The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

How do you go about turning a comic (of the comedian variety) into a successful comics (of the graphical variety)? That was the question facing Stuart Hample in the mid 70s; he’d decided that Woody Allen could make a good subject for a newspaper comic strip while the writer/actor/stand-up/director was still building his now formidable reputation and, with Woody’s blessing and help the strip came into being as Allen’s star was rising fast, with many of the character quirks you’d expect of Woody from his films (especially the mid to late 70s period), the flaws, the obsessions, the panics, the relationships, causing Hample to sometimes wonder why Woody seemed so happy to have himself depicted this way in comics form for national syndication:

“I often wondered why Woody gave the concept a green light. In 1977, he related the following anecdote. He had cast the actress Mary Beth Hurt in his movie Interiors. Hurt regularly phoned her mother in Iowa to reassure her that she was safe and happy. During one of those calls, she proudly announced that she was going to play Diane Keaton’s sister in a movie “by somebody you probably haven’t heard of, a director named Woody Allen”. “I know about him,” said her mother, “he’s in the funny pages.” Woody’s manager figured it was no bad thing if his image was disseminated daily out in the heartland.”

(Dread and Superficiality: Woody Allen Comic Strip, by and (c) Stuart Hemple, published Abrams)

I’ve got to confess I’ve never come across these strip before (and I’m a huge Woody Allen fan, with a special fondness for his earlier comedy work) and found the article in the Guardian with Hample discussing how it came to be made and how it developed (with input from Woody himself) fascinating, especially Woody’s advice to ignore ‘huckster’ editors who would call for the strip to be less highbrow, less philosophical, more broad-based humour for the lowest common denominator and for the artist to go with his instincts instead. Abarams have a hardback collection of the strips, Dread and Superficiality,  coming out in early November. (thanks to David Baillie for the link)