Review in progress: Exit Stage Left — The Snagglepuss Chronicles
Part of me has been wanting to hold off on getting in deep on Snagglepuss before it finishes, taking in that constantly hollered response of comics to criticism, “Wait until it’s over!” Reasons being for waiting at all is partly because it’s a mini-series and actually has a scheduled, planned ending in mind, and one that’s — relative to other serialized print comics — soon. Partly because of the subject matter the story is tackling, dealing with the Lavender Scare, a part of American history that’s hardly ever talked about at all, even in conjunction with the piece of history it exists with, exists as part of, the Red Scare. Barring massive, obvious screwups on the facts of the matter out of the gate, I didn’t want to weigh in too much. And then, branching off from that, there’s the discussion to be had on what kind of creatives are offered these stories to begin with, and who gets celebrated for making them in the first place.
But then there’s the part of me that has already been weighing in on Snagglepuss to begin with anyway, even if not in formalized full articles. So, figure I might as well be honest with myself and at least talk about what I’ve already been talking about in Snagglepuss, collected into a proper piece.
And the short of it is: I’m not impressed yet, but it’s not for lack of ambition.
So let’s get into the long of it.
Exit Stage Left: The Snagglepuss Chronicles — written by Mark Russell (known for his recent work on the comics Prez and The Flintstones), pencilled by Mike Feehan, inked by Mark Morales, and colored by Paul mounts — takes the queer barely-subtext of the original Snagglepuss cartoons and makes it text. Going further than that, it casts Snagglepuss as a southern gay playwright in the mold of Tennessee Williams in 1953, as America heats up its conflict with the Soviet Union, with the House Committee on Un-American Activities taking particular aim at showbiz from Hollywood on down. Trying to find communists and sympathizers wherever they can, or simply inventing them, and to the point of the Red Scare that’s not talked about much, trying to get rid of anyone they’d label as “deviants”. Or, more straightforwardly, queer people. It was the Lavender Scare, and it’s worth reading up on. So sets the scene for this series, as things quickly escalate to Snagglepuss and his friends being directly targeted by the HUAC, their careers and lives quickly being affected.
Russell is swinging for the fences here, and I can’t discount that. Not just talking about the way America treated anyone they even imagined might be communists in the past at a time when America, distanced from Cold War propaganda and with late capitalism crushing millions under its boot, has become rapidly more friendly with the word socialism… but also in bringing up the Lavender Scare at all, and making it a main feature of a story. While I was a kid in middle and high school researching the Red Scare out of a fascination with history, the homophobic aspect of it was never so much as mentioned, and neither did very popular pieces of media about that very era. Be they wholly fictional like “The Iron Giant”, or about and based on the events of the era themselves, like “Good Night, and Good Luck”, focusing on the conflict between Edward R. Murrow and Joseph McCarthy himself. It’s simply not a thing taught in our history books. It’s not the kind of thing you find out about America unless you already know you’re looking for it. Snagglepuss is absolutely an ambitious book, and at a time when media with stronger politics than a milquetoast “both sides” with no real knowledge of actual history, American or otherwise, is desperately wanted, needed. Lord knows I’ve come down with heavy criticism of things like Nick Spencer’s Captain America titles and the Secret Empire event for refusing to engage with history or even with any sort of politics with teeth at all.
But ambition isn’t enough. Ambition catches the eye, gets you to look in the first place. A comic still needs to deliver, especially when tackling a subject like this, and doing it with an old Hanna-Barbera cartoon character to boot. And so far what we’ve gotten so far is something stiff, in both the writing and the art, that’s yearning for emotional investment of the reader, aching to have something that hits the heart like a sledgehammer, but can only at its best manage so far a few admittedly good and snappy lines about oppression. To me, it brings the echoes of The Flintstones; ticking a few boxes of “prestige media” that we’ve been trained to stand attention to, but not being able to deliver much beyond that.
