What Makes Jasper Johns’ Flag Painting 1388 Times More Valuable than a Simon and Kirby Captain America Page?

On a day when Jasper Johns' Flag painting sold at Christie’s for a hefty $28.6 million dollars, a story appeared on Bleeding Cool Comic News about a 1941 Joe Simon and Jack Kirby Captain America page that had been re-listed on eBay after its previous buyer had failed to come through on the $38,000 winning bid. A few days later, the page sold for $20,601, a figure that amounts to 1388 times less than the cost of the Johns oil painting. Given the opportunity to choose between a single Jasper Johns Flag painting or 1388 pages of high quality golden age comic art, one imagines even the most seasoned collector would deliberate—if only for a moment—over which of the two lots they might prefer. And though the works are of a vastly different kind and purpose, it seems a worthwhile inquiry into what makes their cultural and financial valuations so disparate.

The Johns Flag painting, of course, is iconic, a staple image in the Pop Art chapter of most art history textbooks, while the Joe Simon-Jack Kirby page, though respected, has a fame and appreciation limited to a much narrower audience of comic historians and aficionados. But are their current values justified, or are these the early signs of a larger disequilibrium, one which may eventually balance out in favor of an increase in the prices for original comic art? 

Commentary on Wikipedia states that one of the great achievements of John's Flag painting is that it desaturates the flag, as a symbol, of its iconic power, "a visual object, divorced from its symbolic connotations and reduced to something in-itself." But this interpretation runs counter to our experience, as the image of the flag as an icon is the first point of reference from which we begin to relate to the painting, and to suggest that somehow the omnipresent American flag at it's core somehow no longer signifies itself, though conceivable, is a stretch. Rather, placing the American flag as the sole subject of a painting in the context of the visual arts tradition, with all its hyper-dense, multilayered connotations, is the truly revolutionary act.  How do we reinterpret the flag when we consider it as a visual art object with all of the analytical tools that this rich tradition has provided over the centuries?  At its most subversive, this most common of all images is seen from a new perspective, enriched within a new context unlike any other from which we had previously come to associate with it, and, in the process, dangerously, the artwork alters the meaning we attribute to the icon itself.

The Captain America page is another beast entirely.  The intact original artwork of page 8 of Captain America #6 from 1941, created some 15 years before the Johns painting, depicts an action packed scene of Captain America and his sidekick Bucky fighting a series of anonymous Japanese villains under the dark specter of World War II. Drawn in pencil and ink on white paper, the page is thought to have been produced by legendary comics duo Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, creators of Captain America and, later on, the Boy Commandos, which at their zenith sold over a million copies an issue (to put that in perspective, X-Men sold about 250,000 copies when they dominated the market in the 1980s, and, today, a comic that sells 40,000 copies is considered a success).  Though the authorship of the page has been called into question, it seems unlikely anyone other than Joe Simon and Jack Kirby were responsible for its creation, considering the unusually high quality of the art, especially when one observes the hands, boots and draped clothing, which all have a trademark bulky Kirby-esque look and feel.   

The page is divided into two main sequences, the top half focused on Bucky battling a villain, while Captain America dominates the bottom half in a separate fight scene. The drama begins on an action packed note, Bucky dodging a flying axe, convincingly depicted as fast, heavy and damaging, the speed lines covering the young hero's eyes almost as they blaze past our own. The comic panel curves outwards behind him, as if to emphasize the force of the axe hitting the wall, while the villain, hunched over as Bucky draws him closer by the shirt, directs a knife towards the young hero's head, adding further emphasis to the focal point of the drama. Bucky's body, forced backwards in the same direction as the axe, is thrown beyond the confines of the panel, adding further drama and impact to the scene.  Bucky yells “WOW!” in classic comic fashion, triggering the viewer's own reaction to the fast paced action. In the next panel, Bucky retaliates by stealing the villain’s sword and punching him in the same motion, shouting “GIVE ME THAT SWORD!” The action is surrounded by shadowy cross-hatching inside the panel's edges that creates both focus and atmosphere, a trick commonly used in graphic design to this day but which can also be traced back to Renaissance oil painting.  

