‘Radio Graffiti’ Forever: Deceased Artiste Alan Colmes

I'm pleased to say that this tribute to Alan Colmes will be a Hannity-free piece. Alan spent 13 years being Sean Hannity's partner (some would say “sidekick”), and I skillfully avoided ever seeing more than five minutes of the show. This obit for Alan is solely concerned with his talk-radio work, pre-Fox News (the cable TV network and the radio syndication outlet).

Listening to Alan's radio shows, one was aware of his debt to the East Coast pioneers of talk radio. He either verbally cited them as influences or, as was the case of Jean Shepherd, he interviewed them on-air. I first heard of Alan when he was doing a show on WPIX-FM, where he was known for a short time, for some incomprehensible reason, as “Alan Le Colm” (spelling is dubious, as was the whole nickname thing). When he arrived at WABC-AM for a morning drive-time slot, they dubbed him “Alan B. Colmes” – the middle initial fitting in with their call-letters but being another dippy work of fiction (his middle name was Samuel). WABC did a short obit tribute this past week to Alan in which they kept identifying him by this stupid moniker, which seemed moronic and disrespectful.

His specialty during his stint at WPIX was having various levels of kooks as guests, in an echo of Long John Nebel's radio show. This meant he could be heard talking to folk who interacted with aliens, various and sundry psychics, and the odd show-biz type.

Like all great radio personalities, the thing that made Alan special was his voice. He had a warm, comforting sound, and occupied an unusual place in the talk-radio spectrum, since he was openly liberal and proudly Jewish, as well as being okay with letting the “inmates run the asylum” by having segments on his shows that encouraged creative prank-calling. The best of these was “Radio Graffiti,” a segment where you were allowed “one sentence, one sentence only.” (An even better, longer version from the WEVD years can be found at the bottom of this webpage.)

As talk-radio became incredibly “specialized” on the AM band (read: simply conservative chatter, or all sports drivel all the time), Alan had fewer outlets to be heard on. This resulted in him being on a trio of stations that all shifted their format, meaning that he was on the last hours of all three (he was the very last voice heard on two of them; I can't verify this about the third).

The first was 66 WNBC-AM, where Alan took over for Joey Reynolds when he was “moved on” by management. Alan had Joey on as a guest during that time and it's pretty fascinating, since Joey was in transition and the callers are openly abusive to both Colmes and Reynolds (who keeps reminding them he doesn’t work at NBC anymore).

Alan polished his talk-show formula beautifully on NBC in the afternoon drive-time slot from 1987 to October '88 (the point at which I became a devoted listener). Alan hosted the very last show on the station before it made the switchover to “the FAN” (an all-sports format that gets amazing ratings and is toxic for folks like me).

From there Alan went to WMCA, the one-time home of the man who created talk radio as we know it, Barry Gray. Alan was on that station from '88-'89, when it, too, changed formats to all-Christian radio (more deadly than sports!). This is the best example of Alan's radio work on YT – an evening in which he pretended that he was giving up hosting his show and gave it over to the callers. What resulted was beautiful chaos, in which prank callers alternated with what sound to be prepared pranksters recruited by Alan ahead of time. Truly fun stuff.

In the late 1990s – around the time he began his TV stint with Hannity – he had a late night stint at WEVD. This station was a longtime left-wing station (named after Eugene V. Debs) that found Alan in good company politically. He also still devoted time to comedy – including two memorably serious interviews with Jean Shepherd and George Carlin.

WEVD went off the air in 2001, with Alan again being the very last voice heard on the station – wags on a certain radio-pro/fan message board deemed Alan “the Grim Reaper of Radio.” Alan got a lot of shit from a lot of parties for a few things he did, most notably his “partnership” with Sean Hannity. Now that he's left us, I'd like simply say that he was a great radio personality who gave me a lot of entertainment in the years that I listened to him. And my personal favorite partnership he had? It was with a caller, who was actually a professional performer that called in as different characters.

Alan had three regular callers, all of whom were played by this unnamed, unidentified comedian (there is *nothing* on the Internet to identify this guy). The last creation was “Mace,” a gravel-voiced alcoholic who called up Alan while he was fully lit and ready for destruction. The calmest of the three was “Steve,” a wimpy guy who had a bizarre obsession with Eddie Albert and was dying to host Alan's show.

The best comedy character, though, was “Elmo.” Alan's nemesis, Elmo called him to remind him that he wasn't funny, he conducted bad interviews, and generally made a lousy host. Alan would allow Elmo to dissect him at length – I remember him noting that Colmes “sucked all the humor out of comedians,” in reference to the Shepherd and Carlin interviews. It was a nice touch for a radio show – an antagonist who called in to say how badly the show was going.

Elmo also took the time to mock Alan's liberal politics. And when he did it, it was funny….