Normally, I’d talk about the writing first, and then the art. But I feel the need to reverse this. Part of it is because people in comics will tell you, 100 percent correct, that comics is not either/or writing and art, it’s both. They’ll also tell you, with few exceptions, that most comics coverage (even from publishers themselves) has mostly focused on writers and treated artists as an afterthought, not really giving them their due. And with Snagglepuss, the flaws of the book are so clearly intermixed, it’s impossible to lay the fault at either the writer or the artist. The writing isn’t accounting for the art, and the art doesn’t seem capable of delivering what the writing so badly needs.
The first issue of the book has a page, this page, which I keep coming back to as the model for the flaws of the book as a whole. Panelling, composition, dialog, transitions, the weaknesses of the “realistic” aesthetic, the works. It’s hard to know where to begin, because they all interconnect, but the panelling seems as good a place as any, since it’s what contains everything else.
Throughout the course of both issues 1 and 2, Feehan and Russell use a lot of very, very large panels, with generally not a lot of dialog or action in them. Wide panels in particular, filling up from one side of the page to the other, taking on the ‘cinematic paneling’ that’s long been a style in comics, but perhaps most rose to prominence in the early 00s in the Ultimate comics line from Marvel, on books like Ultimate X-Men. The problem isn’t the style being used, but that it’s not being used well in Snagglepuss. The transitions from panel 1 to panel 2 and panel 3 to panel 4 on that page above are about as abrupt as they get, and with seemingly no reason or intentional effect for it. They jar with how sudden they cut from one scene to another, and none of the scenes having anything particularly memorable or important about them. It feels like forgettable filler, delivered in a way that wastes page space and doesn’t read well. This kind of paneling would be good to deliver a drawn out, emotional, isolated, moment, but there’s hardly any emotion to be had in the whole page, as can be seen with the stiff posture of most everyone on the page and the abundance of utterly neutral expressions.
It’s a problem throughout, each part of the art and writing compounding the flaws of each other. Giant, wide panels that don’t take effective use of the page, meaning a waste of page space, which means less and less time to tell the story it wants to tell in as constrained a thing as a mini-series. The stiff postures, the stiff, empty facial expressions, dialog that’s wanting for passion and emotion but everything coming out largely as detached casual conversations no matter the circumstances, and in that intermixing of art and writing, the writing not taking into account these giant panels and how to get the most out of them, or writing for a different panel layout all together. Huckleberry Hound drops his tale of his dissolved marriage and his outing to his ex-wife with no emotion in his words at all, and the art continues that, feeling like it has the intensity of a shrug. The almost kiss between Huck and the unnamed man feeling like two men falling asleep while standing up, with an investigator in full suit and an enormous camera standing maybe 5 feet away from him.
These wide, giant panels, and minimal dialog, or no dialog don’t have to be a weakness, though. But they are in Snagglepuss, because the writer and the artist don’t seem to know what, exactly, to do with them, or what they’re good for.
In a comparison and contrast, my mind thinks of Katsuhiro Otomo, and his most famous work, Akira.
Three panels for a page. Just three! And the only words in any of them is graffiti by one person in the story we’ll never meet to another person in the story we’ll never meet. Tetsuo at the bottom panel there doesn’t even have any background behind him. The space surrounding him is pure white, putting him in dead center of it. And all that’s accomplished narratively is Tetsuo walking towards the school. This could very easily be a waste of a page, of the space on the page. But it’s not, because these wide, large panels are put together to give an emotion, an atmosphere to the action, and to have it sink on the reader. Otomo even tweaks and repeats this three panel layout multiple times in Akira, with Tetsuo reinforcing that mood and atmosphere for the character, the scenes he’s in, and the story as a whole.
It’s mood these pages are going for, not pushing the story, the plot, ahead, per se. Making you feel the emotions Tetsuo is feeling by giving them all the room they need, and focusing them dead center. What he’s looking at, you’re looking at, contextualized by the panels that come before, and when you look at him, you can feel what he feels.