In the following row, Bucky returns the villain's sword, throwing it across the three panels in an amazing depiction of energy that fully persuades the reader of the absolute force of the throw, splitting the wall and pinning the villain to the wall.  Bucky yells, “BOYS WHO THROW HATCHETS GET IN TROUBLE!” suggesting to the reader that Bucky is the ‘boy’ he is referencing, followed by “SO I’LL HAVE TO KEEP YOU OUT OF MISCHIEF!”, creating a humorous reversal of the boy-hero Bucky calling the grown Japanese men 'boys'.  The last panel depicts a racially stereotyped Japanese character with what looks like mock Japanese text, so unthinkable in today's climate of political correctness that it borders on being classic, misguided as the generalizations may be. Like the first panel, all the characters break out of the frames which contain them, adding dynamism to each of the panels and to the page as a whole.

The bottom half of the page continues the same breathtaking pace as Captain America rolls into the panel fighting two villains simultaneously, while the omniscient narrator interjects, “Meanwhile THE SHADOW OF DEATH HOVERS OVER CAPTAIN AMERICA --”.  In the following circular panel, a villain plunges a sword into Captain America’s shield, which “SAVES CAP FROM BEING BEHEADED!” while the hero simultaneously restrains another villain under his weight.  Outstretched, Cap strikes back in the following row, laying a massive, defeating blow into the chest of his opponent, while yelling in pure pop, 1940s American English, “HERE! TRY SOME OF MY BRAND”.  The final panel transitions through an electrical divider, heightening the intensity of the scene, zooming in on Captain America's head and fist as he declares, “AND NOW MISTER FANG, I’M READY FOR YOU!”, a well crafted, though somewhat racist pun, combining the sound of a traditional Japanese name with the insidious sounding animalistic incisor tooth.

Despite these impressive accomplishments, many good reasons justify the higher market valuation for Johns' Flag painting. Unquestionably, it has more poetic depth than the Captain America fight scene. Johns was making far reaching speculations on identity, patriotism, the mass media, and the consumer society and, perhaps most importantly, he was the first to isolate the mass media icon as a subject for contemplation, which was highly influential on the Pop art movement that followed, which, in turn, had a transformative effect on the culture. In this respect, the painting can be legitimately considered a landmark in the history of art, as well as human thought as a whole. 

Johns' Flag also has a title, distinguishing it from the comic page in the sense that the painting is a self-conscious presentation of a unified artwork, while the comic page is a fragment of a larger work (the full comic book) and therefore lacks the unified cohesion of the painting. Were the comparison with a comic cover rather than an inside page, however, this distinction would be much less pronounced. 

Interestingly, many of the themes obtained in the painting are present in the Captain America page, though they are brought up in a more accidental manner, not because the comic artists wished to convey profound sentiments on the topics, but rather because they were immersed in them. One could say with a fair degree of certainty that Simon and Kirby were not attempting some "meta" statement on the subject matter of America and its role as an icon in the depths of our unconscious minds. Nevertheless, an accidental poetry remains in the comic page of the kind we might find in the hieroglyphs in the tomb of Ramses II. In a parallel fashion, these artworks were not created by individuals questioning the myths of their day, but were rather enforcing them using art as a form of nationalistic propaganda. Do we consider ancient egyptian tomb paintings any less works of art as a result? Were the comic page exhibited among the paintings we traditionally view in the art gallery, I suspect it would retain an unusual popularity among the crowds, and not simply because it's easier to consume, which it is, but for it's artfullness. Seen outside of our cultural biases, comic artists also share many of the challenges of Italian medieval and renaissance painters, who were often charged with the task of portraying multi-sequenced religious narratives.

