In the mid-1970s, brothers Joseph and Dominic Ramacieri were running the family pepperoni business in Canada. Joe was interested in a way out, and he somehow struck upon the idea of sponsoring a daredevil stuntman in much the same vein as Evel Knievel, who had gained popularity a few years earlier. The brothers formed another company called Human Fly Spectaculars, Ltd. and hired Rick Rojatt to take the mantle of The Human Fly.

Rojatt's story was a bit dubious. He claimed to be a former Hollywood stuntman, whose wife and daughter were killed in a car crash that resulted in 60% of his skeleton replaced with steel. Joseph was skeptical, but figured that if the guy could do stunts, he didn't care. Dominic also hit on the idea that by putting Rojatt in a costume that completely covered him, they could replace him pretty easily if they ever needed to. (Either to get more precisely trained individuals for each stunt or, more cynically, if Rojatt died during one of them.) The group then set out a five year plan of different types of stunts, working hard to ensure prime media coverage.

Rojatt's first stunt, in 1976, was to strap himself on top of a DC-8 jet, which then took off for a long flight in which he endured 250 mile per hour raindrops pelting him. He passed out during the flight, and spent the following six weeks in the hospital, but he had made a name for himself.

It was after then, with The Human Fly now generating some name recognition, that Ramacieri's legal team started talking with Marvel. This would have been after a few years of office tumult at Marvel that eventually left Archie Goodwin as editor-in-chief. Bill Mantlo was given writing duties and Lee Elias initially took on the art chores. (Elias left Rojatt's real-life costume design alone, only emphasizing the musculature a bit more.) Mantlo took some of the basic backstory elements provided by Rojatt and team, and expanded on them. Which Rojatt, in turn, expanded upon in subsequent interviews.

The first issue, which came out in mid-1977, didn't sell particularly well. Though the daredevil himself was at the height of his fame, Marvel was still trying to sort out the burgeoning direct market system and hadn't figured out the best distribution for the book. The title basically got lost in the market.

Several months in the book's run, however, Rojatt attempted jumping 27 buses on a motorcycle, which would beat Evel Knievel's record of 13. Problems with the ramp's construction, though, led to Rojatt blasting off the ramp at the wrong angle. His bike stalled in mid-flight, the back end curled under the front, and Rojatt landed on his back with the bike crashing down on top of him. He survived, amazingly with only a broken ankle and various cuts and bruises.

Questions started coming up about the whole operation, though. A woman in Florida said she recognized what little people could see through The Fly's mask, and that he had walked out on her and their two kids. Some of Rojatt's safety coordinators dropped stories of possible mob ties that scared them from working with Human Fly Spectaculars again. There were claims that a million dollar life insurance policy was put on Rojatt right before his jump.

But after another hospital stay, Rojatt vanished. The comic went on for about another year. Mantlo even incorporated the disastrous jump in issue #11, which led the comic book version of the character down a journey to psychologically overcome his failure. But it eventually ended with #19, long after Rojatt himself had been out of the news cycle.

To this day, no one knows what actually happened to Rojatt. Or, for that matter, if that was even his real name! In the 1980s, a man named David Wolff (former boyfriend and manager of Cyndi Lauper) performed a concert as "The Human Fly & Red Rider" and the act was once again backed by Ramacieri, but whether they were just adopting the name or Wolff was really Rojatt is unknown. Filmmaker Tony Babinski, trying to put together a documentary about all of this -- a preview trailer of which can be seen here -- thinks he tracked Rojatt down in Ontario, but the man who answered the phone refused to talk. So the mystery remains.

Regardless, though, all of this left readers with a year and a half of Mantlo-written stories, not quite like anything before or since.

While "fumetti" is just the Italian word for "comics" it's generally understood in America to mean comics that are created using photographs. So while "comics" are defined without a particular set of tools needed in their creation, "fumetti" (at least by the American definition) requires the use of a camera of some sort. Meaning that fumetti could not have existed prior to the 1800s. But what was the first fumetti? Who was the first person to put together a series of photographs to display a narrative?

The Wikipedia entry goes back as far as 1927 citing the New York Daily News utilizing photos of Ziegfeld Follies stars Eddie Cantor and Frances Upton telling jokes with speech bubbles superimposed. However, it seems to treat these more as proto-fumetti, suggesting that it didn't really "count" as its own thing until showing up in Italy in the 1940s and '50s. (I suppose this is to justify using a Italian term for something that isn't especially Italian in origin.)

But that seems a bit late, as people were experimenting with commerical photography as early as the 1860s. While there may be earlier examples that have been lost to time, I think a strong argument could be made for Eadweard Muybridge's Sallie Gardner at a Gallop from 1878. You might be familiar with the sequence, at least nominally so. Leland Stanford hired Muybridge to figure out if all four of a horse's feet were ever in the air simultaneously while it galloped. It was the subject of some debate as the human eye couldn't process things fast enough to see in person, and so Muybridge went about trying to capture the image of a horse running while all of its feet were in the air.

