Specter is voting no on Employee Free Choice. (Failed prediction here.)
Author Archives: Tom Crippen
Stan Lee Presents: Welcome to the Babe-o-Dome (FCR part 2)
Noah’s been conducting the FCR Roundtable by himself and doing a good job of it. My contribution is an extract taken from “Face It, Tiger,” a column I did for TCJ last year. It’s about Spider-Man’s Brand-New Day relaunch, including the cold-blooded decision that Mary Jane could no longer be part of the series as Mary Jane, wife and long-legged gal; now she has to be Jackpot, a superhero who has no claim on Peter but can swing around the rooftops with him.
The extract focuses on Mary Jane and her sad history, with attention to her roots in Stan’s Atlas humor comics. Before getting to the extract, which I promise is down below, I’m going to talk a bit more about the babe covers Stan dreamed up for Atlas. He loved them; coming up with those things suited him down to the ground.
Let’s start with an example (Atlastales.com guesses it was drawn by Ken Bald):
The covers are kind of sweet, in that the point is simply how swell various guys find the featured girl — outlandishly swell. The girls transport them the way Frankenstein’s monster scares hell out of Lou Costello. But the focus is different, in that Frankenstein’s monster is there an excuse for Costello to do his doubletakes — the real point of the scene — whereas the guys are there to underline how wonderful Venus is (or Millie or Hedy or whoever).
From what I’ve seen, and I have looked thru many piles of Golden Age comics, the “ga-ga” approach to teen humor was not too widespread. Lots of comic books featured pretty girls doing silly things, but usually the gag had nothing to do with how delirious they made the average joe feel. Usually the joke came from the girl getting jealous or skimping on her homework or possibly falling on her ass while she was out for a skate. That last cover has a panties flash because it’s for a Fox title and Fox was put on earth to make Atlas look like it had class. Al Feldstein worked on the series in question, called Junior, and did a series of odd covers that combined smirkiness with very stiff drawing. It was like seeing busty cigar store Indians wearing wigs and lipstick and getting molested by gusts of wind. Those sweaters got molded very tight but around inhumanly definite body parts; just the sweater folds looked like they could hurt you.
Stan, by contrast, seemed to operate on the idea that there was no such thing as sex. He wasn’t hinting at the forbidden; he didn’t have a clue about the forbidden. Consider:
A given feminist might dislike Stan’s covers more or less or about the same as any other good-girl cover from the period. Stan’s approach wasn’t feminist, it was just Stan: candy colored, high spirited, and cut off from entire realms of pressing, everyday facts, such as the obvious followup to kissing a powerful older man who can give a gal a job. (Side note: Kind of surprising to see sandles on a 1940s Hollywood director, or any Hollywood director; didn’t realize that was ever part of the stereotype.) Stan took a boosterish approach to good-girlism. Everything was upside, no problems in sight. Betty and Veronica and Archie had problems, though trivial ones. Hedy and Millie and so on mainly provided an excuse for Stan to give a hip-hip-hoorah.
I hated the way Stan and Jack presented Sue Storm, and it’s rare that comic book sexism gets a rise out of me. But the childish way they made her act was really irritating. Millie and Venus and so on are also infantalized, but I don’t mind them. My guess at the reason: Sue was part of a working team, and her playing the fool provided an occasion for Reed to be the grave, authoritative man in charge. The scenes reminded me of the shoddy way men tried to con themselves into thinking they were manly (capable, authoritative, adult) by pretending that women were tit carriers with boop-a-doop brains. (I use the past tense, “tried,” because at that point the dodge had yet to be challenged and therefore was more widespread; I don’t mean that it has died out.) But no one is an adult in those Stan covers. It’s a baby universe, as if someone had figured out a way to get swimsuit models and necking into a P. G. Wodehouse story.
Mary Jane is the follow-up to the Stan Lee good girls of the 1940s. I think she’s great, the crown jewel of the collection. But she became progressively less great the longer she stuck around. You can pretend for a very brief while that the notion of a knockout girl who loves a good time has nothing to do with sex. But Mary Jane was around for more than a brief while, and therefore her problems began.
