Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...
But it interestingly had a rocky start.
The show first debuted on ABC in September 1973. The character designs and stories were fairly straightforward and simplistic, but the lack of depth or complexity was pretty standard for Saturday morning at the time. The first season was comprised of only 16 episodes, which were re-run through August 1974. The show was then cancelled. Presumably from less than anticipated ratings, but perhaps also influenced by cameo appearances on The New Scooby-Doo Movies and The Brady Kids the previous year.
The success of the Wonder Woman TV show in 1975, and probably the early development interest in the Superman movie which had secured Marlon Brando that same year led ABC to reconsider Super Friends. The original 16 episodes were re-run beginning in early 1976, while production began on a new series. To help promote the new series, DC also began publishing a Super Friends comic. While the stories there were independent of the show, they followed much the same style of the original series.
Not wanting to miss out on the apparent upcoming superhero fad, CBS also began working on The New Adventures of Batman and Robin. They were able to secure the voices of Adam West and Burt Ward from the 1966 television show, while ABC used Olan Soule and Casey Kasem from Filmation's 1968 Batman cartoon.
Beginning in mid-1977, E. Nelson Bridwell, writer of the Super Friends comic, learned of some of the cast changes (notably, the replacement of Wendy and Marvin with Zan and Jayna) after working on the book for several months and wrote the change into his stories, so by the time the new season of the show began in September 1977, the comic had already made the transition to the new characters. Despite no real obvious and/or ongoing correspondence between the comic's creative team and the show's, they played amazingly well off one another from a timing perspective. Interestingly, though, this seems to be the extent of any collaboration between the show and the comic, as the villains from the show are largely ignored, as are the heroes created for the show.
What I find curious is that the comic only survived until mid-1981, while the show continued into 1982. However the show was only re-runs for the 1982/83 season, and was cancelled outright in the fall of '83. The show was brought back again in 1984 and ran until September 1986.
Given the on-again-off-again nature of the show, and regular use of mixing re-runs with new material, I suspect there were more than a few clashes within the network about the show's future throughout it's tenure. If, then, DC was continually getting notices about the show maybe being cancelled or maybe not, and/or what direction the show might take, I wonder if editor Julie Schwartz just decided that it wasn't worth the effort. I don't have insight into sales numbers from that period (even John Jackson Miller has something of a hole in there!) but I never got the impression the comic was a top-seller. It had a respectable five-year run, so it couldn't have been doing too badly, especially with the cartoon tie-in, but if they felt at DC that it was only saleable so long as the cartoon was ongoing, they may well have cancelled the comic, assuming the show wasn't going to last either. After all, it'd been cancelled once already.
Richard Outcault is frequently given credit for "inventing" the modern comic strip. That's not really an accurate claim, but he did do some innovative work in the field and deserves some credit for that. I've always been more partial to Winsor McCay, who worked not only in the same field in the same time frame, but also for the same employers. In fact, both Outcault and McCay ran in to legal issues with publisher William Randolph Hearst with regards to who owned the comics they drew, and both artists went on to other publishers taking the essence of their strips, if not the original title, with them.
It was pointed out to me recently, though, that McCay in fact drew one of Outcault's strips for a time. From 1906-1908, McCay worked on "Buster Brown" after Outcault left the New York Herald, where he first developed the strip in 1902. There's several things to be fasincated by in this, but the thing that immediately struck me was how we can directly compare the two arists' work as they were working on the same material. Here's a panel of "Buster Brown" from each of them...
This isn't to say Outcault was necessarily an inferior cartoonist than McCay, but I would easily posit that McCay was a better artist. I would've said so before, but having the direct and immediate comparison of having had both of them work on the exact same strip, the comparisons are even more inevitable than before.
Now I'm going to have to track down reprints of McCay's "Buster Brown" comics! (h/t Peter Sattler)
It was pointed out to me recently, though, that McCay in fact drew one of Outcault's strips for a time. From 1906-1908, McCay worked on "Buster Brown" after Outcault left the New York Herald, where he first developed the strip in 1902. There's several things to be fasincated by in this, but the thing that immediately struck me was how we can directly compare the two arists' work as they were working on the same material. Here's a panel of "Buster Brown" from each of them...
This isn't to say Outcault was necessarily an inferior cartoonist than McCay, but I would easily posit that McCay was a better artist. I would've said so before, but having the direct and immediate comparison of having had both of them work on the exact same strip, the comparisons are even more inevitable than before.
Now I'm going to have to track down reprints of McCay's "Buster Brown" comics! (h/t Peter Sattler)
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?
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.)
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...
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.
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...
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...
