presentation 2, part 2

In the previous blog, I covered how I began my presentation on Plastic Man and the Spirit's roles as pre-postmodern heroes, focusing on how they defied the superhero genre. Now let's move on to how they both defied the conventions of the medium of comics and all storytelling conventions as well.

First of all, Eisner innovated the concept of the first page of the story being an attention-grabbing splash page that draws readers in. This was in part done out of necessity, for the Spirit was being published as a newspaper insert, coverless newsprint, so the first page of the story had to do double duty as the comic section's "cover" of sorts as well. But Eisner took it a step further, by constantly changing the logo on these splash pages, so that it was never the same thing twice. If you look at the first page of stories like "Life Below" from February of '48 or "Fox at Bay" from October of '49, you can see how he played with the logo in each story, modifying it and molding it into the story so that it's part of the image. Jack Cole's Plastic Man stories later followed suit, with some incredibly arresting first page splashes of its own (only natural, really, since Cole worked with Eisner for a time, even scripting and pencilling a few Spirit stories from late '43 to mid-'44 while Eisner was in WW2).

Eisner's layouts as well were innovative with his use of silent panels to punctuate action and his tendency towards portraying moments indirectly, showing us reaction shots rather than actions so as to engage the readers' imaginations more. And of course the Spirit comics had a unique format as well. In a time when comics were frequently reprinting strips out of newspapers, Eisner was taking comic adventures TO the papers, creating his book weekly as an syndicated insert to various papers across the country.

As for art styles, Eisner was drawing from noir and German expressionism to tell "two bottle of ink" stories like "Lorelai Rox," stories so much darker than traditional comic art as to be practically dripping in shadow. Meanwhile, Cole was breaking all the rules by combining a more cartoony or "bigfoot" style of art with the muscular anatomy found in typical superhero art. If you merely look at the contrast between Plastic Man and his sidekick Woozy Winks, you can see the dichotomy between the styles Cole was combining quite clearly.

Finally, Eisner refused to follow the restrictions of the medium of comics by using the Spirit to tell stories in multiple genres, not just superhero. He did several science-fiction stories (such as "Visitor" in Feb of '49), westerns ("The Feud" in March of 1946), and fairy tales. He twice used the Spirit to adapt famous pieces of literature, and he eventually began taking advantage of the opportunity every Halloween and Christmas to tell special tales in the spirit of the season. One of the earliest examples of Eisner bending genres came in October of 1941, when Eisner did a story called "The Oldest Man in the World." It featured a frame story of archaeologists 1000 years in the future finding a Spirit section and reading the story within, about an immortal man doing battle with the Spirit and apparently drowning in the sea in the end. They dismiss the story as rubbish but are then attacked by this same man.

This story actually also illustrates Eisner's innovative approach to art as well, as he colors the frame story differently from the "actual" Spirit section. It also serves as an example of how Eisner was constantly defying the conventions of storytelling, with its story-within-a-story which serves as a bit of metafiction (Spirit comics now suddenly exist within the world of the Spirit, calling into question what is real and what is fiction).

Eisner employed the technique of breaking the fourth wall quite often in his stories, occasionally creating characters which were thinly veiled satirical copies of his contemporaries (like Al Capp and Frederic Wertham) as well as inserting himself into the pages of the Spirit more than once.
He depicted himself in a splash page once... facing his drawing board with his back to the reader as he drew a Spirit splash page. Perhaps the most famous example of his insertion into the Spirit came on December 31st, 1950. In that week's edition of the Spirit, Eisner falls asleep at the drawing board and his assistant Jules Feiffer comes in, kills him, and creates a story featuring a character of his design posing as the Spirit. At the story's end, Eisner wakes up at the drawing board, having realized it was all a dream. However, having slept so long, the actual strip he was supposed to do for New Year's Eve would not be able to run (and in fact did then run as a part of the following week's paper).

Jack Cole had Plastic Man break the fourth wall many a time by literally turning to the reader and directly addressing them. In one adventure, Plastic Man is helping a spy protect his secret device that was aiding in the war effort, and in the end of the story Plastic Man asks what the machine does. Then he catches himself and realized it isn't safe, since there might be saboteurs reading the comic at that very moment. Cole also inserted himself into Plastic Man's adventures as well, in Police Comics 20 in July of 1943. In the story Woozy Winks needs someone to compile a sketch of a criminal, and he calls in Cole, who only agrees to set aside his work drawing Plastic Man in the comics because Woozy offers to pay him a dollar. Cole is self-deprecating to a fault, depicting himself in this story as slackjawed and speaking with a stutter for the purpose of making the incident even more humorous.

