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.
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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.

Nut Magnet Parking Lot: the documentaries of Jeff Krulik

The final 2016 filmgoing experience I wanted to write about is a mini-retro that occurred at the Anthology Film Archives (still the most adventurous rep house in NYC) a few months back. It was a tribute to the great documentarian Jeff Krulik, who was present to speak after his best-known video, “Heavy Metal Parking Lot” (which had its 30th anniversary this year), a group of his shorter docs, and his latest film, a feature that you will not be seeing online.

I will stress that last aspect, since Jeff Krulik has been incredibly generous with his work and has posted for free online nearly every video he's ever made, from the sublime to the ridiculous (and some that are sublimely ridiculous). I've enjoyed his videos since I first saw “HMPL,” but the thing I most admire about him is the fact that he is clearly interested in sharing his passions, and moments from the lives of the eccentric folk that he encounters (and so clearly loves).

That generous instinct means that you can take in most of Krulik's filmography (more properly titled a videography, since he has worked, to my knowledge, exclusively on video) for free online. Before I talk about his work, I would heavily advise, exhort, urge you to see Jeff when he appears live with his films in your part of the country, since he is a great advocate for his work and a good speaker, but also because he likes to spice up programs of his old work with new docs no one has seen, and depending on the venue, sometimes even snippets of really great material he couldn't find a place for (or source material he couldn't afford to clear the licensing for) in his finished works.

So what are his documentaries about? Well, he gravitates to certain topics over and over. The first, best-known are gatherings of, let's say, eccentric or rowdy fans. The second is most definitely collectors and their insular (but very content) world. The latter mostly involves fan-geek males — there are many women in Jeff's videos, but the most memorable individuals are always the eccentric men, with the major exception of the girl who says she would like to “jump Rob Halford's bones” in “Heavy Metal Parking Lot.” (Halford responded to her sexual interest in him, “Didn't you know yet…?”).

Krulik doesn't make “fly on the wall” slices of verite. His personality is felt throughout his videos, and he doesn't shy away from interviewing his subjects on-camera. He clearly enjoys their obsessions and is a fellow fanboy (although generally not in the same areas as his subjects). His work captures a very weird strain of Americana, namely the obsessions of the average gent in the suburbs (his interview subjects usually seem to own houses in which they store their carefully curated collections — or from which they're trying to escape into rock 'n' roll heaven….).

The filmmaker who Krulik’s docs seem closest to is Errol Morris, for whom he worked as an archivist (on The Fog of War). What's interesting here is that Jeff has always been heard or seen in his docs, while Morris maintained a Herzog-like distance in his early works. Throughout the years Morris has become very “present” in his films, to the extent that some of his work now seems like Krulik's work — most notably Morris' “It’s Not Crazy, It’s Sports” shorts about sports fans for ESPN, which play very much like Jeff's videos.

Two other elements strike me about Krulik's work. The first is his “local” focus — he's specialized in showcasing the unusual folk from his part of the country, the Maryland/D.C. area. Thus, while he's got a “micro” stage upon which to draw on, he's actually wound up getting a broader view of American obsessiveness than he would've if he'd travelled around the country, looking for roadside weirdos.

The other aspect I admire about Krulik's work is his generosity with his work. I haven't yet written about Joni Mitchell on this blog (long may she reign, hoping her health improves), but one of her lyrics that has always affected me the most is “For Free,” in which she sings as a professional, admiring the virtuosity of a musician who “plays real good/for free...” This may sound like hyperbole, but I believe that Jeff is in that category, as he seems compelled to share his discoveries, as so many of us who work in access love to do. Thus his “giving away” the bulk of his filmography online for free (with a “101” of his best appearing below).

Krulik, "HMPL" codirector John Heyn, and some fan of their work.

The mention of access is intentional on my part (and not intended as self-promotion). From 1985-90 Krulik ran the public access studio at MetroVision Cable in Capital Heights, Maryland (there's fascinating video of him giving a tour of the facilities here). He thus was working on access programming (which even to this day has made YouTube and other online portals look like places “where the sane people go”) and has collaborated with many souls who were happy to share their work for free.

In an American corporate culture where money is valued above all else, I find it incredibly refreshing and noteworthy to discover the work of someone who wants to share new discoveries, even at the “price” of not earning cash off their creations. That is why I encourage you to see Krulik when he visits a rep house or museum/university near you — attendance is the original form of “crowd-funding”!

There are many interview clips of Krulik available online (check out his website), but this is perhaps the most interesting, as he openly talks with the interviewer about clearing music in his documentaries. He discusses how, if he uses a song he knows is ideal but couldn't afford to clear, that “I can't sell [the film], but I can share it.” He also addresses the “gray area” that many documentaries inhabit and offers very pertinent and helpful advice to the aspiring documentarian while also advising them “don't follow my lead.”

Before I get to Krulik's own creations online, I must offer up at least one of the items he's posted that he didn't make. This is a music-video made by a woman named Ilana Sol, and it is quite… unique. It also captures the home-made, pre-computer-editing quality that distinguished access at its best in the Eighties and Nineties. You just know Ilana had a burning need to share this video.