And now, from “Face It, Tiger”:
I remember being a kid and seeing my first Spider-Man issues, and the presence of Mary Jane and J. Jonah Jameson made substantial, roughly equal contributions to my belief that these were the right stories to be reading. I was under 10 and we’re talking, mainly, about early ’70s reprints of the Lee-Romita, Lee-Ditko stuff from the 1960s, emphasis on Romita. That’s when JJJ and Mary Jane laid down their groove. They were civilians, but they had oomph, like Spider-Man did in fight scenes. Instead of being heroic, one was funny and the other was sexy, but they were human exclamation points, the way superheroes are. Which is to say that the Romita-Lee Mary Jane stood in relation to period romance/teen-humor heroines in the same way a Marvel fight scene stood in relation to Green Lantern fiddling with yellow trees or the Flash running about in tight little circles. She was designed for just as much impact as audience age permitted. Getting fancy, I’d say she celebrated the idea of impact, the fact that nowadays our fun-time media really had the freedom to work us over.
Mary Jane talked the way Stan Lee wrote captions. She was a perfect expression of Stan-ism: pizzazz as a way of life. If you’re into hero comics, her first appearance counts as a touchstone. I mean the panel everybody has seen, the one with Peter’s jaw hanging open and Mary Jane standing in the doorway. She says, “You just hit the jackpot.” After saying, “Face it, tiger,” because it was a one-two punch. The moment was just boy-meets-girl, no special effects, no powers. As far as I know, this is the only civilian touchstone in the entire superhero mythos. The point of Clark Kent is that he gets to change into Superman. The point of Peter Parker, at the moment shown in this panel, is that he gets to look at Mary Jane. She’s the show. J. Jonah Jameson is the only other civilian to pull that off, in his different way — the man does a hell of a turn. Whereas Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane and Happy Hogan and Alfred and Pepper Potts are more like curios and familiar faces, tchotchkes bunched around the star. Maybe Superman is unimaginable without his guys, but that’s the only reason they matter. Look at Perry White. He may be indispensable, but he’s useless.
Stan Lee had been building up to Mary Jane for years, through all those teen-humor books he liked writing so much. He never did a lot of Simon-and-Kirby-style romance, the kind with moon-faced women pondering the hazards between them and married life. Stan wanted covers with a knockout girl blazing forth her power as a knockout. Men walked into each other, fish jumped into her boat, the football player wanted to tackle her. A dork bystander might be on hand as counterpoint, to radiate cluelessness. He’s looking at the screen, his buddy is looking at the girl usher. The dork: “Wotta production!” The buddy: “Ya can say that again!” The dork bystander didn’t know fun when he saw it, and that was the joke. You could just dive in and have a good time, grab a girl and do what comes naturally. But the poor fool wouldn’t; he would never catch on that life can be fun. (If you want to hear Stan speaking with disdain, catch him on DC. It’s the same principle at work.)
The big engine behind necking, and teen romance, and giddiness at the sight of a bombshell girl, is sex. Industry rules don’t allow any follow-up for that sort of thing. As a result Stan’s approach to romance works best for one-offs, like cover gags or Mary Jane’s doorway moment. Mary Jane emptied a full bolt of glory her first time out and then it was 40 years of decline. J. Jonah could stay funny because he had the full range of motion needed for his schtick; as seen recently, he can go all the way to heart attack. But if Mary Jane wasn’t going to have sex, there wasn’t much else for her to do. In the ’80s, Marvel stuck her with a TV-movie backstory that said her larking about was just a defense; she’d put it on because of her lousy father’s drinking. So everything specific to Mary Jane turned out to be an act. The reason, presumably, was that her schtick had worn a bit thin and she now needed explaining away. At this point, Mary Jane became the girlfriend, then the wife. She didn’t do badly in these roles, but no one can do especially well in them. She was on hand. She helped buck up the hero; she provided relationship tensions. But she didn’t do anything interesting. She dressed louder than the other superheroes’ wives/girlfriends. I guess she also had more spunk, for what that’s worth. Differences in spunk among this bunch get to be like IQ shadings at a high-price computer camp. All the girls have spunk, if they don’t go crazy.