Muybridge in fact did manage, through trial and a lot of error, to get a single photo of a running horse with its feet off the ground in 1877. A print was sent to the local press (this was, as I said, something of a debate after all) but there was evidence that the photo negative had been retouched and it was generally dismissed.

The following year, Muybridge tried a different approach. Rather than using a single camera and hope for a great shot, he set up a series of 24 cameras, mounted about 2½ feet apart alongside a race track. He then rigged the camera's shutters to tripwires laid across the track. Using this method, as the horse ran over the tripwires, the camera it was attached to would automatically take a picture. He then directed one of Stanford's jockies, a man by the name of Domm, to run Sallie Gardner at about 36 miles per hour on the track. The result was that Muybridge got 24 photographs of Domm riding Sallie Gardner, each taken about an eighth of a second apart. Indeed, several of the pictures show Sallie Gardner with all of her feet off the ground.

Now, this is often showcased as a precursor to film. The images are put together as a flip-book of sorts, and showing all 24 images in the span of about three seconds gives the illusion of motion. That's basically how movies work. Muybridge figured out a way to create movies before movie cameras existed.

But pause a moment. Muybridge used 24 individual cameras. Each camera took a single image. The point of the exercise was to capture a still image of a horse mid-stride, and the images were circulated as a sequence of still images like I've included here. Muybridge was trying to capture motion, but for the express purpose of slowing it down to a series of still images, not in order to replicate the motion itself.

The series of images doesn't have a plot, but there is a very deliberate sequence here. That's comics. Created using photographs. That's fumetti.

Muybridge went on to do more movement studies in a similar fashion, largely funded by the University of Pennsylvania. Those studies amount to around 20,000 additional images, which made it into an 1887 book called Animal Locomotion: An Electro-photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements.

So, any other earlier candidates for first fumetti?

If you've studied Golden Age comics more than a bit, you've almost certainly run across the name of Vincent Fago. After working for Fleischer Studios, he headed over to Timely Comics in 1942 and did any number of funny animal books. He became the defacto Editor-in-Chief (though not officially called that) when Stan Lee went into the Army. But after Lee returned from World War II, Fago is all but forgotten in comics history. One might conclude that he left the field of comics altogether. In fact, he continued drawing funny animal comics through the 1950s and then worked for Golden Books in the 1960s.

But what's even more rarely mentioned is that in the early 1970s, he started his own publishing firm, Pendulum Press, and began putting out comic book versions of classic literature. He scripted most of the books himself, adapting and abridging the originals as closely as possible given page limitations, and then got talented "newcomers" like Nestor Redondo to illustrate them. Indeed, for many of the books, he acted only as editor and got others to write the scripts.

Fago's stated intent was, like the Classics Illustrated series before him, to use the comic medium to encourage children to pick up the great works of Western literature. I don't know of any actual research done to see if this indeed works on a large scale, but I can vouch that it did work for me. Two of his books I received as a youngster were 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Treasure Island -- both of which remain as two of my favorite stories. And Fago's versions were so powerful that I still find closer association with those stories than the incredibly commanding performances of James Mason or Robert Newton in the Disney versions. (Though I will admit that Mason's and Newton's voices do carry through my head when I hear those characters!)

I thought his hardcover, black & white versions were short-lived and I had a great deal of difficulty first finding anything about them online. Indeed, I'm still not sure how many and which of these books were ultimately produced. But I was quite surprised, in going through my father's collection years later, to discover that Fago had evidently re-published the books with new covers in the early 1990s as prestige format comic books... Curiously, while these books use the exact same art, there's no scripter credit in the newer version. They've also been colored (to the detriment of the series, if you asked me) but no coloring credit is noted either. Fago's own name as editor is stripped of the series, leaving only art credits.

The introduction to each book, and the "Other Books In This Line" list at the end, note that there were to be 72 issues in the series. However, I can again find only the barest of information about this online, and what I can find suggests that the series was discontinued after the sixth issue.

I've only got a couple versions of some of these stories in comic book form, but I'm half-tempted to seek out other iterations to see how Fago's version holds up against the others. They all certainly had great material to work with, but it'd be interesting to see how fared in a sort of head-to-head competition.

But more importantly, the work that Fago (and others) did to bring great literature to a younger audience is noteworthy. And sure, the comic book versions are "dumbed down" a bit from the source material, but getting these books into the hands of kids is only guaranteed to entice them to seek out more. And I suspect that Fago's biggest hinderence to not doing that more successfully was simply one of distribution. After all, the world's greatest work is worth nothing if nobody can find it!