Finally, both creators broke from convention in their stories often by shifting the main character into the background. Several of Plastic Man's adventures were really about the misadventures of Woozy as he went about trying to solve crimes while Plas was occupied elsewhere. The Spirit also barely appeared in more than a few adventures bearing his name. The story "Two Lives" which I mentioned previously has him appear in the background of one or two panels only. "10 Minutes" in Sept. of '49 (a story that plays out in real time, by the by, a very innovative storytelling technique for comics to attempt) place the focus, instead of on the Spirit, on a young guy in a neighborhood who makes a bad decision and is forced to pay a terrible price. And of course, there is the story of Gerhard Shnobble, perhaps the most famous story Eisner ever created, which follows a man who can fly in his final hours, as he gets caught up in the fracas between the Spirit and some crooks that he is trying to apprehend.

I then concluded my presentation with the following:

Any one of these examples taken on its own might not be seen as especially inventive or groundbreaking. Eisner and Cole were not necessarily the originators of any of these techniques, but the fact that they used them in such volume and with such aplomb in their stories made them innovators. Their works especially stand out since they were working at a time when comics were still in their infancy as an artform. Both Cole and Eisner then could be seen as the progenitors of postmodernism in comics. These artists paved the way for the experimentation with form prevalent in indie comics of the '60s and '70s, and their creations acted as predecessors and precursors to the eventual acceptance of postmodernism into the mainstream seen in the modern era of comics.

And here, by the by, is my works cited page:

Barrier, Michael and Martin Williams, eds. A Smithsonian Book of Comic-Book Comics. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1981.

Benton, Mike. The Comic Book in America: An Illustrated History. Dallas: Taylor Publishing Company, 1989.

Brancatelli, Joe. “Jack Cole.” The World Encyclopedia of Comics. Ed. Maurice Horn. New York: Avon Books, 1976. 174.

- - - -. “Plastic Man.” The World Encyclopedia of Comics. Ed. Maurice Horn. New York: Avon Books, 1976. 559.

Cole, Jack. The Plastic Man Archives, vol. 1. New York: DC Comics, 1998.

Cole, Jack. The Plastic Man Archives, vol. 2. New York: DC Comics, 2000.

Couch, N. C. Christopher and Stephen Weiner. The Will Eisner Companion. New York, DC Comics, 2004.

Daniels, Les. Comix: A History of Comics in America. New York: Bonanza Books, 1971.

Eisner, Will. The Best of the Spirit. New York: DC Comics, 2005.

- - - -. Comics and Sequential Art. Tamarac, FL: Poorhouse Press, 1985.

Feiffer, Jules. The Great Comic Book Heroes. New York: Bonanza Books, 1965.

Goulart, Ron. The Comic Book Reader’s Companion. New York: HarperCollins, 1993.

- - - -. The Great Comic Book Artists. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986.

Harvey, Robert C. The Art of the Comic Book: An Aesthetic History. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1996.

Spiegelman, Art and Chip Kidd. Jack Cole and Plastic Man. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2001.

Thompson, Don. “The Rehabilitation of Eel O’Brien.” The Comic-Book Book. Eds. DonThompson and Dick Lupoff. Carlstadt, NJ: Krause Publications, 1998. 18-34.

Thompson, Maggie. “Blue Suit, Blue Mask, Blue Gloves—And No Socks.” The Comic-Book Book. Eds. Don Thompson and Dick Lupoff. Carlstadt, NJ: Krause Publications, 1998. 112-134.

presentation 2--Plastic Man and the Spirit: Pre-Postmodern Heroes of the Golden Age

On the morning of Saturday, October 13th I presented at the Midwest Pop Culture Association's conference in Kansas City. My presentation was the first one of the day, at 8:30 am, the morning after the free food was served at the bar as the opening night's reception. So attendance was not as great as the previous weekend's presentation. Besides the other presenters, there were less than five people there, and two of those people were the panel chair and the girlfriend of one of the other presenters. Oh, and my presentation was scheduled in a room that, essentially, was one big room that was split into two by... a thin curtain. So you could hear the presentation going on on the other side of the room the entire time I was speaking... Suffice to say, circumstances were less than ideal.