The World's Foremost Authority: Deceased Artiste Professor Irwin Corey

Courtesy vs-uc.com

It is the mid-1950s. A disheveled middle-aged man comes out in a swallow tail coat. He is here to deliver a lecture, but realizes he doesn’t have the text of his speech. He searches for it, taps his pockets, looks in his coat, glances around to see if he dropped it… and then says, “HOWEVER….”

November 2004. A very old gent, 90 years of age, comes out onstage in a swallow tail coat, looking like he woke up in the damned thing. He’s beyond disheveled, but he’s here to tell us something. He suddenly realizes he doesn’t have his speech. He taps his pockets, looks in his coat, glances around to see if he’s dropped the text, and… “HOWEVER….”

The one thing that struck me the most about Professor Irwin Corey’s act is that he “aged” into it. He was always funny, but a middle-aged man being a crazy lecturer isn’t anywhere near as funny as a 90-year-old man doing the same act, and coming out with the same improvised nonsense. When the middle-aged Corey did it, it was radically weird — the end of the act I’m describing above (at least on the Steve Allen Show on which I have him doing it) is that the Professor would run into the audience and the show’s crew members would pursue him with a butterfly net.

As a very old man doing the bit, though, he was the “voice of wisdom” — except his wisdom made no sense, and was thus a perfect spoof of academia and the notion of a “public intellectual” (a real, actual phenomenon we used to have in this country, smart people who would hold forth on news and talk shows about smart things!). As the Internet has crushed all our attention spans and made us prone to loving small bits of digestible but pointless information, Professor Irwin Corey became a comedian whose crazy, rambling lectures truly suited our culture.

His early life was rather amazing and was discussed in his obits: born as one of six children, he wound up in an orphanage (his parents couldn't afford to feed him and his siblings). From the age of 13 onward he was on his own, traveling the country, then toiling for a public work relief program (where he became a featherweight champion boxer) and the Int'l Ladies Garment Workers Union. His work in the union's show Pins and Needles in the late Thirties spurred him on to the career in show biz that he pursued for the next 80 years. It also cemented his eternally Progressive political stance.

Irwin was not the only family member to pass the century mark. In researching this piece, I found an article on the York Daily Record site (a newspaper in York County, Penn.) about his sister Thelma. She was a professional dancer who, in 2009, celebrated her 100th birthday. The article can be found here.

A lot of tributes online have linked to YouTube clips, but I wanted to explore an earlier adventure in the Professor's career. In December 1944 (the year after he appeared in the New Faces of 1943 show), he appeared on a few episodes of The Chase and Sanborn Hour, hosted by Edgar Bergen and his little wooden pal Charlie McCarthy.

Edgar needs a tutor to teach Charlie (it wasn't clear what), and the gent recruited is the Professor, who was already being called “The World's Foremost Authority.” It's fascinating to hear Corey at this point because he's formulating the character, who has a somewhat British accent. (And his voice is quite high – but, then again, Corey is only 30 years old!)

Two of the episodes with Corey as Charlie's tutor, in which the Professor does what seems to be his own material, are available online. In the first, Corey compares L.A. to NYC — when asked if it's hard to get around NYC, he responds, “Any taxi driver will tell you where to go… and they usually do!” In the second episode he gets his own segment, lecturing on the future and electricity (and, again, it sounds like his own material and ad-libs).

The December 3, 1944 show can be found here. It is the 45th show in the collection. Corey enters at the 13:00 mark and is on for four and a half minutes.

The December 10, 1944 show can be found here – click the Chase and Sanborn Hour, and listen to the  “Charlie McCarthy 44-12-10 Signe Hasso.mp3” link. The professor appears around 10:15.

Courtesy of the Scott
Rollins blog.

I never spoke to Irwin one-on-one or interviewed him, but I saw him perform in a few unique circumstances. The Nov. 2004 gig I mentioned above took place at Lehman College in the Bronx, when a show called “The Comedians” played in their auditorium. This particular show was traveling around the U.S. at the time, and its roster was quite impressive: The Professor, Bill Dana (subbing for Louis Nye, who wasn't well), Mort Sahl, Shelley Berman, and Dick Gregory. The host was the “baby” of the bunch in terms of age, Dick Cavett.

The Professor kicked ass at 90, but even more impressive was what occurred at an April 2014 screening of the documentary Irwin and Fran at the Anthology Film Archives.

Irwin & Fran trailer 2014

Corey was a mere kid of 99 (!) at the time. He had agreed to do a Q&A after the picture, but he wound doing what amounted to more than 20 minutes of standup comedy from his wheelchair. Members of the audience kept asking him serious questions, but I was very happy to throw him a “straight line” after he asked us, “Any more stupid questions?”

Feeling that he did not want to answer any more queries about the film — which is a very touching portrait of the relationship between Corey and his wife Fran, who were married for 70 years until her death — I asked about his sex life. He responded with a line that he attributed to George Burns, likening senior-citizen sex to “trying to shoot pool with a rope.”

