Mr. Media Interviews by Bob Andelman
Monday, March 31, 2008
Danny Fingeroth, DISGUISED AS CLARK KENT, SUPERMAN ON THE COUCH, author, comics editor: Mr. Media Interview, Part 2
Return to Part 1!
BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: I’ve lived in Florida now for 30 years. I think probably just about the same time you got to Marvel I was coming to Florida, and I’ve been hearing ever since that we need to lock down the state, we need to close the exits, not let anymore people in here to spoil what we’ve got. Good luck with that. You got a state surrounded by water. Good luck locking it up. Tell me a little bit about Superman on the Couch. And I’m gonna be perfectly honest. I think you already know this. I have not read the book, but I love the title, and I love what I’ve read about it. What was the driving force in that book?
DANNY FINGEROTH: That was the idea of taking my experience as a comics professional. I’m trying to sort out a lot of different answers to that. There’ve been a lot of books, obviously, written about comics and comics history, but as far as I can tell, since Dr. Frederic Wertham, there has been no psychiatrist or even psychologist who has written a complete book about comics. They’ve written about everything else and every other pop culture movies and TV and the Internet and theater and painting, but no psychiatrist ever found it worthy. I’m not a psychiatrist nor do I play one on TV, but I thought taking a psychologically-oriented look at superheroes and why people love them. And also the added thing of me having been someone who wrote and edited comics for decades, specifically superhero comics, I thought I would bring -- as I do to Disguised as Clark Kent -- a point of view of an insider that, as good as a critic or an academic may be, they don’t have that insider knowledge.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Right, right.
FINGEROTH: And by the same token, everybody knows and loves those characters. If you have a society where there’s people really with masks and advanced technology going around taking the law into their own hands, you just have to look at the news to see societies like that are in really big trouble. You don’t want to live in a society like that, and yet even people who may regard themselves as pacifists or just completely opposed to violence, “Oh yeah, Spider-Man, he’s so cool.” “Wonder Woman, she’s a role model for me.” So that was really what Superman on the Couch was about. Why it was that people had such warm, fuzzy feelings about what were essentially vigilante fantasy figures.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: This is gonna be a strange connection, but I was listening to Howard Stern this morning, and he had another DJ on there, Jay Thomas. And Thomas was in quite a mood, and he was talking about how what he’d really like to do is get somebody who could just go out on the streets and collect up all the scum, give them an injection, and be done with them. And then Robin Quivers said to him, “But Jay, why is it you should be the one to make the decision about who is scum and who is not?” But that’s exactly what we’re talking about, right?
FINGEROTH: The fantasy of the superhero really is less about the superpowers than about that ability to wield power wisely - the idea that Superman will just knock somebody out and that Spider-Man will web somebody up and leave them for the police. There was that darkening of the superhero that started in the wake of Watchmen and Dark Knight that sort of took the surface veneer of those stories without really investigating the subtleties of them, and suddenly you had characters like the Punisher, who goes out and kills people.
I’m not sure how many of your listeners read comics currently, but that’s the whole sort of dialect, if you’ll pardon the expression, in comics now. How realistic do you want your superhero to be? Yes, if they really were superheroes, they probably would be crazy and probably would be sadistic and probably would do horrendous things, whether on purpose or by accident. But then it’s not really the same fantasy anymore, is it? It’s a bleaker fantasy. It’s not something that’s inspiring or uplifting.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: I was going to ask you about this later in a different way, but let’s go ahead and touch it now. I was one of those kids who grew up reading comics all the time who loved comics. I had to have my comics fix. And then you grow up, and you move on to other things. And then when I had my kid, I started looking again cause I thought, “Hey, great chance to go back and start reading them and introduce my kid to all these great times I had.” But I look at them the last couple years, talk about dark, just the covers, the images, the colors that are being used. It’s all dark. It completely turns me off. I don’t know. I guess it’s just the day and age, or maybe I’m just old.
