'Drew Friedman's Heroes of the Comics' tells American pop-culture history in portraits

Drew Friedman’s Heroes of the Comics

Drew Friedman

2014

Fantagraphics Books, Inc.

Seattle

Drew Friedman has always disturbed the hell out of me. His photorealist-seeming grotesques, studies of minor and marginal celebrities in dark and turgid circumstances, were for me like a flamethrower blast from a terrifying alternate universe – one that lurked beneath our all-too-thin floorboards. In mags like Heavy Metal, MAD, National Lampoon, and RAW he fought for – and won away – my attention from such trifles as big-breasted space maidens.

His new book is a gallery of 83 American comic-book greats that combines the virtues of a portrait gallery and a collection of life stories. These individual portraits in words and pictures, when read together, form an entertaining and neatly comprehensible history of the comics in America.

In rough chronological order, Friedman takes us from Maxwell Gaines, the visionary but short-lived progenitor of EC, through list of the usual Golden and Silver Age suspects such as Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Eisner and the lot. But he also lavishes attention on the obscure but well-deserved – Mac Raboy, Gardner Fox, Ramona Fraden – all names for the enthusiast to scribble down and add to his or her research list. (Hell, he even throws in Frederic Wertham, whose infamous “Seduction of the Innocent” witch hunt against comics in the 1950s killed a lot of publications and careers).

Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the creators of Superman. From Friedman's 'Heroes of the Comics.'

Friedman had the enormous good fortune to have a father (writer Bruce Jay Friedman) who kept him awash in comics through his childhood, and who knew seemingly everyone in the New York comics scene of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Friedman’s child’s-eye glimpse of the mechanics and business of the industry gives him unparalleled insights – and some great anecdotes – about this lost world, all to be found in his entertaining introduction.

Fantagraphics’ respect for the image gives Friedman’s work a large format, printed on high-quality paper stock. The artists, writers, and publishers are shown in humble situ – posed at drawing desks, cradling cigarettes, in photo-based illustrations. As Friedman puts it, these pictures are “ . . . neither idealized nor romanticized, but depicting the years of dedication etched into their faces.”

This book succeeds as a reference work, an aesthetic object in itself, and a good time – a trifecta that all good non-fiction storytellers would do well to shoot for. “Drew Friedman’s Heroes of the Comics” is an essential tool for understanding how comics became what they are.

Born to laugh at tornadoes: a personal history

[Photo by Harald Richter/NOAA Photo Library]

By BRAD WEISMANN

On May 22, 1962, I was a one-and-a-half-year-old playing on the front porch of our house in Cedar Rapids, Iowa when the tornado hit. It boiled up so quickly, my mother said, the warning sirens never went off. As she ran from the back of the house to snatch me up, she watched through the windows on that side of the house as the unattached garage next to us wrenched out of the ground and leaped into the air.

I was watching it, too, tracking it as it sailed over our house and dropped neatly onto the house next to us, causing considerable damage.

According to Mom, I was laughing.

What’s so funny about tornadoes? Nothing and everything. Someday I mean to ask Don and/or Dave Was why they named their 1983 pop album “Born to Laugh at Tornadoes” (check it out, it’s weirdly brilliant)(1), but of course the title resonates with me. The first seven years of my life, my family and I lived, voluntarily mind you, smack-dab in the middle of the Midwest, in the crosshairs of Tornado Alley.

Now, of things in life that are inherently funny, violently rotating columns of air that destroy life and property are not high up on the list. Culturally, it doesn’t seem like we’ve ever really integrated this phenomenon into our collective psyche. In our books and movies, tornadoes serve as plot points, agents of drastic change. In the era of digital effects, they serve as ends in themselves – spectacles of termination, the putative death-wishes that we seem so fond of in our disaster films.

My pump was primed. The first time we watched “The Wizard of Oz” in its then yearly showing on network TV, the twister made its appearance and I was done for the night, bawling and blubbering. Even on our crude little black-and-white model, it looked uncannily like the real thing. (It’s amazing what they could do with a 35-foot-long muslin stocking.) With lots of emotional support in place I made it through the next annual screening – but never without a twinge of dread.

“Oz” didn’t give me nightmares – my dreams were regularly interrupted by sirens every summer. Almost worse were the sudden interruptions on the TV or radio – the high-pitched C-note tone, the slow crawl of information, the scratchy-voiced cut-in of some Weather Service guy’s voice, flatland accent burring the r’s, outlining the danger area. We were well-rehearsed in emergency measures. Many comics have made hay out of the fact that the warnings usually include these little nuggets of info: “Seek a low-lying area such as a ditch,” and immediately after, “Beware of flash flooding.” Hmmmmm.

We spent all summer every summer on Grandpa Ralph’s immense (to us) Missouri Valley farm, which sat splendidly on the highest point of the ridge overlooking Underwood, Iowa, from the west. The passage of decades’ worth of tornadic activity had led to indifference from the old folks, who were as unperturbed by rushing, thundering storms as we were sent to furthest extent of frantic.

My other set of grandparents, across the river in Nebraska, were much the same. I remember standing with them at their kitchen window at night, them sipping coffee and eating cake while watching the honey locust rive in twain from a lightning bolt. “Whew, that was close,” my grandma murmured casually, lighting another Pall Mall.

