Comic Book Confidential (1989) on Netflix
PG19891h 30mDocumentary
American comic books from the 1930s through the 1980s, treated as art and set in their social context. Creators in the field discuss their contributions and read passages from their comics.
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- Netflix3.6/5
- IMDb7.0/101,133 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes75%
Trailer
Plot summary
The history of American comic books from the 1930s to the 1980s is the subject here, looked at as an art form and against the society the medium appeared in. Twenty-two figures from the field are profiled; fifty to sixty people were interviewed and seventy hours of footage were shot, with most of that left out of the finished film. Those who appear sit for interviews about the work they did and the changes the medium went through around them, and passages from their own comics are read aloud while filmograph animation moves the drawings. Decades of pages are gathered into montages, older broadcast material from a 1950s show called Confidential File is woven in, and Zippy the Pinhead turns up in live action.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Comic Book Confidential (1989)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Ron Mann was hired to make an electronic press kit for Legal Eagles, and he used the free film stock and crew he was given to interview comic book artists in New York instead. Universal Pictures was unimpressed and asked for the footage back.
- The film's title was chosen in a contest advertised in Marvel Comics; the winning entry, Comic Book Confidential, came from a suggestion by Art Spiegelman, who had put forward Comics Confidential.
- When Ron Mann pitched it as a half-hour documentary for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, producer Don Haig derided the project and asked "who reads comic books?" - then agreed to produce, and the film's length was expanded after research.
- Editor Steve Weslak cut the film with Ron Mann and Robert Kennedy, reducing a rough cut to three hours, but Mann fired him after the third rough cut and editing continued for another year.
- Animation supervisor Ellen Besen was fired after returning from a wedding and a week-long vacation; with Don Haig and Martin Harbury on other projects and Besen unable to reach Mann, the production was spinning out of control by March 1987.
- Fifty to sixty people were interviewed and 70 hours of footage shot, but only twenty-two appear in the film; among the cut interviews was Frank Zappa, who was questioned about music censorship.
- Comic Book Confidential was one of the first films released in CD-ROM format for home computer viewing, a forerunner of the 2002 DVD, and it carried 120 pages of comics and the complete Comics Code.
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