52 Films by Women Vol 3. 20. PROFESSOR MARSTON AND THE WONDER WOMEN (Director: Angela Robinson)
There aren’t many films about real-life comic book writers. The documentary Crumb and the Harvey Pekar biopic American Splendor starring Paul Giamatti spring to mind - until I saw it, I thought the latter was about a sugar substitute. We have seen characters who write comic books, such as the hero of Condorman as played by Michael Crawford. For reasons best known to Hollywood, no one has wanted to tell the story of Charles M Schulz (1922-2000), author of the ‘Charlie Brown and Snoopy’ newspaper strips, or Jim Davis, the creator of ‘Garfield’, the lasagne loving cat, or even Art Spiegelman, the author of ‘Maus’. Writing a comic strip is not (yet) considered a noble profession. Part of the reason is that because we are so drawn to their creations, we don’t want to think about who first drew them - you don’t want to know who created a deity. The real issue is that the lives of comic book writers are not overly dramatic. The principle narrative that you can construct is about the struggle ...