(During one tornado, my dad insisted it wasn’t that bad and drove us home 20 miles from his parents’ house, madness in itself. They secretly tailed us in their car all the way back, “to make sure we got home OK,” then went home again – all while the storm howled around them. We were too dumb to live, too tough to die.)

There were many exciting tornado stories, which we pleaded for from grandparents, uncles, and aunts. We also learned a slew of exciting and entertaining misconceptions. We learned that if you shut all the doors and windows of your house before the twister hits, it will, due to the sudden drop in air pressure surrounding the dwelling, explode! COOL! Not true. That a tornado will drive a straw through a telephone pole. A pretty thought, but unsubstantiated by a rigorous scientific study. Cows turned inside out? The mind boggles.

Now, a couple of these old wives’ tales have some truth in them. First, I don’t care what they say, I’ve never met a twister that didn’t like a trailer park. They are referred to at our house as tornado magnets.

Second, the green sky before a tornado. I’ve seen it. You’d think that an atmosphere full of debris would be gray or brown. I guess, though, that the sheer mass of torn-up vegetable matter suspended in the wind torrents gives the air a greenish cast. On one afternoon before a dash to the basement, I watched the slow drift of grass and twigs past a window. The dim cloud-filtered light gave sunlight with no shadow, a green teeming like a neglected aquarium illuminated from within.

The closest call is a bit harder to pin down, sometime in the late 1960s, late, late at night on the farm. The usual  array of warnings hadn’t deterred us from hitting in hay in our usual beds.

Something kept blowing the door open, I remember. Over and over again. Then it blew open and stayed there, the doorknob punching through the plaster. My mom was up, moving swiftly, grabbing first myself and my younger sister off of the couch we shared.

“Go,” she said. A calm voice, but one that riveted my attention with its absolute earnestness. We moved through the living room, met halfway across the kitchen my her mother, similarly bent. All four of us sped for the screen porch, the access to the basement.

I looked out. It was the dead of night. All the power was out. No lights, no stars. But I saw something out there, something close, something moving, something darker than the darkness. I heard it moan – just like the rumble of a train across a trestle, I thought while being half-dragged across the floor in my pajamas. It took such a long, long time to cross that kitchen floor.

We made it to the cellar door – exactly like the “Oz” one, flat with a ringbolt set into it. We heaved it up, fastened the heavy slab of wood, and padded down the concrete stairs into the musty depths. A pile of coal in the corner. The ancient washtub. This and that, dusty. We settled down on a pile of blankets. “Sleep,” said our mother. We slept.

In the morning, we surveyed the damage. Here an immense tree had been uprooted, then lifted in the air and thrust down inextricably between two other giants. Wagons, implements, scattered around the landscape. Shingles like fallen leaves on the grass. Huge rents and furrows in the yard, branches stabbed into the hillside.

We couldn’t see the town, which sat in the valley below us. We sat in the kitchen nook and waited for the light to come up. Finally, we could see. It looked like the town had made it.

No wonder strong winds unsettle me, and I follow severe weather with the avidity of a religious acolyte. I have been caught in various storms since then – an uneasy night at a motel in Ogallala, and a whopper of a storm in the middle of Texas in 1994, undoubtedly made more frightening by my friend and I’s brilliant decision to split a tab of acid to keep us awake on the non-stop drive from New Orleans to Denver.

In 1967, my family moved to Denver, a climatological refuge. Rare floods, no earthquakes, fires only in the foothills, and snow that melts almost as soon as it falls.

Except recently. Climate change means much more rain than I can recall in 45 years; and tornadoes pop up closer to the mountains every year. The insulation from severe weather is rubbing thin here.

I won’t be happy to clamber down into my crawl space if one plows through my neighborhood, but I am grateful for the previous exposure. It calms me down. It doesn’t hurt that I can tweet and post my obsessional life away during a storm, alerting all and sundry. You’re welcome.

And I’ve grown more indifferent as well, just like my ancestors. Still alive after all these years, I’m not so impressed with a faceful of disaster. Tornadoes are just as unfortunate and random as many of the other calamities we deal with and, sometimes, the best thing to do is hunker down and wait for them to blow over. And laugh defiantly.


1. One of those albums that wound up getting engraved on my brain, such as the original cast album of "Jesus Christ Superstar," 10cc's "The Original Soundtrack," "Another Monty Python Record," and "The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway," that I can recite/sing/chant word-for-word with other fanatics at parties until I go on for so long that it gets rather embarrassing and we have to leave.

‘Stories by the World’s Favorite Authors’: Me and Classics Illustrated

Panel from "20,000 Leagues Under the Seas," CI #47 -- art by Henry C. Kiefer; adaptor unknown.

137 comic books changed my life.

I’m not talking about superheroes, though no one felt more sympathetic than 8-year-old me to the emotional turmoil involved with being Captain America or Iron Man. I drank deeply of the Doom Patrol, the Flash, and Batman, too – I was a pagan to my schismatic fellow comic-book readers, a worshipper of both DC and Marvel. It was the apex of the Silver Age, and I was up to my eyebrows in it. (This achieved mostly loitering at the rack in the dime store, as there weren’t many dimes to be had in those days.)

