I Was a Teenage Movie Maker: The Book by Don Glut. Foreword by Bill Warren. McFarland and Company, 2007. $29.95.
"The true amateur, even in consort with other amateurs, is always working alone, gauging his success according to his care for the work rather than according to the accomplishments or recognitions of others." --Stan Brakhage, "In Defense of Amateur."
There are limits to any kind of cultural criticism, including comics criticism. When I write a review, I celebrate the achievement of the art under scrutiny, or I talk about how the art falls short of my own inevitably subjective "standards." but what I can't discuss, unless I know the artist personally, is how meaningful the process of making art is to the artist him- or herself. I'm sure there are thousands of professional and amateur cartoonists who can't draw worth a damn (at least according to my "standards") but whose lives have been profoundly enhanced by their art. Instead of sitting in front of the TV chomping down Doritos, these folks make pictures, publish fanzines, build websites, make friends through the mail and at conventions, and in general refuse to passively drift through life waiting for Three's Company to entertain them. So why should they care if I don't like their work? Their art has inherent value to them; they'll continue to make their art regardless of what the critics say, and good for them.
Enter Don Glut.
Glut was born on an Army base in Pecos, Texas on February 19, 1944. His father, a member of the Army Air Corps, died in WWII action in a plane over Germany in 1945, and I wonder if Glut's lifelong love of fantasy--and powerful creatures like dinosaurs and superheroes--grew out of a desire to control and/or escape the hardships he and his mother experienced after his father's death. Around age 9, Glut fell in love with comic books (including Dick Briefer's Frankenstein and a Canadian horror anthology titled Strange Mysteries), got involved in fandom, ad scripted his first professional comics story, an adaptation of Washington Irving's "The Devil in the Marsh," for Creepy #29 (1969). Soon, Glut began writing for Western/Gold Key Publishing, first for their Mystery Comics Digest and then on new titles that he created. In a terrific interview with Jon Cooke in Comic Book Artist #22 (2002, a special Dell/Gold Key issue)--from where I cribbed a lot of the above biographical information--Glut describes the origin of his most famous character, Dr. Adam Spektor:
So I started writing Mystery Comics Digest, and in one I introduced a new host character, Doctor Spektor, who was influenced by such earlier features as "The Secret Files of Dr. Drew" and The Many Ghosts of Doctor Graves at Charlton. I did a number of those stories where Spektor just hosted the tale, and didn't really partake in the action. Then one day Del [Connell, Gold Key editor] called and said, "Hey, we really like this character. We'd like you to do a whole Doctor Spektor book." I said, "Oh, great!" So he let me go off to write the book. What I brought in was not what they had anticipated, what they wanted. Gold Key thought I was going to bring in three stories with Doctor Spektor just narrating, and I brought in a book-length story in which he was the lead character. They didn't know what to do. They felt a little guilty because I had written a whole 25-page story, and thought people would only respond to a character like that if he was introducing the tales. I said, "Look, why don't you just try it?" They hemmed and hawed, and finally put the book out, and it became an ongoing series from that point on. (105)
I remember buying The Occult Files of Dr. Spektor off spinner racks in the early 1970s. For a brief time, it was one of my favorite comics, mostly because the back-up stories were these nutty, pseudo-mythic tales about "Dark Gods" whose details I could rip off and import into the world I was creating as the Dungeon Master of my neighborhood Dungeons and Dragons game. (We should really sheath our vorpal blades here and observe a moment of silence for recently deceased D&D co-creator Gary Gygax.) Here's a page from the back-up in Dr. Spektor #10 (1974), "When Gods Collide":
"But not all of the extraterrestrial spores developed into the warrior gods." Right on! In the 1970s, virtually every sentence in a Marvel comic ended in an exclamation point ("Thank you for passing the salt, Aunt May!"), so it cracks me up that Glut finishes his sentence about "spores" and "warrior gods" with a humble period, as if the whole spores-to-gods evolution wasn't that big a deal. In my head, I hear Ben Stein intoning "but not all of the extraterrestrial spores developed into the warrior gods" in his flattest Ferris Bueller monotone.
By the late 1970s, Gold Key had drastically curtailed its production, channeling its efforts almost exclusively into those bagged "3 Comics" packs available at department stores rather than newsstands, but by then Dr. Spektor had been cancelled and Glut had moved on. After a brief time writing fill-in scripts at Marvel, he established himself as an author of mass-market books, and even had a best seller with his novelization of The Empire Strikes Back (1980).
