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Defenders, Seuss, and Faint Praise

Admiration can inspire the imagination, and sometimes creative minds experiment with the delivery of tributes by imitation. These do not always commend themselves or the material which they intend to honor; for example, a few years back Paula Abdul, in attempting to deliver, via a music video, a tribute to the late Bob Fosse, managed to considerably water down a striking scene from the movie "All That Jazz" so that the very impact of it did not appear in imitation - in essence, she managed to imitate almost everything, except the point of the piece. Perhaps the untimely death that came to Fosse spared him some needless suffering here.

Where someone of rare talent pays an homage, we can indeed represent the intent to pay tribute. We saw the like, for instance, in Alan Moore's treatment of the derivative superhero Supreme, a character Moore gave a core concept in using him as a vehicle to recapture the whimsy and surrealism of Mort Weisinger's interpretation of Superman in the 1960s. However, where a tribute lacks adequate inspiration, it can become something embarrassing. Back in the eighties, when someone came up with the notion of celebrating the refurbishment of the Statue of Liberty by filling a football field with hundreds of Elvis impersonators, said innovator might have missed the point of attempting to give honors to points of Americana. Honors made of trash tend to drag down, rather than compliment, the target.

These insights came to me when I recently rediscovered a gem from the early eighties, a comic book that, for me, represented the low point of a series that had slowly lost steam over several years previous. Combine weak delivery with a much out-of-context tribute, and you can see the all-around awkwardness of Don Perlin's and J. M. DeMatteis' attempt to recognize Dr. Seuss within the pages of Defenders.

The Seuss Phenomenon

Seuss brought the vision of a surreal humor cartoonist to a literature aimed at the very young in a way that inspired the imagination, taking the view that fun and education did not have to stand as contrary poles of the same process. And this distinctive, peculiar, cartoony approach had an appeal that reaches both children and adults across broad lines of culture.

Furthermore, back in the era of psychedelia uber alles, Seuss' pieces fit in well. They had authentic credentials as literature for children, which placed them on the supposedly-correct side of the child-versus-parent divide; they had a coherent unreality to them that fit well with a culture shaped by Pink Floyd albums and experimentations with expansion (or, really, chemically damaging) consciousness.

Seuss' style existed in recognizable form as early as the 1940s, however, and we therefore tread on dubious ground if we attempt to appropriate it as some kind of heavily subtextual bow to the drug culture of the sixties. To make such a connection, we must resort to the more dishonest kind of deconstructionism, which sucks the meaning out of a work of art and replaces it with one chosen by the observer, who can then claim that the artist meant that all along.

Seuss entered the children's book market as an already-mature cartoonist with plenty of imagination, which showed in the appeal his mixtures of text and pictures have for generations of readers. By the late 1960s, through various vectors, he had become a cultural icon in his own right; and in his broader, across-the-board appeal, J. M. DeMatteis chose to pay him a tribute in the pages of one of the weaker Marvel titles of the period.

The Basic Premise

This story occurred in the middle of a depressing couple of years in the pages of Defenders, from the death of the Squadron Sinister's Nighthawk (he came back, discussed here) to the ruination of the version of that character from the Squadron Supreme (discussed here). So, evidently, someone wisely saw that the book had become too depressing and heavy and thought that it needed to lighten up. This much we can give them with good faith.

The basic premise of this story, furthermore, borrows somewhat from the first appearance of the Squadron Supreme, way back in the dawn of the seventies. This story involved an error of teleportation which left several of the Avengers amid a snide, Agnew-era caricature of the Justice League (discussed here).

Therefore, we begin this story with the Defenders desiring to return to their own world from the depressing, sloppy wasteland of a planet occupied by the Squadron Supreme. A cockroach gets into the wiring of the Squadron's teleportation machine, and this leaves several of the Defenders stranded in a strange, cartoony place, attempting to find a way out in spite of a different internal logic that belongs to that setting.

Once in the new world - a children's-book setting - the four Defenders find themselves greeted by a cartoonish soul named "Greeneggs," who has a companion named "Andham." Greeneggs reveals to them their own role in local prophesies about a group of four individuals called "They" who predictions say will come to rescue them from the malevolent occupation of their land by some goofy cartoon cat in a bejeweled stovepipe crown.

Wandering across a landscape of logical paradoxes, fractured syntax, and silly rather than funny gags, the Defenders-in-attendance vow to redeem the citizens of Greeneggs' homeland (called "Here") from the domination by the evil powers from elsewhere ("There"). And, along the way, everything takes jabs at the posturing arrogance of Prince Namor, as if he couldn't easily roll up anything that annoyed him into a big ball, seal it with duct tape, and leave it on the curb for the city to haul away with the trash.