The war comics were big for me as well – Sgt. Rock, the Haunted Tank, Nick Fury and his Howling Commandos, Enemy Ace, the Unknown Soldier. With Vietnam on the TV every night at dinner time, in the kitchen where our parents smoked while they ate, the 1960s created a generation of children who could relate to being a tank gunner outmanned by menacing forces.

I was also lucky enough to find and start mainlining the DC “House of Mystery” horror anthology comic right at the beginning of the tenure of editor Joe Orlando. His innovative and truly scary efforts began to reverse the long ban on horror subjects and other “objectionable” subject matter, leading to the destruction of the repressive Comics Code of 1954, the liberation of the medium and its eventual mainstream American explosion in the mid-‘80s.

We could digest about any kind of sequential graphic narrative publication, including the dorky Archies our well-meaning grandparents would slip us on vacation. Even worse, we might have to smile and thank a dimwit relative for giving us some Disney crap, or the mélange of TV- and film-related titles that came out of the tangled fortunes of ‘60s comics giants Dell, Western, Gold Key, and Whitman. But we had to draw a line somewhere – and that was at the terrifyingly unfunny Fawcett and Harvey funny-animal comics.

What laid the groundwork for my keen appreciation of all of the above – what in fact taught me how to tell a story – was a line of comics that sat yellowing in dusty cardboard volumes in my grandparents’ basement, waiting for me to crack them open. When I did, it became impossible to get me away from them.

A page from "A Connecticut Yankess in King Arthur's Court," CI #24 -- art by Jack Hearne; adaptation by Ruth A. Roche and Tom Scott.

In 1941, publisher Albert Kanter had the brilliant idea of adapting great works of literature for comic books -- Classic Comics/Classics Illustrated. Years later, he succinctly outlined his philosophy:

“The taste for good literature and fine art must be cultivated in a child slowly. He must be made to understand it before he can like it. . . . a pictorial rendering of the great stories of the world which can be easily understood and therefore more readily liked would tend to cultivate that interest. He will more eagerly read them in the original form because he will already have a mind’s eye picture of what the author was trying to portray in words.”

The above quote was mined from William B. Jones, Jr.’s magisterial “Classics Illustrated: A Cultural History.” I read the first edition a few years ago, and this expansion and revision is virtually a new book. I marvel at Jones’s relentless research, far-ranging contacts with former artist, editors, and writers in the series, illuminating anecdotes from fellow aficionados and collectors – and the most meticulous and comprehensive indexes I have seen in any work. This kind of scholarship requires great focus and great patience, and conscientious scholarship like this is rare. Bravo, Mr. Jones!

Classics Illustrated: A Cultural History (Second edition)

William B. Jones, Jr.

2011

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers

Jefferson, NC and London

  

Thanks to Jones, we now have a coherent sense of what drove Kanter, how the series developed, and what killed it. While entirely successful for decades, it was always too low-brow for the scholarly and too pretentious for the unworldly, too childish for the morbid and too adult for the censorious. It ran glancingly foul of Fredric Wertham’s anti-comics witch hunt, and never subscribed to the rigid, neutering, self-regulating Comics Code Authority. The final issue, number 169, the already hopelessly out-of-step “Negro Americans: The Early Years” in 1969.

My grandfather collected them for my dad, who was 7, when the series began with Malcom Kildale’s rendering of Dumas’s “The Three Musketeers.” Here were D’Artagnan, Porthos, Aramis, Athos! Here the evil Richelieu and M’Lady! Intrigue, danger, swordfights, chases; friendship, honor, honesty, bravery.

I sped through them in order – “Ivanhoe,” “The Count of Monte Cristo” (the last issue to bear the spine banner “COMPLETE * ENTERTAINING * EDUCATIONAL”), Louis Zansky’s marvelous “Moby Dick,” Lillian Chesney’s wispy, intricate “Arabian Nights.” The list of artists who drew for Classics Illustrated is not short, due at least to the horrible page rates Kanter paid. The ranks include the names of future comics greats such as Dik Browne ("Hagar the Horrible"), Angelo Torres (MAD Magazine), Harvey Kurtzman ("Frontline Combat," MAD, Little Annie Fanny) the aforementioned Joe Orlando, and even Jack Kirby, who created more superheroes at Marvel and DC than anyone else.

The significantly numbered 13^th issue, “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” widely regarded as the first full-length horror comic in history, came out in August 1943, at a time when Allied victories were just starting to take shape. Arnold Hicks’s graphic graphics are still a little unsettling.

The first horror comic -- published 1943.

Page from "Dr. Jeykll and Mr. Hyde," CI #13 -- art by Arnold Hicks; adaptation by Evelyn Goodman.

A lot of Classics Illustrated are of two genres – the 19^th century canon of Dead White Guys in literature, and what were then termed “boy’s books.” There was lots of Verne, Stevenson, Fenimore Cooper, Conan Doyle, Wells, and Kipling, even two books of animal collector Frank Buck. The adventures of knights, pirates, soldiers, cowboys, explorers, rebels, and fortune-hunters filled my eyes.