Which isn’t hurt by the fact that Tetsuo and everybody in Akira itself, even when doing something as small as smirking, are more expressive, more natural and flexible in their posture, than those in Snagglepuss.
There’s another thing to Otomo’s panelling the separates it from what Russell and Feehan are doing, and that’s the fact that Otomo had gobs and gobs of time, of pages, to tell his story. There are six Akira volumes, and the first one is several hundred pages all on its own. Exit Stage Left: The Snagglepuss chronicles is a six issue mini-series, which means it has around 120 pages or so to tell it story. These choices for this cinematic paneling instead of something tighter, more condensed, more panels and actions per page is part of a very real time and page limit for the story. Russell and Feehan don’t have the hundreds upon hundreds of pages to tell their story that Otomo did with Akira. They’ve got just a little over 100 pages to get from start to finish. To deploy these panel layouts, and so frequently, requires knowing exactly what you’re using them for and how. And in what we’ve seen of Snagglepuss so far, they’re not being used for much of anything. There’s this lack of emotion in them, and they eat up page space, they eat up time, winding down the clock of getting to tell its own story in a satisfying fashion. The Snagglepuss Chronicles doesn’t have the time to screw around that much longer stories do, which heightens this tension that all the other story beats won’t get the time they need to have the impact they want, and might get told with the same emotional dead weight of these pages too. Hell, you can compare it to me writing this very piece. If I was writing this for most comic outlets, I’d get 500–1000 words or so, 2000 at most. I already crossed that limit a couple sentences ago. I’d need to cut, cut, cut, to fundamentally write this piece in a different way to work with those limitations, and that’s just a fact of the matter. The panel decisions from page to page in Snagglepuss come off as being made with the idea that this is a much longer work than it is.
There’s the other choices for the art as well. When Snagglepuss originally showed up as a preview, with art by Howard Porter, it got a response that… I don’t think DC would’ve expected, nor would most people in comics sold on the direct market. To put it the short way: A bunch of furries looked at it and went “I could do better”.
And it’s not really untrue! I’m a pretty big fan of Howard Porter, flaws and all, going all the way back to his time on Grant Morrison’s JLA, but artists for the big 2, for a lot of the direct market publishers in general, are not the kind of people drawing furries in general or have any real aptitude or training with drawing furries. You can go through a whole mess of X-Men and X-Men related comics from the 2000s on where Beast looks like a goddamn mess depending on who he’s being drawn by. When it comes to drawing animal people, it’s not a skill that’s a standard in the industry anymore the way it might’ve been when funny animal books still ruled the shelves.
Mike Feehan does a better job than Porter on this aspect, but he’s still an ill fit, and it’s not just for how he draws walking, talking animal people either, but for how he draws people, period. The party page still feels like the strongest demonstration of this. Let’s go back to it.
Everyone’s posture is stiff, stiff, stiff, stiff. Standing on the lawn before the party — an awkwardly composed shot itself — Huck and Snag, standing on their tippy toes, exude no kind of energy beyond that of action figures frozen in place with glue. And its doubled down on at the party itself, where the closest anyone has to a kind of natural posture is the unnamed man at front and center, crossing his arms. And all of this exacerbated with the fact that this book has a real problem with any sort of facial expression other than “neutral” or “malaise”, and its made far more difficult with the furry characters who they’ve insisted on working in this realistic style. If passion is lacking in the humans, then it seems to be thrown into a void for characters like Snagglepuss himself and everyone else like him.
