Potrzebie
Monday, March 22, 2010
The Gorbals Vampire
On September 23, 1954, strange things were happening in Glasgow as hundreds of children raced through a local cemetery, the Southern Necropolis, with stakes, sticks, stones and knives seeking to vanquish a vampire with iron teeth.
Hy Fleishman's "The Vampire with the Iron Teeth" appeared in Dark Mysteries #15 (December 1953). To read Fleishman's full story, go to The Horrors of It All. Also see Monsters with Iron Teeth (Sheffield Academic Press, 1988) by Gillian Bennett and Paul Smith. Numerous books on urban legends mention the Gorbals Vampire of 1954 and the 1879 poem "Jenny wi' Airn Teeth".
On Tuesday, March 30, BBC Radio 4 will broadcast a documentary on the connection between the Gorbals Vampire and EC and other horror comics, exploring how this incident triggered censorship of comic books in the UK. The Gorbals Vampire event was previously described in Martin Barker's A Haunt of Fears: The Strange History of the British Horror Comics Campaign, published by London's Pluto Press in 1983. This book is still available from the University Press of Mississippi which reprinted it in 1992. To read what Barker wrote about the Gorbals Vampire, go here.
Here's a link to the BBC News story and a 1989 Scottish Herald article. Thanks to Trevor M., Pappy and Karswell for the tips. (See comments.) For a memorable film set in the towering Glasgow projects, see Andrea Arnold's Red Road (2007).
And here's the BBC press release:
The Gorbals Vampire
Tuesday 30 March 11:00-11:30pm BBC Radio 4
Novelist Louise Welsh investigates how a comic-book vampire brought horror to Glasgow's south side and its impact on Britain's censorship laws. Glasgow's Southern Necropolis is an eerie place at the best of times but when two local policemen answered a call in September 1954 they encountered a bizarre sight. Hundreds of local children, ranging in ages from four to 14, were crammed inside, roaming between the crypts, armed with sharpened sticks, knives stolen from home and stakes. They said they were hunting down "a vampire with iron teeth" that had kidnapped and eaten two local boys. The policemen dispersed the crowd, but they came back at sundown the next night and the next. The local press got hold of the story and it soon went national. There were no missing boys in Glasgow at that time, and press and politicians cast around for an explanation. They soon found one in the wave of American horror comics with names like Astounding Stories and Tales From The Crypt, which had recently flooded into the West of Scotland.
Academics pointed out that none of the comics featured a vampire with iron teeth, though there was a monster with iron teeth in the Bible (Daniel 7.7) and in a poem taught in local schools. Their voices were drowned out in a full-blown moral panic about the effect that terrifying comics were having on children. Soon the case of the Gorbals Vampire was international news. The British Press raged against the "terrifying, corrupt" comics and, after a heated debate in the House of Commons where the case of Gorbals Vampire was cited, Britain passed the Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act 1955 which, for the first time, specifically banned the sale of magazines and comics portraying "incidents of a repulsive or horrible nature" to minors. This programme explores how the Gorbals Vampire helped bring the censorship of comic books onto the statute books.
Presenter/Louise Welsh, Producer/David Stenhouse
BBC Radio 4 Publicity
Jenny wi' the Airn Teeth
WHAT a plague is this o' mine,
Winna steek his e'e,
Though I hap him ow'r the head
As cosie as can be.
Sleep! an' let me to my wark,
A' thae claes to airn;
Jenny wi' the airn teeth,
Come an' tak' the bairn:
Tak' him to your ain den,
Where the bowgie bides,
But first put baith your big teeth
In his wee plump sides;
Gie your auld grey pow a shake,
Rive him frae my grup—
Tak' him where nae kiss is gaun
When he waukens up.
Jenny wi' the airn teeth,
The bairn has aff his claes,
Sleepin' safe an' soun', I think—
Dinna touch his taes;
Sleepin' weans are no for you;
Ye may turn about
An' tak' awa' wee Tam next door—
I hear him screichin' oot.