However, here are some gems in the series – Dickens, Shakespeare, Homer, Bronte. Nordoff and Hall’s Bounty trilogy, played out in Classics Illustrated pages, pushed me into a lifetime of interest in that historical tragedy. August Froelich’s rendering of “Black Beauty” was immensely moving. Would I have picked up “Cyrano de Bergerac” or “The Iliad” without the secret reading of the comics under the covers, late at night? Maybe not.

Each issue was crammed with little features as well. The back of the book had a one-page author’s bio, along with articles about “Pioneers of Science,” dog heroes, the stories of great operas, illustrated history outlines, famous poems, and more. A “Who am I?” literary-character quiz marked the inside cover. (“The Call of the Wild” featured the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, recently adopted by the UN, in its entirety.) I could read a dozen a day, over and over, for summers on end.

Not that each and every issue was a grabber. I could barely get through “Silas Marner” and “The Lady of the Lake,” I remember. Some of the drawing was just repellent to me – the more spidery work of Henry C. Kiefer and the sweaty messes of Rudy Palais weirded me out – I much preferred the cool simplicity of Alex Blum’s or Norman Model’s lines.

Panel from "Treasure Island," CI #64 -- art by Alex A. Blum; adapter unknown. Blum's clean lines and strong compositions are very effective.

The idea of matching a unique artist to a title was not a consideration at the time. As Classics Illustrated moved ahead, its production and editorial styles became streamlined and uniform, leading to a house style epitomized by the strong, spare drawing of Blum, Kiefer, and Lou Cameron. Meanwhile, TV started taking up children’s time. A welcome development was the increase in affordable juvenile editions of the books summarized; readers were going to the source. The series petered out.

Did they succeed in Kanter’s high-minded mission? First, of course excessively lengthy or complex novels, or ones with interiority, wouldn’t work; there are no Tolstoys, no Austens in the list of Classics Illustrated titles. An extroverted title, an adventure, fantasy, or epic, worked much better. Even then, all these texts required condensation, abridgement, the elimination of subordinate plot lines and characters, further simplifying them. (In CI’s “David Copperfield,” the climatic, stormy fate of Steerforth and Ham Peggoty, though featured on the cover art, is completely missing inside.) Then breakdowns into panels, the storyboarding at the heart of the process.

"Kidnapped," CI #46 -- art by Robert H. Webb; adaptation by John O'Rourke. Cinematic blocking.

With all these filters in place, it’s a wonder many of these titles aren’t as good as they are. That many issues are dialogue-heavy, crammed with stiff figures whose faces often resemble each other, is true. Signs of haste are evident here and there. Inaccurate proportions and perspectives, bad color registry, and other technical issues can be found. 

The usual cultural norms of the time are in place – women are passive unless they are evil, or Joan of Arc. The heavy hand of Western colonialism is on many pages – the simultaneous attraction to and repulsion from “alien” cultures, and the impulse to assimilate or destroy it, is here. Non-Caucasians are not articulate, thick of feature, and well in need of the white man’s aid if anything constructive is to be done. The “house style” becomes deadening aesthetically, manufactured-feeling. Plot points play out in rigid six-to-eight-panel-per-page style.

After 1969, the rights to the series changed hands several times, well-documented of course in Jones’s book. Of the several attempts to revive the franchise, the most successful and the most adventurous was the Berkley/First Publishing line of 27 editions of 1990-1991. By now, the concept of auteurism in graphic storytelling had hit, and Berkley matched distinctive artists to titles they could illustrate with freedom, giving each issue a wildly different feel. Gahan Wilson led off the series with his rendering of Poe’s “The Raven and Other Poems.” Among others, Rick Geary and Kyle Baker contributed, creating a unique gallery of illustrative achievement.

"The Fall of the House of Usher," Berkley CI #14 (pub. 1990) -- art by Jay Geldhof; adaptation by P. Craig Russell.

Now, of course, the idea of adapting great literature into graphic novels is business as usual. A new series created and edited by Tom Pomplun, Graphic Classics, has been turning out elegant and engaging titles since 2002 for ages 12 and up. Rick Kick’s amazing three-volume collection The Graphic Canon (2012-2014) takes the concept and pushes it into the realm of bold, alternate, underground sensibilities – finally, visual styles as subversive as the texts they illustrate, which range from Gilgamesh to “Blood Meridian.” The field is wide open.

We wound up with every issue of Classics Illustrated up to 137, Marryat’s “The Little Savage.” (Gives me 32 more to run down and enjoy!)  Published in March, 1957, it would have come to my grandparents’ house about six months before my dad married my mom. I still have them; all my kids have been through them. However, to them the storytelling and presentation are as hopelessly out-of-date as my grandfather’s Tom Swift books, or Dad’s “Dave Dawson of the R.A.F.,” or Mom’s Trixie Beldens. The world in general moved on a long time ago. As Jones points out, “Nostalgia is a seductive yet sterile trap.”

Page from "Moby Dick," CI#3 -- art by Louis Zansky; adaptation by Zansky.

Did it do him any good, growing up with these comics? I don’t know. He was a credit sales supervisor, but he was conversant with culture as well. For me, they went off like bombs inside my head. I know that every issue sparked my imagination and spurred my haphazard and eccentric education in a hundred ways. Hiding out in my grandparents’ cool basement on a hot summer day with these piled around me in a magic circle, a colorful abundance, was a saving grace. 