There are four YouTube channels in which you can find Krulik's work, all of them posted by the man himself.

This YT channel is a good starting point.

This channel is for a “deep dive."

This channel is all Borgnine all the time. (See below.)

And this channel has videos that all relate to Krulik's best-known video, “Heavy Metal Parking Lot” (1986) “HMPL” (as it is known to abbreviation- minded fans) was made by Jeff and John Heyn, and like many beloved cult items, wasn't made to be anything special. The pair behind the camera just thought it would be fun to record the concert-goers tailgating on the day of a Judas Priest concert.

The result is a very funny and weird slice of history. To those who knew this kind of head-banging metal fan, it's like a trip down memory lane. To those of us of a certain age, we avoided these people in real life but are perfectly fine with watching them preserved forever on video (cue the John Waters review of the video, “Thanks for letting me see it, it gave me the creeps”). To younger generations, this is like a message in a bottle from the past, from a generation that liked to “party” with no political or even cultural aspect to what they were doing. Plus, the fashions, those insanely tacky Eighties animal-print fashions....

"HMPL" is, as of this writing, the subject of a museum exhibit at the gallery of the Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library at the University of Maryland. The film was never intended as a time capsule but it is one, without a doubt. The more I see it, the less I laugh at it; when I rewatch it these days I'm just mesmerized by how Krulik and Heyn captured something that they themselves weren't a part of — they weren't scientists studying creatures under glass, but they did provide these kids with a video soapbox. These stoned Priest fans thus decided to scream, talk nonsense, and ego-talk themselves into history.

The video was such a cult item (dubbed endlessly on VHS and given from friend to friend) and has such a devoted following that it spawned countless “sequels” where Krulik and Heyn (and other people ripping them off) chronicled fans in different places. In some cases, the results were odd because they clash with the original (“Harry Potter Parking Lot” [which should be titled “Harry Potter Bookstore”] contains the smartest bunch of people in any Krulik/Heyn fan movie — and they're all under 14 years old!). But sometimes the disparity is pure genius, as here in the 1997 short “Neil Diamond Parking Lot”:

One of the most enjoyable aspects of Krulik's docs is that many of them are short and in fact leave you wanting more. Jeff seems to have a good idea of how long certain concepts should run onscreen and frequently has made short-shorts out of his docs.

Any good collection of his work has to emphasize his videos about fans whose devotion to their subject is indeed fanatical. Krulik has referred to himself as a “nut magnet” in one festival of his work — while these people aren't nuts in the usual sense of that word, they are… a bit strange. One of the best of these video portraits is “King of Porn” (1996), in which we are introduced to a man with an incredibly large archive of porn, kept in a spectacularly organized fashion around his house.

Another Krulik “discovery” is Richard Wilson, a dealer in costumes and personal clothing worn by celebrities. The short, called “Celebrity Underwear,” was shot in 1998 and edited for screenings in 2013.

The last and possibly best collector in Krulik-world is Neil Keller, a man who wants to know which celebs are Jewish and which are not. The ones he is sure of he puts in his many (many!) binders of autographed pictures, letters, and sports cards. “Obsessed with Jews” (2000) is a truly wonderful portrait of a guy who has pretty much one driving force in his life — from his pride at being a Jew, Keller (who is an accountant by trade) has constructed a world in which he MUST know which celebrities are or aren't Jewish (and even when they tell him they're not, he still wants to include them in his collection as if they were).

There has been no sequel to “Obsessed by Jews” (yet), but I was surprised to find an entire Neil Keller YT channel that has segments shot by Krulik about Keller's later adventures in collecting.

The three preceding docs are thoroughly entertaining, but “The Saddest Collector in the World” (shot in '93) is a wonderful in-joke for those of us who collect. It follows a sad-sack gent as he walks around an Atlantic City toy show, glumly eyeing the items on display, seemingly knowing he can never afford them and yet wanting them. I think what Krulik gets at here is the underside of collecting — you can never get enough of your favorite topics, but often your budget is the final arbiter of what you can and cannot have….

It follows that one of Krulik's more conventionally structured docs is about one of the strangest kiddie shows ever, Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp. Jeff's “I Created Lancelot Link” (1999) profiles comedy writers Stan Burns and Mike Marmer, who created and ran the Lance Link TV show. The men hadn't met in person in years at the point that the doc was shot. As could be expected, the resulting video has plenty of stories about monkey actors getting rambunctious as they acted out Burns and Marmer's really, really oddball scripts.

Though it's not on the plane of sheer surreal bliss on which My Breakfast With Blassie exists, Krulik's Mr. Blassie Goes to Washington (1995) is a lovely tribute to the late Mr. Fred Blassie (a part of my interview with “the fashion plate of wrestling” can be found here). In this fanboy fantasy, Jeff and a friend take Fred on a tour around Washington, D.C. Fred lectures the passersby and tells anecdotes from his long wrestling career. The best moment is when one lone woman he encounters knows who he is and she reacts to him as a “heel” wrestler, to which he responds perfectly.

