangsta, pre-iPod, even pre-television or the Internet, found mesmerizing.

  It was my McGuffey's Primer, my Joseph Campbell, my Will & Ariel Durant Story of Civilization. I am convinced no smug, self-absorbed, arrogant Xboxer wallowing in today's BritneyParisR.Kelly mudhole can have the faintest perturbation of soulful cognition as to what I'm positing here. On that summer day of which I will write, in Shelby, North Carolina, with the sun undoing the horizon and the whirring insects filling the space around me with conflicting soundtracks, I wandered with World's Fair in hand, into an enormous stand of sugar cane. I was a very little kid: the sugar cane field may not, in fact, have been so enormous. But I, for my part, was not enormous. I was great in expectations and wonder; but not high enough to see the tops of the stalks around me.

  And I came through to a large clearing and there, all around that circle, were black men. Giant black men, shining in the sunlight. They glimmered and glittered with their own sweat, and they wielded huge blades, and they swung and swung to the wash and wind from their godlike strokes. And down came the sugar cane, whistling down in small crashing and chittering sounds, a million scarab husk sounds as the crew moved in a stately, methodical way.

  One great Nubian chieftain glanced over from his labors, and saw me. He may not have been the first black man I'd ever seen (Painesville, Ohio must have had such a population before I attended junior high, yea
rs later, and saw black kids my age), but he is the first gentleman of color I remember.

  He grinned at me. From ‘way up there, his head brushing the sky, he didn't just smile, he grinned. Wide friendly hi-kid sort of smile. And I walked over to him, and he said, “Whachoo doin' out here, son?” and I told him “Nuthin',” because I was six or seven, and at six or seven the answer to any question from an adult as to what you were up to was (and still is) “nuthin'.” And we chatted for a few words, and this living icon from mythology asked me if I'd ever tasted the sweet taste of a sugar cane stalk; and I said nuh-uh. So he swept that mighty blade twice across a pipe of cane, and handed me a length about the size of a shakuha-chi — which, as you know, is a long Japanese tubular flute — more of a contrabass transverse than, say, a piccolo or a zuffolo. And he advised me to go out into the sun and enjoy my treat. So I did.

  Oh, and just as an askance, I know you'll have noted that somewhere a few paragraphs back I slipped somewhichway into faux-Bradbury. I will not apologize. I read Ray long before he and I became chums, but if one is writing about being a country lad on a hot summer's day, one cannot do better than to emulate the Once and Future King of Mars. Now, back to our thrilling story.

  I went out there, and I lay down on my side bowered among the flowers and the grass, and I sucked on that impossible wand of sugar cane, and I read my 1940 New York World's Fair Comics, and it was one of the most perfect days of my life. And here's what is the nicest part: I knew I was having one of the best days of my life, even then, even six or seven years of age. That, my friends, is a small miracle of self-awareness. I hope you've had a few of those; so rare, so spiffy.