Even with its highly selective palette of stories, Classics Illustrated presented a universe of stories, a clutch of standard plotlines, and a raft of character archetypes, all the essential building blocks of storytelling. Each comic was a colorful little instruction manual on how to get from Point A to Point B in a narrative, quickly and efficiently. And despite pretensions to meaning and cultural significance, these were simply a great universe of stories with which to stock my imagination. In those panels were excitement, and feeling, and thought, and meaning. They doomed me to become a storyteller as well.

It’s said that a developing child can learn any language if he or she has the template, the concept of language to begin with. All the stories I have read and written, all the films, the art, the larger culture, bears traces of the classics I was seduced into reading. Jones terms the Classics Illustrated goal to have been “ . . .to make the realms of the literary and historical imagination accessible and immediate.” Mission accomplished.

A GALLERY OF COVERS, PAGES, AND PANELS:

Robert C. Burns's controversial first cover for "Twenty Years After."

Page from "Black Beauty," CI#60 -- art by August Froelich; adaptor unknown.

Page from "The Tell-tale Heart" from "The Gold Bug and Other Stories," CI#84 -- art by Jim Wilcox; adaptor unknown. An extremely stylized approach that looks far more modern than much CI of the time.

"Cyrano de Bergerac," CI#79 -- art by Alex Blum; adaptation by Kenneth W. Fitch. Particularly complex stories often used an opening-page character gallery with some explanatory material to set the scene.

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Panel from "The Downfall," CI#126 -- art by Lou Cameron; adaptor unknown.

Page from "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," CI#49 -- art by Alex Blum; adaptor unknown.

CI "Study Guide" edition reprint of "Lord Jim" from 1997 (art by George Evans, adaptor unknown) -- smaller format and a switch from newsprint to glossy paper gave the original art a much more solid and colorful look. "Study guide" editions attempted to add more analytical information and related essays in the back of each edition. 

"Lorna Doone," CI#32 -- art by Matt Baker; adaptation by Ruth A. Roche. Baker was one of the first African American illustrators to work in the American comics industry.

Panels from "A Study in Scarlet" from "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes," CI#33 -- art by Zansky; adaptor unknown. Zansky's loose, flowing lines and strong inking made his titles a compelling read.

Page from "The Time Machine," CI#133 -- art by Lou Cameron; adaptation by Lorenz Graham.

Panels from "Toilers of the Sea," CI#56 -- art by August Froelich; adaptation by Harry G. Miller (Harry Glickman).

Page from "Mysterious Island," CI#34 -- art  by Robert H. Webb and David Heames; adaptation by Manning Stokes.

"The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," CI#50 -- art by Aldo Rubano; adaptation by Harry G. Miller (Harry Glickman).

Two pages from Lou Cameron's outstanding "War of the Worlds," CI#124 -- adapted by Miller (Glickman).

Trickster Tales: "Pranksters: Making Mischief in the Modern World"

Pranksters: Making Mischief in the Modern World

Kembrew McLeod

2014

New York University Press

New York, London

By BRAD WEISMANN

Nobody likes a smartass.

Pranks are often thought of as a low form of humor, ranged down there with puns and practical jokes. However, Kembrew McLeod’s comprehensive and thought-provoking history of pranking ranks it much more highly. Pranking runs through modern history like a fault line of sardonic disorder, and McLeod demonstrates admirably the great, society-changing effects some of it has caused, as well as the damage and destruction that other examples have wrought.

McLeod’s wide net takes in all activities designed to make fools of society at large. He marks his start at the point where broader, faster forms of communication – pamphlets, almanacs, and proto-newspapers – lent themselves to the pointed attack, the spoof, and the literary hotfoot. The gamut begins with Jonathan Swift’s “Modest Proposal,” and wends its way to today through a variety of forms and frames, motivated by everything from sheer criminal intent to the most idealistic attempts to remake society.

A short list of topics and characters covered should in itself propel the curious into its satisfying pages: Benjamin Franklin, P.T. Barnum, the anti-Spiritualism movement, yellow journalism, the Merry Pranksters and the Chicago 8, “Paul is dead”, Andy Kaufman, and today’s hackers and groups like Anonymous. All relate to the intent of invoking a cathartic rethinking of a culture’s shared assumptions, waking it from its addled distractions.

While it seems that the primary motivation of a prankster is to crack a joke, McLeod makes it very clear that, by and large, society rarely gets it (and if it does, it tries to tear the perpetrator to shreds). Indeed, many of the fonts of crazy conspiracy theories – documents pretending to pertain to the Rosicrucians, Illuminati, Freemasons, the “Inner Circle” – were written as humor, satire, parody, all unfortunately taken at face value and run with by those that are inclined to paranoia. Even more disturbing are his accounts of the life-and-career-ruining “rumor panics,” such as the satanic-messages-in-rock-songs and the repressed-memory-child-abuse cases of more recent decades. In McLeod’s universe, the human mind doesn’t need much tinder to spark an outbreak of fear, hate, and ugly behavior.