One of the more “personal” pieces that Krulik has done is The Legend of Merv Conn (2007). A profile of a beloved D.C.-area accordionist, the doc has the feel of a piece by Les Blank (minus the food aspect — Blank was big on food prep and eating). It's a charming little piece that offers another face of Jeff's work (which he shares with Blank), the performers who keep alive old and classic forms of entertainment.



The same theme is present in Krulik's slickest doc Traveling Sideshow: Shocked & Amazed! (2003), made for the Travel Channel. The program offers a mini-history lesson of the sideshow, while focusing on the contemporary “freaks” and carnies who do in this century what folks did for decades before them. It's fun and informative — because who doesn't like info about freaks and carnies?

Perhaps the most serious of any of Krulik's docs is Hitler's Hat (2003). It is the model of a well-made documentary, in that it has an anecdotal premise and then moves beyond the initial anecdote to explore historical incidents and the theme of memory (more on that below).

The film focuses on the titular top hat, which a member of a division of American soldiers took from Hitler's apartment in Munich. What is more important here is that this squad had just come from liberating Dachau, so the soldier's appropriation of Hitler's chapeau is seen as an act of rebellion. The fact that that soldier happened to be an American Jew (and, later, a stage magician) lends the story a very emotional undercurrent — and yet the silly aspect of the hat story is underscored by anti-Nazi humor from Chaplin, the Three Stooges, and (natch) Spike Jones and His City Slickers.

One of Krulik's best-known videos is Ernest Borgnine on the Bus (1995). It chronicles a road trip taken by Ernie B. in his custom-built RV — each summer when he was bored, Ernie would take a road trip across America and hang out with average Joes and Janes.

It's a strangely touching piece on celebrity, since Ernie was indeed a face known to everyone in America, and yet by the time the doc was made, his name wasn't on the tip of the tongue anymore. You can see that everyone recognizes Borgnine, but only the older folk would seem to know exactly what movies and TV series he was in. (This is supplemented by Krulik asking him questions about his career as he is driving.)

The full doc can be seen below, but Krulik has created an entire channel for the raw footage of the road trip, so those who dig Ernie (or just enjoy seeing the sites of roadside America) can travel along. You can find the channel here; it's another example of Jeff's emotional connection to his subjects.

The final film I'd like to spotlight can't be seen online — it can only be viewed at Krulik's screenings in rep houses and museums around the country. It's his only full-length feature — the closest thing before it was Heavy Metal Picnic (2010), an entertaining doc by Jeff and John Heyn exploring a rock festival “farm party” held on private property in Potomac, Maryland in 1985.

I will confess I was wary before seeing Led Zeppelin Played Here (2013, final version completed in 2016). As I mentioned above, one of the things I prize in Jeff's work is that he has demonstrated time and again that he knows how long each topic deserves, and in some cases has left us wanting more (that's a good thing, since many docs leave us wanting much less).

I was very pleasantly surprised by how good ...Played Here is. Its premise is, again, anecdotal, and in this case the film begins with the anecdote and then researches its veracity in a journalistic fashion, while also offering a meditation on memory (a fave topic in the Funhouse, thus my love of Chris Marker and Alain Resnais), aging, and the period before Woodstock when rock acts on major labels played to small audiences at high schools and youth centers around America.

The anecdote in question is the fact that Led Zeppelin played a Maryland youth center in January of 1969 as “the New Yardbirds.” People who attended the concert swear it happened and have vivid memories of seeing this band that wasn't yet known in the U.S., but there is no proof whatsoever (no tickets, photos, newspaper mentions, etc) of the concert having taken place.

Krulik explores the basic issue of whether or not the concert happened (I won't give away the film's conclusion here). As he does so, though, he moves off on tangents that prove to be far more interesting than the initial premise. The first involves the fact that our memory of performances we've seen is faulty to begin with — watching the people who *swear* that something took place several decades before, one is left to wonder how much any of us can really remember of the live shows we've seen, especially after several decades elapse (and especially having seen a band that was “up and coming” — or, in this case, a “new” version of an old act).

The second tangent that is fascinating is the notion that Woodstock drove up the prices that rock acts could charge for gigs, and so the local, small-venue concerts by acts on major labels pretty much stopped entirely in 1970. Krulik interviews concert promoters and reviewers who talk about how stellar acts played tiny little venues in the late Sixties — in these moments Led Zep is forgotten and Krulik focuses on memories people have of small gigs in the Maryland/D.C. area by acts like Spirit and most especially the Stooges. [Quick confession: I am not a fan of Zep at all, but really, really love Spirit and the Stooges.]

So Led Zeppelin Played Here is a film for rock fans and concert-goers (who may or may not really remember what the hell they've seen), but it's also a great piece of research and a fine mediation on memory (and, again, aging!). Here's the website for the film — check it out when it comes to a theater near you!

Those of us who follow Krulik's work await whatever else he has to offer us. It's a strange world his characters inhabit (mostly in the universes of their own homes — or parking lots) and it should only grow bigger as the years move on.