FINGEROTH: You’re preaching to the choir here, because I agree with you. I think it’s a couple of different things. An online columnist, I forget, and he’s phrased it much better than I will, but we’re sort of at the point now where no matter what you do or what your interests are, you know who Spider-Man is. Spider-Man – Peter Parker, Superman – Clark Kent, Batman – Bruce Wayne. You know all those basic things even if you haven’t picked up a comic for 25 years, but those are not really the characters so much in the comics anymore. Many of them in the comics have darkened in attitude and become more “realistic.” I think it was Tom Spurgeon, if I’m quoting him correctly, but the idea we’re at this point now where what do you end up with when you take a child fantasy and incorporate adult sensibilities? What if Huckleberry Hound suddenly became a dark, gritty vigilante? What if Babar suddenly kicked butt and took names? It really is what happens.
I gave a talk up at a college in Westchester a couple years ago, and a student there named Carl Wadley, I always like to give him credit, he encapsulated the entire kind of argument in comics for the past 30 years. He said, “I’d rather read stories about noble people screwing up than about messed up people doing messed up things.” And that’s really sort of the two sides of the argument in comic books today. When people go to the movies, you’re seeing basically the Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, John Romita Spider-Man. You see the Lee and Kirby Fantastic Four. Those are the aspects of superheroes that are still most appealing to the widest range of people.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Danny, speaking of Jews in comics, how long did you work for Marvel as a writer and an editor?
FINGEROTH: I was there from 1977 till 1995.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Wow! That’s a long time.
FINGEROTH: That is a long time.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Tell me what it was like when you got there and tell me what it was like when you left. How different was it?
FINGEROTH: Boy. When I got there, I sort of had an interesting perspective. I was working in what was called the British department where we prepared reprint comics in black and white to compete in the British market with the British weeklies, and we were also putting out the only original material was something called “Captain Britain.” And I was working for Larry Lieber who, of course, is Stan Lee’s brother, and Larry wrote a lot of the early Marvel… He scripted the first issue of Thor and, I think, of Iron Man. He was there at the creation.
At that point in comics history, I think we all had the feeling that we were sort of there at the tail end of this kind of quaint folk art, and we should just enjoy it while it lasted, and then the last person out be sure to turn off the lights. And it wasn’t even depressing in that sense. It’s just like sort of it was just a fact of life. It’s like okay, we had a pretty good run for 40, 50 years, and now kids are into other stuff, and let’s enjoy it while we can.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: And a generation later -- 18 years passes -- and then what was it like?
FINGEROTH: Well, obviously, the business did not die in the late ‘70s. There were several key creators as well as the creation and the expansion of the direct market system of comics distribution, which is also, ironically, as we like to say in comics, is part of the problem with the comics now because…If you want, we can get into that. But, basically, the system that saved comics was also endangering it, but in between, there were a couple of booms and busts. There was a great speculator boom in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s. And then a lot of stuff went on that became somewhat unpleasant at the company. Plus, I had an offer from Byron Preiss to go work for him, if you know that name.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: I know Byron, yeah. I knew Byron. Very sad, really.
FINGEROTH: It was really tragic. He died in a car crash. So we came off this incredible high of these huge sales, which were largely but not completely fueled by speculators. So we had these record-breaking, all-time high sales, and then there was when the business kind of imploded in ’93, ’94, ’95. Believe it or not, nobody actually needs comic books. If you don’t have comic books, you can probably have a quality life.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: What? What are you saying, man?
FINGEROTH: A highly diminished quality of life, but I’ve heard you can live without them. So it’s always fan-driven and habit-driven. Again, if you want to talk about the ‘90s, we can do that, but that certainly was the state when I left there. And as I say, there was all sorts of strangeness going on at the company and in the industry in general at that point.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Hi, is there a call there for Danny?
COLLEEN: Yes. It’s me. It’s Colleen here.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Hey, Colleen. How are ya?
