COMIC BOOK CONFIDENTIAL is a well-constructed, succinct introduction to an underappreciated art form.
The film opens and closes with references to one of the comics' bleakest hours, when pop psychologists and politicians convened congressional hearings on the comic-book industry in 1954. The 10-cent illustrated magazines, especially the multitudinous horror- and crime-oriented titles, got blamed
for just about every act of juvenile delinquency in the country. It wasn't always that way. Comics were started by simply repackaging color-supplement "Sunday funnies" and selling them to avid readers without the bulk of a newspaper attached. Soon imaginative artists and writers (like Jerry Siegel
and Joe Shuster, Superman's creators) were generating original material strictly for comic books. The Depression and WWII provided an ample market for this easy-to-read escapism, with genuine graphic geniuses (like Will Eisner, who created the film noir-like crimefighter The Spirit) experimenting
with designs and genres. It was for a more sophisticated, adult, postwar audience that the chronically ghoulish fantasies of William M. Gaines and Harvey Kurtzman (Tales from the Crypt) were intended. But the scantily clad women, bloody axes, and rotting zombies outraged moralists. Although Gaines
makes a heroic stand before the Senate to defend comics as harmless entertainment, the industry is terrified, and placates its critics with a "Comics Code" stamp of approval, outlawing words like "weird" and "terror," and even forbidding perspiration on the characters' brows.
Nonetheless, comics rebounded, Gaines and Kurtzman with the immensely popular illustrated satire Mad. Stan Lee brought a fresh approach to superheroes by giving them more-or-less realistic dialogue and personal problems. The 1960s counterculture in San Francisco spawned a new genre, the
"underground comix" of Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton. Independently published and circulated, influenced by psychedelic poster art, sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll, they thrived outside of the waning influence of the Comics Code. The 1980s finds writer (later screenwriter) Frank Miller reigniting
the 50-year-old Batman character with his brooding, brutal "The Dark Knight Returns." At the opposite extreme, Robert Crumb collaborator Harvey Pekar realistically chronicles his drab, day-to-day Cleveland existence in American Splendor. Art Spiegelman co-publishes Raw, a magazine (published by a
major book publisher) devoted to comic art, in addition to his own works, which include the 1992 Pulitzer-winning Holocaust metaphor Maus, a sober allegory in which mice stand in for Jews, and the Nazis are cats.
COMIC BOOK CONFIDENTIAL's virtue is not letting the gaudy costumed-superhero genre overwhelm the entire spectrum of comics--Batman only rates a mention in the context of Frank Miller, late in the film. Even though COMIC BOOK CONFIDENTIAL works well as a lively timeline, Mann has said it was not
intended as the definitive history of comics, but rather as a profile of the varied artists. It is rather odd to find someone like Pekar or Charles Burns, creator of the grotesque "Big Baby," given as much screen time as Marvel Comics icon Stan Lee, but the variety works toward Mann's goal of
portraying comics as "a viable, meaningful art form." Conspicuous by its absence is any examination of the close ties between comics and motion pictures, from the cinematic storyboard style of the drawings to the advent of blockbuster screen adaptations--from the sublime SUPERMAN II (1980) to the
dismal HOWARD THE DUCK (1986). Nor does Mann spend any time on comics abroad, like the hugely popular manga of Japan or the photographic fumetti of Italy. Mann, an aspiring screenwriter, said he himself came late to the realm of comics, and his enthusiasm shows. Even for those with zero interest
or respect for comics (still scorned in the Wall Street Journal of the 1990s as "anti-intellectual property"), the film maintains an amusing anti censorship stance, with a ludicrously alarmist vintage "instructional" film showing how reading horror comics turns tykes into knife-wielding little
savages. (Profanity, substance abuse, adult situations.) leave a comment