Back to my original point: if you run across the name of Vince Fago and how he did all these wonderful funny animal books, I'd like you to take a second or two to remember that he wasn't JUST a funny animal cartoonist. He was a man who had an impact on kids, like myself, whose first introductions to prose novels were his comic books.

Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

Kleefeld on Comics: Monday Thoughts on Wednesday
https://ift.tt/aopdXIy

Kleefeld on Comics: How Political Should Comic Books Be?
https://ift.tt/MrpcW16

Kleefeld on Comics: Dick Calkins' Buck Rogers
https://ift.tt/tUTkZPF

Kleefeld on Comics: Billy and the Boingers
https://ift.tt/hcSGjE7

Kleefeld on Comics: The Origin of the Comic Book Assembly Line
https://ift.tt/IrM08SN

You're probably aware that many of the more commercial comics are done by a series of people, right? A writer will draft the story, a penciller will do the initial illustrations while an inker cleans the linework up, a letterer is actually the one putting in the dialogue, and a colorist applies... well, color. Pretty standard breakdown of work, right? It mostly makes sense, as those individual tasks require slightly different skill sets. That approach is generally credited to Will Eisner, who by the late 1930s began getting too much work to handle by himself and found he had to hire a staff of creators to help meet the demand. The list of Eisner & Iger Studio alumni is a veritable who's who of early comicdom: Jack Kirby, Bob Kane, Lou Fine, George Tuska, Mort Meskin, Bob Powell... In hiring all these new people, he established this assembly line process to help speed up production.

(The art accompanying this post is the original rough layout for the page in which Eisner explains his approach in The Dreamer.)

What I'm wondering, though, is how/where did Eisner hit upon the idea originally? I've seen/heard it referenced almost every time the Eisner-Iger shop is mentioned, but there's very little in the way of details. In fact, The Dreamer is about the most elaborate version I've found, and he literally spends only one panel on it. From Eisner's own accounts, he didn't seem too business savvy at the time, so it strikes me as odd that he might lift the idea wholesale from Henry Ford. Also, I doubt he would've woken up one day and suddenly hired fifteen people to help out; he would've picked up one guy here, another there over the course of weeks and months, so even if he did have a flash of inspiration, he wouldn't have had the resources to implement a full assembly line at the outset anyway.

So some kind of gradual approach seems to make the most sense. Maybe start with "I'll write the story and do some rough layouts, you finish it and make sure everything looks polished"? Then perhaps "I'll write the story and do some roughs, you write in the dialogue and draw the figures, and you fill out the backgrounds"? Then "I'll write the story, you do some roughs, you write draw the main figures, you drop in the dialogue, and you finish it"? Something kind of like that makes sense, right?

But how much experimenting did he do with that? How long before he settled on a single methodology? What were some of the options he might have tried that didn't work out well?

And one thing I've always been struck by is that Eisner has mentioned on more than a few occasions that different artists worked on the main figures than the backgrounds. I understand that's not an uncommon practice in manga, but it's definitely not common in North American comics. At least not since the death of the newspaper adventure strip. I've heard Bryan O'Malley, Jamie McKelvie and Marc Silvestri have used background artists on occassion, but that's far from the norm, I think. When/where did that comics assembly line process shift into the penciller/inker model we're more familiar with? Is it indeed more efficient than a foreground/background approach?

I find it a little curious that, for as much as has been written by and about Eisner, and for as significant as that division of labor was/has been to comics, that there seem to be scant details about how it actually came about. At least, as far as I can find.

In 1986, Berkeley Breathed had some of the cast of Bloom County form a heavy metal band by the name of Billy and the Boingers, formerly Deathtöngue. (Opus played the sousaphone, a "weighty brass.") The comedy played out in the strip for a while, culminating in the band's one-stop world tour at the Hiawatha Room during the 1987 Albuquerque Moose Lodge Banquet. Pretty typically funny stuff from Breathed.

When the strips were collected into book form, it included a flexi-disc with two of the Boingers' songs on it. "I'm a Boinger" was in fact written by Richard LaClaire and performed with Scott Freilich, Rich Kazmierczak and Mike Bryydalski who collectively were known as The Harry Pitts Band. As far as I can tell, this was their only recorded song.

The b-side was "U-Stink-But-I-♥-U" by Bill Casler and performed with Chris Milnes, John Milnes, Danny Nastasi, and Scott Lepage. They formed the real life band Mucky Pup, and enjoyed a fair amount of success for ten years, releasing six studio albums. While they formally split up in 1996, they got back together in various incarnations for short tours and reunion shows sporadically in the early 2000s. Their last performance was in 2014.

Both songs were chosen from reader submissions as part of a contest. Mucky Pup went on to record a video for their song, and it continued to be one of the band's closing numbers. Although non-winning songwriters weren't contacted at the time, some of have since come forward to place their recordings online. I'm still partial to "I'm a Boinger" though.