Glut had always been a multi-tasker with multiple interests. Even while he was avidly reading comics, Glut was likewise smitten with movies, especially the old Universal horror films distributed to TV stations for the first time during the late 1950s. Glut wasn't alone in his love for Dracula, Frankenstein and the Wolfman--consider the popularity of the Aurora models of these monsters in the early '60s--but he took his obsession considerably further than most American kids. He subscribed to Famous Monsters of Filmland and Castle of Frankenstein and poured over every word in these magazines. He also created his own creature-feature make-up and had the cojones to wear his costumes out in public. Here, from Glut's I Was a Teenage Movie Maker website, is a photo of him getting ready for the "St. Benedict High School Mardi Gras dance":
The photos on Glut's movie website have to be seen to be believed, so go there right now. As much as I love his monster masks and make-up, my favorite is the costume he wore at the "L.A. Con Masquerade" in 1972:
I laughed for five minutes straight the first time I saw that photo, and I promise, here in "print," that I will buy Glut an expensive dinner in gratitude if I ever meet the man in person.
Most significantly, Glut was the central make-up man--and screenwriter, and director--of forty-one amateur movies shot between 1953 and 1969. These films typically starred him and his friends in either monster roles (The Revenge of Dracula [1958], Revenge of the Teenage Werewolf [1960]) or as superheroes purloined from comics or serials (Spy Smasher vs. the Purple Monster [1964], Spider-Man [1969]). For a long time, these films were almost impossible to see, but last year Cinema Epoch released all of them on a two-disc DVD, and, alas, they're not so good. Glut clearly loves B-movies, gorillas and superheroes, and that's the central problem; he emulates Superman serials and Dracula programmers without establishing a critical or ironic distance between his own films and the movies that inspired him, and consequently a Glut production is a low-fi, rough-hewn copy of stuff that was pretty raw in the first place. (It's tough to compete with Hollywood when you're an amateur, and maybe the best tack is to instead openly mock Hollywood production values standards, like the Kuchar Brothers do in such bodacious epics as I Was a Teenage Rumpot [1960] and A Town Called Tempest [1963].) Still, the DVD stands as a document of Glut's roving, hyperactive personality, and of a time when it was considerably easier to make actual movies (rather than videos or digital images) on an amateur level.
What I can unreservedly recommend, however, is Glut's I Was a Teenage Movie Maker: the Book, his written autobiography of his directorial career. A straight-forward and engaging writer, Glut also has a frighteningly comprehensive memory--he remembers the names of every single school chum who appeared in his films--and tells some charming, joyously self-deprecating stories about his triumphs and failures as a tin-can auteur. While attending the University of Southern California film school, for instance, Glut scripted Superman vs. the Gorilla Gang (1965), which called for scenes of Superman in flight. Encouraged by the techniques of low-budget SFX wizards Theodore and Howard Lydecker, Glut tried to make us believe a man could fly:
Ray [Craig, a fellow USC student] and I spent an entire day out in Malibu. Much of that time was spent stretching the fishing line from one hilltop to another. More time was eaten up attempting to keep those annoying little wheels from slipping off their respective lines. Finally, as the sun kept sinking lower towards the horizon, we tried launching our blue, red and yellow-outfitted dummy. The Lydeckers, I would later learn, made their dummies out of some rigid, lightweight material such as balsa wood that could maintain an heroic flight posture, legs held backwards and arms jutting forward. Our dummy, which was stuffed with cloth, was heavy, and unwieldy and constantly buckled up in an attitude hardly dignified for a famous flying superhero. By the time we were finally able to get our first shot of the thing, the fishing line had stretched out so far that the Superman dummy was barely more than an inch off the ground. Finally giving up, we decided to save the dummy for a shot where Superman dashes the Keene Duncan character off a hill and shoot the flying scenes later using a miniature figure. At least we tried. (163)
All this trying made Glut's life immeasurably richer. I had a blast reading I Was a Teenage Movie Maker: the Book because it gave me a glimmer of just how much fun it must've been to dress as a werewolf to the school dance, and build an exploding dinosaur in your basement. I was a lazy, boring kid, but Don Glut had the energy and vision to bring people together (including seminal comics fans like Larry Ivie and Ron Haydock) to make films and have good times. Glut was a poor fit at USC--he wanted to be Ford Beebe at a time when all the other students wanted to be Jean-Luc Godard--but he became (in)famous enough to inspire fellow student John Milius to write a script about him. (The result was a student film simply titled Glut (1967), starring the man himself; a Quicktime excerpt from Glut and some of the films Glut directed are here, if you scroll down the page.) There doesn't seem to be a division between Glut's life and his passions. He followed his muse always, and plunged into every new project without worrying that he wasn't good enough to be a writer or a filmmaker or a rock bassist (for the band Penny Arkade), and in the process he's lived a life we can all envy. I strongly recommend I Was a Teenage Movie Maker: the Book, and I'm considerably less enthusiastic about the movies themselves, but so what? Glut's life is his art and his art is his life. He's critic-proof.
