Debuting in early 1900, Carl "Bunny" Schultze's Foxy Grandpa took the New York comics scene by storm. The strip generally centered around Foxy Grandpa's two grandchildren, Chub and Bunt, trying to play tricks on him. But Foxy Grandpa was always a step or two ahead of the kids and was able to prank them first, often with a very similar gag. I suspect the notion of "these kids today" always getting what's coming to them was a large part of the appeal.

The strip, as I said, was immediately popular. Licensed games started appearing within a year. The strips were collected in bound editions beginning in 1901; there were 30 volumes of them ultimately. The stuffed toy pattern shown below was produced around 1910. The strip was adapted into Broadway shows and some early silent films, portions of which still survive.

The strip ended in 1918. (Given that it was essentially a one-note gag, I'm surprised it lasted that long!) But it's cropped up every now and then since. It ran briefly in The Funnies in 1929, and there's some quick allusions to it in the movies Crashing Hollywood (1938) and Murder My Sweet (1944). Most recently, it was referenced on a trucker cap in SpongeBob SquarePants.

Although Schultze lived very handsomely while the strip was still running, he evidently spent most of his income so that he was hit especially hard by the Great Depression. He did little drawing work during the 1920s, and while he was able to illustrate a few books in the 1930s, he spent much of that decade relying on President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration for income. He died of a heart attack in 1939, at the age of 73, nearly penniless and with only one living relative still near his hometown back in Kentucky.

Heathcliff has become an interesting comic in recent years. Not because it's really funny per se, it's more that it kind of has an absurdity to it. Beyond the basic framing of the idyllic white picket fence lifestyle lauded as the epitome of the Amercian Dream^TM in the 1950s, the jokes mostly seem to focus around presenting the absurd in non-chalant fashion. As if the exceptional were mundane.

I'm reminded a little of the old Addams Family show. (Not the comics themselves, the TV show based on it.) A lot of the humor there was in how "outrageous" the Addams were while acting as if they were the most ordinary people imaginable. However, the show's humor laid in their neighbors' outsized reactions: overacted double-takes and spit-takes and such. Of course, what was presented as outrageous on broadcast television in 1964 was pretty tame even then, and positively dull by today's standards. Hell, I think if any of my friends visited someone with a giant taxidermied turtle with two heads, their reaction would be, "Oh, cool! Where can I get one of those?"

In Heathcliff, though, the humor is not in the reactions. The reactions are almost always understated, almost to the point of not being reactions at all. Peter Gallagher has created this entire alternate reality world where this 1950s asthetic is overlaid on top a surrealist painting. The comic strip asks things like, "What if garbage day were celebrated by all the animals who would cheer on Garbage Ape as he paraded down the street, usually swinging two steel garbage cans?" The strip almost bears more of a resemblance to Zippy the Pinhead in terms of content than George Gately's original iteration of Heathcliff. If you've read Heathcliff at all in the past several years, you know what I'm talking about.

Interestingly, so far this month, Gallagher seems to have taken up a less unusual theme for the comics pages: crossovers. What if Heathcliff lived in the same world with other cartoon figures. Here's three examples, the most recent from yesterday...

I think perhaps because most comics style crossovers tend to take a this-is-just-completely-normal approach, these don't feel as successful as many others. We've seen the Lockhorns hanging out with Blondie and Dagwood, Dennis the Menace hanging out with Curtis, Popeye playing tennis with Grimm, Dick Tracy teaming up with The Spirit, Lio playing with Billy and Jeffy... Geez, Beetle Baily shows up in Hi & Lois semi-regularly because they're literally family! So for Clifford or Mr. Magoo to show up in Heathcliff is almost to be expected.

I don't know really have a specific point here, other than finding it interesting one of the things that can make other comics feel special -- a guest appearance -- actually works against Heathcliff because of how the strip has been set up. Had these been gags Gately had tried back in the day, they probably would've gone over better because he had a different brand of humor that wasn't predicated on treating the extraordinary as ordinary.