The girls aren’t all that different from one another. Put them in a situation and they’ll say the same things. And of course, their job pretty much is to be put into situations, the terrible jams facing their boyfriends/husbands. In One More Day, the love interest speaks: “Peter? Is something —” Also: “Peter, what’s happening?” Resolute: “They’ll have to come through me first.” That’s Mary Jane — not much was left at the end. One More Day has a two-page spread intended as a grand summing up of her glory. (This is just as the demon Mephisto undoes her marriage to Peter in return for letting Aunt May live.) After 41 years of print existence, you’d think there’d be plenty of material, but apparently not. She and Peter ride a bike together, just like a Pepsi ad from the 1970s. MJ sits on a couch with Aunt May, and they’re watching TV. The only bit that shows character and flair is the survival from ’60s-era MJ. There she is, wearing a Romita-designed tinfoil dress and dancing on a table. Good for her! Her final words trail into the ether. You know what they are. “Face it, tiger,” they begin, and so on.
At least she’ll be around. Her costume is fancier than most girls’, and she says “Tiger” and “Pussycat.” So the markings have been preserved, even if now they’re stuck on a superbeing. But she isn’t what she was. The old Mary Jane had a power, and that was to whip men’s eyes about in a way that deeply impacted the nervous system and left the subject feeling happy and grateful. No wonder she always had to be so giddy (“With the brain of a mosquito,” in the unkind words of Not Brand Echh). It was because she made us giddy; she represented the principle of giddiness, all-out fun. She doesn’t have that role any more: She’s another cape with a slightly different line of patter. Mary Jane’s essential purpose was to be fun. Jackpot’s essential purpose is to be Mary Jane. It’s all a bit thin and derivative.
Ted Hughes … What a Fucking Douche!
Did you know that Ted Hughes left Sylvia Plath with two little kids when he walked out? I guess most people who care about Sylvia Plath would know that. But I don’t care about Sylvia Plath, so it was news to me. Jesus Christ, Hughes was a fucking douche. You’d have to be to make me sympathize with the spindizzy who wrote The Bell Jar.
In other news, their son just killed himself “forty-six years after the suicide of his mother.” Oh, the sad harmonies of time. He was a marine biologist at the fucking University of Alaska but had quit, or taken a leave of absence or something, “to make pottery in his home studio.” He was really depressed, apparently. I can’t say I blame him, considering his fucking mother killed herself in the next room when he was two or something.
Hughes’s next wife, the one he left Plath for, also gassed herself. Instead of just leaving a couple of little kids without parents in a cold London winter, she took that extra step and actually killed her little daughter while killing herself.
Here’s what Plath wrote about her little boy at some point before offing herself: “You are the one/ Solid the spaces lean on, envious./ You are the baby in the barn.” Well, Jesus. If my mom said that about me, I’d slap her face. But she’s got class and a sense of responsibility. I’m lucky to have her, taken all in all.
Fuck, how much does it take not to be some kind of poetic fucking asshole?
UPDATE: And my mom tells me she thinks Sylvia Plath was actually a good poet. Score one for human complexity.
Great Name!
Check out the start of this cite:
Steffie Woolhandler, M.D., et al., “Costs of Health Care Administration in the United States and Canada,” New England Journal of Medicine, August 21, 2003.
Hah!
Letter to the Believer About Mort Weisinger
I keep meaning to send this letter off to The Believer, but I don’t get around to it. Nerves probably.