As far as the comic page's incompleteness is concerned, do we consider fragments of ancient art, such as the Victory of Samothrace, any less of an art object because a part of it is missing? Further, were the paintings in the caves of Lascaux ever given titles by their creators? It appears that many of our assumptions about what constitutes an art object is defined by gallery-centric notions, while the ultimate test of an artwork's value is whether it is returned to, for its own sake, over the course of time. Does it continue to communicate something unique to which we can appreciate and relate over the ages? As we move into the future and increase our distance with the 20th century, it's possible that comic art will become more closely associated with the fine art of the century as the cultural biases towards comics fade, and a newer, anthropological perspective takes shape. 

As archeological artifacts demonstrate, the financial value of a work is commiserate with its esteem in the culture, regardless of whether it was intended as art for art's sake. In this respect, it's easy to imagine original comic art, especially covers, commanding much greater prices in the near future, as the inherent beauty of these pieces becomes increasingly recognized. Renowned TIME magazine art critic Robert Hughes once called underground cartoonist Robert Crumb, "the American Breughel", yet his works, among the most expensive of original comic art, still sell for a fraction of much less important pieces classified as 'fine art'. So there is a bias, but one which is becoming increasingly undermined as an upward trend towards higher prices takes hold. The cover of Mr. Natural #1, for example, sold in 2007 for a record price of $100,000, which, if "cultural importance" is our gauge, is very cheap.  In one image, Mr. Natural evokes the entire hippy counterculture revolution; ironically, it's difficult to think of a painting in the visual arts that captured the hippie ethos as effectively. In a sense, it's perfectly reasonable to see it best represented in the form of comic art, rather than an oil painting.

Other sales of original comic art pages, almost exclusively covers, confirm the trend. The cover to Daredevil #158 featuring the Black Widow by Frank Miller, from his celebrated run on Daredevil in the 1980s, recently secured $100,000 at auction. Even more impressive, an EC Comic cover by Frank Frazetta of Weird Science-Fantasy #29 (1955) sold in a private sale for $380,000, whileTodd McFarlane's sensational cover of Amazing Spider-man #328 sold for a record breaking $657,250 in 2012. Considering the sales of original copies of Action Comics #1 and Detective Comics #27 have topped $1 million at auction, it would seem the million dollar original comic art piece beckons.

For all the arguments in favor of an undervaluation of comic art, the fact of the matter is that artworks in the fine arts tradition are more culturally valued than comic art, and, most of the time, for good reason. But with the recent increase in the prices for fine art, alongside the heightened ambiguity in the inherent value of contemporary art, the disparity is becoming increasingly imbalanced. Yes, the Johns and Simon-Kirby works are of a different order and poetic magnitude, and to suggest that the Simon and Kirby page should be worth anything near as much would be absurd. However, what it does show is that original comic art, relative to the boom in the art market, is greatly undervalued. Ask yourself, would you rather own a Hirst or a Crumb? And in 200 years, who's work will be more valuable? 

Why is old LEGO so much better than new LEGO?

Although LEGO is more popular than ever, the company seems to have lost the imaginative spirit that once made it great.

While visiting a LEGO store in a shopping mall over the Christmas holidays, I had the chance to browse the latest offerings from the world renown toy manufacturer that had played such an important part in my childhood. Enamoured with the classic set designs of the 1980s, I walked through the store with money to burn, eager to find something which could provide me with an afternoon’s entertainment during the holiday festivities. Nevertheless, with an entire store dedicated to the latest LEGO products, I couldn’t find a single item that could charm me in the same way as those classic sets from my early youth. Somehow the magic had disappeared, replaced with lacklustre design concepts that lacked depth, charm and originality. I left the store having purchased a LEGO key chain as a gift for someone else, wondering to myself, what had changed? How had this beloved privately traded toy company, having been responsible for creating thousands of hours of inspiration in my youth, been unable to produce one new product I found interesting?

Perhaps I set my standards too high; after all, the classic space LEGO sets from the 1980s are arguably among the greatest children’s toys ever produced. Their inherent innocence, harbingers of an optimistic future of smiling spacemen focused on the exploration of space and desert planets, was an unusual combination of futurism, internationalism and engineering, almost as if LEGO had stumbled upon a universal toy that might one day even entertain aliens from other worlds. The wordless instructions and simple English titles combined with the silent, desert landscapes of deep space on the box beckoned to an idealistic and utopian vision of the future where happiness and peace between humans had been achieved.