Dump, dump, awa' she gangs
Back the road she cam';
I hear her at the ither door,
Speirin' after Tam.
He's a crabbit, greetin' thing,
The warst in a' the toon;
Little like my ain wee wean—
Losh, he's sleepin' soun'.
Mithers hae an awfu' wark
Wi' their bairns at nicht—
Chappin' on the chair wi' tangs
To gi'e the rogues a fricht.
Aulder weans are fley'd wi' less,
Weel aneuch we ken—
Bigger bowgies, bigger Jennies,
Frichten muckle men.
-Alexander Anderson, 1879
Hy Fleishman's "The Vampire with the Iron Teeth" appeared in Dark Mysteries #15 (December 1953). To read Fleishman's full story, go to The Horrors of It All. Also see Monsters with Iron Teeth (Sheffield Academic Press, 1988) by Gillian Bennett and Paul Smith. Numerous books on urban legends mention the Gorbals Vampire of 1954 and the 1879 poem "Jenny wi' Airn Teeth".
On Tuesday, March 30, BBC Radio 4 will broadcast a documentary on the connection between the Gorbals Vampire and EC and other horror comics, exploring how this incident triggered censorship of comic books in the UK. The Gorbals Vampire event was previously described in Martin Barker's A Haunt of Fears: The Strange History of the British Horror Comics Campaign, published by London's Pluto Press in 1983. This book is still available from the University Press of Mississippi which reprinted it in 1992. To read what Barker wrote about the Gorbals Vampire, go here.
Here's a link to the BBC News story and a 1989 Scottish Herald article. Thanks to Trevor M., Pappy and Karswell for the tips. (See comments.) For a memorable film set in the towering Glasgow projects, see Andrea Arnold's Red Road (2007).
And here's the BBC press release:
The Gorbals Vampire
Tuesday 30 March 11:00-11:30pm BBC Radio 4
Novelist Louise Welsh investigates how a comic-book vampire brought horror to Glasgow's south side and its impact on Britain's censorship laws. Glasgow's Southern Necropolis is an eerie place at the best of times but when two local policemen answered a call in September 1954 they encountered a bizarre sight. Hundreds of local children, ranging in ages from four to 14, were crammed inside, roaming between the crypts, armed with sharpened sticks, knives stolen from home and stakes. They said they were hunting down "a vampire with iron teeth" that had kidnapped and eaten two local boys. The policemen dispersed the crowd, but they came back at sundown the next night and the next. The local press got hold of the story and it soon went national. There were no missing boys in Glasgow at that time, and press and politicians cast around for an explanation. They soon found one in the wave of American horror comics with names like Astounding Stories and Tales From The Crypt, which had recently flooded into the West of Scotland.
Presenter/Louise Welsh, Producer/David Stenhouse
BBC Radio 4 Publicity
Jenny wi' the Airn Teeth
WHAT a plague is this o' mine,
Winna steek his e'e,
Though I hap him ow'r the head
As cosie as can be.
Sleep! an' let me to my wark,
A' thae claes to airn;
Jenny wi' the airn teeth,
Come an' tak' the bairn:
Tak' him to your ain den,
Where the bowgie bides,
But first put baith your big teeth
In his wee plump sides;
Gie your auld grey pow a shake,
Rive him frae my grup—
Tak' him where nae kiss is gaun
When he waukens up.
Two views of the gatehouse in the
much-vandalized Southern Necropolis
much-vandalized Southern Necropolis
Whatna noise is that I hear
Comin' doon the street?
Weel I ken the dump-dump
O' her beetle feet.
Mercy me, she's at the door,
Hear her lift the sneck;
Whisht! an' cuddle mammy noo
Closer roun' the neck.
Jenny wi' the airn teeth,
The bairn has aff his claes,
Sleepin' safe an' soun', I think—
Dinna touch his taes;
Sleepin' weans are no for you;
Ye may turn about
An' tak' awa' wee Tam next door—
I hear him screichin' oot.
Dump, dump, awa' she gangs
Back the road she cam';
I hear her at the ither door,
Speirin' after Tam.
