Movie Comics

Blair Davis

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780813572277
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

As Christopher Nolan’s Batman films and releases from the Marvel Cinematic Universe have regularly topped the box office charts, fans and critics alike might assume that the “comic book movie” is a distinctly twenty-first-century form. Yet adaptations of comics have been an integral part of American cinema from its very inception, with comics characters regularly leaping from the page to the screen and cinematic icons spawning comics of their own.    Movie Comics is the first book to study the long history of both comics-to-film and film-to-comics adaptations, covering everything from silent films starring Happy Hooligan to sound films and serials featuring Dick Tracy and Superman to comic books starring John Wayne, Gene Autry, Bob Hope, Abbott & Costello, Alan Ladd, and Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. With a special focus on the Classical Hollywood era, Blair Davis investigates the factors that spurred this media convergence, as the film and comics industries joined forces to expand the reach of their various brands. While analyzing this production history, he also tracks the artistic coevolution of films and comics, considering the many formal elements that each medium adopted and adapted from the other.    As it explores our abiding desire to experience the same characters and stories in multiple forms, Movie Comics gives readers a new appreciation for the unique qualities of the illustrated page and the cinematic moving image.    

1

1930s Comics-to-Film Adaptations

As the 1920s came to a close, Hollywood found itself at a turning point. With the overwhelming success of The Jazz Singer in 1927, sound filmmaking captured the public’s imagination. Silent pictures suffered in turn, and any hopes that the two could flourish side by side quickly faded. But by the start of the 1930s, Hollywood was still attempting to master sound filmmaking techniques, and many in the industry found these early talking pictures (or talkies, as they were commonly called) less satisfying despite their public appeal. Film scholar Thomas Doherty notes how Universal Pictures head Carl Laemmle was dismayed in 1930 by the “‘constant barrage of speaking or music’ in the ‘chattering dialogue pictures’” of the period, which had lost their emphasis on visual storytelling.¹

Sound filmmaking suffered a learning curve, and the transition to talkies was not a “gentle grafting, but a brutal, crude transplantation,” says historian Scott Eyman.² After making several silent features based on comic strips in the late 1920s, Hollywood abandoned them throughout 1929 and 1930 while rethinking the types of films best suited to the new production methods of sound filmmaking. The market for long-running silent short films based on Mutt and Jeff, Krazy Kat, and their peers also dried up as audiences demanded talkies. If comics characters were to still retain a big-screen presence, they would first have to find their voice.

SKIPPY: COMICS “COME ALIVE” IN THE TALKIES

In 1931, Skippy became the first live action feature sound film based on a comic strip. Featuring a mischievous but lovable little boy, Percy Crosby’s Skippy began in Life magazine in 1923 and became a newspaper strip two years later. With its charming depictions of childhood life, it was an influence on both Charles Schulz’s Peanuts and Hank Ketcham’s Dennis the Menace strips. The film adaptation and especially its marketing reveal a great deal about how Hollywood saw comics in the early years of sound filmmaking. The film tells the story of ten-year-old Skippy, a successful doctor’s son who would rather play with his shantytown friend Sooky than the well-off local kids. Together, they fight to save the shantytown from being demolished and to raise the three dollars needed to buy a dog license for Sooky’s impounded dog, who will otherwise be euthanized.

Child actor Jackie Cooper had already appeared in numerous Our Gang short films and was loaned to Paramount by Hal Roach Studios to play Skippy.³ Striking a balance between comedy and melodrama, Skippy was produced with more than just youth audiences in mind, with Paramount spending an estimated $295,000 on the film.⁴ This makes it among the most expensive films based on comics to be produced in the 1930s and 1940s, when they were more commonly associated with lower budget B-films and serials. Crosby himself wrote the film’s initial treatment, something few creators would do as comics became more commonly adapted for the screen in the decades to come. The film even earned Norman Taurog an Academy Award for Best Director, along with nominations for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Actor for young Cooper. Though an impressive start for comics adaptations in the sound film era, Skippy and its source material remain less well known today than many other comic strips of the period.

