Our pal Todd Klein — you know, the guy who always wins the Best Letterer award at the Eisners — posts these great logo studies in which he discusses the fine art of designing logos for comic book covers. He's recently completed a six-part analysis of the logos on DC romance books which among other things, convinces me that one of the things that killed off that genre was that most of the logos were expertly rendered but unsightly. Not that that was the main reason love comics went away. There were at least three other more salient factors, I think:
At a time when other comics were evolving towards longer stories about recurring characters with more personality, romance comics were resisting. Most stories remained short. Most protagonists remained cardboard. And if some character did stand out, he or she was married or moving out of town within about eight pages, never to be seen again.
At a time when mores and sexual attitudes in the nation were becoming more liberated and open, love comics — perhaps of necessity — clung to not even 1950's sensibilities but often to something from the forties. They felt to young readers like what your parents wanted you to think sex was like, which is to say there wasn't any involved in the mating process.
Not all the time but too often, the company used lower-paid, less dynamic talent on the books. It was that old, suicidal attitude of "Hey, sales are down, let's cheapen the product." It got especially lethal when they started saving money by intermingling reprints of older stories, thereby exacerbating Salient Factor #2 above. They'd have the clothes and hair styles redrawn by rather mediocre artists...and I oughta know because I was briefly one of them. And sometimes, they'd really hip things up by replacing a reference in the dialogue to Elvis Presley with one about The Beatles. But it just made square books seem even squarer.
The logos were a problem, too. You can almost sense the indecision in them, sense that the editors weren't sure if they were aiming for the crowd that bought other kinds of comics or for the romance magazine buyers. Ultimately, they snagged neither...and romance comics went away. Todd gives us a good look at their cover identities. Here's Part One. Here's Part Two. Here's Part Three. Here's Part Four. Here's Part Five. And here's Part Six. And you might enjoy Todd's entire blog which as you might expect, does not have a fancy, personalized logo. Todd is much too popular to work for someone like Todd.
This runs a half-hour and the sound is a little out-of-sync. Then again, the sound was a little out-of-sync on everything Edgar Bergen did, at least in TV and movies where you could see his lips move more when Mortimer Snerd was speaking than Clint Eastwood's do when Clint Eastwood is speaking. Still, we love Mr. Bergen and Mr. Snerd and Charlie McCarthy and their general funniness. Jim Backus is also in this and he's pretty funny, too. It's a special from 1950 and I see at the end, it was directed by Alan Dinehart.
I assume this is the same Alan Dinehart I worked with in the seventies and eighties in the animation business. He occasionally acted, wrote or produced but primarily worked as a voice director. For a long time, he voice-directed all the Ruby-Spears shows like Plastic Man and Thundarr the Barbarian, and we had a friendly but occasionally-contentious relationship. But I'm a bit confused about all the Alan Dineharts who have worked in Hollywood and the Internet Movie Database is more confused than I am. They list five or six separate individuals who are either Alan Dinehart or Alan Dinehart Jr. and I think there have only been three.
The first was a prolific character who passed in 1944. I think all his credits are correct but he had a son Alan and a grandson Alan. The son, who was born in 1918 and died in 1992, is the one I worked with and he had a long career in both cartoons and live-action, writing and directing...and I think most of the Alan Dineharts they list are him. Grandson Alan Dinehart was born in 1936 and they have him listed but I'm pretty sure most if not all the credits they have for him are actually his father's.
If and when I get the time (ha), I may try to straighten this all out. But there must be someone reading this who knows more about the various Alan Dineharts than I do. If that person could help out, I'd be most grateful. The Alan I knew deserves a factual recital of his amazing career...which I suspect was more vast than the IMDB will ever be able to itemize. And now, here are Edgar and his friends...
February 22, 2010