It’s probably the worst in the kissing scenes. Wanting for passion, for embrace, for something intense, the art can’t seem to figure out how to make the kiss work, giving off a vibe of permanent hoverhanding, but for mouths
The want for a “realistic” art style is understandable. It immediately sells to readers that this is a “serious” product, and should be considered as such, and to basically get over any biases they might have against it for featuring Hanna-Barbera furries or homosexuality, or both. But the way Feehan renders that realism comes at the cost of any sort of energy in the way people in the story are framed, from their poses to the expressions on their face. In comparison for rendering humans in a realistic style but not lacking for that emotional energy, I’d point to, say, Kevin Maguire (Justice League International), Dave Gibbons (Watchmen) or Brent Anderson (Astro City).
These all are, I think, strong examples of doing “realistic” features on people and still having emotions come through that don’t feel stiff, dispassionate. If there was an artist I think I’d compare Feehan’s kind of realism to, it’d actually be Alex Ross. Certainly, Feehan isn’t attempting the painterly style Ross is, but he shares with Ross a similar flaw of not being able to get across kinetic movement. A naturalness, a stretchiness to the human body that just doesn’t exist in so much of their art. When Ross’ weaknesses really come through, it’s like someone took a photo of statues. Immaculately rendered, but lacking any kind of bend or life that’d be in a real person.
But, Ross still has something over a lot of the pages Feehan has delivered in the book so far. When Ross renders an expression, that still comes through. He and Kevin Maguire are both very big on using actual people as reference for human expression, and it shows.
It’s a mix of so many of the characters in Snagglepuss barely emoting at all, settling for a constant neutral, indifferent looking expression, with this awkward plasticity to the art when they do emote that contributes to the book so often lacking for that emotion it so badly wants to have so far. Even during a climactic moment in a rehearsal of one of Snagglepuss’ plays where a man hollers out a monologue and tears off his shirt, there’s this atmosphere of “Eh.” about the whole thing. When one of Snagglepuss’ friends tells him she’s done with the business and leaving the country for Paris, she, and everyone else on the pages, has about the energy level of a shrug.
Then comes the matter I can’t help but bring up, that not only are there ways to render this realism without giving up that emotional intensity, but also, that realism isn’t the only way this book, or other books with similar topics, similar premises, could go. That a cartoonier style can be just as good, if not better — though it might sacrifice that desire to be taken “seriously” that DC is obviously aiming for. When that Snagglepuss preview art debuted, a lot of furry artists showed off how more naturally they could render the guy, but I can also point to queer furry comics, by queer furry artists, that can deliver on the emotional intensity that — so far — Snagglepuss is so badly lacking, so often. A personal favorite would be Night Physics, by Austin Holcomb.
I’ve seen plenty of moments that are wanting to hit like a hammer in Snagglepuss, but none of them are getting to me like those pages in NP did, or even close.
Instead of feeling torn up, I feel a lot of “sure, I guess”. Snagglepuss has had some smart zingers here and there about oppression and the nature of it, and I won’t discount those, but in terms of having emotional heart, in terms of tugging at the heartstrings of the reader, 1/3rd of the way into the story, it’s still coming up short. The only emotion the book seems particularly good at getting across is emptiness, malaise, as we see with that panel of Huck eating his TV dinner. But while malaise and emptiness catches the eyes of those looking for “serious” stories, it’s not enough to hold a story together, to make it heartfelt and memorable. And while I’ve harped on the art a lot here, it’s not just the art, it’s the writing too. Writing that doesn’t account for the art, and writing that itself isn’t as strong as it’s selling itself as.
A lot of the problems I have with Snagglepuss are pretty much the same problems I had with one of Russell’s earlier books, The Flintstones. He and I share the fact that we both hate the property, but what Russell did with it ended up leaving me cold even as so many were stunned by it. It’s the prestige media checklist, I’ve come to call it. It’s nailing down all the little things that are necessary to be categorized as a Serious and Important story by critics and readers, but if you’ve gotten fed endless amounts of those or have started to notice the patterns by which we celebrate and canonize these kinds of stories, it gets less impressive. Take a man, give him an existential crisis he writhes around about, throw in a dash of currently relevant cultural/political touches, bam, you’re already on your way to being praised up and down the street by everybody. And this extends far beyond comics, we see this pattern in books, TV, movies, video games. The kind of stories we’ve been trained to recognize and elevate as important have very noticeable patterns. A lot of people saw “Mad Men” inside of Russell’s reboot of the Flintstones and praised it for it, but that was the exact thing that frustrated me. The repetition of these prestige media tics, and without a whole lot beyond them to hold the thing together, and that goes for both The Flintstones and Mad Men.