He's a crabbit, greetin' thing,
The warst in a' the toon;
Little like my ain wee wean—
Losh, he's sleepin' soun'.
Mithers hae an awfu' wark
Wi' their bairns at nicht—
Chappin' on the chair wi' tangs
To gi'e the rogues a fricht.
Aulder weans are fley'd wi' less,
Weel aneuch we ken—
Bigger bowgies, bigger Jennies,
Frichten muckle men.
-Alexander Anderson, 1879
Labels: barker, censorship, crypt, ec, glasgow, gorbals, hajdu, jack davis, vampire, wertham
¶ 6:42 PM 5 comments
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Wood Chips 14: A visual book review of Jules Feiffer's Backing into Forward
Reviewing this book for Publishers Weekly, I wrote:
As a kid (he was born in 1929), drawing comic strip characters on the sidewalk was a way to avoid Bronx bullies: “I was never not afraid.” Serving an apprenticeship with cartoonist Will Eisner, he felt he was a fraud (“My line was soft where it should be hard, my figures amoebic when they should be overpowering”), so he instead graduated to ghostwriting Eisner's The Spirit. His account of hitchhiking cross-country invades Kerouac territory, while his ink-stained memories of the comics industry rival Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize–winning fictional portrait. Two years in the military gave Feiffer fodder for the trenchant Munro (about a child who is drafted). Such satirical social and political commentary became the turning point in his lust for fame, which finally happened, after many rejections, when acclaim for his anxiety-ridden Village Voice strips served as a springboard into other projects. Writing with wit, angst, honesty, and self-insights, Feiffer shares a vast and complex interior emotional landscape. Intimate and entertaining, his autobiography is a revelatory evocation of fear, ambition, dread, failure, rage, and, eventually, success.
Wood on Feiffer: Jules Feiffer's Outer Space Spirit script and rough as drawn and inked by Wally Wood.
Feiffer 's friend, Ed McLean, who became a legend in direct marketing copywriting, died August 13, 2005. In 1947, Feiffer asked for a raise, and Eisner instead gave him his own page in the Spirit section. Feiffer used it to create his first professional comic strip, Clifford. Feiffer probes his innermost thoughts, anxieties and memories in this compelling autobiography, and he devotes five pages to his struggle with Clifford, recalling, "It turned out to be more natural for me to write an episode of The Spirit than to write and draw my own comic strip... Now, even though I had preceded both Schulz and Watterson with my kids' strip, I was still too young and callow (and cautious) to make my point or make my mark... Without Eisner's guidelines, I was on my own, and not up to it."
Below is a Wood story from the period Feiffer described. "Man from the Grave!" in The Haunt of Fear 4 (November-December 1950) was one of five horror tales Wood did for The Haunt of Fear. Wood did a total of nine horror stories and several horror covers for EC during 1950-51.
Feiffer at the Strand Bookstore (May 15, 2008)
In the early 1950s, after rejections of his books by numerous publishers (as he describes in Backing into Forward and the Strand Bookstore clip), Feiffer finally scored when his Sick, Sick, Sick comic strip began in the October 24, 1956 issue of the Village Voice. To launch his Voice strip, he wrote about his own stomach spasms and drew it with a UPA style, as he explained: "The drawing style, I decided, should be direct, cartoony, animated, akin to what I so admired coming out of the UPA studios, Gerald McBoing-Boing and The Nearsighted Mr. Magoo. The more painful the subject, the funnier it should look. So my chronic stomachaches took center stage for my first Village Voice cartoon in October 1956, turning a psychosomatic problem into a metaphor. For what? Who cared? It just seemed funny."
