DORIS DANGER!

COMMENTARY:

Inked by Dick Ayers!

LAZY VAGUENESS

If you look at the page 035 – Script, you’ll notice that page four, panel 2 coincides with panel four of this page – but that there’s no mention of “mutated mongoloid midgets.” There’s just a vague suggestion that something is going on, to “entice the reader.”

I hated writings like that, but the ideas weren’t yet developed in my head. I didn’t know what “the truth” was yet, I just had the general idea that there SHOULD be a “truth” that everybody knows or doesn’t know except the reader, so I had no choice except for the story to “keep you in suspense”. So I jotted down “the truth is more horrifying than anyone expects!” It’s a cop-out. It’s easy for something to be more horrifying than anyone expects, if you don’t know what it is.

I overheard an artist I very much admire talking with one of his fans. He said, “At home, I have created the most amazing, most touching painting of this superhero you will ever see. It will bring tears to your eyes! But I will never publish it!” Well, that may be or it may not be. It actually doesn’t MATTER if it is or not, if you look at it that way. That’s kind of how I felt the writing of my panel was. Why even say it.

OFFENSIVE AGAIN

(NOTE: I spoke more about offensive material on page 033 – Commentary.)

So by the time I drew the page and lettered it, I decided, there needed to be at least SOME HINT of what “the truth” was. And “mutated mongoloid midgets” was my solution.

However, I knew that it’s considered a derogatory term, and that didn’t sit well with me to use the term in my comic. Alliteration be damned!

Here is what the Little People of America have to say about the use of the word, midget.  It’s a really succinct, important, article.  “…created as a label used to refer to people of short stature who were on public display for curiosity and sport.”

While we’re on the subject, HERE is a great article on the derogatory use of the words, “Mongoloid” and “Mongol.”

While creating this story, my friend Wayne Jones was helping me with the post-production of the comic. I would scan the pages, and we’d go over the files, then size and clean them, get them in order and ready for the printer, get the text pages lain out, that kind of stuff that I didn’t know how to do yet. Actually, Wayne did the bulk of the work, but I would go over to his house toward the end, and we’d just print stuff out and look it over together. And we were discussing how it isn’t a good idea to use the word “midget.” So that’s when we decided we should have a cautionary paragraph explaining the use of the derogatory word, “midget.”

WARNING LABEL

I was thinking about how old cartoons or comics or movies often have an apologetic explanation of how times were different when the movie or whatever was made, and it’s not okay to be racist, for example, but people just … well, who knows what? How can you excuse it, you know? They just didn’t know better? Were all racists? It was an alternate reality with different standards? Everyone from that era just thought it was funny and acceptable to be racists? You know? I know, it’s REALLY complicated and none of these are entirely it, but these cautionary excuses that you hear at the beginnings of stuff sometimes just got me thinking – so I decided I’d just do a cautionary excuse too, NOT to make everything all right to be offensive, but to comment on the whole subject of it.

Here’s an introduction to the Tom and Jerry DVD set, by Whoopi Goldberg, addressing racism.  She did a similar one for a Looney Tunes DVD set.

With all these ideas in mind, we wrote our cautionary explanation.  We decided, No, we should start out as an apology for this thoroughly offensive idea, and THEN get even more offensive, like the editors just REALLY don’t get it. And that’s how the footnoted paragraph came about. It’s a technique Ricky Gervais used as his boss character in the original Office, and for much of his humor.  It is absolutely offensive and incorrect, with the intention NOT of belittling little people, but of pointing out the hurtful, uncaring, ignorant tone so many people still have toward ethnic groups.  How we don’t understand or want to try to understand, or care about the feelings of anyone if they’re not like us.

That was my intent.  All that said, it was still a portrayal I don’t feel entirely comfortable about, because it means PORTRAYING BEING hurtful and uncaring and ignorant.

INTERVIEW ON THE SUBJECT OF OFFENSIVENESS

Tim O’Shea interviewed me about the SLG Doris Danger book, back on January 4, 2010. For some reason, of the 96 pages of absurdity in the comic, he singled out this panel, and asked about it. The interview is HERE, at his “Robot 6” column on Comic Book Resources. Here’s the question and my response:

O’Shea: OK, in terms of your comedic sense, why on page 35, go to the trouble of setting up a tale “as written in 1955, republished in 1981″ and using a footnote that explains the use of the derogatory term “midget”? Are you trying to ridicule the politically correct nature of some folks when it comes to historical fiction?

Wisnia: Layers of layers. I find I’ll come up with a joke, then realize I can take it a step farther for another bad pun, and I just think stuff out way too obsessive-compulsively, to the point (I fear) it could very easily make my work inaccessible, and alienate the readers. But to me, it’s funny, heh heh…

The way this particular gag developed, I came up with the joke, and I used the word “midgets” in it for insensitivity. And then I felt guilty, so I decided I should affirm that I recognize the insensitivity. And by doing so, I could historically add layers by explaining the change in the use of the term from time period to time period.

I was thinking of when you read older books, history documents or whatever, that use the word “Negro,” or “mentally retarded,” or things like that, that were acceptable at the time but are now offensive. And how then historians always have to spend a paragraph apologizing for it. I’ve got a Loony Tunes box set where Whoopi Goldberg apologizes for some of the horrible racial stereotype gags in some of the cartoons.

And then I thought, well it would be even worse to acknowledge the insensitivity, and then ignorantly be even MORE insensitive. And you didn’t even mention how I made it a running gag, and the subject matter returned in the letters pages (page 43)!

MY IDEA OF USING LITTLE PEOPLE

Over the previous issues (and into future ones), I had been coming up with ideas of all these giant monsters being a hoax – they’re robots, they’re movie projections, they’re puppets on strings (see panel 5).  And I was developing the idea that EACH giant monster could be an attempt at experimenting with a different hoaxing technique.  So the story concept on this page is that “someone” is hiring actors with dwarfism, having them dress in masks or costumes or makeup to look like monsters, and then projecting them in some way or using visual sleight-of-hand, so that they appear to be humongous-sized, instead of little-people-sized. If you look at the proportion of many of Jack Kirby’s giant monsters, they often have shorter limbs and larger heads, which was his way of conveying power and strength:

I chose for my monsters in Doris Danger to have these proportions, way back when I was creating them in 2002.

Perhaps someone thought it was a funny joke, to play on size, or perhaps someone else agreed with my thoughts in regard to body proportions, because in Avengers: Infinity War (2018), Peter Dinklage plays Eitri the Dwarf, a fifteen foot tall master forger:

A NEW LAUGH

Notice also, in panel four, that there is a new laugh! “Guffaw guffaw!” So we first saw “tee hee“, then the chilling laugh, “hardy har!”

In panel five, the idea was that all this time they thought they were in the open air, but then it turns out they were in a building, or like a movie set, where the sky is just painted onto the walls. As if people wouldn’t know the difference between the actual sky in the open air, and being in a room with the ceiling painted to look like the sky. But then they suddenly realize it IS a room and not the sky, because these UFO’s blast through the wall that had all this time looked like sky, and NOW the truth is revealed! What an ingenious deception! Why someone would go to these lengths to do this kind of deception?? You know, like, Why don’t they just deceive Doris and Steve out in the actual jungle? Who knows? We don’t know, but that is just ONE of the mysteries we ponder in our attempt to discover … “The Truth!”