One final page, then, from my dog-eared copy of Dagar the Invincible #1 (1972), written by Glut and drawn by Jesse Santos, a Filipino artist and frequent collaborator of Glut's at Gold Key:
Ccrreeeeeaaakkkkkkkk!!!! Swww-karunkkk!!! Right on! Critic-proof!
Sweet post, Craig, thanks! Ah, the unexpected byways of comics, and film, history.
I confess I never read Dagar or Dr. Spektor, but I have to say that those pages look good. Looks like Santos drew both. The GCD indicates that almost all of Santos' work in US comics was for Gold Key. He did a lot of mystery/horror comics work for them, e.g. Spine-Tingling Tales, Mystery Comics Digest, etc. And plenty of work with Glut, e.g., Tragg and the Sky Gods. I recall that this stuff was well-covered by Jon Cooke, Chris Irving, et al. in CBA #22.
Santos had a long career in Philippine comics. The Lambiek Comiclopedia has a helpful entry on Santos, which fills in some background about his career:
http://lambiek.net/artists/s/santos_jesse.htm
But even better is the information and gallery found at Gerry Alanguilan's online Philippine Comics Art Museum (which is a treasure trove):
http://museum.alanguilan.com/jessesantos.html
Great site. As a kid, I saw the work of Philippine comics artists like Alfredo Alcala, Nestor Redondo, Alex Nino, and Rudy Nebres, and of course I could see a family resemblance, style-wise, but I never realized they were all Filipino. Duh. The first Swamp Thing I ever saw was by Redondo, and can be seen at the Museum here:
http://museum.alanguilan.com/redondo5.html
It's almost TOO elegant, eh?
Your Glut/Santos examples remind me that handsome, fecund-looking artwork is often more than half the battle in comics. The scripts may lend themselves to easy ridicule, but, man, the images have such authority...
On another note, and here I'll pick nits, I'm not sure I agree with the implications of your epigraph, the quote from Brakhage. An amateur may be driven by "his care for the work" first and foremost, but aesthetic pleasure and pride of craft are still informed by shared standards, and so I'd be tempted to say that no one really works "alone," in that sense. No matter how idiosyncratic the artistic work, its participation in larger traditions is what renders it intelligible to us, no?
Ditto criticism: sure, criticism is inevitably subjective, but I don't think it's ever WHOLLY subjective. Not only is it communicated to others (as we do here), and thus part of a virtual conversation, but it's also informed by standards that, while certainly not objective, are not wholly personal either. Robert Scholes makes a point, in his book TEXTUAL POWER (1985), which I encountered as an MA student in 1989, that all criticism involves us in collective interests and entails a social and ideological position. This is a point I was unwilling to grant in 1989 (I thought, what does individual opinion have to do with groups?), but now I think Scholes is correct. In a sense, we are, or seek to be, part of a community through our critical work (TB not excepted). It's a question of social positioning as well as aesthetic judgment. And I'd venture to say the same about Glut's amateur film-making, insofar as it involved him, and continues to involve him, in a community of shared effort and appreciation.
What's exciting to me about criticism is when the balance between communal and individual is readjusted by a critic who, while being part of a community of taste, nonetheless manages to strike out on his/her own in such a way as to have an unanticipated effect on said community. When someone who is part of the conversation says something so unexpected or provocative that it causes a bit of a stir, and sends the conversation in a productive new direction, that's when criticism becomes most interesting to me. It could be said that the best critics in TCJ have done that, recalibrating our understanding of comics in the process.
So, I know that criticism is not objective, but this does not mean that it is entirely subjective either. This reminds me of a course on creativity that Michele once took, in which it was argued that human creative endeavor is only understandable in terms of convention and social context, not exclusively private terms. Otherwise, we have no way of recognizing it as "creative." Point taken, even for the most stubbornly individualistic of artistic (or critical!) endeavors.
Posted by: CharlesWHatfield | March 15, 2008 at 11:09 AM