It ain't Toontown

Joe Tobul's Mother ruined my life. Under another name, Joe Tobul's mother blighted your life as well. For the past 50 years, all the Joe Tobul's mothers of America--kind and decent women who kept kitchens so clean you could eat off the floor, and who wouldn't harm a fly--blighted the lives of boys and girls with absolute innocence. They did it, as Joe Tobul's mother did it to me, by tossing out all those kids' funny books.

Stand in one of the hundreds of direct-sales comicbook stores that have sprung up across the country in the past decade, challenging the hegemony of traditional newsstand distribution, and listen to that 50-year-old man accompanying his 12-year-old grandson rummaging through this month's various X-Men comics. Mr. 50 stares into the triple-locked display case at the unnumbered first issue of Captain Marvel Adventures, dated 1941, and he says oh so conversationally, "I had that comic. How much is it?"

And the clerk smiles benignly, because he has had this conversation a hundred times, because he knows that the guy remembers paying ten cents for it when it was new, because he knows what's coming, and he replies, "It's only in fine condition, not near mint. It goes for $2700. Shame it's got a little spine roll to it, or we could've called it very fine; that'd be about six grand." Pale, very pale, goes Mr. 50.

And he says (make book on it), "My mother threw out all my comics."

And that's why this guy's kids never got to go to college. Because Joe Tobul's mother threw out all those comics that would have become an annuity. Guy could have been living on the Riviera today. Could own a controlling interest in A.T.&T.

But that's the way it was. Because comics were kid stuff. They were "bad" for kids, the way a Red Ryder BB gun was bad for kids. The rifle would put your eye out (as Jean Shepherd has told us), and comics would rot your brain. And if you didn't believe it, along came the Fifties' own Cotton Mather, the late Dr. Frederic Wertham, who, in a book called Seduction of the Innocent, could give you chapter and verse, gore and protuberant nipples on how mind-rotting those evil comics were. So all the Joe Tobul's mothers in this great nation, meaning well or just cleaning out the closet when you went to college, saved their kids from a fate worse than enlightenment, and thereby blighted millions of lives.

Yeah, that's the way it was. Today, following the lead of the rest of the world, coming to awareness behind the eye-opening and ground-breaking achievements of a handful of comics writers and artists who have snared critical and flash-media attention, this great nation is coming to understand that it has been a long time since comics were only kid stuff, that comics need no longer be a secret "guilty pleasure" for adults, that a vast treasure-trove of wonders has been lost, forgotten, mishandled and ignored, while its creators have been kept in artistic chains and actual poverty like poor bean-field hands, and that comic books not only have a claim to posterity but are one of only five native-American art forms that we've given the world: jazz, of course; musical comedy as we know it today; the detective story as created by Poe; the banjo; and comic books.

Yet every time some parvenu publication "discovers" comics, only 20 or 30 years late, untutored and ham-handed editorial twits invariably present the material under idiot headlines of the "Bang! Socko! Whack!" ilk, reinforcing subliterate stereotypes of a genre that for three generations has delighted the rest of the world with its cleverness.

Every other October in Lucca, Italy, the town turns into a comic-book festival. The entire town. Guests stream in from around the world. Lucca even issues postage stamps with Prince Valiant and Steve Canyon and Little Nemo on them. In Japan, as common as sashimi are the millions of copies of comic books--called manga--sold every week, some as thick as the annotated Kobo Abe, read by more adults than children in that most literate of nations, and read as seriously as novels and financial reports. In parts of Africa, Marvel's ebony superhero, The Black Panther, is looked on as a significant mythical figure, in the way Spaniards revere El Cid. In France, comics are held in such high esteem that Metal Hurlant, a graphics magazine, is a bestselling periodical, and the artist Moebius is considered a national treasure.

