“Exit, Stage Left” & The Perils of Making A Cartoon Character Into A Depressed Historical Queer
As a number of online publications — from Vox, who referred to it as the “first great book comic of 2018”, to Paste Magazine, who featured it in its top twenty-five — will tell you, Exit Stage Left: The Snagglepuss Chronicles was a critical hit. Even its Goodreads score is on the high side, boasting a 4.32/5 with 500+ ratings. Its positive reviews cite how brilliant it is for making Snagglepuss into a queer writer in 1950s America, dealing with McCarthyism at its peak. It’s smart. It’s daring. It’s progressive. Hell, GLAAD just included it in their 2019 Media Awards recognizing “fair, accurate and inclusive representations of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer community and the issues that affect their lives.”
The truth is that it’s anything but.
Exit Stage Left follows a similar trend as many a Best Picture nominee (and winner) do: 1) take a minority and stick ’em in a narrative where they’ll become easy to relate, 2) don’t worry about the actual depiction of said minority in the narrative because you’re doing a good thing by simply showing that they exist, and 3) make people feel smart by explaining things to them and having them think they’ve learned something at the end of the day.
In the case of Snagglepuss, it’s queer people. The comic turns numerous Hanna-Barbera characters into queer men living in New York City: Snagglepuss living rather successfully, albeit closeted, as a famous writer; Huckleberry Hound as a wandering spirit in the big city, down on his luck after being caught cheating on his wife with a man; and Quick Draw McGraw as a closeted police officer who “protects” the famous Stonewall inn (yes, that Stonewall), accepting bribes to not raid the place. Augie Doggie also makes a brief appearance styled like Oscar fucking Wilde for some reason.
There is, inherently, something interesting about turning a character who was coded queer into a character who is explicitly so. Some would say this is what progress looks like, but there’s something more powerful (in my sincere opinion) about a character who was coded as queer existing in a time when queerness was suppressed. Queer audiences, for the last century, have had to find themselves in art that wasn’t necessarily made for them, with books like Vito Russo’s The Celluloid Closet and Alexander Doty’s Flaming Classics, among others, providing a handbook of how we were depicted and could find ourselves.
To take the power of subtlety and turn it into something without that, turning queerness into a literal identity that means nothing, creates a work of art without impact. There’s nothing inherently wrong with using queerness literally. After all, the 1990s gave us a boom in the arts where queerness was in your face. It was angry, it was subversive, it was unique. In 2018, things have slid into a realm where assimilation is meant to be the primary goal of the queer community.
Like many a minority that has come before us, we’re told that simply because we’re depicted, we’re meant to be happy, even if the stories that are being told are damaging and/or simply a showcase of misery. This past year it happened with Bohemian Rhapsody, it happened with A Fantastic Woman, it happened with Boy Erased, it happened with Green Book (a conversation that extends past a poor depiction of queerness and into a poor depiction of blackness, filtered through an entirely white heteronormative lens). With Exit Stage Left, Mark Russell is telling a dangerous story under the guise of chronicling history through cartoon characters.
From the get-go, Russell’s Snagglepuss comic sets itself up as a period piece about Important Things. Its first issue quickly strolls through 1950s talking points: melodramatic stage plays as hits, closeted gays at Stonewall, McCarthyism taking over America, and Batista in power in Cuba. It’s a history lesson packed into a neat miniseries, drawn by Mike Feehan in a manner that would make any artist of furry porn on DeviantArt recoil with horror (neither anthropomorphic animal or human figures look especially good and the way the two bodies interact is rather inept).
And with history comes historical figures, which the comic haphazardly includes to ground itself, almost treating Snagglepuss as a sort of Forrest Gump figure who allows us to interact with many of them. In some cases, they serve as set decoration. In others, Snagglepuss improves their lives by merely being present, a gay best friend to save the day.
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are literally executed in the comic in a shameless attempt at emphasizing “Americans love to watch people suffer” (which is especially ironic in a comic book dedicated to the suffering of queer folks). Dorothy Parker steps in to drink, complain, and lecture Snagglepuss on how he’ll end up like her. Lillian Hellman discusses her appearance in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and gives a History 101 lesson on the Lavender Scare. Marlon Brando moves some furniture.
