Geekdom is a small world sometimes...

So, follow me here: a few nights ago, Wonder Wife and I watched The Rocketeer,  the 1991 movie based on the classic Dave Stevens pulpy comic book series (that had several homes and incarnations in its all-too-brief run). The movie is pretty goofy, more matinee fun than anything, and there are some great turns by folks like Jennifer Connelly, Alan Arkin, Timothy Dalton, and Paul Sorvino (and a pre-Lost Terry O'Quinn as Howard Hughes) as they support Billy Campbell as the high-flying hero.

Anyway, the main muscle for the bad guys is Lothar, a giant, hulking thug in a porkpie hat, played by actor Tiny Ron Taylor:

IIRC, Lothar wasn't in the original series (although he was apparently added to a later adventure created after the movie was made).  The character is clearly modeled on The Hoxton Creeper, a character played by actor Rondo Hatton in the 1944 Sherlock Holmes movie The Pearl of Death:

Now, Tiny Ron Taylor, the movie Lothar, was a big guy - seven feet tall according to his own website - but he was just a guy who gets his clothes at the Big & Tall Shop and was pretty average looking. Here's Tiny Ron without his Lothar makeup:

 

But Rondo Hatton suffered from acromegaly. This pituitary gland disorder is sometimes associated with gigantism, but surprisingly for his image, Hatton was only average height - maybe a little tall, but certainly not Tiny Ron size. The effects of his condition can be seen more in his facial features, which were distorted by the disorder - his Creeper visage was not done with prosthetics. Here's a typical publicity shot:

So as I was researching all of this after watching the movie, a little bell went off. Remember my review of  Different Ugliness, Different Madness from a few weeks ago? The French graphic novel about two lost souls finding each other? Here's their first meeting from that story:

Let's zoom in on that last panel:

Look familiar?

Now, that there are hommages in Paul Stevens's work is nothing surprising - his stuff was practically wall-to-wall period references and riffs. But why would a French cartoonist working in 2005 use the image of a Hollywood actor who had died in 1946 as the model for his forlorn and alienated character? I can't find a connection between Hatton and France besides his having served there in the First World War. Did Marc Males Google acromegaly and find a picture of Hatton? Or had he watched The Rocketeer too?

Or is is just that all of us nerdy types, whether creators or audience, are all drawn to the same stuff?

5 x 5 Bande Dessinée Critique: L'autre laideur, l'autre folie

Different Ugliness, Different Madness by Marc Males
Published byHumanoids/DC Comics, 2005

1.  This 5 x 5 review also has a late to the party tag: apparently it was part of a short-lived DC Comics venture into publishing French graphic novels about ten years ago; I found it in the mark-down bins of a comic shop while I was waiting to take Wonder Wife to her birthday dinner last month.  I picked up several sale items that evening and this was the best of the lot, by far.

2.  This is a comic that has the feel of a French art film: slow-moving, quiet, and living in its details. It tells the story of two lost - or at least displaced - souls encountering one another in rural 1930s America, and its narrative is driven by small steps, tiny gestures, and unhurried interactions as opposed to action and conflict. There is a story arc, and the narrative structure includes flashbacks and flash-forwards, but as a reader I was less interested in rushing the plot forward and more interested in just watching how these people would behave as their circumstances unfolded.

3. But this is not a movie, it is a comic, and it is a wonderfully technique-driven one. You could use Different Ugliness, Different Madness as a course text to accompany Scott McCloud's books: excellent controlled and effective examples of the six forms of transition from Understanding Comics and the five choices from Making Comics seem to jump off the page. Males makes comics the way Hitchcock or DePalma make movies: with a thorough understanding of exactly what strings they are pulling to manifest their vision. And we relish experiencing every manifestation of their craft.

4. One odd note: I don't know if this was part of the original art design or something that happened in the translation process, but the lettering is smaller than it needs to be for the size of the word balloons. The result is a proportionality that reads more like whispering in most mainstream comics, but that is clearly not the intent, for it is used consistently even when it is obvious that voices are louder. It took a while to get used to, but then it just reinforced the feeling of an old movie.

5. The French idea of what a Depression-era American farmer looked like seemed a little off to me, but I am a city boy, so what do I know.

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