Ah, but in America, venal televangelists as crazy as fruit bats hold up copies of Elektra: Assassin and scare a video congregation slavering for fresh satanic menaces (having long since grown bored with the red herring of alleged demonic messages badly recorded backward on heavy-metal albums nobody would listen to without a gun at their head, anyway) with assurances that this comical book is filled--nay, riddled, nay, festooned--with demonology, bestiality, rampant sexuality and even--whisper the dreaded word--humanism! Yeah, sure; and Mighty Mouse sniffs cocaine ... if your head is loose on its bolts.

For more than half a century, comics in America have been kept adolescent, considered throwaway trash, beneath the notice of "serious" critics of art, paid heed only when the Warhols and the Lichtensteins plunder the treasure house, selfconsciously recasting the innocent and innovative work of creative intellects whose names are unknown to all but an underground of readers, specialty hucksters, pop-culture academics and wave after wave of bright-eyed naïfs come to work in that slaughterhouse of talent, the comics industry. Their names are unknown to those who stock the Frick, the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim, but not to Fellini, Truffaut and Resnais, who constantly pay homage to the images of Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, Jack Cole, C. C. Beck, Will Eisner, Bob Kane and Bill Finger.

If those names do not resonate as clearly as those of Norman Rockwell, Maxfield Parrish and Andrew Wyeth--great American illustrators who worked in media popularly accepted and not considered disreputable--then how about these names: Captain America, the Silver Surfer, the Hulk, Superman, Plastic Man, Captain Marvel, The Spirit and Batman?

While your back was turned, while you were busy fighting wars and codifying the rise 'n' fall of the Yuppie empire, comic books went whistling past puberty and reached adulthood.

In a recent issue of The Incredible Hulk, an up-and-coming young writer named Peter David wrote one of the most powerful battered-wife stories you'll encounter outside 60 Minutes. Yes, the story features the tormented Dr. Bruce Banner, whose exposure to gamma rays turns him into the ravening Hulk when he gets angry, but the spur to triggering his transformation is a mainstream examination of machismo, the tyranny of smalltown bullies and the brutalization of women.

In the first issue of a marvelous new comic titled The Big Prize, the talented Gerard Jo es recasts the Walter Mitty idiom by taking nearsighted, plain-as-soda-water Willis Austerlitz into the wish-fulfillment world each of us has yearned to know: He wins the big prize: A time traveler from a TV show of the future makes a mistake, lands in our today and awards him the right to visit the past. Austerlitz goes back to a gentler, more interesting time, the Thirties. But it isn't the idyllic dream our memories deliver. It is a time of poverty, racism, the Iowa farm strikes, Red baiting. It is the real Thirties, not an adolescent recollection of "good times."

Antic comedy as rich as Pogo or the best of Dudley Do-Right roils and gushes and overflows the pages of William Van Horn's Nervous Rex, the primordial saga of a henpecked tiny Tyrannosaurus whose behemoth of a wife devils his every moment, whose world is filled with mud flies that deliver one-liners in a Mexican accent, with the saurians determined to debase him, with a world very much like our own, in which we find ourselves often unwittingly acting like Caspar Milquetoast when we know that we are capable of courage and heroism.

Doesn't sound much like what was going on in comic books even ten years ago, does it?

Those are a mere handful of the creations of a cadre of some of the most innovative, wildly imaginative artists and writers this country has ever produced, work-for-hire talents who have created a vast body of popular art that constantly struggled against Philistine ignorance and market-place brutality toward High Art. But Siegel and Shuster's Superman does not hang in the Museum of Modern Art, and the imitations of Warhol and Lichtenstein do. Yet the former is persiflage, you may say, and the culture mavens at Art Forum will agree, while the latter has solid claim to posterity.

But consider this: If one of the unarguable critera for literary greatness is universal recognition, in all of the history of literature, there are only five fictional creations known to every man, woman and child on the planet.

The urchin in Irkutsk may never have heard of Hamlet; the peon in Pernambuco may not know who Raskolnikov is; the widow in Djakarta may stare blankly at the mention of Don Quixote or Micawber or Jay Gatsby. But every man, woman and child on the planet knows Mickey Mouse, Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, Robin Hood ... and Superman.