The audience was amazed at the energy coming from the Professor. He was pretty much unable to hear anything by that point (his son was repeating the questions to him, in a louder tone of voice so he could hear them) and he was indeed wheelchair-bound, but he was “on” and in the mood to do his shtick. And he was *very* funny.

By comparison, at his 100th birthday celebration, held at the Actor's Temple, he spoke but only for a few minutes and with none of the gusto that he had at the Anthology event. I'm assuming he was exhausted by the proceedings, in which he was being surrounded by people and praised by numerous folks at the mic.

I feel the only way to end this piece is to showcase Irwin's best performance in a film. He had done serious acting since he was a young man and had many credits in “legit” theater, but his movie roles were mostly supporting parts that were pretty silly (as with his “mystery man” character in Car Wash). That was not the case with Herb Gardner's Thieves (1977), directed by John Berry.

Irwin had played the role of Joe Kaminsky, the cabbie, in the Broadway production of the show, and repeated his performance in the film. It's a beautiful turn, mostly because he's playing a cartoonish character who is simply a note of “local color” for a lot of the film, until we reach a beautifully written scene in which he talks to his daughter, played by Marlo Thomas.

I've rhapsodized before about Herb Gardner's writing on this blog — you can check out an entry on his Nebbishes cartoon and merchandise here and his long out-of-print novel and short stories here. Gardner wrote a kind of urban poetry, and his dialogue transforms his comedies into these sublimely rendered character studies of folks in middle-age (with some unforgettable senior characters in the later plays).

I remember that Frank Rich — the lousy, *horrible* movie reviewer (he hated every great movie of the mid-Seventies) who then became a very influential theater critic and is now a political pundit (?) — trashed Thieves and, in particular, loathed Corey's performance. As he always was, Rich was wrong about the film, and the Professor — I find this scene beautifully scripted and just wonderfully acted by Thomas and Corey. (Note: I uploaded the clips seen below, including the eight-minute scene in question. The sound is only active on one channel, and the titles come from the episode I did on Thieves back in 2014.)

Since the Professor's act consisted of nothing but surprises, given his talent for ad-libbing, I think the biggest surprise was that he was a very talented character actor as well….

***** 

Thanks much to Max Schmid — host of a very long-running show about old-time radio on WBAI (check out his FB page here) —  and Stephen K. for help in uncovering the Chase and Sanborn shows.

MTM in bed: the mind-bending special “Mary’s Incredible Dream”

Mary Tyler Moore wanted to be known as a song and dance woman. Never mind that she was hailed by both the public and her colleagues as a great comic actress, a talented dramatic actress, and a producer of successful TV series in a number of genres. She wanted her music skills to be recognized — the only problem was that she made some *very* bad choices.

First, there was the Breakfast at Tiffany’s musical called Holly Golighty in December 1966; it ran on Broadway for only three days. The year after that, she costarred with Julie Andrews in Thoroughly Modern Millie, one of countless late Sixties/early Seventies musicals that helped kill off the genre. It’s a charming picture in its own way, but it didn’t click with the public and did nothing for any of its stars.

Then she was in a musical where she watched someone else sing. It’s something every camp fan in good standing must see, the startling A Change of Habit (1969). MTM plays a nun helping “inner city youth” and Elvis plays a ghetto doctor (yes, you read that right).

It’s a stunningly, wonderfully awful movie that is the only time “the King” is seen in one of his vehicle pictures confronting the significant issues of the day. Poverty, race relations, Vietnam, the rebellion of youth — they’re all tackled in Habit in a bizarrely silly fashion.

The film’s conclusion is a startling moment in which MTM the nun watches ghetto doctor Elvis singing at a “folk mass” and ponders her fate. We see her POV as she thinks about whom she should choose (via a number of clunkily edited shots, some including awkward, Fulci-like zooms), will it be Jesus or Elvis, JesusorElvis, jesusorelvis? A smooth crane shot (Johnny LaRue would be impressed) moves us high up above the pews in the church, and the credits start to roll. End of film.

A friend, who adored Elvis way, way too much, perfectly explained the film’s conclusion to me once, saying that no matter whom Mary chose she was choosing God. “Elvis *is* Jesus. Jesus *is* Elvis. She’s choosing God either way.”

Change Of Habit 1969

That bit of theological deduction aside, the movie stiffed. The year after, she swung a deal for The Mary Tyler Moore Show. I won’t discuss that perfect sitcom here, because it has been spoken about quite a lot in the weeks since Mary’s death. What has not been discussed, however, is her 1976 return to musical comedy, the mind-bendingly strange TV special “Mary’s Incredible Dream.” When you watch it, you’ll understand why it’s been left out.