Interestingly, there were no weapons in early LEGO. The most violent piece was what looked like a double pronged laser shooter, which, nevertheless, retained a virtuous ambiguity: was it for shooting other spaceships or simply for vaporizing passing asteroids? Unlike later LEGO, these sets seemed to be focused on space exploration and resource extraction, rather than pursuing space criminals like the later, short-lived Space Police theme. Thematically, the earlier LEGO represented a more enlightened humanity where everyone was on the same team. Today there are robbers, and various other criminals, not to mention highly individualized characters based on stale creations like Jar Jar Binks.

In recent years space LEGO has been replaced by the Star Wars license. Previously happy spacemen are now unsmiling “clone troopers”, violently firing lethal weapons at their enemies. The previous special blue spaceman has been replaced with laser cannon firing “Mandolarians” (left), who far from representing an optimistic and peaceful internationalism, resemble Orwellian gestapo-like goons for the New World Order. In the bottom left-hand corner of the Star Wars sets, a figure can be seen menacingly pointing guns at the viewer. Worse, the sets themselves lack the creativity and imaginations of their earlier predecessors. Almost all the new designs are riddled with special pieces that have limited use outside of their preassigned function. One gets the impression that the designers in the 1980s only introduced new pieces after extended and lengthy debate, so few were they in number, and when they did, it was an exciting, carefully thought out addition that led to more possibilities, not less, as I’d argue is the case with many of the newer pieces.

Further the sets themselves are based on preassigned narratives from the movies they represent rather than creating a more general springboard from which children can imagine stories from -- the more detailed the scene or license, the less work is required from children’s imaginations. This lack of creative engagement is further evident on the back of the boxes, which used to show how completely different objects and scenes could be built using the same contents of the box. Today, that’s been replaced by photographs of the main set from different angles, or the picture of another set in the series. A space that was once used as an example of the potential of one’s imagination has now been replaced with cheap advertising.

It seems nearly impossible that the same leadership is in charge of both the old and new. The old designs are stylish and timeless, toys of true genius and masterpieces of design; whereas, today’s LEGO sets are hardly distinguishable from action figures, with the exception that they can be taken apart and reassembled. Sadly, this is not an exercise in nostalgia, but rather another symptom of a larger trend in the West that shows a general degeneration of innocence and creativity in cultural products, whether it be pop music, visual art, movies, cartoons, comics, or even LEGO building blocks. Ironically, many of these classic LEGO sets are available on eBay at premium prices, so I think it’s important cultural producers remind themselves: thing don’t need to be this way. Quality will sell.

Hollywood Zombies Part of Rich American Tradition

Topps' Hollywood Zombies trading cards show America is still capable of making a classic.

2007's landmark release of Topps' Hollywood Zombies trading cards is a remarkable addition to a unique American tradition that includes EC Comics, MAD Magazine and Wacky Packages. The cards are fascinating not only because they parody our Pop culture, but because they summon timeless themes of celebrity and death in a horrific and humourous mix. The painted images of decomposing celebrities and the thoughtful write-ups on the back combine to create truly entertaining experiences, which are Pop culture phenomena in and of themselves.

The pioneer of this sensationalistic, black humour style was EC Comics' Publisher William Gaines, whom inherited the EC comic book company after the sudden death of his father Max in 1947. Under Bill's stewardship, EC Comics changed its name from Educational Comics to Entertaining Comics, and, shortly thereafter, began publishing science fiction, horror, romance, war and crime comics, as well as the now iconic MAD Magazine. Due to the bold originality, gruesome stories and unusually detailed art, the company achieved a high degree of success in a relatively short time period, employing legendary comic artists such as Wally Wood, Jack Davis, Frank Frazetta and Graham Ingels. Whether it was supernatural, criminal or tragic, the comics often had an edge, which seemed to speak to a newer, younger, deliquent America.