This fanciful creation--in 1933--of a pair of 17-year-old Cleveland schoolboys has remained center stage in the American mythos for more than 50 years. The orphan from Krypton has appeared in animated cartoons for theatrical exhibition, in live-action movie serials, in a radio series, television series, cartoons for television, novels, hundreds of thousands of comic books, Broadway musicals, on lunch boxes, bed sheets, drinking glasses, as Halloween costumes, dolls and plastic models and made a star of Christopher Reeve.

But Superman is more than just the fanciful daydream of a couple of kids who wanted to break into comics. He is the 20th Century archetype of mankind at its finest. He is courage and humanity, steadfastness and decency, responsibility and ethic. He is our universal longing for perfection, for wisdom and power used in the service of the human race.

The comic books have been the McGuffey's Readers of the masses, the picture books of our strange society. And, at last, in just the past seven years, it has become clear that intelligent adults, lovers of art, discriminating readers, observers of the forces that shape our culture are rediscovering the comic book. At its best, the new work of Alan Moore, Paul Chadwick, Peter David, Frank Miller, the Hernandez Brothers, Dave Gibbons and Steve Moncuse--and a rage of others--is creating a superior library of serious, entertaining, important reflections of our times, our dreams, our nobility and our depravity.

As the science-fiction movies of the Fifties reflected Cold War paranoia, so do the comic (continued on page 174)It Ain't Toontown (continued from page 165) books of the Eighties mirror and interpret our contemporary fears and obsessions. In Concrete, we deal with individual identity, the cult of celebrity, the venality of the common man and woman; in Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, we suffer the terrors of urban blight, random street violence and the alleged impotence of the average citizen; in The Watchmen and V for Vendetta, we are permitted to extrapolate the menace of multinationals running amuck, government by secrecy, the instability of society in the nuclear age....

But that's getting ahead of the story. It has been only since November of 1981, and the appearance of the premiere issue of Captain Victory, the first creator-owned superhero comic in the history of the industry--written and drawn by the legendary Jack Kirby--that the exploitative "plantation mentality" of the traditional comics publishers was challenged. A mere seven years since the emergence of the independents, the kick-in of a royalty concept, the advent of the direct-sales market (brain child of an unsung hero, the late Phil Seuling) and the greening of a creative arena that permitted the newest crop of talents to flourish.

But if you would understand the nature of the chains that are being broken, come back in time to the days in which those chains were first fastened on. Come back to the origins of the Gulag.

•

Nineteen thirty-three. Since the turn of the century, the closest thing to modern comics has been compilations of previously published newspaper strips. Now a New York printing company, Eastern Color, one of perhaps a dozen firms engaged in producing newspaper comic sections as Sunday color supplements, begins issuing books in the modern format--slick covers, newsprint-paper guts in crude color, roughly 7" x 10"--as premiums: giveaways for retailers and manufacturers.

A salesman at Eastern named M. C. Gaines notices how popular the loss leaders seem to be. Gaines is a colorful character: ex-haberdasher, ex-bootlegger, ex-munitions-factory worker; a man who marketed We Want Beer! neckties during Prohibition; and the father of Mad magazine's Bill Gaines. But beyond his flamboyance, he's canny: He sees how kids seem to clamor for those eight-page tabloids folded down to 32 pages. He tests the market by putting ten-cent price stickers on a few copies and leaves them at two newsstands just to see what happens. They're snapped up instantly. So Eastern publishes the first modern comic book, Funnies on Parade, follows it with Famous Funnies later that year and, sensing that it is on to something hot, still later that year goes to 100 pages in Century of Comics.

