Page Created: 09/16/10. Last Updated: 11/01/10. Last Google Group Page Update: 05/10/08.
ARLEN SCHUMER
Books:
Visions from The Twilight Zone
The Silver Age of Comic Book Art
Neal Adams: The Sketch Book
Contributor To:
The Amazing World of Carmine Infantino
Curt Swan: A Life in Comics
Streetwise
Arlen Schumer Website (Dynamic Duo Studio):
http://www.dynamicduostudio.com/
Arlen Schumer on My Space:
MEETING SUMMARY:
Meeting Date: April 12, 2008.
Meeting Site: Saddle River Valley Cultural Center, Upper Saddle River.
Official Attendance: 17.
Meeting Program: Talk by Media Writer.
Notes:
Meeting Memories:
Newsletter Account:
The following account is reprinted with permission from THE STARSHIP LOCAL Copyright 2008 Philip J De Parto:
The most recent meeting of the Science Fiction Association of Bergen County was held on Saturday, April 12, 2008 at the Saddle River Valley Cultural Center in Upper Saddle River, New Jersey. Author Arlen Schumer was the guest speaker. It was a good, if complicated, meeting.
The first area of uncertainty dealt with the meeting site. The meeting had originally been scheduled for the Cultural Center. Then the Methodists, who own the Center, requested that we swap meeting sites with their Seder and hold the meeting at the Church across the street. This would minimize the dinner's inconvenience but to the remodeling of the Church kitchen. We agreed and sent out the Meeting Notice stating the change of venue. The day before the meeting, the Methodists asked us to switch back to the Cultural Center as the remodeling had not yet actually started. We again agreed, asking them to send anyone looking for the Science Fiction Meeting to the Center.
The other complication was the hospitalization of S F A B C Director Philip De Parto's father about a week before the meeting. Running back and forth to the hospital and associated matters took up a lot of time and energy, delayed the newsletter, short circuited publicity, and truncated other behind the scenes prep work for the meeting. On Saturday afternoon I got a call from by brother telling me to get to the hospital because the end was near. My brother, sister, and I were with him when he left us a little after 5:32 PM.
Pamela Webber covered as best she could, opening the Center, and bringing the television, DVD player, and other club supplies with her. Then she had to go home to take care of her mother before the start of the meeting.
Fortunately, Arlen Schumer was the perfect speaker for this event, a self-starter who required little hand-holding. Newcomer Thomas Schoenborne was of invaluable assistance in providing technical support for Arlen's Powerpoint presentation. We had had a three way correspondence arranging matters in the week leading up to the meeting.
Arlen had suggested showing TWILIGHT ZONE episodes in place of our usual pre meeting animation. Chuck showed three episodes, "Where Is Everybody? (the series pilot), "Eye of the Beholder," and "Number Twelve Looks Just Like You." Our guest gave commentary on each of these shows.
The first episode shown, "Where Is Everybody?" engendered a particularly hearty discussion. Since I wasn't there, I'll quote from Mr Shumer's book:
Virtually every TWILIGHT ZONE them is implicit in the premiere episode "Where Is Everybody?" (10/2/59). This terse tale of a uniformed amnesiac who finds himself totally alone in a mysterious abandoned town--but feeling somehow under observation--manages to conflate loss of identity with the end of the world, suggesting the transformation of ordinary reality into an overdetermined realm of inauthentic experience. For the next five years, THE TWILIGHT ZONE's key recurring image would be that of the empty place, the department store after hours, the deserted city, the barren asteroid. (Page 150)
When the last of the episodes was over, the viewers went upstairs to join the rest of the gang and begin the meeting proper.
Mr Schumer is the author of VISIONS FROM THE TWILIGHT ZONE, a coffee table volume from Chronicle Books which explores the art and set design of the series as surrealism and the writing of the show as existentialism.
The slide show focused on five themes the author considered central to the program: "A Question of Identity," "The Time Experiment," "Science and Superstition," "Suburban Nightmares," and "Obsolete Man." He gave illustrations for each of these themes from a number of different episodes.
"A Question of Identity" is probed in "Number Twelve Looks Just Like You" in which a young teen is medically altered to look and think like everyone else, in "Eye of the Beholder" in which a young woman undergoes surgery to make her look like the rest of her race, and in various episodes featuring manikins, robots, puppets, and dolls come to life, pass as being alive, or take on characteristics of being alive.
I arrived after the slide show had concluded and the meeting had resumed following the customary break. The dialogue had moved to the subject of comic books, another topic upon which Mr Schumer has written.
Our guest believes that the best comic book art is as good as the work of the Old Masters, and certainly superior to the vast majority of Modern Art championed by the galleries and museums. Until a major museum is willing to do a serious exhibit on the material, comic book art will be relegated to the sidelines.
Mr Schumer believes that comics are modern myth making and that the only way to do justice to them is to make the images larger than life. Hanging comic books on a museum wall or mounting the not much larger original art is not going to capture the spirit of the drawings. Instead, they should be blown up to dominate the walls upon which they are displayed.
There was talk about movie adaptations, about the importance of Kirby, Ditko, and other Silver Age artists, and encounters wth the men who designed THE TWILIGHT ZONE logo and the theme music. Thanks go to Theresa Verhaalen, Barry Weinberger, Thomas Schoenborne, and everyone else who helped out.