Arthur Miller died a few weeks ago and a bunch of people said he was married to Marilyn Monroe and I didn't care. And they said he was America's foremost man of letters, and I said "No, you just thought that because he was married to Norma Jean, just like those idiots who say Joe DiMaggio was the greatest baseball player of all time." And then they said he was the greatest American playwright, and I thought "No, Neil Simon." (I used to be a theater critic which tends to give me a butts-in-the-seats approach to quality. Though my mom assures me it's Thornton Wilder, and a drama professor friend of mine assures me it's Edward Albee, and a friend of mine who is a patent lawyer tells me it is Eugene Ianesco, but I've seen "Rhinoceros," and he is on crack.) And then they said "The Death of a Salesman" was the greatest play ever written, and I started to think about comics.
I hate "The Death of a Salesman." In English 4X I was forced to read it for the first time, and I hated it more than Byrne's Man of Steel. (I went to high school after the AP tests were implemented, but before there were AP Courses. I ponied up the fifty clams and never saw an English course again anyway.) I made fun of the play in a short story called "The Death of the Snail Men" which I claimed was Arthur Miller's attempt to write a Hollywood sci-fi serial, and he later cannibalized the title. I've since seen it in person a couple times. I hated it both times but I had been indoctrinated enough to figure it was me. Nuh uh. It's that miserable, depressing excuse for a play.
The last time I saw it was third year of law school. My buddy Jake (pronounced Jackie) was a fellow law school student. We would occasionally do stuff together. She had been a cheerleader at Minnesota, so I can only assume her dance card was pretty full when not hanging out with me (I'm extremely ugly, and she's quite short so we weren't destined an item, so to speak), but she came with we to review a couple restaurants and a micro-brewery, and we'd see some shows together. Mostly musicals. One time we went to see this theatrical monstrosity. It was a *brilliant* performance. The IU drama department is one of the top programs in the country, and they were in top form that night. By the thirty-minute mark, I wanted to go on stage and strangle Loman myself. Jake claimed I just don't appreciate fine drama. I claimed they should give out Prozac at the door. I'm not claiming fine drama can't be depressing. I am saying that being too depressing is a mark against a work in a way being too funny is not. (Compare "Mr. Roberts" which at least tempers the ending a little.)
So I made a mental note never to see the Salesman play again, even with beautiful former cheerleaders as company, and occasionally I would cogitate on the how drama interact6ed with other forms of entertainment, and whether stage drama has a particular effect on the rest of the cultural milieu. In the twenties the greatest American playwright was, I dunno, Eugene O'Neill probably and then Thornton Wilder into the thirties, George Kaufmann too but I don't think he did much to influence comics later. In the thirties we have Moss Hart. In the forties we start in on some real heavyweights like Tennessee Williams (who lacked a champion amongst my friends, but also competes with Miller if you ask me), Rogers and Hammerstein, and Artie. In the fifties we have Miller, but toward the end of the decade we also have Edward Albee, Steven Sondheim and Neil Simon.
Now, Thornton Wilder, Moss hart and George Kaufmann wrote such plays as "You Can't Take It with You" and Our Town." These plays were made into movies. These were sort of people friendly stories. My mother, for instance, finds comfort in the notion of a life after as imagined in "Our Town." These plays were actually quite socially relevant in their own way, but on the surface they seemed rather innocuous. (The original S/S Superman is also pretty socially relevant, but quickly succumbed to pabulum.) Now, this dramatic mindset came about just as mass media was coming into its own in the form of radio and movies and television, and it reset America's cultural mindset at Capra level -- good times. (The Dark Capra somehow seemed to escape everyone, but c'est la vie.)
Comics got set there too. But then something odd happened. Drama changed. O'Neill wrote "The Iceman Cometh" (Now, *there* is the great American play.) Tennessee Williams came in. And Arthur Miller as well. Plays became grim and gritty, if you will. This took a while to filter down to comics, but comics got grim and gritty a couple decades later. The odd thing is the theater of the absurd and light comedy came into vogue with Albee and Simon, and they seemed to have and immediate impact on comics. How else to explain Batman in the Silver Age? And Flash, fer Pete's sake.
Oh course, the other companies like Marvel and Charlton seemed to take other tacks. Charlton's tack seemed to be printing whatever they could on a machine built for cereal boxes. I�ve read a lot of Charlton comics from E-man to Blue beetle to Ibis to Beetle Bailey. I�m not altogether certain they ever had an editorial policy.
Marvel took on a gritty realism to an extent. Angsty comics which fit in more with Tennessee Williams than Thornton Wilder, though "The Skin of Our Teeth" appears to have a direct descendant in the Roy Thomas X-Men. Now, it is slightly harder find the connection to DC in the 1980's with "death of a Salesman," I suppose, except that comics seemed to equate "dark" with "quality." I don't know that death is responsible for that directly, but I submit that Miller did a number on American culture in general and that this filtered down to comics in the 1980's.
Following that train of thought, I predict we are in for some Neil Simon type light comedy soon. I see Superman as Oscar and Batman as Felix. I also see Brainiac 5 as the owl and Dream Girl as the pussycat. And Nightwing and Starfire would fit nicely into "Barefoot in the Park." You could do "Chapter Two" with Batman and Robin.
Nah. I just mean that we'd have comics that are light hearted and quality, instead of grim and quality. The Giffen stuff is absurdist. Archie is stuck in Capra mode. The indies are all over the place, but there�s no sophisticated adult middle class comedies like Neil Simon did.
Posted by Mike Chary at March 10, 2005 7:06 PM