But those are still reprint books. It isn't until February of 1935 that the first comic book comprised entirely of original material and continuing characters is published. It is titled New Fun Comics and its parent company is an offshoot of a healthy printing company owned by Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson; he names it DC, short for Detective Comics. You can soon forget the major, because late in 1937, he folds and sells some of the DC properties to Harry Donenfeld, who goes into the business with the attitudes of the garment industry--piecework, sweatshop, assembly line--and he takes on as an operating partner a savvy accountant, Jacob Liebowitz, who functions as publisher.

I say soon forget, but not immediately forget, the major, because he plays one additional role in the creation of this eventually multimillion-dollar industry. By 1936, he is using comic strips with titles such as Dr. Occult and Slam Bradley in New Fun, New Adventure and Detective Comics, features written and drawn by Siegel and Shuster. Now he passes into the mists of minutiae and we follow Jerry and Joe, those two ex--Cleveland high school boys who, three years earlier, came up with the concept of Superman.

Now it's December 4, 1937, and Jerry Siegel meets in New York with the new DC publisher, Liebowitz. Heed this meeting. It sets the tone for all labor-management relations in the comic-book medium for 50 years.

According to historian Steve Gerber (who, incidentally, is the creator of Howard the Duck): "That meeting resulted in a contract agreement that stipulated that Siegel and Shuster would continue to produce Slam Bradley and The Spy exclusively for DC for two years, that DC would be sole owner of the material, that the creators would be paid ten dollars a page of story and finished art for their efforts, and that DC would have first option on acceptance of any new comics features that Siegel and Shuster might originate."

Now it's 1938, Gaines has gone over to help Donenfeld get the DC line moving; Superman has grown tattered, being shunted around for possible daily-strip syndication, but has been universally rejected; Siegel takes it in to DC, where Gaines, Donenfeld and Liebowitz look it over and decide to buy the feature and use it as the lead in their new book, Action Comics.

Liebowitz then sends a release form to the boys that reads, in part, as follows:

I, the undersigned, am an artist or author and have performed work for strip titled Superman.

In consideration of $130 agreed to be paid to me by you, I hereby sell and transfer such work and strip, all good will attached thereto and exclusive right to use the characters and story, continuity and title of strip contained therein to you and your assigns to have and hold forever and to be your exclusive property....

The garment-center-sweatshop work-for-hire mentality comes early and ferociously to the new land, a.k.a. the Gulag.

On March 3, 1938, Jerry and Joe sign the release and lose, for all time, any and all claim to whole or partial ownership of Superman, the creation on which they've pinned most of their hopes and dreams for five years.

(It is impossible to arrive at even a ball-park figure, even for DC, but a knowledgeable source who continues to work in the field suggests that in the 20 years from 1960 to 1980, more than $250,000,000 was logged by DC for royalties accruing from Superman gewgaws, collectables and tsatskes).

The Depression was in full swing. Gasoline cost 15 cents a gallon. A loaf of bread was seven cents. In today's currency, Siegel and Shuster's $130 would be equivalent to $2000. And don't forget: These were two naïve, hungry Ohio kids, trying to make a living in a fledgling industry.

In a 1975 press release on the occasion of the purchase of rights to Superman by Ilya Salkind and Pierre Spengler for the first Man of Steel motion picture, a film originally budgeted at $15,000,000 (eventually $55,000,000), a deal from which Siegel and Shuster never realized a cent, Siegel wrote, "I can't stand to look at a Superman comic book. It makes me physically ill. I love Superman, and yet, in my mind, he's been twisted around into some kind of alien thing."

At the time, he and Shuster were 61 years old. Siegel was working in a mail room in Los Angeles, making $7000 a year. Shuster was legally blind, unemployed and being supported by his (continued on page 222) It Ain't Toontown (continued from page 174) brother. They lived in what historian Gerber reported as "a shabby apartment in Forest Hills, Queens, from which he ventures out only occasionally." Today, they both live in Los Angeles, and DC Comics, now a division of Warner Communications, sends them an annual stipend ... as long as they make no public statements about their history with DC or their feelings about the past 50 years or contribute to the perpetuation of said sordid history. Needless to say, I was unable to obtain any statements from Siegel or Shuster during the preparation of this article. Without word from Siegel, there is no way to verify the long-standing story that the infamous $130 for the buy-out on Superman was actually money owed to Siegel and Shuster for work previously done; money withheld to force their signing of the release. As their 75th birthdays approach, fear of retaliation--via a press-blackout clause in the gentlemen's annuity deal--ensures that these men will not add to DC's weight of albatross guilt.