One of the things that's struck me about older comics is some of the cross-media attention they were given. I think many fans are at least nominally familiar with some of the serials that were produced using Superman, Captain Marvel, Captain America, and others, but less well-known are the radio programs that were popular around the same time.

The Adventures of Superman, of course, is one of the more well-known, largely by virtue of the titular character's popularity. He was, arguably, one of the first cross-media phenomenon. The old Fleischer cartoons are certainly well-known as are the serials and later TV show. So I think fans readily roll the notion of a radio show under that umbrella. "He was in all media, so of course he would have a radio show!"

But I don't know that fans today understand the importance and impact radio had back in the day. Unlike comics, radio programs could be listened to collectively and were a communal activity in a way that many other media -- certainly other media of the day -- couldn't be. So to have a character make the transition from comics to radio was a big deal, culturally on par with getting a blockbuster movie today like Shang-Chi.

Besides Superman, other comic characters that got their own radio programs included Batman, Blue Beetle, Flash Gordon, Blondie, Popeye, Blackstone, Archie, Dick Tracy, Gasoline Alley, Li'l Abner, Little Orphan Annie, Skippy, Terry and the Pirates, Mark Trail, Buster Brown, and the Gumps to name just a few! Perhaps surprisingly, considering how little is spoken of them in comic circles, they continued to be popular up through the 1950s!

What's striking to me is that any of them maintained any level of success at all! After all, comics are very much a visual medium and radio very much is not. Therefore you not only lose the visualizations provided in the strips, but the nature of the storytelling needs to be changed significantly. Think about that sequence from Action Comics #1 where Superman comes up to a locked room and the governor's assistant dares him to knock it down -- the subsequent panel shows Superman doing exactly that but without any dialogue or sound effects. While that sequence could be translated into a radio format, it would require some re-working for the non-visual medium.

I wouldn't mind seeing more writing analyzing how various comics were able to make the transition versus how many simply applied comic strip characters to what were essentially existing radio scripts.

Shortly after the Black Panther movie came out, I wrote a post talking about how successful it was commercially. I wrote several, actually, but I'm thinking about this one in particular. What I called out in that piece was initial box office projections were modest, and they kept revising them upwards over and over again the entire opening weekend as the ticket sales numbers being reported were phenomenal. Their last estimate, as I recall, put it at around $220 million for opening weekend, but the actual final total was $242 million. I then called out a quote I found in a Hollywood Reporter article...

"The movie continues to play ahead of our modeling," says Disney's film distribution head Dave Hollis. "It has become a cultural phenomenon. This is a movie audiences were hoping for, and that delivered beyond expectations."

I haven't been tracking Shang-Chi as closely, but it looks like a similar pattern. Initial projections had it at around $35 million for opening weekend, but the latest numbers I'm seeing as I'm writing this have it just shy of $90 million. And the various projection revisions throughout the weekend were increased repeatedly, just like they had been on Black Panther. Granted, Shang-Chi's a considerably lower total than Panther but we're still dealing with a pandemic and a lot of people simply are not going to movie theaters at all right now, full stop.

So what happened? I mean, Disney has been in the film business for a century now. They've shown repeatedly that they're experts at this sort of thing. And yet, not only were their initial projections way, way off but they had to keep revising opening weekend estimates all through opening weekend and into that Monday. How did these people who have been doing this type of thing for decades suddenly miss so widely?

In a word: racism.

I'm not saying that anyone doing the actual calculations here is a racist, mind you, but the system as a whole is set up with very racial prejudices built into it. Essentially, the models aren't designed to take into account Chinese-American (and, to a lesser extent, Asian-American) people. While Shang-Chi doesn't seem to be quite as infused with Chinese culture as Panther was with African influences, most of the key decision makers are of Asian descent. The director has Japanese ancestry, the lead writer has Chinese ancestry, one of the key editors has Korean ancestry, the choreographers were from China themselves... to say nothing of a cast that is almost all visibly of Asian descent.

