I present Kung-Fu Frankenstein!

I wrote about this guy the other day, mixed in with some other blather about Kirby knows what. I don't. I've forgotten.  Anyway, this is a character I came up with at work last week.  I doodled a couple of quick concept drawings, aiming for a kind of Jack Kirby-Steve Ditko-late 60s Marvel synthesis.  Trust me-- he looked a lot better in my mind! 

I had this idea of mocking up a comic book cover or two from a fictional bottom-feeding type company where the editor-in-chief or publisher saw what was happening at Marvel and it blew his mind.  Unfortunately, his imagination wasn't up to the task, and his budget only afforded him to hire guys as talented as I am.  These sad circumstances led to this character, a shoddy Hulk rip-off and eventual disaster.  I was going to create a whole pseudo-history for the company complete with hack freelancer writers and artists rapidly descending the professional career ladder on their way to destitution.  Which, I admit, isn't very funny when you consider this actually happened to real people back then, including some formerly top names.

Still, I was enthused enough with the idea that evening to whip out this more realized concept piece, which proved to me what a terrible idea the whole thing was in the first place.  I still like the character and elements of the design, and a quick Google-search revealed there is not already a character named Kung-Fu Frankenstein.  Or, if there is, it's not well-known enough to show up on Google.  So just maybe I got there first for a change. (UPDATE:  Yet another Google search reveals a movie of some kind called Kung Fu Frankenstein and various references to "Frankenstein's Kung Fu Monster."  Yes, I know the monster is not named "Frankenstein," but rather its creator; however, I bow to childhood tradition in this matter and imagined my mythical comic book publisher would have as well.)

Which reminds me.  This morning I was doing a little reading about Dan Clowes' Lloyd Llewellyn and I made a startling discovery about myself!  First of all, Clowes is a legitimate genius of the form.  I got into him via Ghost World, like a lot of jerks-come-lately, but when I did, I went whole-hog into his back catalog... as far back as just past Lloyd Llewellyn.  Which is why I was curious about it. 

Anyway, to end this shambling story, this led me to a Wikipedia search (first resort of the lazy and time-pressed; there are no others) and to the realization my genre is Lowbrow Art.  Or "pop surrealism," which is too pretentious for my taste.  I realize I'll never be paid to produce art, which is kind of depressing, but at the same time I'm feeling enlightened by this realization.  I am affiliated with a movement and now my tongue-in-cheek, vaguely asshole-ish approach to drawing superheroes makes sense.  I'm probably not capable of producing straight adventure material, so I'll just have to resign myself to admiring it.

Now this doesn't mean I won't keep trying to improve my art skills.  What it means is, I'll probably become more precious and affected, without first having gone through a commercial period.

On industry phonies...

Recently I've become interested in comic industry phonies.  By that I mean people who lie about professional credits, pretend artists who rip off people with fake art or by taking money for commissions or other work and then never producing, people who set off Kickstarter disasters and the occasional oddball who gloms onto an actual professional then claims the relationship is more than it is.  Stuff like that.  Some of these people become Internet infamous with a lot of blog entries and message board discussions to keep you busy for hours plumbing the depths of their strange stories.  These things are sickly fascinating, but after immersing myself in a number of them, I end up feeling nervous and paranoid about ending up inside one of these narratives!

This is why I'm always careful to characterize myself as the outsider I am.  A fan who likes to do fan art and the occasional semi-scholarly analysis or deep reading of the comics I like.  I can bring some of my art school and graphic design knowledge to bear on certain things, but for the record, my comic book industry print career consists of having one fan letter published in a Sgt. Rock comic and another in Comic Book Artist magazine.  Like many people obsessed with funny books, I once submitted a story proposal to a publisher and never heard back from them.  Rejection by silence.  But I still love their comics and will continue buying them.  Yeah, and since I have these semi-slick drawing skills, I've even thought about trying to do commissions.  I'm worried about taking someone's money with good intentions, then not producing their product.  I do not want to risk that.  Nor would I enjoy getting into legal trouble with copyright laws.  I haven't a clue how those things work.

I will, on occasion, on this very blog, engage in some satirical hoaxing.  Or rather, I'd like to!

The other day I came up with a character and got this bright idea to write up a story about a low-rent comic book company from the 1960s and their one flagship title that brought them a brief taste of success but ultimately failed, sinking the company in the process.  I had this idea I'd create the writer and artist, a couple of marginal types barely eking out a living providing back-up stories here and there finding themselves ineptly riding a short tide of fame before wiping out.  I was going to do a cover or two and some panels from the stories, done in a Jack Kirby-meets-Steve Ditko style, which would have been perfect for what I'd planned.  Whenever I try to draw like either of those guys (which is often, because they're great and it's fun!), it invariably comes out like the exact kind of amateurish schlock art appropriate for some crap company where the employees could see what was happening elsewhere but couldn't quite match it despite their best efforts.

What inspired this flight of imagination?  Thinking up the name, "Kung Fu Frankenstein."  Imagine a 1960s where Marvel's success inspires the worst comic book company in the world to try that as a title, complete with a pseudo-Stan Lee "You, the reader!" type rap.  This idea enchanted me for about... oh... an hour before I thought, "Jeez, what are you, some kind of idiot?"  I drew a character concept, put it on Deviant Art and my Tumblr blog and slapped whatever passes for sense back into my head.

