Art Spiegelman #4: MAD, Kirby, Fletcher Hanks, Eisner and Plastic Man
February 27th, 2007 by Menachem Wecker
If you haven’t seen them, see posts three, two and one. Thanks to Bruce Guthrie for the image.
In a class he taught at Columbia, Spiegelman found that students didn’t appreciate the fact that he didn’t like Jack Kirby. To Spiegelman, Kirby was “the father of a genre that has been mistaken for a medium,” namely, the graphic novel. Kirby was “an idiot savant,” who was “obsessed with orgasm,” almost like Henry Darger.
Spiegelman then moved on to Fletcher Hanks, who drew in a style best described as “Magritte for beginners.” As the bad guy looks through his “evil-doer-looker-after machine” in an attempt to stop the earth from rotating, Stardust the Super Wizard comes to the rescue.
But unlike Hanks, Will Eisner, in Spiegelman’s narrative, “wasn’t so interested in a super hero, so he put a mask on a detective and called it a costume.” Thus The Spirit was born. Eisner was “making movies on paper,” Spiegelman explained, showing how Eisner used a notion of set design and scene setting. This work was hardly “primative and orgasmic.”
Next came Plastic Man, who “could become anything he wanted as long as it was red, yellow and black,” and was endowed with “all of the powers of India ink.” In Plastic Man’s world, thugs all hang out in art galleries.
But Spiegelman’s entire lecture seemed to be leading up to his views of MAD. To Spiegelman, MAD told its readers, “The whole adult world and the media are lying to you, and we are the media.”
“We studied it like the Talmud,” he said. “MAD created the generation that protested Vietnam” and that held, “We are all savvy, but too savvy to do anything.” In fact, this “neo-sincerity” has resurfaced in a different form. “I like to think that the Daily Show has it,” Spiegelman said.
Next time, Spiegelman lights a sixth cigarette, and discusses R. Crumb.