Sound filmmaking fundamentally altered the ways in which audiences experienced movies, including how it changed the art of adapting comics. With silent films, comics were brought to the screen through a combination of images (animated or live action) and intertitles. Since comics themselves also were created by combining words and images, the adaptive process prior to 1930 was somewhat less complex given that neither silent cinema nor comics use sound. By 1931, however, some comics fans worried that their beloved characters would now be ruined with the coming of the talkies. As one 1931 article noted, “Many were agonized when they learned ‘Skippy’ was to be movified. Those who had learned to love Percy Crosby’s Skippy on the comic page feared what Hollywood would do to him. . . . But Skippy is grand. You’ll love it—as much for what it isn’t as for what it is.”⁵ This rhetoric concerning advance criticism of the adaptation is especially interesting because it echoes modern sentiments from many comics fans and their fears of how Hollywood might wreck a character that they love (especially upon seeing the first publicity images). Clearly, apprehension over how comics are brought to the cinema did not begin on Internet message boards but is instead a time-honored trend: comics fans are a passionate lot, and they don’t take kindly to a screen version of a character that isn’t how they envisioned it.

FIGURE 3. Advertisement for Skippy (Paramount, 1931).

Doubting fans had little to worry about with Skippy. The film was celebrated by critics, with one calling it “a gem of purest ray serene! Though nominally a kid picture designed especially for juvenile audiences, this really possesses the wildest [sic] sort of appeal. Every spectator, no matter how far time has removed him from childhood, will see something of his own youth in the joys and sorrows of the golden age we find here. For these children are real in psychology, in speech, in action, and better still, they are not cute—they are poignant.”⁶ Skippy was heralded as comics adaptation done right for creating a human connection with its precise casting, script, and direction.

The film was part of a wave of children’s films in the early 1930s, but was sold as being more than just that—as a superior picture that adults would enjoy as well. In a letter to Paramount chief Budd Schulberg, Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) head Jason S. Joy wrote that he found “nothing objectionable” in Skippy’s script, adding: “Incidentally, we enjoyed reading the script very much and believe that it should make a very amusing and popular picture.”⁷ This was rare praise from the MPAA, the “industry’s own self-censorship mechanism” that provided certificates of approval allowing films to be distributed,⁸ which seldom took the time to compliment the films that it reviewed. Another MPAA report stated, “It can be highly recommended as suitable for both children and adults because of its sympathetic humor and pathos. It is splendidly produced and merits the highest recommendation on the part of all our committees.”⁹ Skippy seemed to be the ideal film according to the MPAA, not only suitable for family viewing but also well written, acted, and produced.

Such universal appeal was regularly addressed in reviews of the film, with Billboard echoing the MPAA’s sentiments: “Here is a picture for the whole family. . . . There are laughs galore and a few tears, and a cast that is par excellence. This may sound like superlative, but this is a superlative bit of innocent amusement in this day of racketeering and sex films.”¹⁰ Another review calls Skippy “probably the greatest youngster picture yet made. It should do a great deal toward bringing them back to the theater and the parents will enjoy it as much as the children. Jackie Cooper in the title role is largely responsible for the success of the picture. He makes the cartoon character a most living and vital youngster and his performance is one of the greatest bits of juvenile characterization in motion pictures, in our opinion.”¹¹

This idea of the comic strip brought to life (with film here able to make Skippy “living” and “vital”) would dominate how adaptations of comics to both film and television were conceptualized for decades to come. The novelty of moving photographic imagery thrilled motion picture audiences in the medium’s initial years. Novelist Leo Tolstoy wrote in 1908 of how movies seemed “closer to life” than novels. “In life, too,” he says, “changes and transitions flash before our eyes, and emotions of the soul are like a hurricane. The cinema has divined the mystery of motion. And that is greatness.”¹² The ways in which the still images of characters are granted photorealistic movement in cinema remains a large part of the appeal of live-action films based on comics. That which once did not move now does onscreen, and that which was hand-drawn becomes embodied by human actors; these two factors are regularly evoked by film critics and marketers attempting to convey the pleasures of comics adaptations to potential audiences.

