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Superman / Madman Hullabaloo and "Reservoir Dogs"

Comics, often enough to note (as this feature sometimes observes) use referent material, either self-contained (within comics) or external to the medium. This serves a number of purposes. In the one case, writers could simply reuse an overworked formula in order to get out a monthly book. In another case, writers could attempt to recognize some other work they feel might deserve more attention. And, in another case, writers and artists might plant recognizable pieces from other works of whatever medium in a seemingly-unrelated comics piece, often for gag value.

A bit of reference can take a variety of scales. For instance, a poster on the wall in the background of a single panel can refer to something; or some character from popular culture can appear in a throng of onlookers, not to reappear elsewhere within the scene or within the story. Or, alternately, an entire story can represent some kind of tribute to a larger work, such as the story in Avengers that paid tribute to the movie "Fantastic Voyage" by featuring Ant-Man traveling into the Vision's body (discussed here). Either scope will work (though gag and homage require different levels of commitment), but somewhere between these scales writers and artists can run into trouble by inserting material on a scale too large for a simple gag and too small for a full homage.

Not all references in the comics work equally well. If a comics work itself thematically serves as an homage to another piece, it stands a better chance of enduring both independently and as a bit of metaculture. If a smaller scope applies, and the gag comes and goes and lets the story get on with its business, it will tend to work in a more limited way. But Mike Allred's transplantation of Steve Buscemi's character from "Reservoir Dogs" into Superman / Madman Hullabaloo began as an amusing gag and then changed (some might say lost) direction quickly, having come in larger than a scene but too small to mean much in the context of the story.

The Priest Proscription

Somewhere out on the web, perhaps in his own pages out there, Christopher Priest has provided to the wider world some of the standards documents based on his own editorial principles, including style guides for lettering and some varied instructions relative to various aspects of producing comics. In one set of principles, I recall reading an unambiguous injunction against artistic stunts like planting Fred Flintstone's head in the middle of a crowd scene; Priest derided such stunts as unprofessional and certain to incline him to fire anyone who attempted such a stunt.

In the wider world of comics, however, including material that falls outside Priest's Proscription, comics creators - and, evidently, readers - find some considerable amusement in sequences when comics pay homages to the wider world. Much of the amusing cultural self-reference can occur in backgrounds, in understated elements of layout, and in things concealed (or blatantly planted) within crowd scenes. The classic humor behind EC's Tales Calculated to Drive You Mad (and lesser works like Panic) often relied heavily on such mechanisms. And, to my eye, this reflects less unprofessionalism than a sense of humor and a refusal to take the comics form itself so accursedly seriously that no room exists for a planted gag here and there. Especially where the medium labors under the burdens of a superheroic monoculture whose key elements include hypermuscular men in skin-tight leotards beating each other up for the readers' amusement - does a Fred Flintstone head in the middle of a crowd really undermine the dignity inherent in such a piece?

While I generally take a pro-Priest stance, I would argue on this point that he, the seasoned, mature, intelligent, and esteemed comics professional has missed the point of comics. Comics do (or, at least, once did) serve as entertainment delivery systems which do not (or, at least, once did not) require too much of the reader. The quick gag can serve to hold the attention of the less-intense reader without necessarily compromising the quality of the work; note, for instance, the cameos of the Cosby kids from the Fat Albert cartoon and even the Village People in certain sequences of Kingdom Come.

Nonetheless, we can occasionally see his point. For instance, what Allred probably intended as no more than a sight gag in Superman/Madman Hullabaloo took on a cancerous life of its own as a character pulled out of a Tarantino movie became a central player in the crossover piece - and, furthermore, in a way that, panel by panel, had less and less to do with the source material.

Tarantino's Piece

When "Reservoir Dogs" hit movie screens around America, it certainly seemed like a big deal. I saw it myself at a university movie theater on the campus of the University of North Texas, invited there by a friend from India who understood the piece to represent some kind of significant achievement in cinema. He found himself (logically enough) thoroughly disgusted with the violence of the work, and, furthermore, concerned at the unusually high presence of policemen on the university campus near the theater as we left the theater. I recall a cluster of cops giving us bad looks, as if, perhaps, they expected us to mutilate one of their black-shirted brethren with a straight razor after seeing the grotesque sequence of cop-torture and cop-murder in the movie.

To think about the piece later, I would postulate as the most significant feature of that movie its altogether blunt presentation of violence, generally devoid of euphemism, nor a particular heroism or villainy attached to it - violence, instead, remained an ever-present undercurrent in the lives of men who (with certain exceptions) would have preferred to go about their business of robbing people blind without having to resort to it. Violence seemed more inevitable than admirable or despicable here, except in the one case of a sadistic goon who enjoyed it for its own sake, and therefore crossed some unstated line of principle about armed robbery.