I’ve often talked on the Funhouse TV show about the schizo nature of later Sixties/early Seventies  variety shows. They presented a very odd mixture of the old and new. By the Seventies, the genre was dying out so it split in two directions — the shows hosted by “hip” pop acts (led by Sonny and Cher) that were anything but hip, and the old “songs and sketches with repeated characters“ model (represented by very late Gleason — woof! — and Carol Burnett).

A third type of show was rarer, but far more sublimely awful — the “concept” variety show or special. The best-remembered of these are the “Star Wars Xmas Special” and the Krofft-produced variety shows that were set in odd circumstances (Donny and Marie near an ice rink, the Brady Bunch near a swimming pool).

“Mary’s Incredible Dream” is a stunning example of the concept variety special. Most important to remember is that MTM chose to produce and star in it while The Mary Tyler Moore Show was still getting great ratings and regularly winning Emmys. The show is a sort of distant cousin to the religious rock operas of the Seventies — it’s closer in tone to the ultra-goofy Godspell, rather than the earnest but instantly dated Jesus Christ Superstar. Why Mary wanted to make a musical special translating Old Testament stories into tacky “modern” musical numbers we’ll probably never know, but therein lies the joy.

The show was directed by Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour collaborators Eugene McAvoy and Jaime Rogers. The script was written by Jack Good (producer of Shindig), McAvoy and Rogers’ partner in creating the amazing — and in this case I mean that seriously — concept variety show “33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee” (1969). That show exhibits a greater “handle” on rock music — especially in the sequences featuring Julie Driscoll and Brian Auger, and a Fifties rock 'n' roll segment that features Fats Domino, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis — and was intended to showcase the “implosion” of a musical act.

The guest list of the “Dream” special is a classic variety show roster, minus any comedians — that would’ve taken the special into the area of intentional comedy and we certainly wouldn’t want that. Ben Vereen in his bearded, Bob Fosse-directed, Seventies rockin’ soul incarnation, is the main guest; Cajun fiddler Doug Kershaw is also featured. Completing the roster is the Manhattan Transfer and Arthur Fiedler conducting not the Boston Pops, but the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra.

The show’s frame device is that Mary is dreaming this musical mess. The best place to start adapting the Bible is the beginning, so we start out with Vereen as a flashy-trash Satan tempting “Woman” (MTM) and “Man” (Doug Kershaw) in the Garden of Eden, as the Manhattan Transfer sing “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree” (get it — it’s a joke! Apple tree, Garden of Eden…).

The show is embedded below, so I won’t run through the “plot” or the blissfully dippy selection of songs. The most interesting choice in the early scenes, in which man is surrendering to the impulse of war, is a World War I recruiting song that is “sexy” for its time (1914), “I’ll Make a Man of You.” Clearly, this was a nod to Cabaret, as Mary is seducing soldiers into war with her sexy outfit and her not-that-sexy way with the number.

The “war” section of the special closes with the dropping of the atom bomb, after which the Transfer sing “Sh-Boom” (get it? a bomb dropped — boom? It’s another musical pun!). This song is accompanied by a fast-action montage of Henry Kissinger meeting world leaders. (President Ford is briefly shown, but clearly Jack Good felt Kissinger went better with the Transfer’s song….)
 

The special has very little dialogue and mostly functions as a pop-rock operetta. It fully breaks on through to the bizarro universe when Mary and Doug survive being on Noah’s Ark and Mary sings Cat Stevens’ “Morning Has Broken.” From that point on the show gets odder and odder, as Mary does the full version of Sondheim’s “I’m Still Here” from Follies (why Herbert and J. Edgar Hoover are being mentioned in an Old Testament context is inexplicable), Ben Vereen does a rockin’ “Ball of Confusion,” and one of the male members of the Manhattan Transfer does “Sympathy for the Devil.” (Thereby answering the trivia question, “when did Mary Tyler Moore produce and star in a show that has an insane musical number conceived around a Rolling Stones song?”)

The show ends on a triumphant note that you will discover if you watch it. And then Jack Good throws in a bit of closure, bringing back the frame device for the final time. I do remember my best friend noting in the Seventies that he had seen this puzzling bit of programming, but I missed it at the time. We can be very grateful to the YT poster for having “made it public” for all to see.

The only (partial) musical endeavor that Mary was involved with after this special (trivia-fiends, correct me if I’m wrong) was her short-lived variety series, best known for having an ensemble that included newcomers (David Letterman, Swoosie Kurtz, Michael Keaton) and one seasoned vet (Dick Shawn). This, too, was a disaster, and the remainder of Mary’s career was split between acting and producing. There was no second “Incredible Dream.”

The beginning of the show is here:

And the point at which the show gets insane:

It’s enlightening to know that Mary really loved the special before it aired. Blogger Jaime J. Weinman notes here that Mary was quoted by columnist Marilyn Beck as saying "As a performer I can go to my grave happy now. I've done everything I want to do."

