Writer Fred Van Lente digs into the roots of the medium with 'Comic Book Comics' discussing war, pop art and Adam West
By Kiel Phegley
Posted 3/28/2008
When writer Fred Van Lente and artist (and frequent Wizard and Toyfare contributor) Ryan Dunlevy launched Action Philosophers! in 2005, the comics world was left a bit stunned but laughing pretty hard, too.
While the idea of the lives of famous philosophers being told in cartoon form was an uncommon one, Van Lente and Dunlevy's execution was so spot on in terms of historical accuracy and comedic acumen that the pair won several awards and much acclaim. Last month, the partners launched a new historical comics series which began mapping out the history of...well, comic books. And if that idea wasn't as obvious yet untested as any comics pitch in a long time, they named their new series Comic Book Comics just to get the point across. Van Lente took a break from both his self-publishing gig and his days writing superhero books for Marvel (including the just-launched Wolverine: First Class to tell Wizard Universe what it’s like being a comic historian, how the Adam West "Batman" show had a bigger impact on comics culture than you may think and why being funny is a legally sound idea.
WIZARD UNIVERSE: How do you guys formulate how you're going to present these stories? Some use a narrator, some use direct historical quotes...do you just pick an anecdote from comics history and try to figure out the easiest way for Ryan to draw it?
VAN LENTE: The easiest way to say it is, "Water trying to find its own path." There's so much information and we have such a limited space in which to do it. You really have to feel your way through it, and just hope you nail your mark. One of the challenges of Comic Book Comics versus Action Philosophers! is Action Philosophers! was done in a very episodic, biography-oriented fashion while Comic Book Comics is a much more traditional, linear comic book series where you're doubling back a little bit but you're essentially going through time—what I like to call the biblical theory of history. You know, [Richard F.] Outcault begat [Bud] Fisher, who begat [Winsor] McKay. There's a lot of "begetting" going on here, artistically at least. So it's a challenge, and I just hope at the end, by issue 5 [I won't be saying,] "I should have said that in issue #1!" Fortunately one of the joys of being a self-publisher is that in the trade or online or whatever, we can just go back and redo it. We have total control over the product, so I don't have to beg production at Marvel to change the lettering. I'm the letterer of Comic Book Comics, so I can just go in and change it myself.
With complete control, sometimes it must be kind of tough, because there's no one stopping you from navel-gazing a bit. How did you for yourself pick the stuff that's really important, that really weighs on comics history? Were there pet fascinations of yours that you didn't put in?
VAN LENTE: I'm kind of a crappy geek, when you come right down to it. I'm not obsessed with EC or the X-Men or any aspect of comics history. I like all of it, so I'm kind of polymorphously perverse when it comes to comics. There were some really crazy anecdotes that I really wanted to tell that just got forced out by recognizing from a scholarly standpoint, "Yes that's funny and interesting and bizarre, but I can't tell this story without leaving this other thing out, and this other thing is much more important for the reader to get where we're going with the overall arc of the narrative." And the other end of the spectrum is that a lot of the stories turn out to be lies.
Where do you do your fact-checking? Considering the fact that you live in Manhattan, it seems that some of the actual materials and people and resources are somehow at your disposal...
VAN LENTE: Yeah, being a couple stops away from the New York Public Library and its stacks and holdings is pretty spectacular, and the fact that you don't need to be paying college tuition to have this terrific research resource to you is very advantageous, and I've been using it quite a lot. What I’m doing right now, the pop art story about [Roy] Lichtenstein that ties directly in the Adam West Batman TV show—for some reason, you can't get the Adam West Batman TV show on DVD. But, you can go to the Paley Media Center on 52nd Street, ensconce yourself in one of their cubicles, put on headphones, and they will give you tapes of the complete run of the series. So I was able to just walk in off the street, sit down, write my little slip out, and they beamed "Hi Diddle Riddle," the ["Batman"] premiere into my little monitor. I've got pop culture at my fingertips! The power! So being in New York City has been very advantageous. We’ve been to the Smithsonian and one of the things we've been doing is taking pictures of ourselves in important locales in comics history. The first underground comic was actually in the basement of the state capitol in Austin, which is a story you can read right now at comicbookcomics.com! So we went down to STAPLE!, the independent comics convention there, and we took photos of ourselves in front of the capitol.
Interview continues below preview page.