So popular were the comics, that they were eventually subject to hearings before the US Congress, largely in response to the work of Dr. Fredric Wertham, who had been a fierce opponent of the stories of crime, violence and the supernatural in comic books. Wertham, a German psychiatrist living in America, published two papers in 1948 entitled "Horror in the Nursery" and "The Psychopathology of Comics," as well as the damning 1954 book, Seduction of the Innocent, all of which listed comic books as a major contributing factor in juvenile delinquency.

In response to increasing pressure, Gaines spearheaded a committee of publishers to restore the medium's reputation. This resulted in the establishment of the Comics Code Authority (CCA), which, ironically, Gaines refused to join, believeing it had become a vehicle of censorship. And he was right. The CCA acted as a self-censoring board for the comics industry that required all content be approved prior to publication in order to bare its stamp of approval. The CCA now had power to refuse any content it deemed improper, thereby killing the comic's distribution.

Sadly, it was not long before EC Comics went out of business, unable to survive the stringent conditions placed upon the company by the CCA. There's evidence that the board was directly biased against EC Comics as well, banning the words "weird," "terror" and "horror" from comic titles, which were present in the some of EC's best selling comics. Interestingly, MAD Magazine was not subject to the same restrictions that had been placed on the comic book medium because it was in the magazine format.

Another example of this tradition of American pop, black humour are Wacky Packages trading cards. First released by the Topps trading card company in 1967, the cards spoofed various American products with a fiendish spirit that leaned toward the creepy and weird. Nevertheless, the formula became an enormous success, briefly outselling the Topps Baseball card line in the 1970s. Like EC, the cards had beautiful artwork and smart puns, which appealed to kids and teenagers. This spirit has been a part of our Pop culture for over four decades, and arguably laid the groundwork for humour displayed in shows like Beavis and Butthead and The Simpsons.

In 2004, Topps relaunched the Wacky Packages series and have released a new edition every year since. Unfortunately, they don't seem of the same quality as the older series. Though, in February 2008, Topps will release the Wacky Packages Flashbacks series, featuring some of the more popular cards from years past.

Today, however, is the era of the Hollywood Zombies. These cards speak to our current trash tabloid, celebrity culture in a way that Wacky Packages can't, as their focus is on iconic personalities, rather than iconic products. The cards are brilliantly designed and the writing is hilarious. Like Wacky Packages, the images on the cards are painted, giving them a sense of depth and quality.

On the front, the image of a zombie celebrity covers the entire card with a small logo in the top corner and a scary version of the icon's name like "Oprah Winfreak" and "Melt Gibson" written on the bottom, The back of the card contains a parody of an American news outlet like "Entertainment Freakly" and "The Hollyweird Reporter," or a tabloid website like "TMZombie." A headline and a satirical, zombie inspired write-up fill out the back of the card. Another small but significant detail that makes the cards particularly contemporary is the placement of the website address on the back.

Admittedly, to buy Wacky packages these days is an exercise in nostalgia, but to buy the Hollywood Zombies cards -- this pokes fun at the very heart of our MSN culture, engaging with the looming icons in our collective minds the world over. And in this respect, the cards are subversive. There's something about Tom Ooze, flesh rotting, jumping up and down on a casket, or Paris Hellton walking straight out of hell onto the red carpet that speaks to today's individuals who are incessantly force fed our celebrity culture. Thanks to the Hollywood Zombies cards, the tables have been turned. We morbidly enjoy the decrepit celebrity corpses dangling in horror, bodies falling to pieces, after having been endlessly paraded in front of our eyes in grocery store lineups and the ever pervasive mass media.

Like EC and Wacky Packages, the Hollywood Zombies trading cards are quality. The ghoulish artwork is both risque in content and well crafted technically, while the writing cuts deep and is genuinely funny. Importantly, the cards are priced reasonably, retailing for about $2-3 for a pack of 7 cards. It's great to see a resurgence of a great American tradition that can be appreciated from Baghdad to Shanghai and the world over.