Beck added, “Mary's so convinced the special is the best thing ever to hit the airwaves she's been talking it up to anyone who will listen. And has been cornering so many of her friends for preview cassette-unit glimpses of the all-musical hour that actress Betty White finally told her teasingly, 'It's a shame you don't put it on TV, instead of showing it door to door.' " 

Thanks to Stephen K. for sending this disaster on — as well as Mary singing Loudon Wainwright’s “Dead Skunk” on her failed variety show!

Of comic books, colors, movies, and Jack “King” Kirby

I’ve been on a little journey. It’s taken me back to my childhood and connected me with the memory of my father, who died last February. Of all the things he left me — which I discussed in an earlier blog entry — the first was comic books, most especially those by his two heroes, Will Eisner and Jack Kirby.

I’m sure I’ll be exploring Eisner at some point in the future, but for the time being I’ve been on a Kirby Krusade, since I “inherited” my dad’s comic collection — the sad fact being that the possessions of those without a will are simply taken, although he did verbally like to say, “These are yours after I’m gone….”

Besides the sentimental attachment I have for Kirby’s work thanks to my dad’s reverence for it, two things spurred me on to reread his comics. The first was reading Mark Evanier’s Kirby: King of Comics, a coffee-table book that, as thoroughly engaging and informative as it is, left me wanting more. (Evanier has noted that the book was a preliminary to a bigger Kirby bio that he’s working on — until we get the next bio, this one is a great starting point.)

Young Kirby, taking no nonsense.

The second was attending a panel about Kirby at the Parsons School of Design in October 2016 — a presentation of the “NY Comics and Picture-story Symposium,” run by the visionary cartoonist Ben Katchor. The panel is available on YouTube (with wobbly audio, especially when the Skype guests are spoken to) here; its title was “Crossing Kirby: the ‘King of Comics’ in context of social issues and ‘fine’ art.” The panelists discussed Kirby from a number of intriguing angles, but it was the splash pages and double-page spreads shown onscreen that made me want to revisit his comics.

One thing that struck me was that those who spoke the most favored the comics my father and I had stopped buying, because they seemed to be kiddie fare that Kirby did in the wake of his ambitious and amazing “Fourth World” saga in the early Seventies and The Eternals in the mid-Seventies. Devil Dinosaur, Machine Man, and Kamandi were all touted as some of his best titles — in fact Kamandi was cited by two panelists as the one comic they’d recommend to someone who knew nothing at all about Kirby’s work.

[Note: I’ve since reread Kirby’s run on Kamandi, and it’s much better than I remembered but is far from the first thing I’d recommend to someone who doesn’t know Kirby’s work, due to its rather bizarre anthropomorphic animal aspect.]

Given my memories of those books, I was indeed surprised, but decided that I needed to travel once again to “the Kirby-verse” (a DC phrase used to hype his work). I began at the best entry point, the "Fourth World" comics — they're my recommendation if you really want to have your mind blown by some of the finest, boldest, smartest, and yes, craziest comics of all time, *and* if you can easily obtain the four books that contain these titles.

DC issued beautifully designed “omnibus” books collecting just about all of Kirby’s comics for the company in the late 2000s. The books were so popular and so under-produced that some of them sell for insanely high prices on Amazon and eBay (if you’re looking for The Demon collection, you pretty much need to break out the credit card or just find the original 16 comics in lesser shape at a lower price….).

The Fourth World Omnibus is a four-volume collection of his overlapping, early Seventies DC comics The Forever People, The New Gods, Mr. Miracle, and Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen — the latter being the finest silk purse over made out of a sow’s ear in comic history, and the home of most of the aforementioned really crazy stuff.

In that burst of 55 comics (and two later epilogues, the second of which is beautifully written but jarringly drawn), Kirby offered the best proof that it was he who gave birth to the Marvel revolution in superheroes (along with Steve Ditko — credit where credit is due). While they admittedly lacked Stan Lee’s energetic and polished dialogue and captions, the Fourth World books showcased Kirby’s flair for crafting heroes as modern gods, villains that were sometimes ridiculous (“Virmin Vundabar” was a fave of my father’s) and sometimes profoundly tragic, and situations that seemed to have spun from Kirby’s own nightmares. (One torture chamber disguised as an amusement park in The Forever People is wildly effective, even by today’s far more graphic standards.)

Rereading these comics (and catching up to the issues I missed way back when), I was struck by several things. The first is the sheer exuberance with which Kirby tossed off indelibly complex and innovative (and sometimes intentionally absurdist) ideas to the reader — assuming that he/she would fully understand.

The second is the deeply Freudian level of his comics, especially in regard to the aforementioned nightmare situations. The third “discovery” was one that has been mentioned before, but bears repeating — that George Lucas really did rip off aspects of the Fourth World comics for Star Wars (as if stealing Kirby's design for Dr. Doom’s mask for Darth Vader wasn't blatant enough). This influence should've been acknowledged by Lucas in every interview he did – Kurosawa and Joseph Campbell, my ass….

