GIRAFFES ON HORSEBACK SALADS - JOSH FRANK, TIM HEIDECKER, MANUELA PERTEGA

Another library pick-up. I’d heard of this movie before, like the Kubrick Nazi movie, or the Cage Superman film or the Jorodowsky Dune movie (which itself has a documentary very similar in tone to this comic), and it is certainly in the pantheon of famously never made movies. Perhaps in the top 5 of such dream-films. The book itself is mostly background information and histories of Dali and Harpo and their intersecting lives. Frank was able to get his hands on a treatment, some sketches and a 6 page script outline from various museums and archives and, with the help of Heidecker, wrote a script for the movie that Pertega ends up illustrating. The plot is pretty basic Dali stuff, a man, who’s an aristocratic Spaniard, exiled by the Spanish Civil War, a detail that highlights Dali’s bad politics, falls in love with The Surrealist Woman, who has the ability to make situations bizarre and surreal (ie summoning flaming giraffes) through a power that is not explained. The man was supposed to be played by Harpo and the other Marx brothers, essentially, themselves. Heidecker is a weird choice for me to punch up the script. He does have an eye for bizarre and over-the-top visuals but I don’t associate his comedy with the hyper-wordy, rapid-fire wall-to-wall schtick that Groucho is famous for. Visually, this book does cool stuff, lots of splash pages and innovative panel design and whatnot but this falls a bit flat for me because of the medium. I once heard famous curmudgeon Alan Moore talk about how comics allow you to do anything at a very low price, basically whatever it costs to pay the illustrator, while a movie costs millions and millions of dollars which makes the moral stakes higher. Basically, if you make a bad comic, no biggie, but making a bad movie wastes tons of money. This comic elides that problem but in so lowering the stakes it makes it less interesting. Obviously, Dali could have done whatever he wanted in a comic, what we missed out on from the movie was the chance to see if one could translate Dali’s insane visions into celluloid, a much more unforgiving medium than comics. So it all looks great and fine but, relative to other comics, it’s not that bizarre or strange. ‘64 flaming giraffes.