Comic Book Confidential

(Movie Review)

This film is close to 20 years old (originally released in 1989) but it's new to me. You can imagine how excited I was when I saw it in the new release section of my local video store. A documentary about comic books! What is there not to love?

Now, granted because of the very nature of comics they are a hard subject to make a documentary on. The still images of comic book frames are antithetical to the moving pictures of the television documentary. And yet, I can't help but wish there were more documentaries on comic books. I love watching documentaries and I love comic books: why not put them together.

There are certainly no lack of interesting stories about the comic book industry out of which you could make hundreds of documentaries. And that's somewhat the problem in a wide scope documentary like this which tries to tell a little bit of every story. Sometimes less is more and it can be more interesting to narrow the scope a bit. For instance recently I saw this BBC documentary on the life of Steve Ditko. (I saw it on youtube at the time, but the youtube police have acted fast and it is down already, so I can't give you a link. Sorry about that).

The BBC documentary is so fascinating because it focuses in on just one artist, and tells his story in detail.

This documentary however tries to tell the whole story of comic books. Jack Kirby and Stan Lee are together with Art Spiegelman and Robert Crumb. There are glimpses of fascinating tidbits, but on the whole the film has to cover so much ground that it doesn't have time to get into detail about anything. I learned almost nothing new from the whole documentary.

Fortunately the film doesn't rehash the whole history of comics. There's no Katzenjammer Kids or Krazy Kat. This movie jumps right in with the beginning of the actual comic book.

Then the film rushes through the introduction of super-heroes. It gets interesting briefly with the horror comic books of the 1950s, and the resulting Senate Subcommittee on comic books and juvenile deliquency.

(This film is made by Ron Mann, who also made the film "Grass" composed almost entirely of old public service announcements against Marijuanna. He uses a similar style by including lots of old public service films against comic books from the 1950s).

And then, the film starts to get into alternative comic books and the underground scene.

Now, call me a corporate whore if you will, but despite identifying more with the politics of Hippy comic books, I much prefer the pulpy cheesiness of the old superhero comics than the artsy fartsy work of Harold Crumb. And I never really got "Zippy the Pinhead". (By all rights "Zippy the Pinhead" should never have been included in this documentary anyways because it is a comic strip and not a comic book, demonstrating perhaps that the director was less concerned about making the definitive work on comics than simply including what he thinks is cool.)

In short this wasn't quite the documentary I was looking for. But if you're tastes run different than mine, you might enjoy it.

Link of the Day
Whilst were talking about comic books, here's some wasting time comic book links. I found this blog page while surfing the net a couple weeks back. It's a bit of a grab bag, but mostly it focuses on women and comic books, written by a women writer who used to work at DC comics. The story of why she left comic books is hidden inside the archives of the blog.

Also news that a Wonder Woman movie project has been dumped because Warner Brothers decided not to do any more movies with woman in the lead. And further reaction here.


Comic Book Confidential: Movie Review (Scripted)