But for those who dote on stories that wallop you in the heart, here are a couple that have been authenticated:

On March 29, 1966, opening night of the Broadway musical It's a Bird ... It's a Plane ... It's Superman, among the crowd milling about in front of the Alvin Theater on West 52nd Street was a shabby old man. Tear your heart out just to see him. Right. But it would elicit anger more than knee-jerk sympathy to learn that it was Joe Shuster, the guy who first drew Superman, standing there without the money to buy a ticket to his own creation.

Shuster was working as a messenger. Broke, going blind, unable to get work in the industry he had helped bring into being, he was delivering parcels to midtown offices. Which brings us to story number two. Shuster found himself making a delivery to DC. He walked in with the parcel, and no one knew who he was. He started to leave--so the tale goes--and Liebowitz, the guy who'd gotten the boys to sign over Superman for $130, came out of his office. He recognized Shuster. Frayed cuffs, old jacket, looking gray and destitute. They confronted each other after all those years.

One version has it that Liebowitz gave him money to buy a new suit. Another version says the millionaire publisher pulled a fistful of money from his pocket, thrust it at Shuster and told him never to come back. A third version says it was ten bucks. A fourth telling ups the amount to 100 bucks. But all versions concur that the messenger service received a call from DC later that day, insisting that the old geezer who'd done the delivery that day never be given that run again.

What happened to them is not uncommon. Wally Wood, whose extraordinary art was showcased in EC comics and Mad for more than a decade, worn out and alcoholic, unable to draw after a lifetime at the board, worked so hard he had migraines not even a Dexedrine addiction could ease, returned from his doctor in Los Angeles, having learned he'd be hooked up to a dialysis machine for the rest of his days, put a Saturday Night Special to his head and blew his brains out. They didn't find his body for three days, there in that squalid little room.

Joe Maneely, Atlas Comics artist who drew more than half of the covers for the 70 comics a month the company was producing in the Fifties, having gone days without sleep to complete work unceasingly thrown at him by a publisher, rode a commuter train out to Jersey. He stepped between cars to clear his head--some say he'd been drinking, but so the hell what?--the train took a sharp curve, the cars jostled him and he slipped between them and was crushed to death.

Jack Kirby, whose thousands of pages of brilliant art for Marvel made Thor, Fantastic Four and The Avengers such stars that Marvel now commands almost 50 percent of the market, only recently, after a public crusade, has managed to regain a fraction of his originals, hundreds of pages of which have been given away as convention auction items, ripped off by office personnel, tendered to fans visiting the publication offices in New York, sold and resold by dealers for a tidy fortune over the years. And to this day, Kirby receives no co-creator credit.

Jack Cole, who created Midnight and Plastic Man, whose cartoons illuminated the pages of Playboy in the Fifties, after 20 years of backbreaking labor in the comics Gulag, said, "Ah, to hell with it," and pulled the trigger.

Reed Crandall, whose stylish renditions of Blackhawk remain a pinnacle of comic art, died broke and legally blind, a night watchman in Kansas City, not one cent of pension or royalty coming to him from the uncounted pages of exemplary art that made millions for half a dozen funnybook companies.

And that's the way it was. Till 1981, till Kirby's Captain Victory and Sergio Aragonés' Groo the Wanderer started making money in the direct-sales market, and comics creators were able to break out of the beanfields of the two major publishers to begin controlling their own destinies.