COLLEEN: Fine, thank you. I’ve got one question, and I was gonna ask a second one, but I think you answered it. The second one was do you find comics now being superimposed by online comic and the online media? I guess nobody buys comics anymore. The second question then was, do you really think that there isn’t a need for comics anymore cause I remember reading all these comics that you’ve mentioned like Superman and Batman as well? I guess it’s sort of like you look forward to seeing it on the TV. So what do you reckon is going to happen to comics?
FINGEROTH: If I knew that, I’d be a rich man today, but there’s a few different answers. If you go to your local Barnes and Noble or Borders, and you go to the manga section, you’ll find yourself tripping over actual children and teenagers reading comics. So that is a big part of the future. Whether that future will include Spandex-clad superheroes is another story.
But there certainly is a generation of young people who are learning the pleasures of reading comics. And when I said nobody is buying comics, I mean certainly Marvel and DC still have very profitable publishing divisions. It’s just people aren’t buying them the way they did, say, 30 years ago. There’s a whole trade paperback market and a collectibles market. And also there’s a whole other world that I’m sort of learning about myself in this Rough Guide to Graphic Novels I’m writing. That is the literary graphic novel, sort of Maus and its descendants, the kind of the next generation or two after the underground - comics as an expression of personal experience or history or journalism or fantasy, but comics or sequential art or graphic novels that, again, aren’t about superheroes.
I think the art form is alive and well. I think superheroes, I’ve heard them, and I’ve likened them myself, say, to jazz, whereas jazz was once the mainstream pop music of America, now it’s a strong niche but a niche nonetheless. I think superhero comics has gotten to that point where there’s still an audience, and there definitely is a whole world online. That is really unknown territory, and there’s a million comics online, some better than others, like anything else. The riddle that no one has solved yet is how do you make money off it? Even the most popular web cartoonists seem to make the bulk of their income from collected print editions or from T-shirts or toys or all kinds of merchandising. So I think the idea of comics dying out is not happening, but it is transforming in several different directions.
COLLEEN: Because you also mention the superheroes, and it’s going to be after my first question. That was my first question. That was, as I watch all the comic strips as I’ve mentioned before, did the characters come about, aren’t they representative of the superhero role models that we hope children follow? But the thing about that is, aren’t comic representatives, aren’t they sort of like representing a kind of type of behavior in I’ll say the ‘80s and the ‘90s rather than now? Are comics really appropriate for today’s modern children who know about computers and about all different types of remedies and illnesses and so more than we do, more than I did when I was a child?
FINGEROTH: Do you mean the medium itself or the content?
COLLEEN: The content, yes.
FINGEROTH: Look, if you’re going to read a superhero comic book, you have to have a certain suspension or disbelief, as it’s called, in a lot of ways. If you really, truly believe that they are role models for solving problems simply through punching somebody or shooting somebody, then clearly you may want to keep your children away from them.
If you think they’re metaphors for reaching in and finding the best in yourself and that the physical conflict is more symbolic of inner and psychological conflict, then, as fairy tales are or as certain children’s books or children’s movies are, then I think properly-guided or even minimally-guided, I think especially the older comics, which they’re reprinting in low-priced editions, are very appropriate for kids. It has to do, really, with parental oversight and responsibility. A kid will buy the bright, shiny thing or the thing he thinks is cool or the thing he thinks is forbidden or she thinks is forbidden. I think the thing with comics always was that they were slightly disreputable so that your parents might disapprove but not so terrible that they would forbid them outright. It’s a tough thing.
When you deal in creating popular culture as a profession, it’s a question you ask yourself all the time. What is my responsibility here, if any, and where do I fit in on the whole continuum of the pop culture stew that people are exposed to? And I don’t claim to know the answer. I feel like I read superhero comics growing up, and I know the difference between real violence and comic book style action, and I like to think that most people can tell that difference as well.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Colleen, thank you very much for calling.
Click Here to Keep Reading!
