Flashback to 2008
Mark Juddery discovers the American museums dedicated to that country's inked cultural giants.
Writer Harlan Ellison once suggested that comic books are one of the five art forms (along with jazz, banjo music, Broadway-style musicals and detective stories) that are native to America. Other nations took comics in new directions, hence renowned museums such as the Belgian Centre of Comic Strip Art and Japan's Osamu Tezuka Manga Museum (part of a Disney-style theme park dedicated to Tezuka's work).
Meanwhile, the United States still provides most of the English-speaking world's favourite comics - and New York is the centre of comic-book publishing. America's top comic-book publishers, Marvel and DC, are based in the Big Apple, along with America's largest cluster of cartoonists.
The bulk of Marvel's superheroes, from Spider-Man to the X-Men, were fighting crime in Manhattan long before Rudy Giuliani took all the credit, while Metropolis (home of Superman) and Gotham City (Batman's stamping ground) are thinly disguised versions of the same city.
Even in Australia, art galleries have had successful exhibitions based on everything from early Australian comic books to the craft of Tezuka (whose work was exhibited last year at the Art Gallery of NSW). So you would think that New York, especially with its bounty of museums and art galleries, would have plenty to interest a comic-book lover.
Well, that depends. If you like superheroes, New York's TV and Movie Tours will happily take you on a tour that includes some familiar sights from the Spider-Man films. Serious connoisseurs, meanwhile, might prefer to visit the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art, New York's only dedicated comic book gallery.
Started six years ago in the corner of a Starbucks, it has since grown. But not much. It now occupies a nondescript third-floor apartment in the super-cool Soho district, and it takes only a few minutes to see all of the original art work that hangs neatly in the gallery. The $5 entry fee is called a "donation", which is a good thing. The mostly volunteer staff have an obvious love and enthusiasm for the topic. After enough donations, it can hopefully live up to its potential.
One must-see New York space for lovers of comics is the Overlook Lounge (formerly Costello's), a 44th Street bar known for a mural of original art. In 1976, the greats of the cartoon world gathered to fill one wall with colourful drawings of their characters in action. Marvel's Stan Lee, better known as a writer and editor, revealed his artistic flair with a large drawing of Spider-Man. Dik Browne's Hagar The Horrible, Paul Fung's Dagwood ("Dagwood is here because Blondie isn't," Fung scribbled under the drawing) and many others appear on the wall.
When the bar was under new management in 2004, there were fears that the yellowing, smoke-stained mural would be torn down.
Instead, it was expanded to cover three more walls, on which the latest generation of cartoonists added their characters. So did a few artists who had contributed back in 1976, including 84-year-old Mort Walker, creator of Beetle Bailey. "When he entered the bar," says proprietor Jeff Perzan, "it was like royalty. Everyone worshipped him." The last pictures were added last year, and Perzan says that that's the end. For starters, there's no more wall space.
Secondly, patrons have been adding their less artistic graffiti. "They don't realise it's a piece of New York history."
Walker also opened the National Cartoon Museum in 1974. For years, it was based in a renovated castle in Rye Brook, New York, until the collection - which has grown to encompass countless items, including the largest collection of comic books in the world - became too unwieldy. It is currently looking for a new home, though a large part - including 250,000 orginal cartoons - can be perused by buffs at the Ohio State University's Cartoon Research Library in Columubs. For now, perhaps, the best place for aficionados might be a little further from New York, along the harbour in Baltimore.
