Of course, the Spanich and the Italianos and the Deutchman have also had the Fumetti, that odd ripoff of the comic book that features grown people cavorting and posing in front of the still camera in bits of sequential soap opera. That's something that almost never took off in Amurrica for reasons that I've never understood because I really liked what I saw in National Lampoon magazine as a young teen. Of course it was also one of the few places you could see unfettered female chests unairbrushed or Douglas Kenny in the days before he became deadified.

Fumetti are fascinating to me because they are an interesting divot in the grounds that movies and comics play their little games on. Movies have been made from graphic novels fairly often recently, as with "Road to Perdition" and "Sin City", but, oddly, little recognition is made, except among Fellini fellologists, that movies have been made from Fumetti! Fumetti magazines are as popular in some localities as manga have become in Japan and my daughter's High School.

Back to the graphic novel. There is an odd piece of pucky called "From Hell", which was a graphic novel about Jack the Ripper that was made into a strange and disturbingly bad graphic movie called by the same name and starring somebody named Johnny Depp. I ran across this literary effort in a public library that takes great pains to make sure that minors don't check out "R" rated movies. "From Hell" the graphic novel, which was VERY graphic, with blood and severed breasts and, well, a lot of yucky stuff, could be checked out by teens with access to the upper floor, but the movie, which was VERY graphic, with severed... well, you get the idea, could not. I pointed this out to the librarian who had ordered the graphic novels in a fit of modern liberalness, although she admitted never really reading them because "comic books are for kids"...

Graphic novels are not for kids. They are for adults who never grew up. Sorry, Will Eisner, but most sequential art is for the lowest common denominator and is often created by the same. Witness Rebecca Ramen Stamo's costume in the X-men movies, something Stan Lee could never have put on the Marvel page in the sixties or seventies and gotten away with it with a whole skin. There is an element of porn to graphic novels and pectorally-enhanced but strangely genitalless costumed hero comix alike.

Back in the fifties a bunch of well-educated and bored people decided that the juvenile delinquency that followed the adult delinquency of WWII was simply not going to be tolerated. And part of that intolerance was tracking down the deviants responsible for leading the little innocents down the path of unrighteousness, namely the comic book publishers. That's right, folks, you heard it here first: the masterminds of the Communist conspiracy to render the bodily fluids of America Herself impure had insidiously, after invading Hollywood and raping the minds of the adults, insinuated their foul ideology into the seemingly innocent and childlike comic book pages and implanted horrible subliminal images that made otherwise virginal and pious pimple-free white American youth light up joints, raid the liquor cabinet, dress funny, talk funny, listen to weird and savage music created by Communist sympathizer black people, and *GASP*, HAVE SEX!

So, these well-dress and half-educated people, who probably thought that Bowdler's sister had a really good idea when it came to Shakespeare, took on the comics industry, put out of business the one's they didn't like (most famously EC Comics, which soon spawned MAD magazine) and made the few remaining ones sign on to a CODE that stated what they could show and what they couldn't show, right down the last nipple and crotch. What's truly weird is that the very same thing happened to the movies back in the 30s with the Hays Code. Mae West alone was partially to blame for that, without showing very much at all, but promising quite a lot.

Anyway, the uncoded comics went underground, to emerge in the mid-sixties to inveigle an entirely new generation to light up joints, raid the medicine cabinet, dress funny, talk funny, listen to weird and savage music created by Communist sympathizer liberal arts college drop-outs, and *groan* HAVE SEX! So maybe the folks in the Fifties had a point.

Flash forward to the eighties, when comics have had a resurgence due to dotcom geeks having more money than sense and fanboys staying at home much longer than any Italian would permit, working late nights in video stores and pestering the local Comic vendor for the latest issue of Wolverine or Gambit. Comics became a big deal, with alternate covers, reissues of classics with new art, alternate world and alternate reality and alternate timestream sagas, what-if cross-generational and cross-genre team-ups and vigorous attempts to avoid what happened to "Howard the Duck" and duplicate the success of "Conan The Barbarian".

Independent comic companies sprang up, with artists new and old paying tribute to their vintage favorites and trying things the staid old fogies at DC and Marvel wouldn't allow.

And in the midst of all this were the hardcore, um, bored guys, who were tired of writing scripts for old series and inking in drawings of women with big breasts but no clitorae. They wanted to write and draw LITERATURE. Notice that three of the first four letters of that word spell LIE. You can also find the letters TIT in there if you look really hard, but don't bother since I've done it for you.

So, once upon a time, "The Watchmen" was released upon the world, along with "The Dark Knight Returns" and "Superman Does Dallas" and "Vampirella Gets Her Nails Done". The Watchmen comic was great. I've owned the trade paperback a couple times and I was proud when the otherwise clueless library lady bought a copy to go along with the censored and uncensored versions of Dragonball. Now, "The Watchmen" was a true adult comic mainly because it treated the costumed heroes as adults, as people who had mental problems, needed to go to the bathroom occasionally, got old, sick and overweight, and HAD SEX!

I know that the idea of Bruce Wayne, wearing half his Batman costume, sitting there dejectedly (because he couldn't get a date) engaging in physical masturbation in the loo of the Batcave on Valentine's evening has kept many of you awake through a dark and sleepless night. After cavorting through the metropolis and the universe with Wonder Woman and Harley Quinn, poor Bats still had to keep his hands to himself. And I know that many of you who don't write or read fanfiction (what a name for what it really is!) have still harboured what-if fantasies of popular heroes and mythical characters. Well, so have the new writers of the NEW LITERATURE, GRAPHIC NOVELS. They didn't have the rights to the old characters, so they created new ones and ran them through the mangle. Some who didn't have any ideas of their own went back and stole public domain concepts, like "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" or the Jack the Ripper conundrum. Still others, lacking the savoir faire of Monsewer Manara, headed straight for the filth, and seeking some sort of legitimacy, drew hard-to-look-at black and grey art and substituted the standard voice-over or balloon-filled narrative with nothing. The graphic novel pages became shadow plays of pantomime. And not the Christmas sort, neighther.

A whole new audience spranged up, who were tantalized by the brazenness and filthiness of the NEW ART FORM. People who couldn't write and couldn't draw pumped out their own slickly packaged tomes of crud and won awards for it. Nevermind that R. Crumb had done it all before thirty years before and did it better and more betterly drawn, with better writers coming up with material for him. Nevermind that R. Crumb had elevated filth and perversion to a satirical black humoured art form that is hard to match outside of Von Bode's "Cheech Wizard".

One of the odd and tragic things about "The Matrix", "The X-men", "Road to Perdition", and "Bulletproof Monk" ( I liked the movie better than the comic) is that the moviemakers want to be taken seriously as filmmakers and artists and yet they couldn't take themselves seriously enough to create their own stuff. They had to be serious with someone else's. There will be no mention of Kevin Smith in this article. Robert Rodriguez is the only comic artist that I am aware of who has learned to make his own movies. He is also one of the few of the new moviemakers who doesn't really take himself all that seriously and the result is some pretty good stuff. Almost good enough to merit a Fumetti or two of his movies.