A Study of Comic Books and Their Movies

From Ink to Screen

A study of comic books and their movies

Part I

A History of Comics

Alien – Superman

Superman: The Movie

Superman II

Superman: Doomsday

Superman Returns

Look Up on the Sky: A History of Superman

Rogue/Vigilante – Batman

Batman: Tim Burton

Batman Begins

Batman: The Dark Night

Police – Green Lantern

Green Lantern: First Flight

Amazon – Wonder Woman

Wonder Woman Animated Film

Fool/Innocent – Spiderman

Spiderman I

Spiderman II

Spiderman III

Cowboy – iron Man

Iron Man I

Iron Man II

Iron Man Cartoons

Amazon – Wonder Woman

Wonder Woman Animated Film

Behemoth/JekyllHyde – Hulk

The Incredible Hulk – Ang Lee

The Hulk

God – Thor

Hulk Vs. Thor

Thor: Tales of Asgaard

Patriot – Captain America

The Avengers Movie - Animated

The Avengers II - Animated

Part II

Graphic Novels: Watchmen, Road to Perdition, V for Vendetta, Sin City, From Hell (PG13-R)

Groups: Justice League Animated, Avengers Animated, Fantastic Four, Xmen, Hellboy, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,

Outside work: Daredevil, Constantine, TMNT (live action), Blade, Elektra, Ghost Rider, Jonah Hex, The Punisher or Punisher War Zone, Spawn, Men in Black

Archetype

An original model of a person, an ideal example, or a prototype upon which others are copied, modeled, patterned, or emulated; or a symbol universally recognized by all.

We start with the archetypal Alien, Rogue, Fool (Innocent), Playboy, Amazon, Behemoth, God, and Patriot:

Try and define each and then we’ll discuss:

Alien:______

Rogue:______

Police:______

Amazon:______

Fool:______

Cowboy:______

Behemoth/JekyllandHyde:______

God:______

Patriot:______

ALIEN

Powers:______

Strengths:______

Weaknesses:______

Home:______

Residence:______

Friends:______

Enemies:______

Describe Morality and Ethics of the Character:

______

Superman: The Movie, Superman II, Superman Doomsday, Superman Returns, Look Up in the Sky: The Amazing Story of Superman. Action Comics #1 online: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ug02/yeung/actioncomics/cover.html

What I Know / What I Want To Know / What I Learned

Kill Bill Volume 2

Bill: As you know, I'm quite keen on comic books. Especially the ones about superheroes. I find the whole mythology surrounding superheroes fascinating. Take my favorite superhero, Superman. Not a great comic book. Not particularly well drawn. But the mythology … the mythology is not only great, it's unique.

The Bride: [who still has a dart in her leg] How long does this shit take to go into effect?!

Bill: About two minutes, just long enough for me to finish my point. Now, a staple of the superhero mythology is there's the superhero and there's the alter ego. Batman is actually Bruce Wayne, Spider-Man is actually Peter Parker. When that character wakes up in the morning, he's Peter Parker. He has to put on a costume to become Spider-Man. And it is in that characteristic Superman stands alone. Superman didn't become Superman. Superman was born Superman. When Superman wakes up in the morning, he's Superman. His alter ego is Clark Kent. His outfit with the big red "S", that's the blanket he was wrapped in as a baby when the Kents found him. Those are his clothes. What Kent wears – the glasses, the business suit – that's the costume. That's the costume Superman wears to blend in with us. Clark Kent is how Superman views us. And what are the characteristics of Clark Kent? He's weak, he's unsure of himself, he's a coward. Clark Kent is Superman's critique on the whole human race

Story Arc

Plotting the Superman Story

Following a story arc, see if you can plot out the entire Superman story following the four movies we watched in class.

Superman: The Movie Main Plot Points
Superman II
Superman Doomsday
Superman Returns

Friday, Nov. 02, 2007

In Search of Superman's Inner Jew

By Jeffrey T. Iverson/Paris

The debate has raged for decades: is he Jewish, Methodist, Kryptonian Raoist? But finally, it's been settled: Superman is definitely... a non-Aryan Protestant. The complex origins of many a comic book character are deconstructed at the engaging and erudite exhibit, "From Superman to the Rabbi's Cat" — through Jan. 27 at the Museum of Jewish Art and History in Paris — which explores the impact of the Jewish experience on the evolution of the comic strip and graphic novel.

