Surrender! Characters From Comics Seem To Have Taken Over Our Culture

The sardonic come-on in the TV ad for Sega’s Comic Zone video game says it all: “So … you want to live inside a comic book.”

But we already do.

For better or worse, comics saturate our pop culture: movies, computer games, billboards, automotive designs, musical comedies, frozen yogurt snacks in the shapes of cartoon characters.

Comics are our culture; comics are us. Human beings such as Pamela Lee, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jim Carrey probably wouldn’t even exist in their current forms if comic artists hadn’t been fantasizing balloon animals like them for years.

This year alone, 25 film projects based on comics are in the works or have been released, including “The Phantom,” “Barb Wire,” “Bordello of Blood” (the “Tales From the Crypt” movie) and the sequel to “The Crow.” The fourth Batman blockbuster, “Batman and Robin,” is now shooting.

And you can’t escape them at home. On TV, “Speed Racer” just became the spokes-cartoon for Volkswagen and ESPN, and there’s “Lois & Clark” plus the whole Cartoon Network. All of this doesn’t even count the movies and tube shows that, although they may not have a direct comic-book origin, clearly have a comic-book mentality.

Consider “Independence Day,” “The Simpsons,” “Star Trek,” “The X-Files,” “Ace Ventura,” anything from Walt Disney, “Xena: Warrior Queen” and just about the entire network schedules of Nickelodeon, Comedy Central and The Weather Channel.

But let’s set aside Hollywood - please. Take a glance at the laminated safety guide that commercial airlines stick in your seat pocket: It’s a comic strip. Or look at the Macintosh or Windows operating systems on your computer monitor: comic-book icons. Look at the user’s manual that comes with any appliance more complicated than a ballpoint pen: a comic book, and the appliance itself is shaped like some lunar death-ray for the X-Men.

Look around your typical modern city. Eateries take a cartoony approach to designate dining out as fun (Uncle Julio’s, McDonald’s, EZ’s). And check out all of the postmodern offices and concert halls that look as if the architect’s name were Buck Rogers and we’re all living on the Planet Mongo.

Not surprisingly, Entertainment Weekly jumped on the most obvious answers to explain movieland’s resurgent interest in superheroes. First, cartoon characters are conveniently pre-sold (who hasn’t heard of Superman?) and the future licensing opportunities are endless: toys, games, greasy food, odd clothing. Second, the three “Batman” films account for more than one billion dollars in worldwide sales. Add in “The Mask” ($320 million), and a studio might actually turn a profit.

The problem with these explanations is that they don’t account for movies based on obscurities, such as “Tank Girl,” which tanked, and “Timecop,” which didn’t. Sure, “Batman” is a known commodity, but “Judge Dredd”? How did a cult comic from Britain get a top-budget Hollywood production - and flop?

Cartoonist Scott McCloud, who wrote the acclaimed Understanding Comics, the nearest thing comics have to the Bible, notes that even “World’s Toughest Milkman” has been snatched up by Hollywood.

“Don’t get me wrong,” he says, “it’s a good little comic. But its original print run was probably 3,000 copies.”

In short, this is strange, it’s all over the place, and it’s despite a severe downturn in the comics industry itself. According to The Comics Journal, about 2,000 comic-book stores closed in the past year, pushing the total down to an estimated 4,500 across the country.

What’s powering this outpouring of comic-related products, then, seems to be more than just a desire to duplicate “Batman’s” box office.

McCloud posits a conspiracy theory: A number of young fans cut their teeth on the “postunderground” comics of the 1980s, books that combine commercial advances with some of the adultoriented breakthroughs of the ‘60s underground artists. These buffs are now dug in at important points along the Hollywood food chain. And they’ve been green-lighting films that reflect their tastes.

“We have our moles,” McCloud says with a hint of menace.

There’s also a generational explanation: Our comic-book culture is the latest thing we can blame on baby boomers. They seem endlessly fascinated with big-screen versions of the old TV shows that ruined their young brains (“Flipper,” “The Beverly Hillbillies”). Ditto the comics they stockpiled. The movie studios are just fulfilling a generation’s hopeless attempt to relive its childhood. It’s nostalgia with special effects.

But it’s more than that, McCloud believes. Bookstores today cater to a population whose reading habits were formed as much by television and comics as they were by “traditional” reading methods.

Those sensibilities and the artists who reflect them have begun to shape our reading culture. Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” - a harrowing, two-volume graphic novel about the Holocaust - won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992. “Dinotopia” and “Elves” have been huge publishing phenomena with adults. And because of such developments, the major bookstore chains have started devoting whole sections to comics.

“The industry assumption has been that the clientele turns over every seven years,” says Rusty Witek, author of “Comics as History.” “That no longer holds. People read comics at least into young adulthood.”

What’s more, whether our culture is going to be postliterate, multiliterate or subliterate, comics - with their combination of accessible images and words - are one of the most effective means of communicating across cultural and language barriers. They are simple but dramatic; they show and tell.

xxxx