Having finally overcome the evil occupiers - mainly by creating a diversion while Greeneggs himself entered the villain's castle after the denizens of "There" neutralized the defenders with a long-winded thingus in boxer shorts - the residents of "Here" reward the Defenders by giving Namor a pair of stinky red sneakers with which he could, Wizard-of-Oz style, return home.

Weak Gags a-Plenty

A real Dr. Seuss gag usually had something funny about it - some interposition of contradictory elements, some insufferable weirdness, some clever wordplay, something; and fairness would require that he who dares to imitate such work should have something similar going.

However, many of the jokes here come off dishwater-dull. Most characters have hats, as did many Seuss characters. Seuss characters frequently had unusual outfits - for instance, grown-up variants of a kind of infant garment that tapered to a point instead of branching into two legs. The characters here sometimes have derivative but not clever outfits; in more cases, we encounter characters wearing big boxers, evidently a source of mirth in an era when the brief ruled and the boxer bore a stigma of the tastes of the 1950s.

I have no personal grudge against J. M. DeMatteis. Later works by this writer have, sometimes, borne the ravages of time with considerable dignity, even in the case of the often-maligned spin that he and Keith Giffen gave the Justice League. Nor do I belong among the Scowling and Mirthless Arbiters of Comics who find humor in a superhero piece an insufferable intrusion. No, my beef, in essence, amounts to this: Jokes should work or not appear at all. Where they attempt to honor an idiosyncratic style of humor, they should do this.

Derivative Schtick

Another way derivative pieces can fail involves a lack of clarity of definition. Where one wishes to imitate a particular kind of humorous children's literature, imitating another kind of work directed at children, then grafting jokes on it, will generally miss the mark. Thus, imposing on a loosely imitative pseudo-Seuss thingus speech patterns suggestive of a Mister Rogers impersonation performed by someone who never bothered to watch Fred Rogers' show to refine the act does not, in the end, do much for the reader.

I can't really say how the very dated "Can you say...?" gag made its way into this piece, unless DeMatteis or his editor had the notion that all content directed at children axiomatically contained the phrase. Intuition suggests to me that perhaps the ultimate origin lay in one of Johnny Carson's late night routines imitating Fred Rogers. The particular routine I remember included Carson, as Rogers, saying he got burned in the park. Then he held up a big phony bag of marijuana and said, "Can you say, 'too many seeds'?"

Grasping Attempts at Humor

Humor often fails when an audience can see someone trying too hard to make people laugh; the forced product tends to say more about the desperation of the performer or artist than to speak to observers.

Some formula elements play a recurring role in humor. We can include among some of the most potent tools for humor the attack on the inflated dignity of a character. W. C. Fields based an entire career as a comedian and actor on just the sort of humor that punctures pomposity through subversive assaults on phony self-importance. And, in this tale, most of what occurs seems directed at bringing low the haughtiness of Namor, the Sub-Mariner.

Read enough stuff, however, and you can realize that gags that seem to write themselves don't always have the impact one might hope. For instance, though in the right context a humor based on attacks upon dignity can work (the Thing has an entire lore based on this in a long chain going back to the Lee-Kirby Fantastic Four), pulling the rug out from under the Sub-Mariner or setting him up for a metaphorical pratfall just doesn't evoke the howls of uncontrollable laughter that J. M. DeMatteis may have hoped for here.

While I haven't written for comic books, it seems to me like other angles might work better for assaults on Namor's dignity. Forcing him into a pair of stinky red sneakers, in an attempt at ironic reinterpretation of the ruby slippers that delivered Dorothy from Oz, just doesn't do much for me, and probably did little more for other readers.

Where Did This All Come From?

In an earlier day, I and the few comics fans I knew tended to attribute weak delivery to self-congratulation or drug abuse, as if great stories practically wrote themselves and only failed to occur when some human weakness stood in the way. Some fans may still think like this, even ones who attempt, themselves, to write. However, time has made me more sympathetic to the writer, who must, month after month, appease editors; produce in a timely fashion; and somehow hold a reader's interest even after the material has ceased to enthrall him.

Writers who write about other things than comics themselves - meaning writers who have interests and experiences outside of the medium they make it their business to create - often build on a single idea. One Wolverine annual from recent years, for instance, featured a story built on the core notion of the difficulties a man might face attempting to cross town, find beer, and return in time not to miss the last of the card game.

A writer really earns his snuff if he knows how to take a very simple notion like the difficulty buying beer and creates a story from it, and I think, in this piece, we have some product of such a process, born, perhaps, from something like a Don Perlin doodle of a Seuss character on a cocktail napkin.

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Email the author at ouzomandias@mailexcite.com.

Column 246. Completed 01-APR-2001.