Where was I?

Oh, yeah.  Fakes!

What is the purpose of telling lies about yourself?  Some of these con-artists actually go to cons and pretend to be artists.  They make a few bucks that way.  Others may be mentally ill, and if so, they have my sympathy.  Some are just inveterate grifters who go from one scam to another because they've become programmed that way by years of practice or habit or messed-up internal wiring.  Shoot, I don't know.  But telling tall tales about having worked on some comic book as a ghost or something when you haven't is really a pathetic thing to resort to as a claim to fame.

Anyway, spending too much time in these depths can also be depressing.  It's much better to spend your time reading the actual comics.

The Mystery of Cindy Lee

Okay, that video isn't all that helpful, and the "Personal information unknown" subtitles seem a little ominous.  As far as I know, the always awesome Brian "Rick Mason" Cutler seems to be doing fine (I've been giving ol' Rick the business here on this blog, but it's the way DC's writers characterized him in the comic and doesn't reflect at all on Mr. Cutler or my warm feelings towards his role on the show), I haven't had time to look into Joanna Cameron.  But what of that other Joanna?  The one who played Cindy Lee?  And why didn't Cindy appear in the truncated second season?

It's not much of a mystery, and it didn't take Isis and her magical goddess powers to solve it.  Obviously, I'm on something of a The Secrets of Isis kick lately, having rediscovered this childhood favorite of mine.  I was a huge fan of Filmation's live action shows and watched both Isis and Shazam! each week.  I adored them uncritically.  Low budgets and clunky special effects didn't matter to me, and I took to heart the simplistic yet valid moral messages.

But through all the years, my only solid memory of either of these shows was the minor personal trauma caused when Cindy Lee vanished from its second season.  Rennie Carol?  Who are you jokers trying to fool?  Hey, I was eight years old and Cindy was my favorite character on the show.  Not having her in the mix changed the character dynamics.  It destroyed my sense of continuity.

That was my first experience with that kind of change.  TV and comics can be harsh on young psyches.  Networks abruptly cancel shows you love, actors quit due to contract disputes so producers write out their characters, comic book creators kill off others or turn them into villains, or the publishers re-boot their universes and consign any number of fan favorites or marginals to oblivion.  Nothing against her replacement Ronalda Douglas, but I gave up on Isis when it became apparent Cindy wasn't simply absent from school due to the flu-- although given her personality, I doubt anything short of  a coma would have kept her away from good ol' Larkspur High.

So, what happened to Cindy Lee?  This was 1976, years before the Internet and fan blogging.  If she'd appeared in Starlog magazine, I missed it.  And I had no idea the DC comic book-- the letters page being a potential info source-- even existed.  I probably could have written to Filmation or CBS and asked for an explanation, but the idea never occurred to me.  By then I was busy with school, Halloween, Ark II and eventually Isis, Rick Mason and even Cindy Lee passed from my conscious into the scrapbook of my subconscious and I lost the tiny key to its little lock.  Until this month.  And I remembered.  Cindy Lee!  What the heck happened to Cindy Lee?  Got herself into a jam but even this time Isis couldn't save her, huh?

Fortunately, Joanna Pang, the actor who so charmingly brought her to life in all her enthusiastic, perpetually cheerful glory, is very Cindy Lee-esque in real life.  The Secrets of Isis complete series DVD contains a chatty, informative interview with her, and just like the character she once portrayed, she came prepared.  She re-watched the old shows, found her diary from the time-- she apparently thought she was auditioning for Ices, a show about frozen Italian desserts-- shares production anecdotes and details her failed request of either Norm Prescott or Lou Scheimer to change Cindy's hairstyle from pigtails to something, anything, else.  It's good stuff.  But the heart of the matter comes towards the end when she good-naturedly addresses the issue of that second season.

After all this suspense, you're probably going to be disappointed to learn there's nothing sinister involved.  She completed filming on the first season, returned to New York and waited for the call to start the second.  It never came.  She phoned her agent in California, who got in touch with Filmation and learned they'd decided to "go in a different direction."  Pang says this is the reason you get when there isn't really a reason.  And that was that.  She moved on.

We moved on.  Then, for the purposes of this dumb blog, I moved back to the old neighborhood.  The old school is still there, only it's being used strictly for storage these days.

Identifying with Batman and Spider-Man makes you feel good about yourself...

What do you think of this report?  Apparently, some men who identify with Batman or Spider-Man feel better about their bodies when they look at pictures of their heroes, but if they're indifferent, the pictures make them feel worse.  A previous study found a similar effect in women who viewed celebrity photos.

I love this stuff.  I'm a psychology buff, and I know just enough about it to use its jargon to make bizarre, counter-factual claims and asinine pronouncements that can't withstand close scrutiny with facts.  To me, this report actually raises more questions than provides answers.  Here are a few.

1) What if you identify with Dani Moonstar or Cassandra Cain?  What effect does looking at drawings of Spider-Man and Batman have on your self-confidence?

