It seems like movie and TV studios are running out of ideas nowadays, doesn’t it? They’re desperately trying to find a new vein of creativity. The surprising thing is that some question inspirations end up paying off.

The most famous recent example would be the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. I mean, back when it first made light, everyone — and I mean everyone — was clucking their tongues, laughing at how creatively bankrupt Hollywood had become. “A movie based on a Disney ride?” the pop culture wags would say. “How droll! What next: a movie based on Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots? Oh, to see the day when that happens.”

But, as well all know, Pirates was a humongous success, kickstarting a three sequels, the current obsession with pirates, and a whole industry of Jack Sparrow Halloween costumes. It also sorta got it into some Hollywood producer’s minds that, “Hey, if a Disney ride could be a movie, ANYTHING is fair game! Does anyone have the rights to that Milton Bradley Battleship game? Get Liam Neeson on the phone!”

I mean, what next? What if you got really obscure. Like you tried to adapt a loosely connected series of cartoons that were featured in famously high-brow magazine The New Yorker. They’re just vignettes: the characters don’t have names, and the series doesn’t even have a title. How crazy and kooky would that be?

Well, as you guessed from the title of this “Know Thy History,” that’s exactly what happened when Charles Addams gave the world The Addams Family.

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DC Comics’ New 52 initiative has brought several long forgotten heroes back from ignominy. Animal Man and Swamp Thing were rescued from the dustbins of Vertigo past. Grifter and Voodoo were deemed to be the least bland of the WildCATs and were granted their own titles. Frankenstein, Harley Quinn, and The Demon were rescued from second-banana heaven and are the headliners for team-based titles.

And yet, I must ask: wither The Red Bee?

The Red Bee debuted in Quality’s Hit Comics #1 way back in July 1940. He was created by Audrey Anthony “Toni” Blum (one of the few female comic creators in a male-dominated industry) and Charles Nicholas (who I think was really Chuck Cuidera … I’m not totally sure because apparently three different comic creators used that pseudonym, including JACK friggin’ KIRBY).

The Red Bee’s secret identity was Rick Raleigh, assistant to district attorney Tom Darrow. He hailed from Superior City, Oregon, which, despite its lofty (vaguely northern Michigander) name was a hive of scum and villainy. He’d seen far too much crime and corruption slip through the courts.

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If you bring up the word “Metropolis” among your average cineaste, the first thing that will come to mind will be Fritz Lang’s landmark 1927 silent expressionist sci-fi movie where a robot woman named Maria causes sexual havoc among the ruling class and inspires the working class to revolt.

There’s another Metropolis, though, that may just be as wildly embraced by anime and manga fans. That would be the landmark manga created by Osamu Tezuka, a.k.a. “The Godfather of Anime,” a.k.a. “The Father or Manga.” Metropolis was published in 1949, back when the manga scene was inundated with low quality comics. Tezuka set out to change all that by creating a full-length sci-fi epic.

So to what extent was the manga Metropolis was directly influenced by the Fritz Lang Metropolis? From an interview with Tezuka:

This manmade person was based on the image of the female robot in the famous pre-war German film Metropolis. That said, I hadn’t seen the movie at the time and I didn’t even know what it was about. During the war, in Kinema Junpou, or some other such magazine, there was a single still from the movie of the female robot’s birth scene. I remembered it and it just gave me a little hint. I also really like the sound of the word “metropolis” so I used the same title, but other than that there was no real connection to the movie.

of course, he could’ve just said this to appease the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation (which means that, in Germany, Metropolis has to be released as Robotic Angel). Hey, being the Japanese Disney ain’t easy.

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On the eve of the world’s biggest nerd prom, it’s fun to speculate the alternate paths that comics could have taken. Superheroes have been the big game for, oh, forever, but what if it were not always thus? In Watchmen, Alan Moore envisioned a world that had, instead, embraced pirate comics… which isn’t as ridiculous a scenario as it sounds at first.

But … what if the comic industry were dominated by stories of attractive blonde ladies swinging through jungle vines wearing skimpy animal-print bikinis?

A year before Superman founded the superhero genre in Action Comics #1, Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, carved her own sexy, sexy niche in the pages of Wags, a British tabloid. Sheena would arrive on American shores a year later, three months after Superman’s debut. She was such a successful character that she inspired a whole slew of imitators with names like Tiger Girl, Camilla, Lorna the Jungle Girl, Tegra and Zegra… and, later in the 1970′s, Marvel’s not very imaginatively named Shanna the She-Devil. Truly they must be jungle goddesses if they can survive the harsh African jungles while maintaining fabulous hair, impeccable make-up, and impossibly pale complexion! They were also all, for the most part, fairly Scandinavian in complexion, which makes you wonder how all these jungle goddesses managed to avoid getting horribly sunburned.

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It helps to have friends in high places. George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, which ran from 1913 to 1944, never really caught on with the viewing public. The comic was just too dang weird. But all he needed was one fan: William Randolph Hearst, the legendary newspaper magnate and owner of the New York Evening Journal. He loved the comic so much that he gave Herriman a lifetime contract and complete artistic freedom.

People, that is the sort of fan you WANT to have.

Yet while the public never really embraced Krazy Kat, it was embraced by some of the highest profile artists of its era… perhaps because Mr. Hearst didn’t print the strip with the Sunday funnies, but rather within the more prestigious Arts & Drama section. The quirky, melodious dialogue — which included words and phrases like “nigli-gee” and “Li’l Aingil“and “My gooniss Mr. Poodil dunt step in that puddil” — likely made fans out of literary luminaries such as poet e. e. cummings, journalist H. L. Mencken, and famed beat poet Jack Kerouac. In 1924, art critic Gilbert Seldes devoted a chapter to Krazy Kat in his book, The Seven Lively Arts, making George Herriman the first comic artist to be given serious artistic consideration.

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