Comics are serious culture in France, where they were named "the Ninth Art" in 1964 by historian Claude Beylie. Today, the country hosts the preeminent annual international comic book festival in the town of Angoulême. And it is in that committed comic-book aficionado spirit that "From Superman to the Rabbi's Cat" presents some 230 American and European works dating back to 1890, including the 1940 strip How Superman Would End the War. "I'd like to land a strictly non-Aryan sock on your jaw," grumbles the Man of Steel as he drags Adolf Hitler off to be tried for crimes against humanity. For the late comic-book artist Will Eisner, the Jewish people, faced with the rise of fascism, "needed a hero who could protect us against an almost invincible force." Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's Superman in 1938 was only the first and — like Bob Kane's Batman in 1939, Jack Kirby's Captain America in 1940 and many more that followed — he was created by sons of Jewish immigrants living in New York.

Like their characters, many of these artists took on dual identities, says author and comic book historian Didier Pasamonik, a consultant on the exhibit: "There was a kind of diffused anti-Semitism at the time, and it was better to use a good American commercial name to reach the wider public." Even as Robert Kahn had become Bob Kane and Jacob Kurtzberg worked as Jack Kirby, their superheroes reflected some of the identity they were masking, evoking Jewish concepts such as tikkun olam (repairing the world through social action) and legends such as the Golem of Prague, the medieval superhero of Jewish folklore who was conjured from clay by a rabbi to defend his community when it was under threat.

Years later, some comic superheroes would actually be identified as Jews, like Auschwitz survivor Magneto and — the Golem myth incarnate — Ben Grimm (The Thing) of the Fantastic Four. But despite the rumors, the Man of Steel is no Supermensch, says Pasamonik. "Superman is not Jewish," he says. "When Superman gets married it's not at the synagogue!" Pasamonik has not missed the heavy dose of Jewish culture Siegel and Shuster instilled in their character: baby Superman's passage through space in a cradle-like vessel and subsequent adoption "is the story of Moses," he says, adding that El of Superman's given name Kal-El is a Hebrew word for God. But with a Methodist upbringing and extra-terrestrial origins, Superman, says Pasamonik, is best described simply as a "non-Aryan" hero.

And why not? Non-Aryan describes most of the southern and eastern European and Asian immigrants that crossed the oceans with the Siegels, Shusters, Kahns and Kurtzbergs in the late 19th and early 20th century. For the Pulitzer-prize- winning cartoonist Jules Feiffer, World War II-era superheroes embodied the American dream shared by the countless foreigners. "It wasn't Krypton that Superman came from; it was the planet Minsk or Lodz or Vilna or Warsaw," wrote Feiffer in his essay The Minsk Theory of Krypton. "Superman was the ultimate assimilationist fantasy."

After World War II, the comic book genre became an unlikely vehicle for civic protest and consolidation of memory. "The hour of immigrant assimilation gave way to the fight for minorities and civil rights," explains Pasamonik. Harvey Kurtzman used the medium to tackle racial segregation, the Cold War and McCarthyism in his satirical MAD magazine. In 1955, when popular awareness of the Holocaust was scant, Bernard Krigstein and Al Feldstein caused a shock by revisiting the concentration camps with the seminal graphic story Master Race. During the '60s and '70s the genre opened up to the banal and biographical, with Pekar and Crumb's darkly humorous American Splendor and Eisner's landmark graphic novel, A Contract with God.

"Eisner brought an absolutely revolutionary dimension to the graphic novel, which was to make it an instrument of memory," says Pasamonik. Finally, with a nod toward Edmond-Franois Calvo's 1944 La Bte est Morte (The Beast is Dead) — which uses animals to tell the story of World War II — Art Spiegelman brought the graphic novel worldwide recognition by winning a Pulitzer prize in 1992 for his Holocaust saga, Maus. Eisner and Spiegelman's heirs now litter the globe, from Frenchman Joann Sfar (The Rabbi's Cat) to Iranian Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis). "From Superman to the Rabbi's Cat" pays homage to these artists, inviting the viewer to consider the subtexts at work even in comic books about men in tights.

· Find this article at:

· http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1679961,00.html

ROGUE/VIGILANTE

Powers:______

Strengths:______

Weaknesses:______

Home:______

Residence:______

Friends:______

Enemies:______

Describe Morality and Ethics of the Character:

______

Batman and Batman Begins to be watched in class.