Jules Feiffer
Reviewing this book for Publishers Weekly, I wrote:
As a kid (he was born in 1929), drawing comic strip characters on the sidewalk was a way to avoid Bronx bullies: “I was never not afraid.” Serving an apprenticeship with cartoonist Will Eisner, he felt he was a fraud (“My line was soft where it should be hard, my figures amoebic when they should be overpowering”), so he instead graduated to ghostwriting Eisner's The Spirit. His account of hitchhiking cross-country invades Kerouac territory, while his ink-stained memories of the comics industry rival Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize–winning fictional portrait. Two years in the military gave Feiffer fodder for the trenchant Munro (about a child who is drafted). Such satirical social and political commentary became the turning point in his lust for fame, which finally happened, after many rejections, when acclaim for his anxiety-ridden Village Voice strips served as a springboard into other projects. Writing with wit, angst, honesty, and self-insights, Feiffer shares a vast and complex interior emotional landscape. Intimate and entertaining, his autobiography is a revelatory evocation of fear, ambition, dread, failure, rage, and, eventually, success.
Wood on Feiffer: Jules Feiffer's Outer Space Spirit script and rough as drawn and inked by Wally Wood.In Jules Feiffer's memoir, Backing into Forward (due in March from Doubleday), he describes the Wood studio of the early 1950s (located where Lincoln Center is today). Feiffer was 17 when he began at Will Eisner's studio. Working alongside letterer Abe Kanegson, he graduated from ruling lines and erasing to coloring, and he was 19 when he started scripting The Spirit for Eisner. After meeting Wood at Eisner's shop, he began visiting the Wood studio where he became friends with Ed McLean, as he recalled:
Excerpt ©2010 by Jules Feiffer
Wally Wood, maybe a year older than I, was brought back to our office by Will, who was impressed by his samples (no threat to me, he drew backgrounds). Woody was from the Midwest. Enviably handsome, he had a squinting, tousled, mischievous charm. His squint let you know that he knew a lot more than he was saying, which was good, because he was at a loss for conversation. He seemed to be wary of speech, his prolonged silences made him formidable. While Abe and I wisecracked like smart-ass New York Jews, Woody, in no way Jewish, made sly elliptical comments that were possibly profound had we only understood what he was saying.
He shared studio space in a rundown walk-up in a Puerto Rican neighborhood in the Sixties on the Upper West Side (now Lincoln Center) with two other cartoonists and a couple of writers for comic books, already in training, with the help of beer, Chianti, and cheap rye, to make it to the top as the next generation of comic strip roustabouts. In the mid- and late forties, the first step to success for ambitious young men in the low arts was to make a mark in comic books as illustrator or writer and break into syndication with your own daily strip before you were 30.
Cartoonists like Woody saw this as the end of the road, although some others who had the facility dreamed of moving further upscale to magazine illustration. That market was still flourishing, with the Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Esquire, Cosmopolitan, Liberty. A writer’s ambition, beyond comics, leaned toward breaking into the sci fi market… Woody introduced me to his studio mate, a lettering man named Ed McLean, who within minutes let me know that comics were not his end game, that his plan was to write the Great American Novel… Ed intended to impress me, and he did immediately. We met on my first visit to Woody’s studio, a long room that deepened and darkened as your eyes failed to get used to it. Artists and writers sat like galley slaves at desks and drawing tables jammed close enough together to constitute a single piece of furniture, an intimidating world of cluttered comic pages and pounding typewriters, dingy and roach-rich. The no-frills ferocity of the place was intoxicating.
©Jules Feiffer
Below is a Wood story from the period Feiffer described. "Man from the Grave!" in The Haunt of Fear 4 (November-December 1950) was one of five horror tales Wood did for The Haunt of Fear. Wood did a total of nine horror stories and several horror covers for EC during 1950-51.©WMG
Feiffer at the Strand Bookstore (May 15, 2008)
In the early 1950s, after rejections of his books by numerous publishers (as he describes in Backing into Forward and the Strand Bookstore clip), Feiffer finally scored when his Sick, Sick, Sick comic strip began in the October 24, 1956 issue of the Village Voice. To launch his Voice strip, he wrote about his own stomach spasms and drew it with a UPA style, as he explained: "The drawing style, I decided, should be direct, cartoony, animated, akin to what I so admired coming out of the UPA studios, Gerald McBoing-Boing and The Nearsighted Mr. Magoo. The more painful the subject, the funnier it should look. So my chronic stomachaches took center stage for my first Village Voice cartoon in October 1956, turning a psychosomatic problem into a metaphor. For what? Who cared? It just seemed funny."
