A Serious Look at the World of Comics : Documentary Coincides With Annual Convention

With his documentary “Comic Book Confidential,” film maker Ron Mann hopes to take audiences through the same discovery process he experienced four years ago, when a friend exposed him to the modern world of comics for the first time.

“They didn’t look like comics, and they weren’t about the things I thought comics were about, things like superheroes and talking ducks,” Mann said in a recent interview from his Toronto home. “It was mind-blowing. There was a subculture I didn’t even know existed.”

This week, San Diego becomes a mecca for this subculture, a gathering place for the devoted followers of the Dark Knight, Superman, Zippy the Pinhead and other comic heroes past and present. After two days of meetings among industry professionals, the San Diego Comic Convention, considered to be the largest and most inclusive convention of its kind in North America, begins a three-day public run Thursday at the San Diego Convention & Performing Arts Center and the Omni Hotel.

To coincide with the convention, Mann’s “Comic Book Confidential,” perhaps the first full-length documentary to spotlight comic book creators as artists, will begin a weeklong run Friday at the Ken Theater.

The movie and convention share a common goal: the promotion of comics as an art form.

“From the very beginning, the film was intended to be propagandistic,” Mann said. “We wanted to change people’s attitudes, just as my attitudes changed.”

Besides chronicling the often-rocky history of comics--a point brought home in the movie by footage of comic books being burned in the 1950s and William Gaines describing how censorship led him to create Mad magazine--”Comic Book Confidential” portrays comic book creators as something more than cartoonists.

The movie is whimsical, with comic segues, bouncy music and an overly dramatic, cartoon-like atmosphere to the storytelling. Through the words of the artists, it examines the essence of comic books, from the early “funny pages” to the underground artists that emerged in San Francisco in the 1960s to the overtly cynical Lynda Barry.

The tone is often reverential. Twenty-two artists are shown, often narrating scenes from their own work.

“As I started researching, I found the creators knew the potential of their medium,” Mann said. “I wanted to preserve the integrity of their work, not turn it into a Saturday morning cartoon.”

Mann and his crew twice filmed interviews at the San Diego Comic Convention, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. In addition to attracting fans from all over the world, the convention, described by Mann as the “Cannes Film Festival of comics,” is a meeting ground for people in the comics industry.

“The San Diego convention really gets the turnout, not only the Marvel and DC people, but also the independents,” said Charles Lippincott, the film’s production executive.

This year’s convention will feature many of the artists spotlighted in the film, such as Jack Kirby, co-creator of the “Fantastic Four,” and Will Eisner, creator of the seminal comic strip “The Spirit” in the 1940s. More than 10,000 people attended last year’s convention.

The San Diego convention is “probably the one opportunity for people who read comics to actually meet the people behind them,” said Tony Edwards, manager of Golden Apple Comics in Los Angeles, who found “Comic Book Confidential” a “fascinating history of comics.”

The stated purpose of the convention is to “turn people on to the good aspects” of comics, according to David Scroggy, organizer of the convention’s trade show and a board member of San Diego Comic Convention Inc., the nonprofit group that stages the annual event.

The film and convention share several themes, including the popular superhero comics and the underground artists.

“It’s not oil and water,” Mann said.

A few years ago, Scroggy made a special trip to San Francisco to enlist the support of underground cartoonists such as Robert Crumb, creator of “Zap Comix.”

Once the modern comic artists began attending, the San Diego Convention became the leading convention of its kind, enjoying unprecedented support from the comic community.

“A lot of the artists and writers bring people to the convention at their own expense,” Scroggy said.

Lippincott, a longtime comic book fan, first brought Mann to the convention three years ago.

“There were adults there--that was a shock,” said Mann, whose previous films include documentaries on poetry (“Poetry in Motion”) and jazz musicians (“Imagine the Sound”).

Lippincott, the president of his own marketing firm, whose credits include stints as vice president with the MGM/UA, Dino De Laurentis and the Star Wars corporations, encouraged Mann to explore the topic. For many years, Lippincott had been fascinated by the connection between comics and films. When he taught film at the University of California at San Diego in 1970 and ‘71, he used comic books as a teaching tool.

“With comic books you can actually see how a story is told using illustrated panels,” he said.

Mann’s project started rolling when he was able to arrange funding through such groups as the Swann Foundation, a New York-based group established to promote the idea of comics as art. While he was working behind the scenes on the movie “Legal Eagles” in New York, he began working on “Comic Book Confidential.”

“During the day I was shooting Robert Redford and Daryl Hannah, and at night I started shooting cartoonists,” Mann said.

The film became a three-year project. Fifty-five cartoonists were actually filmed, although only 22 were eventually included in the film. Mann said he was trying to use artists that demonstrated the progression of comics.

Ultimately the movie relies on the artists to speak of the art form. For example, Eisner movingly tells of the joy he experiences as an artist.

“Comics deal on two levels,” he says. “It has a completion to it that satisfies me.”

First released in Canada in the fall of 1988, the film, never intended to be a blockbuster, has only been “moderately successful,” according to a spokesman for Cinecom Pictures, distributors of the film.

However, Mann already has found his satisfaction.