© 2008 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: I’ve lived in Florida now for 30 years. I think probably just about the same time you got to Marvel I was coming to Florida, and I’ve been hearing ever since that we need to lock down the state, we need to close the exits, not let anymore people in here to spoil what we’ve got. Good luck with that. You got a state surrounded by water. Good luck locking it up. Tell me a little bit about Superman on the Couch. And I’m gonna be perfectly honest. I think you already know this. I have not read the book, but I love the title, and I love what I’ve read about it. What was the driving force in that book?
DANNY FINGEROTH: That was the idea of taking my experience as a comics professional. I’m trying to sort out a lot of different answers to that. There’ve been a lot of books, obviously, written about comics and comics history, but as far as I can tell, since Dr. Frederic Wertham, there has been no psychiatrist or even psychologist who has written a complete book about comics. They’ve written about everything else and every other pop culture movies and TV and the Internet and theater and painting, but no psychiatrist ever found it worthy. I’m not a psychiatrist nor do I play one on TV, but I thought taking a psychologically-oriented look at superheroes and why people love them. And also the added thing of me having been someone who wrote and edited comics for decades, specifically superhero comics, I thought I would bring -- as I do to Disguised as Clark Kent -- a point of view of an insider that, as good as a critic or an academic may be, they don’t have that insider knowledge.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Right, right.
FINGEROTH: And by the same token, everybody knows and loves those characters. If you have a society where there’s people really with masks and advanced technology going around taking the law into their own hands, you just have to look at the news to see societies like that are in really big trouble. You don’t want to live in a society like that, and yet even people who may regard themselves as pacifists or just completely opposed to violence, “Oh yeah, Spider-Man, he’s so cool.” “Wonder Woman, she’s a role model for me.” So that was really what Superman on the Couch was about. Why it was that people had such warm, fuzzy feelings about what were essentially vigilante fantasy figures.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: This is gonna be a strange connection, but I was listening to Howard Stern this morning, and he had another DJ on there, Jay Thomas. And Thomas was in quite a mood, and he was talking about how what he’d really like to do is get somebody who could just go out on the streets and collect up all the scum, give them an injection, and be done with them. And then Robin Quivers said to him, “But Jay, why is it you should be the one to make the decision about who is scum and who is not?” But that’s exactly what we’re talking about, right?
FINGEROTH: The fantasy of the superhero really is less about the superpowers than about that ability to wield power wisely - the idea that Superman will just knock somebody out and that Spider-Man will web somebody up and leave them for the police. There was that darkening of the superhero that started in the wake of Watchmen and Dark Knight that sort of took the surface veneer of those stories without really investigating the subtleties of them, and suddenly you had characters like the Punisher, who goes out and kills people.
I’m not sure how many of your listeners read comics currently, but that’s the whole sort of dialect, if you’ll pardon the expression, in comics now. How realistic do you want your superhero to be? Yes, if they really were superheroes, they probably would be crazy and probably would be sadistic and probably would do horrendous things, whether on purpose or by accident. But then it’s not really the same fantasy anymore, is it? It’s a bleaker fantasy. It’s not something that’s inspiring or uplifting.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: I was going to ask you about this later in a different way, but let’s go ahead and touch it now. I was one of those kids who grew up reading comics all the time who loved comics. I had to have my comics fix. And then you grow up, and you move on to other things. And then when I had my kid, I started looking again cause I thought, “Hey, great chance to go back and start reading them and introduce my kid to all these great times I had.” But I look at them the last couple years, talk about dark, just the covers, the images, the colors that are being used. It’s all dark. It completely turns me off. I don’t know. I guess it’s just the day and age, or maybe I’m just old.