A lot of the preview pages that have been up online have been the really specific paper comic book stuff, but you're also dipping a hand in the newspaper comics and into animation. When you're branching out into things that aren't specifically comics books, are you using only things that cross over or that inform the rest of what you're talking about in the main thread?...
VAN LENTE: Yes. We're not trying to do a comprehensive history of animation or newspaper strips. I mean, I have to confess to having almost zero interest in newspaper cartooning. Just because when I was a kid, I was all about the comics, all about the superheroes. I just found it so frustrating that people made such a big deal out of four panels a day. I was like, "Four panels! You can't do anything with four panels." And then in the late '80s, it became three panels, which was even more horrifying to me. As a twelve-year-old, I was suddenly turned into a 90-year-old. "You call this comics? This is not comics, this is acting out the first five minutes of the play and going home. It makes no sense."
"It's a doodle, is what it is!"
VAN LENTE: Exactly. And I know I'm horrifying lots of people because lots of people, billions of people, love newspaper strips, and you can definitely say they love them more than comic [books], but it's just not where my interests are. And so that was probably the toughest part about Comic Book Comics #1, was the first story about newspaper strips.
Part of the trap you can fall into in a story is doing the biblical method, which so-and-so begat so-and-so. And really if you look at history closely is never how things happens. It's always. "something happens here, and it's a false start." And then "This guy over here does something, but then this other guy doubled back" and, "Aha!" The history of Famous Funnies #1, the first comic, is a complete mess. One guy says, "No, Max Gaines did it." Another guy says, "No, it was this other Eastern Color salesman.”"And in Gerard Jones' book Men of Tomorrow, he says George Delacourt had a much bigger hand in it than some these other people. To a certain extent you have to realize that what you're going to give the reader and what the reader's going to come away with is, for lack of a better word, the gist of it. To a certain extent, it's almost a Zeno's paradox, the old mathematical paradox of, "I'm halfway there, then I'm half of the halfway there, then how do I get anywhere?" You're always getting closer but never arriving.
I think that's the way it is with truth and with history, because since you weren't there, you just have to bring it closer into focus, and you're never going to be able to reproduce it exactly. Ask any policeman. Eyewitness accounts frequently are completely inaccurate, so even being there doesn't guarantee you're going to get the 100 percent black and white truth. Lots of people are going to read this and think, "He’s making excuses for himself." [Laughs] But I really think that's true! For me, the challenge of a historian is making things intelligible, while still acknowledging that you are giving your interpretation which is different than the old high school textbook idea, which is, "This is the truth. Take it or leave it."
One of the things about Action Philosophers! that was so much fun was that it was philosophy, but it was humorous. For this, what is the balance for you as an entertainer and a historian? Are you trying to provide a context on a history, or just say, "Here's what it is. It's a fun way of telling it, but I'm not going to give any commentary beyond that."?
VAN LENTE: Some of it—and I'm being totally up front about this—is to not get sued. One of the ways to refer to this stuff, because we're using trademarked characters—one of the things people said when I told them this idea years ago was, "How are you gonna be able to do that and not be sued? Because you're talking about Superman, you're talking about Blue Beetle, you're talking about all these trademarked characters, aren't people going to come after you?" And the way you protect yourself from that is—there's an educational component to this that's covered under copyright law as fair use, but there's ways to make fun of them. It's parody, and it's protected. Sometimes it becomes, I gotta tell some jokes here, or I'm gonna get sued! You'll see when you get the comic, the entire inside front cover is taken up by legalese. Humorous legalese, of course, but all accurate nonetheless. You get comics history, and it tends to be coffee table books of excerpts from various comics, which is kind of like an industry of literature that's just permission. We legally—well, we could if we got permission, but we're too lazy to do that—can't reproduce old comics; we have to do it ourselves. Ryan has to draw all the stuff himself, so the satire comes out of both to a certain degree legal necessity, and to a lesser extent, it's our unique way of telling the story. Because we can't say, "Here's Superman, look at Superman! Here's some Joe Shuster pages!"
That's a nice thing then, in terms of Ryan's past drawing so many calendars and strips for Wizard. It seems like with some of the bigger name characters, he probably has his own take on them all ready.