Arthur Miller literally explains McCarthyism and his play, The Crucible, but not before calling Snagglepuss to help him cover for his dating of Marilyn Monroe while she’s supposed to be with Joe DiMaggio. DiMaggio relaxes his rage, after a multi-page monologue about his pain at Monroe cheating and how people treat him as a joke, once he realizes she’s with a queer instead of a “real man.” Monroe reflects on how she’s treated as a celebrity, but only through how men see her, never allowed to have any thoughts in the comic book that aren’t tied to the male gaze, at one point literally saying, “Marilyn is a public spittoon for men’s lust and contempt. I don’t know how much longer I can go on being her. And Joe needs Marilyn.” This comic is about as subtle as having DiMaggio slam a baseball bat against your temple and asking if you got it.
It doesn’t end there, mind you, as the comic also uses Nikita Khrushchev’s corn tour as set decoration and features a scene where Snagglepuss lets Clint Eastwood know that he’s not meant for Broadway. He tells him that he’s not meant to be a stage actor, he should audition for a Western, and he should be breathier in his acting, like Marilyn.
Scenes like this are so egregious that it honestly left me wondering what cameo would come next and how shamelessly it’d be inserted. As a friend of mine joked, “Snagglepuss will then find J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson in compromising positions, the former in a dress.” This, unfortunately, did not happen.
What does happen is that Russell decides that the concept of closeted queer folks in power is a great point of exploration, not through Hoover, but through a fictional human character who serves as the central villain of the comic. Practically a one-woman Terminator dead-set on taking down Snagglepuss and his perversity, Gigi Allen (whose name we have to assume is a reference to GG Allin, but to what thematic point, we’ll never know) is an embarrassment of a character, existing solely as a mouth piece for HUAC.
The twist, though, is that she’s queer herself. Exit Stage Left has a common theme present from start to finish: internalized homophobia. By shacking up in the 1950s, it exists until the presumption that there’s no route for the comic to go other than internalized homophobia manifesting as externalized homophobia. Russell treats the time period as though the natural state of things is going to be misery through and through (which, Patricia Highsmith was out here writing a marvelous book called The Price of Salt about queer people falling in love and not killing themselves in 1952, so please, kindly, fuck off with that presumption). There is, certainly, a way to deal with queer misery and death, particularly suicide, in a way that doesn’t feel cheap (and numerous queer writers have done it since), but Exit Stage Left doesn’t understand how.
Internalized turned externalized homophobia comes to the surface in a number of scenes. Allen is arguably the most subtle (though nothing in this comic can be referred to as such), her brief reveal of queerness never manifesting as a physical hate crime, but stretching throughout the comic as her entire presence is a stand-in for HUAC. It’s nothing new, though, to place queer people as villains to themselves — a sort of “queer on queer” crime, if you will — with Boy Erased being the latest offender of such a crime with its post-script note about the conversion therapy pastor himself being a gay man. It’s an easy way to take the pressure off the straight reader, knowing that gay people hated themselves as much as straight people hated them, so it’s alright.
The externalization of self-loathing is most unfortunately depicted with Huckleberry Hound and Quick Draw McGraw. Each of the two get a story about how a sexual relation with a man — one caught by his wife in a field and the other caught by a fellow officer in the back seat of a car — either damages their life wholly or simply forces them into an uncomfortable situation. For the former, life is nothing but a series of unfortunate events. There’s no nuance to the way Russell explores Huck’s misery. One might hope for something akin to Christopher Isherwood’s novel A Single Man in how it explores a man grieving for a deceased male lover in an era of repression and how he still manages to find beauty in existing.
Instead, it’s just conversations between him and Snagglepuss, with one arguing that life isn’t too bad while the other sits there wallowing in his pain. “A man is but the accumulation of his failures,” Huck says. Snagglepuss responds, “You sound like a balloon leaking despair.” These final conversations come after not one, but two scenes in which Huckleberry Hound is physically assaulted by a man for being queer. The first is prompted by his poor attempt at flirting on a boardwalk (while Snagglepuss watches, without stopping him or helping) and the second by his lover Quick Draw McGraw during a raid of Stonewall.
Needless to say, he kills himself, off-screen, allowing Snagglepuss to close out the issue with an impassioned speech in front of HUAC at the expense of his dead friend. He gets to grandstand while guilting the lesbian villain in a way that Aaron Sorkin might find riveting, and the play he produced about his friend’s misery gets a standing ovation. He’s every white man you’ve seen give a rousing speech at the end of a movie, only to be handed a pile of nominations and awards. In this way, and through other scenes throughout the comic, Snagglepuss acts more like a straight savior than a queer man himself, sidestepping practically every pratfall set up for him while the queer people around him fail miserably.