A bird on the bass
A tongue, what a face!
At best, the music could be described as lame

Sure we look disgusting
But whose chops are we busting
In a year, maybe two, we'll seem tame

And three years down the track
We'll be a Las Vegas lounge act
We'll be back
We'll be back, 'cus we're the Boingers

Jimmy dropped his pants
And Ozzy dines on bats
And Hendrix played guitars with his teeth

The Deadheads got their Jerry
And Mom's got her Barry
And Ronnie listens to guys like Falwell and Meese

But if you don't know by now
Bill bit the head off a cow
That's no lie
That's no lie, 'cus we're the Boingers

Was Bowie ever a fairy?
Was Debbie ever Harry?
Was Elvis ever the King? let's not be reflective

Does Barbra wish she was a goy?
Is George really a boy?
Is Filthy ever Divine? - It's all subjective

Answers to all this
Lie with their psychoanalysts
Just relax
Just relax
I can't relax!
I can't relax, 'cus I'm a boinger!

Although many people are familiar with Buck Rogers generally, I suspect that few realize how pervasive a character he was. Even back in the 1930s, he was showing up in what might be considered a proto-transmedia manner. Let's take a look at his early publishing timeline...

• August 1928
  "Armageddon 2419 A.D." by Philip Francis Nowlan was published in Amazing Stories starring the character Anthony Rogers.
• January 1929
  Rogers was given the nickname "Buck" and appears for the first time in the Buck Rogers in the 25th Century A.D. comic strip. The earliest strips were based off the original story, and drawn by Dick Calkins.
• March 1929
  "The Airlords of Han" was published in Amazing Stories as a sequel to the original.
• March 1930
  A Sunday strip was added to Buck Rogers in the 25th Century A.D. The Sundays were drawn by Russell Keaton and, oddly, did not originally feature the title character at all.
• November 1932
  CBS Radio began airing Buck Rogers in the 25th Century in 15-minute installments. Matt Crowley originally provided the voice of Rogers. Early stories were lifted from the comics and credited to Calkins.
• 1933
  A Kellogg's Corn Flakes giveaway comic book was produced. I believe this was Calkins' work, but I haven't been able to confirm that.
• 1933
  The first Big Little Book featuring Buck Rogers was published. (There would be ten in total over the next decade.) The cover displayed the title as Buck Rogers, 25th Century A.D. while the title page used Buck Rogers in the 25th Century A.D. Both Nowlan and Calkins were credited.
  
• 1934
  A 10-minute film called Buck Rogers in the 25th Century: An Interplanetary Battle with the Tiger Men of Mars debuted at the World's Fair with John Dille Jr. in the lead role. The story was "Adapted from the GREAT NEWSPAPER FEATURE" and Calkins was not only credited but appeared on screen briefly.
• October 1934
  Buck Rogers started being run as one of the features in Famous Funnies. While Nowlan and Calkins are credited, the Grand Comics Database notes that the art was actually being ghosted by Rick Yager, who had begun drawing the Sunday comic strips the previous year.
• 1935
  The John F. Dille Co. published a pop-up book called Buck Rogers: Strange Adventures in the Spider Ship. The book was credited to "Dick Calkins with Philip Nowlan."
• 1936
  A live-action short was created to promote to department stores a growing line of Buck Rogers merchandise.
• February 1939
  The famous Buck Rogers serials began with Buster Crabbe in the title role. (Crabbe had already portrayed Flash Gordon twice by this point.) This version is "based on the cartoon strip 'Buck Rogers'" but it did not credit anyone associated with the strip itself.
• 1939
  Nowlan formally retired from writing the strip and Calkins officially took full story control.
• February 1940
  Nowlan passed away at age 51.
• Winter 1940
  Buck Rogers finally debuted as an ongoing, self-titled comic book from Eastern Printing; however, this was all newspaper reprint material. Artists for the series included Calkins, Keaton, and Stephen A. Douglas (who provided some new covers).
• November 1947
  Calkins formally retired from the comic strip, and was replaced by Murphy Anderson.
• May 1962
  Calkins passed away at age 67.

Like any collaboration, it's almost impossible to parse exactly who contributed what. We definitely know Nowlan devised the original idea for Buck Rogers, and Calkins should get the majority of the credit for defining the visual aesthetic of the character, but everything beyond that is up in the air.

That said, I get the impression that Nowlan had little to do with the direction of the strip. Perhaps some vague direction, in a manner not dissimilar to how Stan Lee used to provide Jack Kirby with an entire comic's plot in just a few sentences. That Calkins is credited so prominently in other media, despite Nowlan clearly having created the characters, suggests that he was either exceptionally humble or not nearly as involved as Calkins.

And while I don't have any real proof in this fairly short overview, I have the feeling that Calkins wound up contributing a lot more to Buck Rogers than Nowlan did, despite his originating the idea.