What do you do when you know the subject of your book is both a good man tied to an important event, and a good—but not great—artist? If you’re N.C. Christopher Couch, you actually don’t know that, and instead prime the pump and inflate, inflate, inflate. Jerry Robinson is responsible for some rare good deeds in comics. Great, even. He helped Siegel and Shuster get (some of) what they deserved. He was a friend and supporter of Mort Meskin. He has worked for international free speech and successfully campaigned to free a jailed cartoonist. He even set up an international political cartoon syndicate. By all accounts, this is a nice man. A thoughtful man. Even a righteous man. And this book, Jerry Robinson: Ambassador of Comics, like a well-meaning award ceremony (come to think of it, kinda like how the comics industry treats most of its grand old men), is a slap in the face disguised as a pat on the back.

Here’s the first line of the Couch’s preface: “Few American artists can claim to have worked in as many media as Jerry Robinson, and with such success in all of them.” Here is a short list of artists (alive, dead, young, etc.) I can think of who have worked in as many or more, with more success: Andy Warhol, Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Dave Eggers, Charles Burns, Stephen King, Gary Panter, Milt Gross, Matt Groening, Jules Feiffer, Robert Crumb… I could do this all day). This sort of jive hyperbole is doing no one any favors. What it does is make you stop and doubt the rest of what follows.

Anyhow, after noting that the book will not be a “strictly biographical or chronological rendering of Robinson’s career” Couch marches straight on through a chronological account of Robinson’s career. And it’s not always so pretty. What we get is some good stuff from Robinson’s childhood; a ton of Batman; a fair amount of his editorial cartoon, “Still Life”; his humorous comic strip “Flubs & Fluffs” (unfortunately both strips suffer from competent-but-generic art of the 1960s/70s greeting card variety — a kind of Mort Drucker default style that has not aged well); and some very earnest but pedestrian paintings and photographs that, while nice to know about, distract from his strength, which is really, come to think of, it, his existence as as a man of substance.

And oh yes, Jerry Robinson invented the Joker, which I guess is a big deal, though it’s hard to say how big a deal. The Joker is a corporate property, not a literary figure, as Couch claims. It’s a very, very popular and yes, very, very profitable property. But not profitable for any of the men who actually wrote and drew him. Not profitable for Jerry. Couch claims the invention of the Joker was unique for comics, apparently blanking on the grotesqueries of Chester Gould and others before him. He recites the tired claims of expressionism and urban sensibility and all the rest, again oddly unaware that recent years have brought a torrent of new information about early comic books and the artistry therein. While Robinson may have been (that’s a big “may”), as Couch claims, unique (with Will Eisner) in his recognition of the artistry possible in the medium, and is to be commended for saving original art when he could, he was not unique for making art in the medium. Or for bringing supposed cinematic influences, etc. Meanwhile, the Batman stuff is so pumped up that we even get a picture of Heath Ledger, as well as one of Christian Bale patiently zoning out at a meet-and-greet with some old dude (Jerry). But not a single picture of Bill Finger, the man who wrote the Joker, and who Robinson called his “cultural mentor” in his revelatory 2004 interview with Jim Amash in Alter Ego #39 (more on that in a bit).

Worse yet, the The Ambassador of Comics appears to pull punches for reasons I can only imagine are political. For example, the vastly superior  Alter Ego interview is more revealing, candid, and narratively exciting because it actually tells the truth. Here are some very important facts in that interview that are not in the book: Robinson’s sadness and outrage over the tragedy of Bill Finger; Robinson’s relationship with the tortured Wally Wood; the real story of Bob Kane’s deal with DC, and Robinson’s feelings on it; Robinson’s important encounter with an aged Jack Liebowitz; Robinson’s sadness over his renumeration for the Joker. For whatever reason, most of what makes Robinson interesting — his well-informed opinions and his eloquent understanding of the plight of his colleagues–is left out, replaced by platitudes and a bizarre tunnel vision about the importance of corporate properties. And here is the crux of the matter: Robinson was a good superhero artist. Not great, but solid.  His friend Meskin was better. As was Barry, Tuska, Roussos, Kirby, Toth, Fine, Crandall, and many others. Robinson’s lines can sag, and there’s a certain absence of zip to his work, leaving it somewhat static on the page. And that’s fine. Trying to make a case for Robinson-the-artistic-genius is bound to fail. He himself would agree, I think, that some of the guys around him were better, and, when working with them, made him better.

See, Robinson seems at peace with himself even if his biographer is not. Unlike so many of his peers (and interestingly, somewhat like Jules Feiffer), he reconciled himself to the inequities of comic books and moved on. He became a sophisticated mid-century humanist. He had a real and active liberal consciousness. His editorial work is a little bland looking now, but was clever and politically aware and counted. He put his money where his mouth was, brokering the Siegel and Shuster deal with DC and founding a global political cartoon syndicate so that newspapers could receive a multiplicity of international voices.

So there is this strange disconnect in this book between the man and his work. It’s clear Robinson is an admirable, intelligent guy. He cared for his colleagues and cared for his world. And he put it in his work. But it’s not great work — it’s earnest and well-intentioned. That’s a very difficult thing to tease out in a monograph that is, of course, inherently visual. And every bit of overpraise, every celebrity photo, every painting we see, every generic image — chips away at his real legacy and dodges the interesting schism inherent in Robinson. He deserves better.

Labels: books about comics, Jerry Robinson, Mort Meskin, Self-Immolation