But it certainly seems to suggest that Disney's "modeling" saw this film as just another superhero film in the Marvel franchise, and discounted what having a Chinese-written, Chinese-acted movie set (mostly) in China about a Chinese family might mean. I can kind of understand how your typical fanboy might miss that, being somewhat blinded to that by virtue of it being only the second MCU film of "Phase Four" but that the Hollywood folks were seemingly oblivious to this too suggests a cultural blindness. They couldn't see the film beyond what it originally slated on paper to be before Destin Daniel Cretton was hired. Their cookie cutter models assume that all films are made by white men primarily for white audiences. They don't account for A) large numbers of Asian-American audiences and/or B) how those audiences buy movie tickets compared to white audiences. (That second part is how/why they kept revising their projection numbers during opening weekend; the incoming data they were paying attention to -- online sales made in advance of actually going to the theater -- wasn't taking into consideration audiences who just rolled up to the ticket window a few minutes before showtime.)

I am absolutely over-simplifying the hell out of this, but that's basically what happened. The models Disney used were dismissive of and/or ignored Asian-American demographic habits and consequently they totally botched every single one of their projections.

One of the hopes a lot of people have right now is that Shang-Chi's success will prove to Hollywood executives that you can make a successful film by/about/featuring Asian people. I'm skeptical, personally, but we'll see. I think one of the other hopes we should have, too, though is that whatever models are used to predict a movie's success will also be revised so as not to discount large swaths of potential audiences. But, frankly, I'm even more skeptical there.

And, considering that everything I posted here starting with the third paragraph is copied verbaitum from my post about Black Panther (except for changing "Black" to "Chinese") I'd say my skepticism was well-warranted.

Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

Kleefeld on Comics: In Praise of Wyatt Wingfoot
https://ift.tt/3mHeOWk

Kleefeld on Comics: The Anti-Comics Crusades (plural!) of the 1950s
https://ift.tt/3zJxfgw

Kleefeld on Comics: The Weird World of the Super Friends
https://ift.tt/3DBFjm5

Kleefeld on Comics: Mad Magazine as a Media Literacy Educator
https://ift.tt/3tbyR05

A few years back, Peter Gutierrez posted a sort-of review of Totally MAD: 60 Years of Humor, Satire, Stupidity and Stupidity. But he makes a really interesting point in there about Mad in general -- one that I hadn't considered before. Namely, that Mad was/is a fantastic educational tool when it comes to media literacy.

First, what is media literacy? Media literacy is the ability to critically look at and analyze media. It's being able to sit down to watch TV or a movie, and understand why it's written the way it is, or why the actors are portraying their parts in a certain way, or what the broader socio-political context of the piece is. It's the ability to understand the media you're consuming, not just consume it.

So how does Mad teach media literacy? Primarily through their parodies and satires. The films and shows they lampooned frequently contained heavily meta-textual references. The one I immediately recalled once Gutierrez noted the idea was in the parody of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I had enjoyed the movie as a child when it came out, but the Mad version contained a scene in which Steven Spielberg and George Lucas appear about 2/3 of the way through. The two talk about the progress of the film as its creators and dream up the mine car chase as a way to keep the action moving along so fast that nobody will realize that they don't have much of a plot. It wasn't until reading that that I realized just how flimsy a premise the movie had, and how a film's creators can add in big, flashy sequences that aren't anything more than big, flashy, hollow sequences.

The other thing Mad did for my media literacy, particularly when I was even younger, was to provide a cultural touchstone with pop culture. I didn't actually see all the movies they made fun of, but I was aware of them, their basic plots, and probably a particularly scathing analysis of the them through the pages of Mad. Other cultural references seeped in as well. I recall a Mort Drucker piece in which he created the "perfect" politician by taking bits and pieces of particularly famous ones. Linocoln's beard, Ted Kennedy's shock of white hair, Carter's lips... I got a civics lesson in notable politicians YEARS before I paid attention to politics. (The punchline, by the way, was that all the parts, when assembled properly, looked like Mr. T.)