Skippy’s pressbook reiterated this idea, with one advertisement having Skippy tell us directly that his film would finally allow us to see him “in person”: “I’ve gotten so popular just from folks seein’ my picture in the papers it came to me, just like that, I should make a personal appearance. So I’ll be seein’ ya!” Another ad has two drawn images of Skippy on either side of the photorealistic image of Cooper with the tagline, “In the Movies now in person—Skippy,” while a similar ad declares: “You’ll never know Skippy ’til you see him active and alive, in love and out, on the screen.” Furthermore, the pressbook provides suggested copy (to be used in other ads, articles, and so forth) that reads, “You’ve seen his picture in the papers—now meet Skippy himself, in person. Alive and kickin’ and talkin’ on the screen.”¹³ If the act of film spectatorship therefore allows us to engage with a character “in person,” as this marketing would have us believe, then the film medium is positioned here as creating a more active experience than reading comics. Film audiences would feel they are finally “meeting” a character in the movie theater after having only observed him at a distance on the comics page. The pressbook’s rhetoric then takes this notion one step further by implying something fundamentally unsatisfying about reading comics that only cinematic adaptation can resolve:

The greatest kid in the world!

No longer the cold, still, fictional little figure of the printed forms—BUT NOW A LIVING, MOVING, BREATHING, TALKING, WHISTLING KID!!

The friend of millions . . . from coast to coast, the nation’s host of wherever chuckles are in order at the breakfast table.

The acknowledged KING of comic-strip characters.

That’s ‘SKIPPY’!!!¹⁴

The imagery of the comics medium is certainly “still,” but the word “cold” suggests something more. If comics characters are described here as being “fictional,” this implies that they are more factual (i.e., real) entities onscreen. But if their characters come to life onscreen, does this mean that comics are a lifeless form? Literally, they are, since the human forms found on the comics page are not alive, but the metaphor of a corpse seems to apply when the word “cold” is contrasted with film’s living actors. The stillness of comics’ drawn imagery cannot seem to match the vibrancy of the human subject recorded on film, which lives, moves, breathes, talks (and occasionally whistles). Still photography was commonly used to take images of corpses in the Victorian age as a way of preserving the memory of the deceased. Moving images demonstrate liveliness whereas the inanimate form of the still image embodies a condition of stasis. While these contrasting factors are inherent to each respective medium, the idea that film embodies life while comics can be equated with death is nonetheless a loaded concept when it comes to aesthetic analysis. The possibilities inherent in, and pleasures achieved by, comics through its sequential images are innately different from the medium of film—something true of all media.¹⁵

What Skippy’s pressbook implies, however subtly, is the inferiority of comics when contrasted with cinema. Comics are seen here as being formally constrictive while movies embody an unbound freedom: one promotional effort reads, “Two famous newspaper comic strip heroes figuratively reach out over their pen-and-ink boundaries and shake hands in ‘Skippy,’ the Paramount talking picturization of Percy Crosby’s famous syndicate feature.” As such, many comics characters literally break free from the comics page in certain movie advertisements. One ad features Cooper’s face appearing to burst through the page of an actual Skippy comic strip, complete with numerous rips and tears. The ad announces that Skippy is “Crashing Through to stardom and high public favor, from the comic sheets to you in the t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Movies and Comics Adapt Each Other
• 1. 1930s Comics-to-Film Adaptations
• 2. 1930s Cinema and Comics: Screen to Page
• 3. 1940s Comics-to-Film Adaptations
• 4. 1940s Cinema and Comics: Screen to Page
• 5. 1950s Comics-to-Film and Television Adaptations
• 6. 1950s Cinema, Television, and Comics: Screen to Page
• Conclusion: The 1960s and Beyond
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author