FINGEROTH: You’re preaching to the choir here, because I agree with you. I think it’s a couple of different things. An online columnist, I forget, and he’s phrased it much better than I will, but we’re sort of at the point now where no matter what you do or what your interests are, you know who Spider-Man is. Spider-Man – Peter Parker, Superman – Clark Kent, Batman – Bruce Wayne. You know all those basic things even if you haven’t picked up a comic for 25 years, but those are not really the characters so much in the comics anymore. Many of them in the comics have darkened in attitude and become more “realistic.” I think it was Tom Spurgeon, if I’m quoting him correctly, but the idea we’re at this point now where what do you end up with when you take a child fantasy and incorporate adult sensibilities? What if Huckleberry Hound suddenly became a dark, gritty vigilante? What if Babar suddenly kicked butt and took names? It really is what happens.
I gave a talk up at a college in Westchester a couple years ago, and a student there named Carl Wadley, I always like to give him credit, he encapsulated the entire kind of argument in comics for the past 30 years. He said, “I’d rather read stories about noble people screwing up than about messed up people doing messed up things.” And that’s really sort of the two sides of the argument in comic books today. When people go to the movies, you’re seeing basically the Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, John Romita Spider-Man. You see the Lee and Kirby Fantastic Four. Those are the aspects of superheroes that are still most appealing to the widest range of people.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Danny, speaking of Jews in comics, how long did you work for Marvel as a writer and an editor?
FINGEROTH: I was there from 1977 till 1995.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Wow! That’s a long time.
FINGEROTH: That is a long time.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Tell me what it was like when you got there and tell me what it was like when you left. How different was it?
FINGEROTH: Boy. When I got there, I sort of had an interesting perspective. I was working in what was called the British department where we prepared reprint comics in black and white to compete in the British market with the British weeklies, and we were also putting out the only original material was something called “Captain Britain.” And I was working for Larry Lieber who, of course, is Stan Lee’s brother, and Larry wrote a lot of the early Marvel… He scripted the first issue of Thor and, I think, of Iron Man. He was there at the creation.
At that point in comics history, I think we all had the feeling that we were sort of there at the tail end of this kind of quaint folk art, and we should just enjoy it while it lasted, and then the last person out be sure to turn off the lights. And it wasn’t even depressing in that sense. It’s just like sort of it was just a fact of life. It’s like okay, we had a pretty good run for 40, 50 years, and now kids are into other stuff, and let’s enjoy it while we can.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: And a generation later -- 18 years passes -- and then what was it like?
FINGEROTH: Well, obviously, the business did not die in the late ‘70s. There were several key creators as well as the creation and the expansion of the direct market system of comics distribution, which is also, ironically, as we like to say in comics, is part of the problem with the comics now because…If you want, we can get into that. But, basically, the system that saved comics was also endangering it, but in between, there were a couple of booms and busts. There was a great speculator boom in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s. And then a lot of stuff went on that became somewhat unpleasant at the company. Plus, I had an offer from Byron Preiss to go work for him, if you know that name.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: I know Byron, yeah. I knew Byron. Very sad, really.
FINGEROTH: It was really tragic. He died in a car crash. So we came off this incredible high of these huge sales, which were largely but not completely fueled by speculators. So we had these record-breaking, all-time high sales, and then there was when the business kind of imploded in ’93, ’94, ’95. Believe it or not, nobody actually needs comic books. If you don’t have comic books, you can probably have a quality life.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: What? What are you saying, man?
FINGEROTH: A highly diminished quality of life, but I’ve heard you can live without them. So it’s always fan-driven and habit-driven. Again, if you want to talk about the ‘90s, we can do that, but that certainly was the state when I left there. And as I say, there was all sorts of strangeness going on at the company and in the industry in general at that point.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Hi, is there a call there for Danny?
COLLEEN: Yes. It’s me. It’s Colleen here.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Hey, Colleen. How are ya?
COLLEEN: Fine, thank you. I’ve got one question, and I was gonna ask a second one, but I think you answered it. The second one was do you find comics now being superimposed by online comic and the online media? I guess nobody buys comics anymore. The second question then was, do you really think that there isn’t a need for comics anymore cause I remember reading all these comics that you’ve mentioned like Superman and Batman as well? I guess it’s sort of like you look forward to seeing it on the TV. So what do you reckon is going to happen to comics?