The fact that Mad kept poking fun at American culture in a critical and intelligent way (admittedly, amid some sophomoric gags and general sillyness) it required its audience to look at what it was parodying with the same critical eye. "It's funny because it's true" is a kind of verbal shorthand that speaks to how a good comedian can cast light on the absurdities of a culture through exaggeration, but that phrase could also well be applied to Mad. They regularly skewered media of all sorts through comic exaggeration, and the only way to really understand what they were doing was to understand what they were really criticizing.

You know, I read Mad as a kid only sporadically. But I have to admit that I did not realize until I read Peter's post just how significant even those few issues I read really were!

For myself, and I expect many Gen Xers interested in comics, Super Friends was a staple of Saturday mornings. The show spotlighted the adventures of the expanding Justice League, starting with a core of Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, Robin, and Aquaman to start and evolving over the show's history to eventually include the likes of Flash, Green Lantern, Cyborg, Firestorm, and new characters like Black Vulcan and Samurai. The show ran for over a decade before ending in 1986. As I said, it was something of a childhood staple.

But it interestingly had a rocky start.

The show first debuted on ABC in September 1973. The character designs and stories were fairly straightforward and simplistic, but the lack of depth or complexity was pretty standard for Saturday morning at the time. The first season was comprised of only 16 episodes, which were re-run through August 1974. The show was then cancelled. Presumably from less than anticipated ratings, but perhaps also influenced by cameo appearances on The New Scooby-Doo Movies and The Brady Kids the previous year.

The success of the Wonder Woman TV show in 1975, and probably the early development interest in the Superman movie which had secured Marlon Brando that same year led ABC to reconsider Super Friends. The original 16 episodes were re-run beginning in early 1976, while production began on a new series. To help promote the new series, DC also began publishing a Super Friends comic. While the stories there were independent of the show, they followed much the same style of the original series.

Not wanting to miss out on the apparent upcoming superhero fad, CBS also began working on The New Adventures of Batman and Robin. They were able to secure the voices of Adam West and Burt Ward from the 1966 television show, while ABC used Olan Soule and Casey Kasem from Filmation's 1968 Batman cartoon.

Beginning in mid-1977, E. Nelson Bridwell, writer of the Super Friends comic, learned of some of the cast changes (notably, the replacement of Wendy and Marvin with Zan and Jayna) after working on the book for several months and wrote the change into his stories, so by the time the new season of the show began in September 1977, the comic had already made the transition to the new characters. Despite no real obvious and/or ongoing correspondence between the comic's creative team and the show's, they played amazingly well off one another from a timing perspective. Interestingly, though, this seems to be the extent of any collaboration between the show and the comic, as the villains from the show are largely ignored, as are the heroes created for the show.

What I find curious is that the comic only survived until mid-1981, while the show continued into 1982. However the show was only re-runs for the 1982/83 season, and was cancelled outright in the fall of '83. The show was brought back again in 1984 and ran until September 1986.

Given the on-again-off-again nature of the show, and regular use of mixing re-runs with new material, I suspect there were more than a few clashes within the network about the show's future throughout it's tenure. If, then, DC was continually getting notices about the show maybe being cancelled or maybe not, and/or what direction the show might take, I wonder if editor Julie Schwartz just decided that it wasn't worth the effort. I don't have insight into sales numbers from that period (even John Jackson Miller has something of a hole in there!) but I never got the impression the comic was a top-seller. It had a respectable five-year run, so it couldn't have been doing too badly, especially with the cartoon tie-in, but if they felt at DC that it was only saleable so long as the cartoon was ongoing, they may well have cancelled the comic, assuming the show wasn't going to last either. After all, it'd been cancelled once already.