But back to Quick Draw, who, as mentioned previously, is a cop. Not just a cop, but a cop who raids the gay bar he exploits and takes bribes from for “protection” and subsequently raids when leaned on by HUAC and his peers. For a comic that externalizes so much — especially in the depiction of violence against queer men, shown more than once in a six issue miniseries — McGraw is never offered a chance at introspection. He’s simply a man who, when caught fucking a man in his cop car, was made to worry about his lifestyle and keep it under wraps. The most he gets is a couple of panels in which he, with frustration, sits on the ground expressing some mild semblance of shame at his raiding of a gay bar. Years later, when the comic skips, he’s allowed to mourn, but the writing offers nothing but excuses in hindsight (which the comic critiques, although halfheartedly, inevitably allowing him to be a savior himself).
By the time Exit Stage Left comes to a close, the comic has made a serious time jump. It’s implied that Snagglepuss was blacklisted, though it comes across as more of a willing step out of the spotlight to avoid controversy. He isn’t jailed, as many were, and doesn’t continue working through the blacklisting like a number of his contemporary writers would. He simply steps out of the limelight and the comic chooses to step away from exploring any number of interesting possibilities of life for a playwright during McCarthyism. Take the previously introduced Lillian Hellman, who despite being blacklisted from Hollywood continued to work on Broadway. Not only did she adapt The Lark from French to English with Leonard Bernstein, and additionally conceive the operetta Candide with Bernstein (working with lyricists like Stephen Sondheim and Dorothy Parker, among others), but she was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Play for her 1960 play Toys in the Attic. Or even Arthur Miller, whose struggles with HUAC and director Elia Kazan would prove a more interesting storyline than what the comic does with Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio.
In a comic so prone to including random cameos, why not dive into Dalton Trumbo? Though Exit Stage Left is more focused on the stage than the screen, regardless of its inclusion of famous screen actors, it feels odd not to explore one of the biggest figures of the period. But the comic wants its characters to move fluidly through mediums without a thread to the reality of these professions. It’s why it expects us to buy into Quick Draw McGraw’s ascendance into television acting after being fired from the police force, however nonsensical a concept that is. It’s a desperate grasp at tying the 1950s setting into the actual Hanna-Barbera cartoon, “Lamb Chopped,” where Snagglepuss makes his first appearance. As depicted in the page above, it also posits that Hanna-Barbera’s Emmy Award winning The Huckleberry Hound Show was helmed by the son of Huckleberry Hound himself, Huck Jr.
A blacklisted playwright turning into a cartoon actor by painting himself orange, adopting the name Snaggletooth (though not in his debut, as the comic incorrectly implies), and presenting as the smart, faggy villain trope that has been used to death throughout history — prior to eventually becoming the pink collared and cuffed cougar he was best known ass — is no less baffling than what the comic does with McGraw getting his own show. The comic never even approaches what it might have been like for an actor who was blacklisted and made a return to the screen without issue, like Burgess Meredith. After being blacklisted for a decade as a result of a HUAC investigation, he slid back into film without an identity shift, working frequently with Otto Preminger throughout the sixties and even as a main supporting role in the Rocky films.
But Exit Stage Left’s haphazard approach to history doesn’t allow for nuance or a genuine exploration of how various arts industries were affected differently during McCarthyism. At the end of the comic, nothing feels resolved, nothing feels learned, and nothing feels like it’s changed. Yes, history has been shown and time has passed and certain revolutions have popped up and changed things. But there’s something disingenuous about the message of progress that the comic puts out there. This is, ultimately, a comic book that critiques the racism of the US where no people of color are allowed speaking parts (except for a single Cuban cast member who serves no purpose outside of being Snagglepuss’ side-piece who, uh, eventually helps to overthrow Batista). It’s a comic that boils down history into flashy talking points brought up by figures with absolutely no personality. It’s a comic that thinks it’s making grand, revolutionary statements by making basic talking points like, “Every nation is a monster in the making. And monsters will come for you, whether you believe them or not.”
There’s no wit here, no sour queers who feel brought to life in their time period like, say, the recent film Can You Ever Forgive Me? There’s no character study here, no sense of interest in the way queer people actually interacted, as the comic is too preoccupied with having Snagglepuss pal around with his celebrities, all of whom vocalize their woes with the world as much as he does. It’s easy to create a text about queer characters in a historical setting. What’s not so easy is making them believable in a world that feels lived-in and honest. That distinction is the difference between depiction and representation, and Exit Stage Left: The Snagglepuss Chronicles is too busy depicting what it thinks queer living was like in the 1950s to bother wondering whether or not it’s an even remotely sincere representation.
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Previously: WONDER WOMAN, EARTH ONE, VOLUME 2