©Jules Feiffer
Labels: andelman, clifford, crypt, eisner, feiffer, haunt, mclean, pw, wood, wood chips
¶ 5:41 PM 3 comments
Sunday, December 21, 2008
EC Comics: From Here to Nudity #2
The story "A Rottin' Trick!", illustrated by Joe Orlando, was published in EC's Tales from the Crypt 29 (April-May 1952). When the story was reprinted in hardcover in 1979, the larger page size and b/w reproduction on quality paper revealed the artwork in greater detail than was evident in the original comic books on newsprint.
Some noticed unusual human figures cavorting in the fabric design on the drapery in the background of page three. Covered by murky. dark purple ink in the original comic book, these drawings went unseen by both editors and readers in 1952. Given the censorship climate of the 1950s, the discovery then of this single panel could have been devastating for EC publisher Bill Gaines.
Eventually, during the 1980s, someone brought the page to the attention of Gaines, who sent a photocopy to Orlando and demanded an explanation. Orlando responded by writing a letter to Gaines about the artwork on February 29, 1988. The closing sentence about "your brother Rex" is a joke, a reference to a funny hoax Gaines pulled in the 1950s, when he had the Mad office boy convinced that he had an identical twin brother, the evil Rex Gaines, who sometimes visited the Mad office.
This was not the only time a prank was slipped into an EC story. In Frontline Combat 4, the story "Bomb Run," illustrated by John Severin and Bill Elder, has an unusual last panel. It shows a copy of Homer's Odyssey, but the drama of the story is diminished because words from the familiar Ajax Cleanser singing commercial were lettered onto the page of the open book by prankster Elder: "Ajax the foaming cleanser Buh Buh Buh Buh Buh Soaps the dirt right down the drain". Perhaps he assumed that the lettering would reduce and become illegible or that it would be deleted before publication. (The full lyrics went something like this: "Use Ajax (boom boom), the foaming cleanser... (boom bub boom buh boom boom boom) soaps the dirt right down the drain... you'll stop paying the elbow tax when you start cleaning with Ajax! So remember... use Ajax, the foaming cleanser, soaps the dirt right down the drain. bub-bub-bub-bub-bub-bub-boom!") In this case, after EC received a stack of letters from puzzled readers, they apologized in Frontline Combat 6 for their "clumsy oversight".
For the earlier installment on this subject, describing some of the EC art pranks which did not get published, click here.
.
The story "A Rottin' Trick!", illustrated by Joe Orlando, was published in EC's Tales from the Crypt 29 (April-May 1952). When the story was reprinted in hardcover in 1979, the larger page size and b/w reproduction on quality paper revealed the artwork in greater detail than was evident in the original comic books on newsprint.
©2008 WMG
Some noticed unusual human figures cavorting in the fabric design on the drapery in the background of page three. Covered by murky. dark purple ink in the original comic book, these drawings went unseen by both editors and readers in 1952. Given the censorship climate of the 1950s, the discovery then of this single panel could have been devastating for EC publisher Bill Gaines.
Eventually, during the 1980s, someone brought the page to the attention of Gaines, who sent a photocopy to Orlando and demanded an explanation. Orlando responded by writing a letter to Gaines about the artwork on February 29, 1988. The closing sentence about "your brother Rex" is a joke, a reference to a funny hoax Gaines pulled in the 1950s, when he had the Mad office boy convinced that he had an identical twin brother, the evil Rex Gaines, who sometimes visited the Mad office.