And at that point, the pressure to keep comics a childish, introverted, essentially frivolous commercial product began to ease. Once there were alternatives, the maturity that had always been there, stunted and ridiculed, censored by the Comics Code Authority and the strictures of the publishers, burst loose.

By 1986, with the blasting open of the medium by Frank Miller and his Dark Knight Returns version of Batman as an aging, more than slightly psychotic crime fighter coming back from retirement, comic books began to achieve the mainstream notice that aficionados always knew was potentially possible.

If Siegel and Shuster were the artistic and imaginative godfathers of the field, if Neal Adams was the champion who shamed DC into giving them a yearly nibble at the profit pie, if Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were the first major talents to reduce the level of silliness in comics characters and show them as real people with unreal powers, then Frank Miller has been the ass-kicking, indefatigable spokesman for a new, adult outlook on funnybooks.

The past two years in the world of comics have been a real toad-strangler. Censorship, duplicity, heroes, quislings, mountebanks and arrogant poseurs. The Gulag has turned into a feeding frenzy, and from the melee has come a banquet of tasty tidbits.

•

Here's the line of logic, for those who think it's been a long journey: If comics are so worthy, how come Joe Tobul's mother tossed out the books I lent Joe back in 1946, when we were both 12 years old in Painesville, Ohio?

Because Joe's mother, who was a nice lady, thought they were trash. And why did she think they were trash? Because the industry had a vested interest in keeping the material childish and narrowly focused. They were men of limited artistic vision, and their commercial view of the medium was equally tunnel-visioned. And how did they keep the unpredictable artists and writers who aspired to nobler ends in line?

They did it by holding both copyrights and trademarks on every last creation. If they owned Superman and Spider-Man lock, stock and long johns, they could always fire those who threatened their policies, even if the one getting the sack was the talent who thought up the character in the first place. So we study the Siegel-and-Shuster case at length, not only because Superman was the feature that made comics as popular as they've become but because what happened to Siegel and Shuster was the same scenario for virtually everyone who went into the field.

And that is why it took more than 50 years for Superman to appear on the cover of Time; 50 years for journals such as The New York Times, The Village Voice, The Nèw Yorker, Rolling Stone and The Atlantic to publish essays that said, "Wow! Look what we've discovered"; 50 years for magazines such as Spin (intended principally, one assumes, for MTV refugees who had the misfortune to learn to read) to write, "These days, comics stores are infinitely more exciting than record stores, even if you aren't a dweeb in highwater pants."

Because for 50 years, what could have been was prevented from being. But seven years ago the creator-owned comic came into existence, and the all-powerful interests that ran the Gulag found that the best talents were cleaning up with offbeat and original work for the independent, smaller houses. In a matter of months, direct-sales comics shops were springing up all over the country, selling many times the units that were being sold by traditional newsstand-distribution methods.

Companies such as Comico, Kitchen Sink, Eclipse, First Comics, Quality and Vortex were stealing away the artists and writers who were producing the books that made them the most money. They still had Superman and X-Men, Batman and Daredevil, but Mike Grell had gone to First, where he created Jon Sable; Sergio Aragonés and Mark Evanier had gone to Pacific, where Groo the Wanderer was pulling down big numbers, and Timothy Truman was writing the revived Forties character Airboy for Eclipse. Even more significantly, Dave Sim, up in Canada, was himself publishing the astonishing Cerebus the Aardvark, copies of the first issue selling for huge sums through dealer ads in the weekly tabloid of the funnybook world, Comics Buyer's Guide; Steve Moncuse in Richmond, California, was self-publishing The Fish Police and copping reams of critical praise; Eastman and Laird had started publishing Teenage Mutant Ninj a Turtles in Sharon, Connecticut, as a gag parody of the profusion of X-Men comics flooding the market, and suddenly, their Mirage Studios was a thriving company.