McLeod is the perfect person to tackle the topic, as he himself has participated and/or perpetrated some mind games of his own. Most notably, he made Michelle Bachmann feel uncomfortable in the guise of a gay robot – which makes him A-Number-One in my book. He is able to expertly dissect not only the mechanics and thrust of the pranks, but analyze the repercussions and the effectiveness of the actions as well, providing a micro- as well as macro-focus.

It’s an examination, not a celebration. The moral ambiguities of pranking are in full view here. Still, there’s a sense here that the author sees pranking at its best as a creative kind of non-violent civil disobedience, justified in the face of a domineering state that brainwashes its inhabitants with propaganda of the kind pioneered by Edward Bernays, which can be construed as a kind of pranking itself. McLeod quotes media critic Stuart Ewen, who “characterizes Bernays’s ideal model of communication as merely a hallucination of democracy: ‘A highly educated class of opinion-molding tacticians is continuously at work, analyzing the social terrain and adjusting the mental scenery from which the public mind, with its limited intellect, derives its opinions.’”

Given this imbalance of power, “Pranking” can be read as a testament to the possibilities of the intelligent and humorous revolutionary. As a study, it soars right up into my bookcase alongside other critical studies of this subject such as Alex Boese’s “Museum of Hoaxes,” H. Allen Smith’s “The Compleat Practical Joker,” and Mackay’s “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.” 

'The Almost Nearly Perfect People': Bustin' on my Scandinavian homies

The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia

By Michael Booth

2014

Picador

New York

Now I know why we left the old country.

Michael Booth’s new survey of the Nordic lands is a feisty, funny, trip that enlightens as it entertains.

The English travel and food writer has a long-standing connection to Denmark through his wife, and the book originated in his chagrin at Denmark’s consistent rating as the world’s happiest, most progressive society. “They don’t look that happy to me,” he thought, and what results is Booth’s frank and acerbic levering up of the great assumptions about these cultures’ superiority to take a peek at what squirms about in the shadows beneath them.

As he travels through Iceland, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Sweden, Booth does an admirable job of blending reportage, anecdote, and historical contextualization to present a balanced sketch of each society. This is a tricky business – Booth plumbs the national stereotypes for validity, and confronts his own ingrained generalizations, revealing a much bumpier, more complex reality.

Not that this is an expose or stab job. Booth is keen to remind the reader that in a world where poverty, conflict, disease, and injustice are par for the course, the problems of the highly developed, affluent North are relatively minor. Additionally, he espouses the virtues that makes these societies work – “trustworthiness, accountability, openness, a strong civil society, long-termism, individual self-control.” However, those of Scandinavian heritage raised with an intimidating sense of where they came from will find this study a big fat relief -- as some of these stereotypes are all too grounded in fact.

For instance, it seems that Danes are not the most happy, they are simply the best at pretending that everything is just fine. The Norwegians come off as not-too-bright, right-wing tribalists rendered effete by their vast oil revenues. Iceland? Vikings led astray into modern financial incoherence by their piratical tendencies. Finland is portrayed as composed of tough, taciturn binge-drinkers. And Sweden, the economic leader of them all, is a stultifyingly conformist culture, the ultimate nanny state, with an enormous immigrant problem.

In fact, the problems of multiculturalism crop up again and again in “Almost.” These host cultures are incredibly homogenous, not just culturally but genetically. The need for workers willing to do the mundane tasks that keep things running falls more and more to refugees, and inclusive philosophies are being tested now up North, with intermittent success. Enforcing tolerance and avoiding racial stratification is the new challenge.

The overall sense that Booth leaves the reader with is that, like a typical American suburb, Scandinavia is a nice place to be from. The traits I thought were my family’s alone are more broadly based. The aversion to conflict, the lack of emotionality, the stiff politesse, the smugness, the non-specific gloominess, the nagging sense of personal unimportance, the shyness, the yearning for universal approval, and wielding relentless, lethal niceness as a weapon all are found among the people Booth meets on his way.

Booth quotes journalist Niels Lillelund --“In Denmark we do not raise the inventive, the hardworking, the ones with initiative, the successful or the outstanding, we create hopelessness, helplessness and the sacred, ordinary mediocrity,” and The Economist – “Scandinavia is a great place in which to be born . . . but only if you are average. . . . if you are extraordinary, if you have big dreams, great visions, or are just a bit different, you will be crushed, if you do not emigrate first.” Why leave heaven? Well, if for you it's hell.

The idea that these “perfect” societies tend to iron out or exclude the unique, eccentric, and enterprising individual makes me understand why my dissatisfied, grumpy, free-thinking ancestors got the hell out of there. Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Ugly Duckling” has more than a dollop of truth in it. Of course, Booth's observations have stirred debate, as they should. "Almost" is great look below the surface.