FINGEROTH: If I knew that, I’d be a rich man today, but there’s a few different answers. If you go to your local Barnes and Noble or Borders, and you go to the manga section, you’ll find yourself tripping over actual children and teenagers reading comics. So that is a big part of the future. Whether that future will include Spandex-clad superheroes is another story.
But there certainly is a generation of young people who are learning the pleasures of reading comics. And when I said nobody is buying comics, I mean certainly Marvel and DC still have very profitable publishing divisions. It’s just people aren’t buying them the way they did, say, 30 years ago. There’s a whole trade paperback market and a collectibles market. And also there’s a whole other world that I’m sort of learning about myself in this Rough Guide to Graphic Novels I’m writing. That is the literary graphic novel, sort of Maus and its descendants, the kind of the next generation or two after the underground - comics as an expression of personal experience or history or journalism or fantasy, but comics or sequential art or graphic novels that, again, aren’t about superheroes.
I think the art form is alive and well. I think superheroes, I’ve heard them, and I’ve likened them myself, say, to jazz, whereas jazz was once the mainstream pop music of America, now it’s a strong niche but a niche nonetheless. I think superhero comics has gotten to that point where there’s still an audience, and there definitely is a whole world online. That is really unknown territory, and there’s a million comics online, some better than others, like anything else. The riddle that no one has solved yet is how do you make money off it? Even the most popular web cartoonists seem to make the bulk of their income from collected print editions or from T-shirts or toys or all kinds of merchandising. So I think the idea of comics dying out is not happening, but it is transforming in several different directions.
COLLEEN: Because you also mention the superheroes, and it’s going to be after my first question. That was my first question. That was, as I watch all the comic strips as I’ve mentioned before, did the characters come about, aren’t they representative of the superhero role models that we hope children follow? But the thing about that is, aren’t comic representatives, aren’t they sort of like representing a kind of type of behavior in I’ll say the ‘80s and the ‘90s rather than now? Are comics really appropriate for today’s modern children who know about computers and about all different types of remedies and illnesses and so more than we do, more than I did when I was a child?
FINGEROTH: Do you mean the medium itself or the content?
COLLEEN: The content, yes.
FINGEROTH: Look, if you’re going to read a superhero comic book, you have to have a certain suspension or disbelief, as it’s called, in a lot of ways. If you really, truly believe that they are role models for solving problems simply through punching somebody or shooting somebody, then clearly you may want to keep your children away from them.
If you think they’re metaphors for reaching in and finding the best in yourself and that the physical conflict is more symbolic of inner and psychological conflict, then, as fairy tales are or as certain children’s books or children’s movies are, then I think properly-guided or even minimally-guided, I think especially the older comics, which they’re reprinting in low-priced editions, are very appropriate for kids. It has to do, really, with parental oversight and responsibility. A kid will buy the bright, shiny thing or the thing he thinks is cool or the thing he thinks is forbidden or she thinks is forbidden. I think the thing with comics always was that they were slightly disreputable so that your parents might disapprove but not so terrible that they would forbid them outright. It’s a tough thing.
When you deal in creating popular culture as a profession, it’s a question you ask yourself all the time. What is my responsibility here, if any, and where do I fit in on the whole continuum of the pop culture stew that people are exposed to? And I don’t claim to know the answer. I feel like I read superhero comics growing up, and I know the difference between real violence and comic book style action, and I like to think that most people can tell that difference as well.
ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Colleen, thank you very much for calling.
Click Here to Keep Reading!
© 2008 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
Labels: Babar, Batman, Byron Preiss, Captain Britain, Danny Fingeroth, Dark Knight, Disguised as Clark Kent, Dr. Frederic Wertham, Huckleberry Hound, Jews, Larry Lieber, manga, Marvel Comics, Maus, Spandex, Spider-Man, Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, superheroes, Thor, vigilante, Watchmen, Wonder Woman
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