The fourth and final thing is that one of the elements that the DC editors reportedly hated about the Fourth World series became an industry standard a few years after the titles in question were all cancelled (the longest-running title, Mr. Miracle, lasted only 18 issues). Kirby chose to have his comics overlap, so that each one added to a tapestry of a greater story about an oncoming war between two different factions of “gods.”

It was felt at the time that this was too confusing or too oblique for readers, but a few years later that became the norm — to the point that it stopped readers like myself from following certain titles, since their overlapping plotlines meant you either had to spring for nearly all the titles being published by DC or Marvel at that time, or give up understanding what you were reading (which was never the case with Kirby's “overlap”).

My current rereading of Kirby's work is still in the first of three “stages” I’ve planned: first, the Seventies work Kirby wrote and drew for DC (his high water mark, in my opinion), then his “comeback” Marvel titles, and then the Sixties Marvel classics. The last category includes Captain America 100, which my dad had Kirby sign to me at a Phil Seuling comic convention in the early Seventies. Jack couldn't have been nicer, but I was terrified to meet him for some reason (weird kid). My dad was delighted to shake his hand. (Kirby's work meant a lot to him over the years.)

There is a reason I’m writing this blog post now, though, instead of after my reading “plan” is complete, or when Kirby's 100th birthday occurs later this year (on August 28th). I wanted to draw attention to the work of a YouTube poster who calls him- or herself “Kirby Continuum” and has posted over 200 videos of a great range of Kirby's art, from all periods of his career.

Sure, watching a YT video — replete with images explored with the “Ken Burns effect” in which we travel *into* the picture — is a terrible way to attempt to “read” comics (in fact they really can't be read in that fashion, except for the vids the poster has noted are “panel by panel”). I've found, though, that it's a wonderful way to review Kirby’s work, and it also clearly demonstrates that the current flood of comic book movies lack the elements that make these comics such an immersive experience, even though they are “merely” colored sheets of paper that lack CGI, 3-D, Imax, and charismatic stars playing the heroes and villains.

The Kirby Continuum poster seems to have spent an incredible amount of time making each of the videos. If you're a newcomer to Kirby’s work, you're better served by just reading the comics, but these videos are pretty wonderful for those who are already fans or who would like a quick, curated look at his work. It’s also very nice to have such a heartfelt tribute to the delirious wonder of Kirby's work on the most-watched site on the Net.

The fact that DC and Marvel may not be thrilled by the videos means that, if you are a comic or Kirby fan of any stripe, you should check them out sooner than later. Interestingly, the poster’s use of music underneath the images might be a bigger potential problem, since YouTube has a capricious and mind-bogglingly arbitrary way of enforcing its highly flexible (and often ridiculous) rules.
*****

On the subject of the modern-day comic-book movie, a little tangent is in order here. These movies are a mainstay in today's Hollywood although, for me, they capture very little of the magic of the comics they're based on. The problems are obvious. First among them is the tedium of the origin story. Comic fans do love a good origin story, but they are never, ever a favorite issue of the comic. These stories simply supply the cornerstones of the character's mythology, and are what you must move beyond to the get to the actual fun, namely the confrontations with the crazy and colorful villains — and, thanks to Marvel, the self-loathing and meditative moments of some of the heroes.

A related problem exists in the tone of the films. Since these are live-action features, the moviemakers feel they must “ground” the action in some sort of recognizable reality. It could be argued that that was part of the Marvel “revolution” in storytelling — Spiderman and friends existed in real American cities rather than the patently fake Metropolis and Gotham City. But let’s be serious about this: the action, the supervillains, the immediate donning of multi-colored costumes (in primary-colored hues) signal instantly that we are in a comic book universe, not the real one that we inhabit day to day (unless your hallucinogenics are particularly potent).

In the most magical and way-out comics by Kirby and Steve Ditko, the characters can't possibly be grounded in anything resembling our reality because the cities they inhabit are very often just wormholes to other universes (physical and metaphysical) where anything at all can, and does, happen. To add a note of mundanity to that kind of storytelling is to miss the point entirely.

The biggest problem, though, with the comic book movies that have flooded into multiplexes in the last few years is how goddamned *bleak* they look in comparison to their source material. Certainly film noir has had its place in the comic world from Will Eisner’s The Spirit onward — Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns and Sin City are heavily indebted to noir, as are many other great comics. But as for superhero comics, even the other great grim masterwork of the Eighties, Moore and Gibbons’ Watchmen, had a BRIGHT color palette that was completely lost in translation to the movie screen. 

Moore has since mocked the grim straitjacket that Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns put on comics (most amusingly in his Supreme series). But the comic book movies embrace this noir overlay, both in tone and attempts at monochromatic color. One gets the impression, though, that these filmmakers have never seen an actual film noir (well, okay, one in their college film class), but instead have based their notion of noir on Blade Runner and other sublime modern-day recreations of the look and feel of the noir cycle.