When Batman Was Gay

Filed by: Tyrion Lannister

July 24, 2008 12:00 PM

Everyone is pretty whipped up about the release of The Dark Knight, which shattered Spiderman 3's record for largest first-weekend box-office draw over the weekend. Unlike Spiderman 3, The Dark Knight is actually a very entertaining film. Christopher Nolan's Batman franchise is darker, more serious, and, consequently more frightening. It also captures the psychological complexity of the titular character in a way that the more stylized vision of Tim Burton - not to mention the dreck produced by Joel Schumacher - never could.

Nolan's vision is inspired by the Golden Age Batman, who was a different breed altogether. Batman of the early 1940s, for example, shot people, tossed them off rooftops, and had few reservations about killing criminals. He menaced murderers, gangsters, and thugs, not overgrown graffiti artists. Early Gotham was a dark and scary place, the sort of place that might inspire people to, you know, dress up like a giant bat. So what happened? Why did the dark and menacing Batman of 1940s become the lame and tame Batman of the 1960s?

Much of it has to do with changing national mores and an evolving economic and social landscape. In this sense, Batman's story is a microcosm for what happened throughout the entire comic book industry during that period and, to a lesser extent, some of the changes that swept across the nation. One of the most important episodes in Batman's metamorphosis centered around the startling accusation that Batman and Robin were gay and might seed impressionable youths with homosexual fantasies. Silver Age Batman was indelibly shaped by the gendered expectations of the era and his failure to adhere to those expectations incited criticism, predictably, that called into question his sexual identity.

I always preferred Batman to Superman, largely because Batman, the central implausibility of his character aside, was psychologically interesting in a way that the bland Superman never was. Of course, my introduction to Batman was Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, a crucial revision of the Batman myth which imagined Batman as a psychologically scarred character inhabiting an increasingly savage world.

In contrast, most baby-boomers may be more likely to associate Batman with the campy, absurdist version of the late-1950s and 1960s best captured in the long-running television series. In the pages of Detective in that era, Batman traveled through time, verbally sparred with "Batmite", and foiled countless plots to deface many of Gotham City's iconic landmarks. In other words, Silver Age Batman was a glorified boyscout, patrolling against vandalism - just like Superman without the awesome powers.

Outing the Caped Crusader

The accusation that Batman was a homo, as strange as it might sound to our own ears, was taken quite seriously by government and public alike. It wasn't leveled by a marginal nut or crank, but by a world-renowned psychiatrist, Dr. Frederic Wertham.

Wertham was the Chief Psychiatrist for the New York Department of Hospitals and an important figure among the New York City liberal intelligentsia. His writings were respected enough to help form part of the legal strategy for Brown v. Board. In 1954, Wertham published a scathing indictment of comic books, The Seduction of the Innocent, which argued that comic books were an invidious influence on American youth, responsible for warped gender attitudes and all manner of delinquency. Wertham's accusations garnered the attention of Senator Estes Kefauver and his Senate Sub-committee on Juvenile Delinquency, where Wertham repeated many of his central claims.

Batman and Robin, Wertham charged, inhabited "a wish dream of two homosexuals living together." They lived in "sumptuous quarters," unencumbered by wives and girlfriends, with only an aged butler for company. They cared for each other's injuries, frequently shared quarters, and lounged together in dressing gowns. Worse still, both exhibited damning psychological characteristics: proclivities for costumes, dressing up, and fantasy play; secretive behavior and double-lives; little interest in women; and, most damning of all, neurotic compulsions resulting in their violent vigilantism. Indeed, Wertham argued, depictions of Batman and Robin were frequently homoerotic, visually emphasizing Batman's rippling physique and Robins splayed, bare thighs.

"Only someone ignorant of the fundamentals of psychiatry and psychopathology of sex can fail to realize the subtle atmosphere of homoeroticism which pervades the adventures," wrote Wertham. "The Batman type of story may stimulate children to homosexual fantasies."

Batman's creators and writers were aghast. Batman, they noted, had a series of dalliances with several Gothamite ladies, even if he'd never settled down. Nor, they argued, had there ever been any explicit homosexual affection between Batman and Robin, much less a portrayal of anything beneath their tights. And, in any case, what sense did it make to interrogate the sexual practices of a character who lived only in the frames of a comic book? Any "sex life" Batman might possess was purely the imagination of his critics and had nothing to do with Batman himself. Right? Right?! Imagination, as they say, is a powerful thing.

As literary critic Mark Best notes, "Wertham did correctly identify the possibility of a queer reading of the superhero, albeit as an example of what was wrong with the comics."