A Passion for Science - Columbia College - Columbia University

Columbia CollEgE Today BOOKShELF
A Serious look at The Joker and His Creator
Jerry Robinson, who attended the College in
the early 1940s, decided to go to Columbia
after he was offered a job illustrating a new
comic book called Batman.
N.C. Christopher Couch ’76, ’87 GSAS took a
more conventional route. “When I visited the campus
with my family, I knew instantly it was where I
wanted to be,” he says.
More than 30 years separated their time at the
University, but a love of comic books brought them
together, first as friends, then as collaborators on
Jerry Robinson: Ambassador of Comics (Abrams
Comic Arts, $35). The book charts Robinson’s life,
from his boyhood in Trenton, N.J., in the 1920s and
’30s to his appearances at Comic-Con conventions,
where he is treated as a mythic figure in comic book
history.
Couch, who teaches courses on comic art and the
graphic novel in the Program in Comparative Literature
at University of Massachusetts Amherst, conducted
more than 50 hours of interviews with Robinson, now
89, to write the book. “I just set down the tape recorder
and asked, ‘What would you like to talk about today?’ ”
Couch says.
Some of the stories Robinson told, such as how he
landed the Batman gig, are the stuff of legend. At a resort
in the Poconos, Batman’s creator, Bob Kane, took
notice of the jacket Robinson wore to play tennis. It
was covered in doodles, including one of a comb stick-
ing out of the pocket. Amused and in need of an illustrator,
Kane asked Robinson to work with him.
Robinson was 17 at the time, “a combination of tough street
kid, budding intellectual and innocent teenager,” Couch writes.
He’d planned to go to Syracuse to study journalism. Kane’s offer
prompted him to select Columbia, which would keep him in New
York City near his work.
It was in his creative writing classes at Columbia that Robinson
got the idea for his most famous character, The Joker.
“A villain with a sense of humor would be the kind of contradiction
that would make a character memorable,” Robinson told
Couch.
Financial pressures and the demands of his comic book work
pulled Robinson away from Columbia after only two years. Couch,
who arrived in New York from St. Louis, stayed 11 years, earning a
B.A in art history and three degrees at GSAS: an M.A., M.Phil. and
Ph.D., all in art history and archeology.
“I knew by my sophomore year I wanted to be a professor. I
was always in the library or Schermerhorn Hall (the home of the
art history department),” Couch says. “To relax, I loved just walking
around the campus.”
Guided by faculty such as the Lisa and Bernard Selz Professor of
Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl and
The Outcry (Library of America,
$40).
immanuel wallerstein and the
problem of the world: system,
scale, culture edited by David
Palumbo-Liu; Bruce W. Robbins, the
Old Dominion Foundation Professor
in the Humanities; and Nirvana
Tanoukhi. Top cultural theorists examine
Wallerstein’s world-systems
analysis, which explains why the
West is able to exploit the rest of
the world (Duke University Press,
$23.95).
B y am a n d a Go r d o n
PhOTO:
JIM gIPE, PIVOT MEdIA
MAY/JUNE 2011
39
Pre-Colombian Art History and Archaeology Esther
Pasztory ’71 GSAS and legendary cultural anthropologist
Margaret Meade, Couch became a scholar of
Native American and Latin American art. He wrote
his dissertation on illustrations in Aztec manuscripts.
In 1988 he joined the faculty of Smith.
Like Robinson, he too wound up with a job in
the comic book industry, becoming an editor at
Kitchen Sink Press, which specializes in comic
books.
“One lesson I’ve learned is, if anyone asks you
if you’d like to be a comic book editor, there’s
only one answer: yes.”
Couch says his five years at Kitchen Sink
changed the way he teaches. “I’ve worked with
printers, distributors, artists,” he says. “I have
a kind of understanding that you can never get
being just a scholar, and it deeply enriches my
teaching.”
It was through his job at Kitchen Sink that
Couch met Robinson and reentered academe
with a focus on comic books, teaching classes
he describes as “historical and contextual survey
courses that are totally informed by art history.”
He’s currently teaching at New York’s School of
Visual Arts and Trinity College as well as at UMass.
For his book, Couch was eager to understand
the sources of Robinson’s dark visual style. He
learned that as a teenager, Robinson had formed
a deep attachment to a volume of Edgar Allen
Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination with illustrations by Harry
Clarke. Robinson also spoke of going to see German expressionist
films at MoMA. “For the first time, I had an explanation for what
I’d seen all along,” Couch says.
The book includes more than 100 of Robinson’s illustrations.
Early on, before anyone thought of their potential historical
significance, Robinson made a habit of retrieving his original art
from printers and holding on to it. Many other artists’ work is lost
forever.
Post-Batman, Robinson created comic book heroes Atoman
and London, and then moved on to editorial cartoons, illustrations
for children’s books such as A Maxton Book About Atomic Energy,
and the comic strip True Classroom Flubs and Fluffs. In 1974
he wrote The Comics. Couch considers it the definitive history of
newspaper comic strips.
While he maintains his scholarly interests in Native American
and pre-Colombian art, “comics is No. 1 now,” Couch says. “I
don’t have any trouble with the idea of legitimizing comics. I’ve
devoted much of my life to that.”
Amanda gordon is a columnist at Bloomberg News.
a behavioral theory of Elections
by Jonathan Bendor, Daniel Diermeier,
David A. Siegel and Michael
M. Ting, associate professor of
political science and public affairs.
Using computational models and
data on elections, the authors contend
that politicians and voters are
only boundedly rational, and they
examine the effects on party competition,
voter turnout and voters’
choices of candidates (Princeton
University Press, $29.95).
Samantha Jean-Baptiste ’13