Allred's Piece

The fundamental dissimilarity of concept may provide the essential awkwardness of the transplanted content that leapt from the screen into Allred's superhero comics piece. For, although Superman / Madman Hullabaloo had an entertaining premise, sharp and stylish delivery, and the necessary minimum of silliness necessary to ward off the demonic forces of self-importance, it simply didn't fit well with the lurid, graphic, and cynical flow of Tarantino's movie.

That disclaimer presented above as an a priori assumption (I leave it to others to prove or disprove aesthetic claims; the rest of us can make do by accepting or rejecting them with or without involved processing) out of the way, we can proceed with a description of the essential concept behind this crossover event.

Whereas many crossover events bury themselves in a grossly inflated scale that forces a simple meeting between the superheroes of multiple publishers into an event that may destroy, save, or remake the universe, Superman / Madman Hullabaloo recognized that certain things should happen in such a piece and others should not. The heroes should meet; perhaps they should dabble in some kind of role reversal; they should move about in each other's milieux and also interact with the supporting cast that belongs to the opposite number. Superman v. Spider-Man works well because it built on such a formula, and therefore holds up fairly well in spite of the absence of a universe-shaking situation to overcome.

In this piece, a cosmic accident partially blends Superman and Madman, leaving Madman's consciousness in a blended body in Superman's home city of Metropolis, and likewise Superman stranded in a mixed form among the mutants and beatnik gangs of Madman's stomping grounds. Each hero copes with the misunderstanding of others, who make errors of identification (more likely in Madman's case, since he ended up in Metropolis with Superman's face and a modified version of a costume still recognizable as some form of Superman's).

Through contacts to the convenient scientists of their various cities, they identify the nature of the accident which partially transposed the two heroes as Superman flew around in space and Madman tested an experimental space ship in the vicinity of some kind of spatial anomaly existing in both their universes. However, even once united, the two realize a greater problem: Superman's powers divided not only between himself and Madman, but also among a handful of suddenly-powerful bystanders who happened to receive doses of the Kryptonian's power.

Thus, in the last portion, Superman and Madman round up various of these temporarily-fortunate individuals, including one who wears the black suit, skinny tie, and goiterish look of Steve Buscemi from "Reservoir Dogs." True to form, this character runs out in the street with a pistol and a bag of stolen jewels, whereupon a car hits him, and, thanks to a bit of a boost from Superman's power, the car does him little harm.

Ultimately, the heroes clean up the various goons floating around, recover the pieces of Superman's powers, and restore their forms to the ones that they know, a rather fortunate turn of affairs since Superman's fused body showed the various stigmata of Madman's reconstruction from various cadavers, including black, sunken eyes and a plate in his head (which either covers some previous injury or, perhaps, offered a convenient method of creating an opening through which to insert a brain into a borrowed skull).

This much understood, we can note the general absence of Tarantino's themes; nor does the overall work seem to contain a large set of cinematic references that would justify something like borrowing a character from a movie for more than a single-panel throwaway gag.

A Gag out of Control?

We can recognize as amusing the sequence pilfered from "Reservoir Dogs" where Steve Buscemi's character runs in front of, and therefore collides with, a moving automobile. We can snicker at the black suit with the skinny tie, the physical likeness, and those details. Within a page, however, the gag has worn off - either more cultural-referent gags must come forth, or suddenly the likeness to Tarantino's goon who didn't leave tips but mouthed endlessly about professionalism vanishes.

Not that this import completely undermines Superman / Madman Hullabaloo; the character doesn't really interfere with the flow of the story, after all, nor undo the premise, nor prevent a clean resolution of the various events between the switch of bodies and the last rounding-up of the citizens who have absorbed their separate pieces of Kryptonian power. However, once one sees the original gag - in the one or two panels involving the car collision - it becomes something of an unwelcome presence that, having served its purpose, should, as honor requires, depart.

So, perhaps, we see a bit of what Priest intended by his proscription. While we can cautiously reserve taking a position quite as decisive and final as his - for instance, the vow to fire someone for a stunt like the embedded Fred Flintstone head seems a bit more than the situation actually requires - we can nonetheless see in imperfectly-planned references to other material a potential source of a loss of focus of a story that would otherwise cohere and flow with the best of them.

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Email the author at ouzomandias@mailexcite.com.

Column 267. Completed 26-JUL-2001.