Super Mario: America’s greatest tenor and the seductions of schmaltz

By BRAD WEISMANN

“ . . . the house had been hit in a raid, and among the losses was my record collection, all save one, which I still have . . . I daren’t play it much; it creates such vivid memories. I have to go for a walk; even then it’s about three hours before I can settle down again.” Spike Milligan, Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall

Sitting in my head for decades is a root musical memory of the vinyl disc RCA Victor LM-1837. It’s got the ungainly title of “Mario Lanza sings the hit songs from The Student Prince and other musical comedies.” On the album’s cover there floats Mario’s big, ripe, grinning head, cut out and set against a blood-red background. Inside, a flood tide of rich phrasing and incredible vocal pyrotechnics. My father, an operetta aficionado, played it all the time. My mother, normally allergic to this kind of thing, shared an affection for it with him. They had been carting it around all their married life. By the time we kids got to it the vinyl was scratched and pitted with affectionate use.

Why was Lanza so important to both of them? What did he mean to them?

Between 1945 and 1955, you couldn’t buy a beat in pop music. Somewhere between swing music and rock and roll, a great wave of sentimental balladry took hold in America. As soldiers came home from World War II and inaugurated the Baby Boomer generation, big bands faded and singing stars – Perry Como, Vaughn Monroe, Vic Damone, Frankie Laine, Dinah Shore, Doris Day, Patti Page, Nat “King” Cole, Pat Boone, Tony Bennett, Rosemary Clooney, Eddie Fisher, Jo Stafford, Andy Williams, the Chordettes, the Ames Brothers, the McGuire Sisters – took over the airwaves and jukeboxes. The county was awash in violins and vibrato.

Now, in 1940, big bands were riding high. The Swing Era was inaugurated by Benny Goodman’s breakthrough concert in Los Angeles’s Palomar Ballroom in 1935. Ten years later, it was over. Many factors contributed – the drafting of many musicians in World War II, the crippling ASCAP strike of 1942-1944, and most importantly the phenomenal explosion of interest in Frank Sinatra, who went from being one of Tommy Dorsey’s juvenile singers to a number-one sensation. Suddenly, instead of a vocalist serving as one component in the ensemble, he or she was pushed into the spotlight. Song choices and musical arrangements were now shaped around a vocalist’s range and persona.

Into this setting stepped the ambitious 26-year-old Lanza. His slowly developing career took off after his performance at the Hollywood Bowl on August 28, 1947. The 4,000 in attendance included many people from the film industry, including MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer. Mayer quickly signed Lanza to a contract. Three films later – “That Midnight Kiss,” “The Toast of New Orleans,” and “The Great Caruso” – he was the first to sell a million copies of an operatic recording, 1951’s “Great Caruso” soundtrack, one that has never gone out of print.

 Then he eased out of the onerous pressures of Hollywood, trained himself to an exemplary degree, and became a long-lived and beloved opera star, the greatest tenor of the 20^th century.

Of course, this did not happen. In fact, this is precisely the opposite of what happened, and that flicked the switch on the tragic nimbus that still hovers behind Lanza’s memory. The singer, the only child of a passive, shell-shocked WWI veteran and a domineering, frustrated-musician mother, was spoiled as a child. His lack of discipline and impulse control as an adult, mated to childish willfulness, led to a lifetime of self-destructive behavior.

Lanza seemed bipolar, swinging abruptly between extravagant spending, womanizing, and boasts that he was greater than Caruso, and long periods of crippling stage fright, depression, isolation, paranoia, and compulsive bouts of eating and drinking. (He repeatedly went on sometimes-successful crash diets to reduce his weight for filming – yo-yoing between 180 and nearly 300 pounds.) He would sabotage his voice by singing loudly all night before a concert – then cancel the concert due to a sore throat. (Like Pavarotti, he was famously called out for lip-synching in public; his sloppy erotic divertissements with Judy Garland and others are on record.) In the end, he stormed and strutted like the stereotype of the preening Italian tenor.

MGM announced that Mario Lanza would play the lead in Sigmund Romberg’s “The Student Prince” in 1951. However, this marked the point at which Lanza’s diva-esque behavior would drive the studio to suspend him, cancel the film, and sue him for damages. After pre-recording his songs for the film shortly before his conflicts with the studio became unworkable, Lanza found himself frozen out of the production. Finally, Lanza submitted to the ultimate insult – his vocal tracks would be lip-synched by a slimmer and more cooperative actor, Edward Purdom. The authorities finally divorced Lanza's wonderful voice from his troublesome self.

The movie was released two years after Lanza’s recording sessions. By that time, he had made one more film in the U.S., “Serenade,” and would be off to Italy, from where he would not return alive.

Lanza was possessed of the finest natural tenor voice many have ever heard. It is full, ringing, clear and expressive. When Lanza was focused and disciplined, his breath control, diction, tone, interpretive skill, and sense of dynamics was unsurpassed. However, when in distress or out of shape, these abilities would lapse and audiences would hear some of the qualities complained about by many critics – a forced, metallic quality, pushing for effect, poor breath support, and an impulse to constantly go for “toppers” – stunning bursts of  volume and flashy high notes, whether the material warranted it or not.

Being an overnight sensation meant that Lanza was pushed into recording lots of forgettable pop. However, while his health permitted his versatility and sensitivity to the material meant that he recorded many fine interpretations of ballads. Too, his renditions of many romantic and lyrical canzone Napoletana (Neapolitan songs) are considered definitive.