Thus some of the mysteries relating to these movies that fascinate (and alternately, depress) me. Such as, why are SO many people going to see them, when the majority of the same people wouldn’t be caught dead looking at an actual comic book? Is the allure of Robert Downey Jr. making snarky remarks (can he actually do anything else?) while wearing fake iron armor that strong? Do couples who need a place to covertly make out really want to do it while a CGI Hulk runs amok onscreen? Are there enough people who really want to see a fucking *third* series of Spiderman movies?

Even the ads are too damned dark!

There has been much talk about how these comic book movies are killing cinema. I am of two minds about that: 1.) Cinema is pretty much already dead, with the exception of a handful of great auteurs whose work most of the American public wouldn’t go to see if their life depended on it; 2.) At their best, comic books are magical, and their onscreen equivalents shouldn’t look as goddamned BLEAK as these CGI-saturated adventure pics do.

The bright colors that adorned Kirby and Ditko’s art was part of the package and remains one of the most important parts of the brilliance of comic art (ask Roy Lichtenstein — he knew which panels to steal… er, grab). I can’t think of a worse way to describe something linked to great comic books than to say “drab,” but that is indeed what these movies are.

Much has been discussed on the Net about the “orange and teal” color scheme that predominates in fantasy/action/comic book movies these days. The blogger at "Into the Abyss" documented the look in great detail, trying to offer an explanation about why it “took over” action cinema (answer: computer color-correction). His incisive essay was supplemented by this article in the Guardian and this overview of the whole phenomenon.

I would go further than the critics who decry the “orange and teal” phenomenon. What I see when I watch these comic book movies is a mess of many muted colors. Captain America in a drab-blue costume, Dr. Strange wearing a drab-red cape, Thor looking all-over goddamned drab. And so the actors and scripters try to “perk up” the characters — in the recent Dr. Strange movie, he’s a modern-day pop-music buff who makes Beyonce jokes. The joy of reading the old Strange comics was that he *didn’t* make gratuitous comments about Iron Butterfly or Vanilla Fudge — these characters exist in “the present,” but, again, they are not in our world. Rendering them in a “realistic” fashion makes them as boring as a “snappy” neighbor on a family sitcom.

There seems to be two very potent arguments for the incredibly, mind-numbingly, bleak looks of these films. The first is that the drab color palette reflects that of many videogames. I am not a gamer, but have been fascinated by the darkness of the majority of the best-loved games (and the computer-generated android-ish-ness of the animation ). The fantasy games intended for younger players are bright and eye-grabbing, but the comic book moviemakers are looking to attract teens that enjoy the “darker stuff.”

The second reason for the bleakness of the colors is indeed the fact that computers now drive the film world. The points made in the articles cited above are all valid, but I’d underscore the fact that action and fantasy films have gotten “darker” in look since CGI has become a major factor in filmmaking.

CGI effects can be “disguised” by an utterly drab color palette, and so CGI-animated characters like the Hulk will just melt into the overall ugliness. The cinema has gone from Gertie the Dinosaur and Gene Kelly dancing with Tom and Jerry to a bunch of guys dressed up as Marvel heroes interacting with a computer-animated Hulk….

On a related note about comics adapted to other media, the 1966 Batman series was viewed by comic fans as a double-edged sword — a thoroughly enjoyable celebration of the intoxicatingly silly aspect of superheroes and villains. But it also became a thorn in the side of comic readers, since it seemed to say that comics were nothing but camp. And so the comic book movies of today (going onward from the 1989 Tim Burton Batman) adopt the post-Dark Knight Returns hardboiled pose and look — this works when a talented filmmaker like Christopher Nolan is at the helm and is just dark and dull when a hack like Jon Favreau is directing (and what exactly happened to Kenneth Branagh’s career that the one-time “new Olivier/new Welles” directed the Thor movie?).

Ah, but we still have the comics themselves. And Kirby’s are among the finest ever — I will set aside the “we hate superheroes!” position adopted by Crumb and numerous underground/alternative cartoonists. Art Spiegelman in particular has noted his disdain for Kirby. Fine, who cares? Because when someone praises funny-animal comics and slams superheroes, we’ve hit yet another perfect example of fan-geeks mocking other fan-geeks.
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Away from the dissenters and the inferior adaptations: Kirby’s “Fourth World” comics (a bizarre name that reportedly was dreamt up by DC and never truly embraced by Kirby himself) were published from 1970 to 1974. The Kirby Continuum poster has put up a review of these comics called “Fourth World Frenzy.” Again, it can’t be read in any conventional sense, but it does show off the brilliantly bombastic visuals:

If you’d like to journey through a whole issue from that period, here’s the first issue of The Forever People, “panel by panel”:

A fan-favorite issue of The New Gods and one of Kirby’s own personal favorites of all his work, “The Pact”:

Onward to The Demon, one of two terrific series that Kirby did for DC after the company killed off his “Fourth World” books (the other being “The Losers” in Our Fighting Forces). It’s been noted that Kirby didn’t really want to do a supernatural series, but what he came up with is so very distinctive that the character was resurrected by both Alan Moore in Swamp Thing and Neil Gaiman in The Sandman.