This time around my topic was "Plastic Man and the Spirit: Pre-Postmodern Heroes of the Golden Age." My presentation was supposed to be around twenty minutes in length, but I ended up speaking for about twenty-five. And I still had to cut stuff. For this presentation I had to do a lot more research, because I wasn't as familiar with the subject matter as in the previous week. This fact also meant that I didn't feel as confident just getting up there and winging it, so I wrote a bit more ahead of time with this one. I did a full intro and conclusion, plus a much more extensive outline of the body, complete with notes on which stories to discuss when and particular quotes from sources I might want to use.

Here then was my introduction, verbatim:

In the contemporary era of comics, the influence of postmodernism can be felt far and wide. Daniel Clowes, Charles Burns, and Kevin Huizenga spring to mind as obvious examples of indie comic artists whose works take a turn into the bizarre. More mainstream works inspired by postmodernism can easily be found in Alan Moore’s classic deconstruction of the superhero Watchmen or the metafiction of Grant Morrison’s Animal Man.

But postmodernism’s roots in comics stretch back all the way to the medium’s infancy. Even in the Golden Age as the genre of the superhero was still forming, it was already being deconstructed. Both Jack Cole’s hero Plastic Man and Will Eisner’s infamous creation The Spirit defied the conventions of the superhero genre in every adventure they undertook, and at the same time their creators explored the ways to defy the conventions of the medium of comics and in fact all storytelling conventions as they related these adventures to eager readers.

(I chose to call this notion “pre-postmodernism” in my abstract for two reasons. First, it seems to fit in neither category as solely modern or postmodern, utilizing some modern ideas regarding form yet serving an intent that is purely postmodern. Secondly, it sounded like an interesting hook.)

So from there I dove into the body of my presentation which I had divided up into three sections: conventions of the genre of the superhero, conventions of the medium of comics, and storytelling conventions. And for each division, I broke it down further, looked at each aspect of those conventions and explored examples of how both heroes defied them.

Starting with superhero tropes, I looked at the secret identity and how neither character really had one. After the origin story of the Spirit, Denny Colt was for all intents and purposes dead, and he walked around as the Spirit all the time. Meanwhile, in Police Comics 26, Plastic Man's secret identity as criminal Eel O'Brien is discovered by his chief at the FBI, and in order to be pardoned for his crimes, he essentially must prove himself worthy by solving three unsolvable crimes in twenty-four hours. Once the task is completed, Eel is pardoned... and is no more.

I moved on to costumes then, to briefly discuss how Plastic Man's "costume" of a red leotard and sunglasses eschewed the typical cape and mask. Then I moved on to the Spirit, who of course had no costume but a domino mask. Otherwise he was just a guy in a suit, which of course how Eisner wanted it. Eisner didn't like the idea of drawing costumed heroes, and the mask was a compromise he made with his publishers.

As for origins, Plastic Man's was very unconventional. He of course started out life as a crook, but all that changed when he had the requisite accident with chemicals. Suddenly, spontaneously, and in the course of one whole panel, he decides to leave his life of crime behind and become a force for good.

As for why he makes this drastic change in character... this explanation is all we get. Just like the explanation of how he got his powers--chemicals--it's like once Cole got the result he wanted, got the story going in the direction he wanted, he just didn't care. In a story from Police Comics 24, Plas's sidekick Woozy Winks gets his powers for a day, and in the end of the story Plastic Man unzips the red and black leotard Woozy is wearing, and Woozy exclaims dejectedly that he has lost his powers. And that's it, the entire explanation of how things went back to normal. Zip, no more powers. Again, it's very much like Cole just wanted to tell his zany stories and didn't care too much about logic.

And that brings me to tone, that Plastic Man is probably the earliest example of the trickster hero. He has a lighthearted attitude toward fighting crime, like it's actually fun for him, and his victories were often rather unconventional. In his fight with Sadly Sadly, a villain whose "power" was that he made such a sad face that would make people feel so sorry for him they would give him all their money, Plastic Man defeats him... by tickling him with a feather until he laughs.

In much the same vein Eisner mixed humor with hardboiled crime stories in the Spirit's adventures. The December 1948 story "Two Lives" involves a criminal breaking out from prison, at the same time that his doppelganger runs away from a home where he is dominated by a controlling wife. The two decide to switch lives, and while the henpecked husband happily goes to jail, the escaped con lives with the domineering wife for a week or so... and tries to turn himself in to return the jail. But no one believes him and he's stuck. Meanwhile, the Spirit's victories as a hero often involved dumb luck. He would get beat up and knocked unconscious, and the criminal would make some kind of mistake to get himself apprehended or killed while the Spirit was out cold. Not very "heroic" in the end.

I'll continue on to how the characters defied the conventions of the medium and of fiction in general tomorrow. For now, this entry is long and I'm tired.