Salon.com > Curt Holman

Heavenly creatures

Mon, 14 Jun 2004 20:00:00 +0000

In the ecosystem of modern comic books, funny animals are the endangered species. Superheroes still make up most of the population, but thanks to the rise of "literary" graphic novels, creatures of different colors -- war correspondents, lovelorn slackers and self-obsessed cartoonists -- roam alongside the men and women in tights. But the art form's increased respectability undercuts some of its youthful fun. Whole menageries of talking critters -- screw-loose squirrels, lucky ducks, li'l devils, amorphous shmoos -- are going extinct.

Overall the old funny-animal comics make no great loss, having mostly been cheap knockoffs of Disney properties or Saturday morning TV characters. But some ingenious creations did spring onto the scene, like Carl Barks' classic Donald Duck comics and R. Crumb's ribald adventures of Fritz the Cat. Two lesser-known yet landmark titles -- one accessible to all readers, the other forbidding and definitely not for kids -- have unfolded in recent years in extended but self-contained, novelistic story lines, and will conclude within months of each other. Dave Sim's "Cerebus" finished its staggering 6,000-page, 300-issue publication in March, while Jeff Smith's "Bone" completes its more modest but still impressive 55-issue run this month.

“From Hell”

Tue, 26 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000

If comic books have a "Citizen Kane," the clear choice is "Watchmen," written by Alan Moore and drawn by Dave Gibbons. Just as Orson Welles' kaleidoscopic biography of a newspaper tycoon invariably tops cinematic best-ever lists, Moore and Gibbons' apocalyptic yet intimate superhero tale commands a similar status in its medium. And as the flashbacks from Charles Foster Kane's estranged loved ones come together to form a tragic portrait on film, so do the distinct voices and aspirations of Moore's Watchmen coalesce into engrossing and credible human beings -- never mind the cowls and capes. "Watchmen" proves that a story published in "funny book" form can be as perceptive, relevant and mature as any novel, film or television series.

When DC Comics published "Watchmen's" 12 issues in the mid-1980s, comics were viewed as the bottom of the pop culture barrel, no more than adolescent fantasies of brightly-costumed characters in never-ending, rock 'em-sock 'em fight scenes. But "Watchmen" proved as far removed from standard superhero fare as "Trainspotting" is from "Reefer Madness," and gave adventurous readers a brand-new addiction. "Watchmen" and its contemporaries not only popularized the term "graphic novel," they made it a necessary distinction that set these new, deeper works apart from juvenile-sounding "comic books."

Dr. Strange Love

Thu, 15 Jul 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Dr. Arthur Schnitzler, an Austrian novelist and playwright renowned for his psychological acuity and frankness about sex, died in 1931, but he's just been initiated into an exclusive fraternity. It's a men's club comprising such diverse members as Vladimir Nabokov, Stephen King, Lionel White, Anthony Burgess and William Makepeace Thackeray -- all writers whose work has been made into films by the late Stanley Kubrick. Except for "2001: A Space Odyssey," based on a short story by Arthur C. Clarke, every Kubrick film -- beginning with "The Killing" in 1956 -- has been adapted from a novel.

Kubrick was a Schnitzler fan for decades, telling Robert Emmett Ginna in a 1960 interview, "It's difficult to find any writer who understood the human soul more truly and who had a more profound insight into the way people think, act and really are, and who also had a somewhat all-seeing point of view -- sympathetic, if somewhat cynical."

Kubrick would reveal an affinity with that perspective as he developed his signature filmmaking style, an icily formal, deliberately paced approach that conveys a clinical, third-person-omniscient point of view. That cool, scrutinizing tone proved the most consistent quality in his body of work, linking movies as diverse as "Lolita," "The Shining," "A Clockwork Orange" and "Barry Lyndon."