So Marvel and DC, who had outlasted the hundreds of comics companies that had flourished in the Forties and been destroyed by the likes of Dr. Wertham in the Fifties, who had blossomed anew in the Sixties and Seventies, now saw the empire at peril. For 50 years the giants had stonewalled the concept of author royalties, vowing, "Over our dead bodies!" But Frank Miller, who had blown breath back into Marvel's Daredevil, wouldn't produce for anyone simply with a work-for-hire contract anymore, so DC lured him away with a royalty deal, and he created the astonishing multileveled six-book "graphic novel" Ronin; and then The Dark Knight Returns ... and it was all over for the plantation mentality.

Rolling Stone did a major takeout on Miller and his gritty, surreal, film noir vision of the myth of superheroes, set against mean streets filled with vicious mad-dog vatos and Swat-crazy fascistic authorities. Batman, middle-aged, racked with guilt over the death of the young man who had been Robin, lost in memories of his caped-crusader career but retired for a decade, goes back to the shadowy alleys and rooftops of Gotham City, a half-crazed vigilante prowling in a nighttime world dolorous under the threat of imminent global nuclear warfare. Superman works for the Government. The Cat-woman is a madam. The Joker, now a media celebrity, shrills at us from the set of Late Night with David Letterman, having at last found his proper venue.

And suddenly, U.P.I, and A.P. started blowing kisses and urging their adult audience to get a load of this! Not yet 30, Miller found himself riding the wave of serious attention. The evening news shows interviewed him, treating him like a modern poet of urban society. Like Fulton, Chaplin, Kerouac or Nader, Miller was in the right place at the right time, with the deliverable goods and an enormous talent, and he became the pointman for the entire comics industry. He opened the door and, because there were now alternatives to work for hire, work at command, other restless creators kicked that door off its hinges and the Gulag began to empty.

Now an adult reader who makes no snob distinctions between the value of a Jim Thompson or Harold Adams suspense novel and the work of Thomas Pynchon, Jim Harrison or Joyce Carol Oates, considered "serious" writing, can go to the nearest comics shop and find magazines and graphic novels that--in this different medium of presentation--have as much emotional and intellectual clout as the best movies, the best novels and one or two items on television. Here are a few of the best:

• Omaha, the Cat Dancer: a spunky, sexy, cleanly drawn contemporary soap opera about the life and loves of a nude terpsichorean who happens to be a, er, uh, a cat. Reed Waller is the intelligence guiding this fable. It is a magazine that has the religious right crazed. It is wonderful.

• Lone Wolf and Cub: a series of square-bound, stiff-cover reprints of the Japanese manga on which the "baby cart" films were based. The episodic story of a masterless samurai and his infant son wandering through blood and shogunate Nippon, staying one jump ahead of the assassins sent to slay them. Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima tell the tales.

• The Spirit: masterworks month after month by Will Eisner. Denny Colt, a cross between the young Jimmy Stewart and the Steve McQueen of The Great Escape, residing under Wildwood Cemetery, helps Inspector Dolan battle crime and usually gets the shit kicked out of him in the process. Stories of character and human foible, tragic and funny and illustrated by a man whose work is simply cinematic.

• John Constantine, Hellblazer: a sublimely deranged view of present-day England and America as a battle between the grotty, amoral survivor Constantine and all the demons of hell that darken our lives, be they religious crusaders or violence-drenched street thugs. Jamie Delano is the deliciously perverse talent who dreams this stuff up every month. If Rimbaud and Baudelaire were writing comics today, they would acknowledge Delano as their superior in portraying decadence.

• The Watchmen: a 12-issue graphic novel that is what experts mean when they talk about science fiction's doing what no other genre of literature can do. From Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, a pair of Olympian English talents, this milestone saga is nothing less than an illustrated alternate-universe novel postulating a world in which Nixon still reigns, in which superheroes have been outlawed because the common man fears them, in which a complex murder mystery is the core of a study of our times and our tenuous grasp on sanity. It was The Watchmen, following the Dark Knight opus, that kicked the Gulag's door off its hinges. As exciting as Hammett, as intricate as Proust, as socially insightful as Auchincloss, if comics have approached literature, it is here.