This was not the only time a prank was slipped into an EC story. In Frontline Combat 4, the story "Bomb Run," illustrated by John Severin and Bill Elder, has an unusual last panel. It shows a copy of Homer's Odyssey, but the drama of the story is diminished because words from the familiar Ajax Cleanser singing commercial were lettered onto the page of the open book by prankster Elder: "Ajax the foaming cleanser Buh Buh Buh Buh Buh Soaps the dirt right down the drain". Perhaps he assumed that the lettering would reduce and become illegible or that it would be deleted before publication. (The full lyrics went something like this: "Use Ajax (boom boom), the foaming cleanser... (boom bub boom buh boom boom boom) soaps the dirt right down the drain... you'll stop paying the elbow tax when you start cleaning with Ajax! So remember... use Ajax, the foaming cleanser, soaps the dirt right down the drain. bub-bub-bub-bub-bub-bub-boom!") In this case, after EC received a stack of letters from puzzled readers, they apologized in Frontline Combat 6 for their "clumsy oversight".
For the earlier installment on this subject, describing some of the EC art pranks which did not get published, click here.
Labels: ajax, crypt, dc comics, ec, elder, frontline combat, gaines, joe orlando, nudity, prank, severin
¶ 6:15 PM 2 comments
Saturday, November 15, 2008
John Semper's The Crypt of Creeporia (episode four)
©2008 John Semper
Kommerina DeYoung is a talented actress who brings a razor-sharp sense of comedy timing to her role as Creeporia in John Semper's The Crypt of Creeporia. In his entertaining online series, Semper combines live-action, puppetry and digital animation for a spooky spoof. To see the earlier episodes, go here.
Best known as the producer and story editor of the animated Spider-Man series, Semper did the English-language dialogue for Miyazaki's Laputa and Kiki's Delivery Service, and his writing for the Static Shock series brought him a 2004 Emmy nomination. His live-action credits include co-scripting the Kid 'n' Play comedy movie Class Act. His Walter Lantz documentary, Walter, Woody and the World of Animation (1982) recently resurfaced on disc one of The Woody Woodpecker and Friends: Classic Cartoon Collection (2007) DVD.
I asked him for some background on the creation of Creeporia, and he responded:
Kommerina DeYoung is a talented actress who brings a razor-sharp sense of comedy timing to her role as Creeporia in John Semper's The Crypt of Creeporia. In his entertaining online series, Semper combines live-action, puppetry and digital animation for a spooky spoof. To see the earlier episodes, go here.
Best known as the producer and story editor of the animated Spider-Man series, Semper did the English-language dialogue for Miyazaki's Laputa and Kiki's Delivery Service, and his writing for the Static Shock series brought him a 2004 Emmy nomination. His live-action credits include co-scripting the Kid 'n' Play comedy movie Class Act. His Walter Lantz documentary, Walter, Woody and the World of Animation (1982) recently resurfaced on disc one of The Woody Woodpecker and Friends: Classic Cartoon Collection (2007) DVD.
I asked him for some background on the creation of Creeporia, and he responded:
Creeporia is shot in the living room of my townhouse here in Toluca Lake. I shoot it, record the sound and light it. To shoot it, I use a cheap, $200 Canon DV home-video camera whose greatest attribute is that it allows me to record sound using an external microphone. Creeporia wears a small, black, clip-on, wired microphone. We run the wire down through her dress, and it comes out the bottom and runs to the camera. For our relatively few long shots, where we can't hide the wire, I use a shotgun mike instead.
On the days we shoot, it's usually just me and her - with a brief appearance in the morning by the pro makeup artist, Rachel, who gets Creeporia into the full regalia and then leaves. We did one day where we were joined by Hans (Eric Von Mayhem) who shot all of his scenes for both his episodes in about two hours. When the shooting is over, I edit the rough cut and later record my voices and do all the animation and post-production myself on my computer. I mostly try to keep it all fun, so if I'm not in the mood to work on the series, I don't. It takes a loooong time and I frequently burn-out, but eventually it gets done.
For me, this is the fulfillment of the dream I've been chasing ever since I was fooling around back in the old days with Super 8. Simply put, I want to create movies involving as few people as possible who can get in the way and muck up my creative vision. Now, thanks to all this digital technology, most of which isn't even all that "cutting edge," I can finally do it everything myself - from beginning to end.
Labels: animation, creeporia, crypt, kommerina, miyazaki, semper
¶ 6:15 PM 0 comments
