The superhero-movie trend wasn't going to die on the vine in the unlikely event that Watchmen-the-movie bombed, and the word on the street is that it didn't bomb, so if you fancy yourself a leading man, you'd better look good in spandex. New potential franchises have already been lining up on the tarmac; a while back, we reported that the job of directing a movie about the mighty Thor has been handed to Kenneth Branagh, who I'm sure will do every bit as well by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby as he did by Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, and Rita Rudner. I can't help but feel, though, that a golden opportunity is still sitting on the shelf there, continuing to be overlooked. I think we've pretty well established that Alan Moore makes for box office, and who has Alan Moore named as his own personal favorite superhero? Herbie, that's who! Herbie, Herbie Popnecker, Herbie the Fat Fury! The scarily bearded bard of Northampton is not alone in his idolatry. There has long been a teeming, steaming cult of Herbie brewing just below the demarcation line we call common sense. But where's our movie? Every so often, lo these past several years, word has gotten out that someone in Hollywood has given the greenlight to a Herbie movie. The pattern is always the same: dancing breaks out in the streets, the good champagne is uncorked, strangers hug each other in Times Square, babies are conceived. Then the morning after arrives and it turns out that the movie is about that damned Volkswagen again.
The creation of writer "Shane O'Shea" (a pseudonym for Richard E. Hughes, editor of the independent comics publisher ACG) and artist Ogden Whitney, Herbie first appeared in the December, 1958 issue of ACG's Forbidden Worlds. A product of that patch of suburbia that would later cast its siren song at David Lynch and John Waters, he was a round little boy with a bowl haircut and a pair of eyeglasses that were the liveliest thing on his poker face. A man of few words, Herbie seldom spoke up except to wave his trademark sucker at people and threateningly inquire, "You want I should bop you with this here lollipop?", a tag line that would later be tightened up and employed by TV's Kojak. Herbie's super powers--including a mighty punch, a menacing stare that could, and did, break the devil, the ability to communicate with animals, and a knack for time travel that helped him to become recognized as a hero and savior to many different civilizations throughout history--were firmly in place from the outset, while he was just waddling about in his Sansabelt slacks. Eventually, though, feeling that he had some responsibility, as the star of a comic book, to try to fit in with the superhero community, he did create for himself the alternate identity of the caped avenger the Fat Fury, flying through the skies barefoot with a toilet plunger on his head.
Like many a pulp hero, from Zorro and the Scarlet Pimpernel down to Superman, Herbie was in a way his own rival, scorned by a love object who admired the Fat Fury without ever guessing that he and the seemingly inadequate Herbie were one and the same. In the case of Herbie, the love object in question was no fair maiden but Herbie's gruff and clueless father, whose open loathing of his offspring seemed to cause Herbie little distress. At the same time, the legions of panting women who offered themselves to our hero, none of whom showed much conern about the fact that he was theoretically too young to be dating, had no effect on him either. As you might expect of a young man who was frequently seen to cut class to make a special meeting with Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, he had his mind on weightier matters. In a recurring development that has probably inspired more than one graduate thesis in the field of Cultural Studies, women who had been spurned by Herbie often ended up running off with the livestock, as if just knowing that Herbie was out there somewhere had ruined them for the human race.
Will there ever be a Herbie movie, ideally one directed a safe distance from Kenneth Branagh? Herbie fans have learned to be disappointed. ACG went under in 1967, three years after Herbie finally got his own book. In 1992, Dark Horse boldly announced that it was bringing out a 12-issue Herbie series consisting mostly of reprints from the long-gone ACG books; it crapped out after two issues were published, making it the Big Numbers of reprint series. Herbie later made a guest appearance in Bob Burden's Flaming Carrot comic, but this was after the magic had gone from both characters, and the results were sort of like those end-of-the-road appearances by the Three Stooges, where the spectacle of men in their late sixties poking each other in the eye seemed less like a cause for amusement than a desperate cry for help. The good news is that Dark Horse has finally done penance for having whiffed in 1992 by bringing out the complete ACG Herbie comics in three hardcover volumes, the last of which comes out next month. These handsome hardcover editions retail in the neighborhood of fifty dollars apiece and would cheer up anyone who needs to unwind after a long argument with the landlord about when the rent check will clear. Now that this material is readily available, maybe some Hollywood A-lister will finally see the potential that starring in a Herbie movie has to take his career to the next level. I don't mean any particular Hollywood A-lister, it could be any Hollywood A-lister, oh, any number of kaff kaff Philip Seymour Hoffman kaff Hollywood A-listers could have a triumph in the role.
