The Deceptions of Argo
For the 2013 Best Picture Oscar-winner Argo, Jack Kirby’s Lord of Light artwork was omitted and his crucial role in the CIA’s rescue plot was downplayed and distorted, but that is only a part of the problem with the film. …History cannot be swept clean like a blackboard, clean so that “we” might inscribe our...
Reverse-Engineering Fairbanks
Silent film star Douglas Fairbanks (1883-1939) was hugely popular in his time. He was one of the first performers of whom it could be said that he was less an actor than a star who was considered to be “playing himself.” He was so universally recognized and his audiences’ expectations were so great that in...
Bang Go the Caresses
Jean-Luc Godard’s 1964 film Contempt inventively deviates from cinematic convention and probes gender relations while it explores miscommunication between people. The storyline is loosely adapted from a 1954 novel by Alberto Moravia, Il Disprezzo [A Ghost at Noon) and depicts the production of a film-within-a film, a cinematic version of Homer’s classic Odyssey. Multileveled ambiguities...
Neal Adams: Ultraviolence
In the seventies, Neal Adams’ realism, comprehensive draftsmanship, hyperkinetic storytelling and page design, sophisticated coloring and in addition his efforts on behalf of creators’ rights marked him as a potent force in American comics. He seemed poised to do something substantial in comics, something that would pull all of his skills together in a...
The Crisis of the Collaborative Cartoonist
Thought forms in the mind as a combination of word and image. For that reason, cartooning is a direct, intimate means to communicate subjective thought to a reader. This is why many of the greatest comics are by artists who write their own narratives. Still, it is rare that a single person can both draw...
