Comic Book Confidential: Movie Review (Scripted)
Video version of an old post (as I explained about HERE)
For the original post, see:
http://joelswagman.blogspot.com/2007/10/comic-book-confidential.html
Thursday, June 04, 2020
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4 comments:
CBC was released on blu-ray a few years ago, and I went ahead and pulled the trigger for the extras. Among the footage dropped was a fairly long interview with Carl Barks. He happily relates how he juxtaposed Donald's character to Uncle Scrooge and the boys, and came up with one idea after another. At some point Mann (off-camera) asks about attribution. Suddenly Barks' face goes dark. "Oh, no. There was none of that." Mann prods and Barks squirms, finally stating somewhat unconvincingly that he believes lack of attribution actually freed him up as a writer. It's quite an odd moment, and I find myself wishing it could have been included. But adding Funny Animals to the stew would have been one ingredient too many, particularly for viewers like yourself who aren't much interested in the "comix" scene of yore.
Oh no, I would have been totally up for Carl Barks. My main complaint with this documentary is that it went a bit too much into the alternative scene, and that it included some comic strips, when the stated focus was comic books. But Carl Barks gets a free pass on both of those. His Donald Duck comic books were totally main stream back in their day, and they appeared as comic books.
...but your general point is well-taken--there's too much stuff to cover, and it would have been hard to please everyone.
I'm mulling over your argument. You don't say it in so many words (I watched your video too, btw), but you point to a dividing line between comic series/serials and other comic metiers. I was set to begin my counter-argument by noting the original "comic books" were just collections of newspaper strips, so Zippy should be fair game. In the Comix scene there were precious few serials running -- FabFurryFreak Bros, Fritz The Cat, one or two more (Harvey Pekar's American Splendour being the real stand-out, imo -- actually, his bit in CBC is a personal stand-out for me, I never get tired of it). Most of what the Comix, and later Alt-Comics scene, produced were satirical digests akin to MAD Magazine (Spiegelman's RAW, or Crumb's Weirdo, etc). Then came Graphic Novels.
Anyhow, I think I'm kind of with you in your criticism, even though I still thought the Alt material personally engaging. BTW, the interview with Dan O'Neil who penned the infamous Air Pirates was a weird bit of happenstance, says Mann in the extras. The strippers showing up to play billiards was entirely unplanned.
I probably shouldn't express any strong opinions here in any direction, because the truth is I haven't even seen this movie since I posted my original review back in 2007. When I do these TScripted Reviews, I just read off my old review. I don't usual revisit the movie.
So first of all I probably shouldn't talk too much about a movie I only half remember, and secondly I probably shouldn't double down too much on some off-the-cuff comments I made 13 years ago. Who knows, if I saw the movie now, I might have a completely different reaction.
...all that being said...
Your not far wrong. My particular gripe with this documentary is just that it's all over the placed. (I would have preferred a more focus look at one or two aspects of comics.--Or at least, such was my mood on that particular evening in 2007.) The comic book/comic strip thing was just my example of how the focus was hard to pin down. It started out as an examination of comic books.
I mean, they could have started with comic strips, and talked about all those old newspaper serials in the 1930s. Because you're right, that is the origin. But they didn't, they jumped right into comic books. So then to suddenly include one comic strip struck me as a bit random, and seemed to reflect what I felt was an unfocused nature of the documentary. (At the time I thought it was just one comic strip, but I've been looking some of these up just now, and you're right I may have overstated it. According to Wikipedia, Fritz the cat was also a comic strip.)
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