Good stories often run deeper than
we realize.
For example, is 1933’s King Kong just an adventure about a
giant gorilla? Or is it about a powerful black
thing that is taken from its jungle in
chains and brought to America where it wants to escape and grab white women?
Did the filmmakers intend the
story as a racist nightmare? No. Is it, nevertheless, unconsciously and in the
context of the Depression era? Yes.
That’s one of the elements that gave
the story its power, one of the reasons why a clearly absurd tale didn’t play
as absurd to those audiences sitting there like the Manhattan crowd of pampered
swells in the film, waiting for Kong to break free. On some deep, dreamy level,
those audiences knew the story that was flickering up there in front of them
seemed real. What we repress consciously comes back to us unconsciously.
Although I’d seen Son of Kong and King Kong vs. Godzilla, I’d missed seeing the brilliant original
film as a kid. So I never learned the actual story until Gold Key published its
one-shot, 64-page comic book adaptation in the tempestuous summer of 1968.
“Perhaps the seminal monstrous
creature film, the 1933 movie of Merian Cooper’s book, King Kong, remains a timeless example of the public’s need to be
frightened,” wrote George Haberberger in the Atomic Avenue blog. Thirty-five
years later in 1968, Gold Key published a 64-page adaptation of the classic
movie. Gold Key, (the comic printing arm of Western Publishing Company), was
well known for adapting popular television shows like Star Trek and Man from UNCLE for
comics.
“The artist, Alberto Giolitti,
lived in Rome and mailed his pages back to the United States at a time when
living in New York was considered a prerequisite for working in comics. He
illustrated Gold Key’s Star Trek
series without actually having seen the show, but presumably he had seen King
Kong. His depictions of Skull Island and its fantastic denizens are balanced by
his equally impressive representation of 1930s New York in this tragic tale of
a monster and his impossible love.”
No comments:
Post a Comment