• Concrete: probably the best comic being published today by anyone, anywhere. Trying to describe the down-to-earth humanity and sheer dearness of Paul Chadwick's creation requires more than words or pictures. Ronald Lithgow, ex-Senatorial speechwriter, has been, er, uh, altered by alien forces. His brain now lives in a rock-hard monstrously ponderous body. And he visits Tibet, and he swims oceans, and he saves a family farm, and he performs at kiddie birthday parties, and none of this casts even a scintilla of light on the magnificence of what Chadwick is doing, issue after issue.

• The Fish Police: another idea that turns to gibberish when one attempts to codify it. There's this cop, Inspector Gill, who is a fish. Except he keeps thinking about something called "ankles." He is obviously some other being, from some other place where people breathe air and "walk." He may be human. It is Chandler and Willeford and the antic parts of Hammett, told as an aquatic allegory. It takes Steve Moncuse to conceive it ... and to explain it.

If one now gets the sense that trying to encapsulate these ribald fantasies in mere narrative is akin to summarizing Moby Dick as a long story about a crazy one-legged guy trying to kill a big white fish, or Citizen Kane as a biography of a guy whose life got fucked up because he lost his Flexible Flyer ... one has put one's little paw on the problem.

Comics are a different medium. They combine film, animation, the novel form, the succinct joy of the short story, the mystery of the haiku and the visual punch of great paintings. They are their own yardstick. Parallels fail. They must be seen to be enjoyed.

And trying to sum up the hundred different wonders of a genre this various would fill (and has filled) copious volumes. There are the exquisite reprint books of Steve Canyon, Li'l Abner, Terry and the Pirates, Popeye and Shel Dorf's meticulous reissuing of Dick Tracy; the English reprint comics of Judge Dredd, Mirademan, Halo Jones; the frequently dangerous stories of a war over which we still anguish, The 'Nam; Gerard Jones and Will Jacobs' The Trouble with Girls, which stands James Bond on his ear; the satire on Fifties bomb-shelter Cold War paranoia, The Silent Invasion; Eric Shanower's gorgeous Oz graphic novels; and Nexus and Zot! and the Hernandez Brothers constantly enriching Love and Rockets and ... and....

It goes on, without drawing a breath or relaxing its grip on imagination. Volumes can be filled with praise for the treasures these past seven years have given us.

In the pages of a new newsletter called Wap! (for Words and Pictures), for the first time in the history of the Gulag, comics professionals are speaking out. Endless recountings of the screwings and hamstringings of their work in a field that was purposely held at an adolescent level. In the pages of Wap! and in the pages of Comics Buyer's Guide, the new, strong voice of an art form coming to maturity can be heard. The censors tremble, the moguls fret, the occasional jumped-up fan turned editor of a critical journal (in the same way that The National Enquirer is a critical journal) spits bile, but after a half century, the talent is finally speaking out.

(Wap!--12 issues a year for $25--can be obtained from RFH Publications, 1879 East Orange Grove, Pasadena, California 91104. Comics Buyer's Guide--free copy on request--is available from Krause Publications, 700 East State Street, Iola, Wisconsin 54990. The former gives the inside, the latter the outside.)

Television wearies. Films pander to the sophomoric, to the knife-kill crazies. Novelists write smaller and smaller about less and less. Fast food gives you zits. But from the rubble of the Gulag the song of the imagination is heard. And there is an insistent rapping on the sanctified portals of the Frick and Moma. Those who have survived come with Zot! and Swamp Thing to demand that, at last, attention, attention must be paid.

That's truth, justice and the American way.

" 'I love Superman, and yet, in my mind, he's been twisted around into some kind of alien thing.' "

"He stepped between cars to clear his head--the cars jostled him and he slipped and was crushed to death."