VAN LENTE: He did some crazy stuff. We have this page on Winsor McCay, and he's like, "I’m gonna draw it like Winsor McCay." And I'm like, "You're crazy. What are you doing?" Sure enough, it took him like two weeks to do one page, and he was like, "I'm going to kill myself," because McCay's stuff—he was so sort of Asperger's Syndrome/obsessive-compulsive about the details. Ryan's sitting there drawing these incredibly detailed buildings, and Little Nemo's flying around—and Little Nemo's public domain! So don't come after us—And at the end of it he was like, "You're right. I'm nuts. I can't believe I did that. That was impossible." Trying to draw in different styles—I thought he wasn't going to try to do that, but from doing Wizard and all the stuff he does for you guys, he's definitely used to drawing in a multitude of cartoonist's styles, whether it's Bill Key or Bill Watterson, or what have you. And we definitely employed a lot of that in Action Philosophers! He's definitely attempting it for some of the sequences in Comic Book Comics, but I think the Winsor McCay thing broke him.
I’ve been reading the Charlie Biro pages online. Have you been finding photo reference so that he can draw creators accurately? Everybody knows what Jack Kirby looks like and Stan Lee, but have you been trying to get as many accurate caricatures in there as well?
VAN LENTE: It's funny, you'd be surprised. A lot of it is from comic book artists doing self-portraits. It's funny how many comic book companies and comic book professionals do comics about themselves. The Charlie Biro and Bob Wood caricatures came from a comic Biro and Wood did while they were doing Crime Does Not Pay. I know that the Siegel and Shuster portraits come largely from caricatures that Shuster did of them in the era while they were doing Superman. It's fun. There are a surprising amount of photos you have access to, but most of it is just aping the self-portraits of the cartoonists themselves.
What are you going to do when it comes to Ditko?
VAN LENTE: [Laughs] Yeah, Ditko drew himself in Spider-Man. I can't remember which Spider-Man it was. He did the pin-up that was of him and Stan Lee. The funny thing about Ditko is that at the early Marvel conventions in the '60s, he would go to all of them. He was the most accessible of the Marvel creators. It's funny, because you read The Golden Age of Fandom by Bill Schelly and he keeps showing up at New York shows until his break with Marvel.
And then he drew a Winsor McCay page and it was all over.
VAN LENTE: Exactly! Then he's like, "Forget it." Jonathan Ross and Neil Gaiman show up at his doorstep, and he's like, "Go away!"
The first issue hits the roots of the Golden Age, and then you're moving on to the Golden Age boom. What are some of the future installments that you're most excited for in terms of your research? I almost feel that some of this stuff has been well traveled ground. Is there anything coming up where you think, "We're going to do a take on this that nobody else in a historical context has done that much with before?"
VAN LENTE: Most definitely. In the second issue what I'm most excited about is a story called "Our Artists at War." What's exciting about "Our Artists at War" is that we actually look at comic book creators serving in WWII, and how WWII impacting the comics medium and cartoonists. Not too many understand how revolutionary what Will Eisner did for the Pentagon [was] when he was doing his comics for them and Army Motors and working with the ordnance department. That was really a significant step forward for comics in America was the way they were adopted and used as a training tool by the Pentagon during WWII. There's an interesting story about what Jack Kirby did during the war, what Bert Christman, who was the co-creator of the Sandman, did. He was a fighter pilot in Burma in the Asian theater.
Another thing, I think it's how fascinating how Walt Disney was saved from bankruptcy by the war. During the war, Disney's output was 75 percent contracted by the government and the military. He probably would have gone under [otherwise]. And that's why Walt Kelly left Disney, because he was a Disney animator, and he left right before they got the contracts and was convinced they would go out of business. So he left and created Pogo the Possum, which is also noteworthy because it's the only popular comic book feature that became more popular as a comic strip. Usually the migration is from strips into comic books, but this went the other way.
Oh, and the second thing I mentioned earlier would be pop [art] in the third issue showing the influence of Lichtenstein and [Andy] Warhol on comics and vice versa. One of the things in there [is] how heavily Lichtenstein influenced the Batman TV show, which kind of defined superhero comics for an entire generation. Those bright colors and sound effects all come directly out of Lichtenstein's work and pop art. In fact, what's hilarious is ABC actually organized the [Batman TV] premiere party in New York so that Warhol and Lichtenstein and all those guys could watch it. Those are the two main things I'm excited about. And Wonder Woman and EC Comics and [Fredric] Wertham—all that stuff.
For more on Comic Book Comics check out Van Lente and Dunlevy's Web site at EvilTwinComics.com/cbc.html, and look for the second issue of the series in comic shops later this summer.