Lanza’s voice is so compelling and penetrating, he sings with such commitment and intensity, that it is difficult to be unmoved. Tied in with the conventions of the day – heavily orchestrated accompaniment, echo, stereo reprocessing – the result is super-extravagant schmaltz of the highest pitch. It’s a collision of the high-art operatic and the lowbrow, sentimental mush of the time.

Success destroyed Lanza. The money, fame, and adulation sudden film stardom brought were just as addictive as the women he chased and the booze he poured into himself. To his handlers, Lanza was a machine that printed money. Very few of the people who did business with or for him had any regard for his sanity or long-term career. Studio heads, music producers, managers, agents, lawyers – he quickly grew a protective carapace around himself -- one that required massive amounts of income to sustain. It was in no one’s interest to say no to him.

So, if Lanza’s life was a tragedy, whose fault was it? It depends on which biographer you read. Six different biographies range in their depictions of Lanza from a suffering saint to a contemptible cur. Some are clearly written for gain, retailing Lanza’s flaws to sell books. These include books in which the authors felt no compunction about making up reams of imaginary dialogue, as well as the inner thoughts of its subject and everyone around him.

Another pushes the myth that the Mafia killed Lanza. In fact, Lanza’s self-indulgent lifestyle weakened his heart considerably and contributed to the phlebitis that killed when a blood clot left his leg and migrated to his heart, causing a fatal heart attack.

One reliable source is Armando Cesari’s “Mario Lanza: An American Tragedy,” which includes a painstaking list of his recordings, films, concert, and radio appearances as well as a Cesari-curated CD of rare live and home-recorded tracks that bolster his extensive, solid analyses of the singer’s changing voice.

Roland L. Bessette’s “Mario Lanza: Tenor in Exile” is its equal. Bessette is painfully honest about many embarrassing incidents in Lanza’s life, but balances them with equally affecting stories of his kindness and his bouts of professionalism. At book’s end, Bessette speculates that Lanza’s inherent character flaws would have prevented him from having other than the life he did. “He had . . . the best career he could have had.” All who examine his life declare his voice a natural talent so immense that it crushed the man who had to bear it.

This is where my parents come in. My father, raised in a comfortable middle-class household, was heir to a taste for light classical music and operetta, from Gilbert and Sullivan through Herbert, Friml, Lehar, and the rest of those composers of tuneful pleasantry from the turn of last century. My mother, out on the farm, had no such musical pretensions, and grew up on country music and white (aka unswinging) gospel. But she was quite imaginative, well-read and had a flair for the dramatic – thanks to her, we had a well-stocked assortment of musical comedy soundtracks.

Somehow, Lanza hit the sweet spot for both of them. It served as a sort of soundtrack to their courtship. Later, it became a humorous and affectionate reference for them. Much later, it became something no one wanted to hear around the house. It had become an unbearable reminder of a romance that played out into a marriage overwhelmed by alienation and despair.

“The Student Prince” is powered by a classic romance plot: he’s a student prince, she’s a barmaid . . . complications ensue.

We kids played Side One over and over, crooning and swooping about the house, making melodramatic gestures of cross-eyed devotion in jerry-built costumes we thought mimicked the elegant finery of the principals. There was nothing more exhilarating than to imagine that I might one day be as captivating as Mario, with a magnetic voice that no one woman could resist!

“Overhead, the moon is beaming

White as blossoms on the bough

Nothing is heard but the song of a bird

Filling all the air with dreaming

Could this beauty last forever?

I would ask for nothing more, believe me

Let this night but live forever, forever and ever more!”

Lanza’s sound penetrates the thick, warm orchestrations, creating a kind of gem-scattered brilliance on a velvety background.  It’s not hard to see how Lanza and his music became a metaphor for the world of unattainable, disturbing fantasy the protagonists of Peter Jackson’s film “Heavenly Creatures” seek. For a while, it was our fantasy world as well.

Likewise, after years of contemplating my parents’ emotional dynamic, and sometimes overcoming its shadow on my own relationships, I have to come to a conclusion parallel to Bessette’s concerning Lanza  – they had the best marriage they could have had.

As for me, to the extent that I grew up thinking that love was supposed to be one long operatic epiphany . . . well, life took care of that. I spent many years chasing that addictive love high. Complications ensued. Now on much more solid ground, I can finally detach myself from all the regretful associations and really hear that voice for what it is.

And there, distilled in those romantic melodies, is still a kernel of what drew my parents together. Whether it was illusory, or never meant to last, those songs embody a majestic passion that must have consumed them, once. It’s comforting to know that.

SOURCES

Mario Lanza: Tenor in Exile

Roland L. Bessette

Amadeus Press

Portland OR

1999

Amore: The Story of Italian American Song

Mark Rotella

Farrar, Straus & Giroux

New York

2010

Lanza, His Tragic Life

Raymond Strait & Terry Robinson

Prentice-Hall

Englewood Cliffs, NJ

1980

Mario Lanza: Singing to the Gods

Derek Mannering

University Press of Mississippi

Jackson, MS

2005

Mario Lanza: An American Tragedy

Armando Cesari

Baskerville Publishers

Fort Worth, TX

2004

The Mario Lanza Story

Constantine Callinicos

Coward-McCann

New York

1960

Mario Lanza

Matt Bernard

Macfadden-Bartell Corp.

New York

1971