Snagglepuss doesn’t have the other incredibly common part of prestige media — heterosexual man futzes about, fuming about how unknowable and confusing but wonderful yet terrible women are to him — but it follows so much of the methodology. And, admittedly, one of those prestige media checkboxes it ticks catches my attention, in talking about the Lavender Scare, the Red Scare, and doing so now in an era where socialism is finally coming back into the mainstream and gay rights groups are fighting to keep what advances they have made at all, on top of trying to get to others. Still legal to be fired for being gay in close to 30 states in the USA.
But it’s not enough. The writing and the art on their own are already full of flaws, and together, they exacerbate each other instead of making something stronger, as comics should. What we’ve gotten so far in The Snagglepuss Chronicles is outlines of characters. They all feel more like ideas instead of something living, breathing, and boiling over with emotions in an era of rampant paranoia and the eye of a government hanging heavy over Hollywood, targeting anyone they could label as a deviant. Snagglepuss is supposed to be a Tennessee Williams inspired character, but he doesn’t have a lick of the intrigue of the real thing. It feels like I’ve been told “What if Snagglepuss was a gay playwright in the middle of the HUAC?”, and I respond “That’s a cool idea.” — and that’s all I get. A cool idea. There’s no transformation on the page that takes this from “cool idea” to “gripping character.” There’s no transformation from “cool idea” to “emotional investment”.
Snagglepuss really does have moments, is the thing. There are moments where the book comes alive and has something solid to say, and it wakes you up and makes you pay attention. Issue 1 has one of them, when Snagglepuss’ boyfriend, Pablo, recounts why he had to flee Cuba after Batista took over, as homophobic violence targeted him and his friends, and how American exceptionalism, the idea of “it couldn’t happen here” or “we’re different” is nonsense.
It’s smart commentary. It’s a strong moment. But it is a brief moment, and that moment exists in the context of Snag and everybody else still feeling more like ideas than anything else, a bunch of pawns to shuffle around and make commentary about the state of affairs around them. One strong moment of emotion is undermined by how neutral or empty everything else feels.
I want the book to be stronger, I want for the rest of the series to really come together more than these first two issues have. And again, I hesitated writing all this in the first place, because, hell, the reason is right there — these are just the first two issues. But this is a mini-series, not an ongoing. Snagglepuss has 4 issues left to tell its whole story, 1/3rd of it already completed, and much of that 1/3rd feeling like it’s not making effective use of its pages, of its time, both writing and art so constantly longing to be stronger than they actually are. They keep hitting the prestige media checklist and ticking those boxes with each issue, bringing up Serious Matters and having Serious Ideas, but there’s an emptiness that pervades the characters, the story, the whole of it that makes the whole structure rattle, like a massive wooden figure standing on top of a pebble, shaking terribly in the breeze of re-reads.
The subject matter of Exit Stage Left: The Snagglepuss Chronicles is crucial, illuminating parts of American history we either choose to ignore or are never told about in the first place. The timing for it is perfect, as we struggle against ever more reactionary forces mainstreaming yet again in America, taking all the dogwhistles off their bigotry, not to mention corporations destruction of unionized labor and their scorn of anything that could be considered vaguely leftist grows ever stronger. The premise is solid. The concept is solid. Finally making Snagglepuss textually gay is great. All the pieces are there.
But the story as we have it so far — the writing, the art, and the intermingling of the two — is still, in so many ways, failing to be more than just the way we’ve been trained to see stories as “Important”.
