The Modern Mono Lisa

Why has Donald Duck become a masochist? Does the disappearance of Mickey Mouse's goodness presage a decline of the West? How much power is conveyed in "bang" and "pow"? Such weighty questions were debated last week at Bordighera, Italy, at the first international exhibition of comic strips.

Exhibition participants, who examined and ponderously commented on all manner of comic-strip techniques, included an assortment of professors, movie directors, publishers, and three imported American comic-strip writers: Al Capp (Li'I Abner), Alfred Andriola (Kerry Drake), Lee Falk (Mandrake, the Magician). Most of the participants seemed thoroughly convinced that significant trends can be discerned in the way Li'l Abner runs from girls or scratches his head.

Violence was a favorite topic. Denying that comics corrupt the young, Professor Fausto Bongioanni declared: "The comics prepare a child for life. Let us accept the facts; life is not sweet." "I have found a moral decline in Walt Disney's comics," announced Professor Giovanni Bertin. "The positive character Mickey Mouse has been replaced by the negative Donald Duck. The emergence of an evil Donald Duck is a bad omen for American mores."

No more ardent comic fan was on hand than French Film Director Alain Resnais, who acknowledges that some of the techniques he used in Last Year at Marienbad were based on Mandrake. Resnais hopes to make a movie with Falk, but why, he wanted to know, did Mandrake warm up to Narda back in 1950? Did Falk change the relationship deliberately? Replied a rather stunned Falk: "I can't even remember what I was writing in those days, but I'm sure it wasn't deliberate."

The fact that the exhibition was held at all is largely due to the interest of French intellectuals who have touched off a European comic-strip boom. Today, Resnais told Andriola, early Charlie Chan strips fetch about $50 each, and original proofs are worth much more. Swallowing hard, Andriola replied that he had recently thrown away all his Charlie Chan proofs: "Resnais looked at me as though I had destroyed the Mona Lisa."

The whole affair was a heady experience for the American comic-strip writers, who have long taken for granted that they are part of the American subculture. Said Al Capp: "At home, nobody has ever asked me for an autograph for himself. It's always for a demented brother who reads my junk, or his idiot nephew. Writers don't take you seriously because you draw. Artists don't take you seriously because you write. Now we come to Europe to find out that it's deep stuff, and if I stay around these guys much longer, I might begin to believe it."

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