One of my TCJ columns was all about Mort Weisinger, the miserable bent man who edited DC’s Superman titles during the 1950s and 1960s. I read a bunch of interviews in Alter Ego and so on (I don’t mean to sound offhand: the magazine makes for good reading) and I read a couple volumes of DC Showcase: Superman, plus old Weisinger Superman stories that were available on the Web (can’t find them now). I even sent away for some of Weisinger’s books: The Contest, 1001 Things You Can Get for Free, How to Be a Perfect Liar. I started with the idea that Weisinger was a jerk. Pretty soon I discovered that, yes, he really was. He was also banal to a degree that’s wonderful. You read Alan Moore rhapsodizing about the miracle conceits of the Weisinger period, and then you encounter the period’s mastermind and realize that behind the conceits lay a man who could not frame a worthwhile thought or write an interesting sentence. His brain had a big lobe for monkey-like ingenuity and no lobes for anything else. And of course he was a mess, an emotional slop pile, a heap of semi-liquid venom. He took delight in splattering anyone without the rank or assertiveness to tell him to lay off. If you want an idea of the low end of the human scale, spend some time researching Weisinger.
Because he was a mess and he had to churn out comics, Weisinger’s neuroses showed up in the Superman stories he oversaw. So it is with artists and neurosis. But Weisinger had very little talent — less, say, than a writer coming up with a funny dream sequence for The Dick Van Dyke Show. The Weisinger neuroses poke thru the stories like broken bones thru skin. God, are they painful. There’s no aesthetic payoff, just the fascination of the awful. But, okay, I’ll settle for that.
My column, called “The Night Thoughts of Mort Weisinger,” looked at a couple of Weisinger fave stories and dug out their abundant emotional subtext. To the extent that anyone reads my columns, this one was a success. So why not resell it? Weisinger seems like a good subject for The Believer, a general-interest magazine that runs articles on ’80s teen movies and the man behind a mid-century publishing imprint dedicated to educating the masses. The Believer, I mean to say, is fairly eclectic and doesn’t demand topical hooks for its articles. So why not an account of how this nasty heap’s emotional problems got imprinted on the favorite reading material of 10-year-old baby boomers? No reason at all, except I’m having trouble writing the letter. I’m just the diffident type.
There is the chance, of course, that someone at The Believer will browse along to this post and save me the distress of stepping forward. I did a post called “Question for Kurt Busiek or Mark Evanier” and, damn, they both wrote in. Conceivably I could write a post called “Will You Love Me, Emanuelle Béart?” and she could write in and say no.
-.jpg){kind=link}
Really Bad Sentence
From Lesbian Images by Jane Rule, published 1975. The book says that Jill Johnston, a loudmouth flibbertigibbet with the Village Voice, refuses to quit being a loudmouth flibbertigibbet:
Instead she seems to collects insults and labels to wear them around her neck like all the other decorations she wears over her comically aggressive costume and then stick that neck out once again, not only to contradict other people’s visions of reality, but her own vision of six months or two years ago.
Yeah, stick that neck out and … Oh well. The sentence is a spasm of klunk, a rare combination of two flaws normally found apart: clod-hopping heaviness and disoriented dizziness.
Wikipedia says Jane Rule, author of Lesbian Images, was inducted into the Order of Canada two years ago. Incredibly, I saw a movie based on one of her novels, saw it way back in 1986. Today I find out that the movie, called Desert Hearts, was based on a book by a woman who became a Canadian knight (or dame) and wrote at least one sentence that sounds a lot like somebody on cough syrup trying to turn an epigram after falling a long way down the stairs.
Bonus facts: Jane Rule was born in New Jersey, and her novel, published in 1964, is entitled Desert of the Heart.
And here’ s the Jill Johnston Wikipedia entry.
Nietzsche-Keane
This is a bit collegiate, but … The Nietzsche Family Circus. A random Nietzsche quote is made the caption of a random Bil Keane cartoon; just hit refresh and you get a new one. Didn’t really make me laugh, but one appreciates the thought.
UPDATE: And then this one did make me laugh.
For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity to exist,
a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.
That kid in the background with the hat. Mom’s going to buy them a fifth and they can get trashed and do amateur theatrics in the backyard.
And this one. It seems too good to be true:
If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.
And finally:
A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.