The two British masters sanded off the rough edges of the character (did he always speak in verse or not? Kirby didn’t seem sure…). But the original series of The Demon is brimming with originality and nicely creepy characters and situations:

A little break from the Kirby Continuum posts and onto the man himself for a bit. Some fascinating materials about Kirby’s life and work were posted by the folks at the Kirby Museum YouTube channel. There you’ll find some truly rare audio and video of Jack talking about his life and career.

The first, most interesting clip finds Kirby discussing his childhood on the Lower East Side. While many artists romanticize their past, Jack was very clear about the fact that he hated growing up in that neighborhood. He also underscores the fact that he wanted to get out of there as soon as he possibly could. Watch the video here.

The other amazing clip is a 1987 radio celebration of Kirby’s 70th birthday on WBAI-FM in NYC. The host, Robert Knight, had a surprise for Jack, who was calling in from California — a guest caller, none other than Stan Lee! To my knowledge, this is the only recording of the two former collaborators talking to each other.

This was after Kirby had publicly aired his grievances about Stan taking credit for things that he, Jack, had created. Stan’s public pose was to feign confusion over this, but it became clear over the years that Lee wanted to take sole credit for the creation of the characters, and all of the scripting (whereas in many cases, especially in the later issues, he just wrote the captions and the dialogue).

Kirby and Lee “make nice” throughout the interview, but toward the end (around 32:00 in) Stan makes a barbed remark about having written all the dialogue, which clearly rankles Kirby. In closing, Jack thanks the hosts for their hospitality but also notes, “Now you know what it was like….” Listen to the show here.

In closing, a short “survey” of the Kirby Continuum videos. First is the most eye-catching and amazing examples of Kirby’s work, his double-page spreads:

Then, two of his most famous story arcs from the “Silver Age” (the Sixties) of Marvel. First, the “Ragnarok” plot in The Mighty Thor:

Then what could be called the turning point for Marvel — the Galactus storyline in The Fantastic Four that introduced the Silver Surfer. According to one story, Stan Lee was perplexed by the character upon first glance and asked Kirby who he was, with Jack replying that he was of course Galactus’s herald. That tale, true or not, defines the way Kirby’s mind worked — if a herald was called for, he most certainly would be a chrome-looking alien humanoid on a surfboard!

And one of my favorite issues of Captain America, a retrospective which found Kirby returning to the comic during a brilliant “Cap is Dead” plot by Jim Steranko.

For those who are already fans of Kirby’s work, the Continuum poster has put up some interesting montages of rarer drawings and sketches. One series of these he calls “Kirby conceptions”:

A rarity I’d never seen before, a comic strip version of the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby, written and drawn by Kirby for the May 1967 issue of Esquire magazine:

Another great example of rarer Kirby panels and sketches:

And I’ll close out with one of the most interesting oddities. Kirby wrote and illustrated an oversized comic book adaptation of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1976. It was a very odd project, as has been noted by many reviewers, because Kirby’s art is rambunctious and over the top, and Kubrick’s is quiet and measured.

He based his adaptation on the Arthur C. Clarke novel and an early draft of the script, rather than the film itself; he also chose to add a narration to scenes that are very notably without dialogue in the film. A monthly, ten-issue series came out of this project, in which Kirby spun out stories about the cavemen and astronauts who were influenced by the monolith. It was a strange series that I plan to revisit soon.
 
The most intriguing thing about both the oversized “Treasury” and the comic series is that they are two of the only items from Kirby’s Marvel work that have never been reprinted — evidently the rights lapsed to the film, since everything else Kirby even touched has been reprinted in one form or another by the folks at “the House of Ideas.”

One of the most interesting things one learns about Kirby in the Evanier biography and the various interviews that are online is that Kirby didn’t think of his work as “art.” He certainly viewed himself as a craftsman, but he preferred being referred to as a “cartoonist,” and he had an immaculate work ethic that found him working on the comics all day and all night when he was fully connected with a project.

Thus I think it’s fitting to finish with a quote from Our Fighting Forces 153, in which Kirby’s narration for a really wonderful story about a geeky sci-fi pulp-reading soldier named “Rodney Rumpkin” who gets to lead a charge against the Nazis (it’s much better than it sounds) ends with this bit of wisdom: “To all the Rodney Rumpkins: Victories are won, yesterday… Recognition must wait for tomorrow….” 

Some of the above images came from the “Fuck Yeah Kirby” Tumblr. General information about Kirby can be found at the Kirby Museum website.