2) What if you identify with Buddy Bradley?

3) Or the Crypt-Keeper?

4) Have they done this study specifically with female comic book fans?

5) Would doing the above study produce similar results?  Or, given the sexualized or fetishistic nature of how many female characters are presented, would they be opposite?  I'd be very interested in seeing how this plays out, because while their numbers aren't as great as with male fans, female comic fans are incredibly passionate about their favorite characters.

6) What is the nature of identification with characters involving female comic book fans?  Is it the same or different than with male fans?

7) What about fans with other gender identities?

8) Related to number one, how much cross-gender identification is there?  Is this common, or isolated?

9) In the study of women and celebrities, what kind of photos were used?  Were they candid shots, photos from public events or sexualized photo-spreads from men's magazines?  And would any of those affect the results?

10) Is identification with characters-- in effect, the reader "masking" himself or herself with certain characters-- important to creating a fan base or readership?

BONUS 11) What about fans who identify with villains?

I'm seriously interested in someone doing a study on these, and some in-depth surveying of women who read superhero comics.  Isn't it a fairly common belief male characters are idealized and more inviting of identification while female characters are objectified and more involving the reader in the male gazed based on an assumption that the readership is almost exclusively male?  And yet women who are into superhero comics really latch onto these characters and they're extremely vocal with their opinions.  Well, maybe that's just part of being a superhero comic fan.  But you know... Stephanie Brown.  Oracle.  Huntress.  Lois Lane. You dismiss or degrade these characters at your peril.

I'm also keenly interested in the gender dynamics.  As someone who easily identifies with female characters-- I have my entire life and probably pretended to be Wonder Woman, the Bionic Woman or any one of Charlie's Angels and even Cindy Lee from The Secrets of Isis as often as I portrayed Superman, the Incredible Hulk, Sgt. Rock, Batman or Spider-Man as a child, and Dani Moonstar quickly became my masking character of choice in New Mutants-- and responds strongly to their positive and negative portrayals, I'm guessing I fall somewhere outside the control group or whatever the heck they used here.  So I also want to know how other fans who view gender and sexuality in ways that aren't traditionally accepted.

And, strangely enough, I also identify quite a bit with characters with ambiguous morality-- in fictional, comic book dichotomous terms, not real life.  I find we have to go outside the mainstream to find these kinds of richly drawn, troublesome characters.  When I read Nexus, I tend to mask myself with Horatio Hellpop, but I find myself drawn to Ursula X.X. Imada whenever she appears on the scene.  Outside of genre fiction, I find Hopey Glass and Terry Downe from Love and Rockets have always fascinated me more than Maggie, the star.  And I have much more in common with Buddy Bradley from Peter Bagge's Hate than I'm comfortable admitting.

When I see drawings of them, how do I feel about myself?  Pretty good, I guess.

It's Cass-Batmas in Japan already, and I haven't even started my shopping!

While Dan Didio recently replied, "Sure" when asked for the one millionth time if Cassandra Cain would re-appear in the ongoing DC universe narrative, it doesn't seem likely to happen anytime soon.  But we Cass fans are a never-say-die bunch of Quixotic fools, so we're doing something pro-active to hurry along that fabled day.  Yes, it's the Support Cass Campaign, a day of celebration and comic book purchasing, one that I hope will become an annual tradition and, eventually, a national holiday.

The idea is, on August 31st (today in Japan) you go to Comixology and buy Batgirl #1.  I think this is a marvelous-- er-- a DCelous idea.  As the old saying goes, "Money talks, bullshit (and waffles) walk."  I'm going to participate as soon as I get off work today if I can find my credit card.  I've already done a little bit to support Cass by staggering as a sweaty human wreck into Blister in Tokyo-- despite having the flu, as it turns out-- and paying a ridiculous amount for a battered copy of Batgirl:  Fists of Fury, a book I've bought twice before.  I've bought three goddamned copies of this thing, DC!  Do what I tell you!

Just kidding.  But not about the three copies.  I still own two copies of Fists of Fury.  One I gave to an EFL student at a previous job.  Share the epic goodness that is Cass, I always say.  Well, I sometimes say that.  Occasionally.  Rarely.  I just now typed it and it's the first time that sentence has ever crossed my mind.  I have a Fists of Fury at my mom's house back in the US and the new one on my shelf alongside all the Marvel, Dark Horse, Fantagraphics and IDW books I buy.  I'm proud of my little Fist of Fury book.  It's in good company.  It's the little book that could starring the little character who could, until someone, somewhere, deemed it necessary she could no longer.

Maybe she could again.  With her mom barely old enough to vote and her dad also missing in action (as far as I know), it might be a long wait.  But in the meantime, you'll have a digital copy of Batgirl #1 to remind you of the good old days, when she was silent and running and fisty and furious.  And a new holiday I call Cass-Batmas.

Which we should celebrate by not speaking for 24 hours, dressing all in black and kicking copious amounts of ass.  And... I don't know... maybe by spending time with loved ones, drinking eggnog, exchanging gifts and decorating a tree of some kind.  I can't think of any other holidays where we do such things, so that seems like a good idea to me.