Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 248: Tor Love Betty (1991)

A semi-obscure 1991 comic book combines two great celebrities of the 1950s.

I feel sorry for the comedians of tomorrow, especially the ones who do celebrity impressions. That job is getting more and more difficult all the time. Eventually, it'll be damned near impossible.

Thanks to advances in technology and an overall shift in the way we consume media, pop culture is becoming homogeneous. And so, too, do our celebrities become homogeneous. And I think that makes them more difficult to caricature. When actors and pop singers become more or less interchangeable, all basically looking and sounding alike, how do you effectively parody them? "Weirdness" is now one of the great sins an artist can commit. Audiences demand predictability, familiarity, and consistency. That's good for algorithms but bad for comedy.

Peter Lorre in Hollywood Steps Out.

It was not always thus. Have you ever seen one of those old Looney Tunes cartoons with cameos by Hollywood celebrities of the 1930s and '40s? MGM, Disney, and even the smaller, independent animation studios did cartoons like these, too, but I remember the Warner Bros. ones best. Examples include Hollywood Steps Out (1941), Malibu Beach Party (1940), and The CooCoo Nut Grove (1936). They show you how distinctive entertainers used to be in the old days. There was no mistaking Mae West, Peter Lorre, Groucho Marx, Edward G. Robinson, or Humphrey Bogart for anyone else.

How did we lose this? I think the rise of television in the 1950s was the beginning of it. Now that entertainers were performing every night in a little box in people's living rooms, rather than on a stage or on the silver screen, they had to tone down their personalities somewhat so as not to be too overwhelming. And so, little by little, pop culture became more even-keeled. Sure, there were reactions against this—think of Tiny Tim on Laugh-In in the late 1960s or the colorful pop stars like Cyndi Lauper and Billy Idol who dominated MTV in the early 1980s—but the overall homogenization process could not be stopped.

The 1990s was the last golden age of quirkiness before the Great Evenness took hold for good. Perhaps dreading where pop culture was headed, hipsters of the era began to dig through the archives in search of oddball celebrities from the past. In an increasingly same-y world, we yearned for something different. (Or something weird, you might say. Hint, hint.) Eccentric filmmakers, musicians, and other wacky celebrities of the past suddenly became beautifully imperfect role models. I don't think it's a coincidence that this was when writer-director Edward D. Wood, Jr. (1924-1978) experienced his second wave of posthumous popularity. This was the era of Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy (1992), Tim Burton's Ed Wood (1994), and numerous Wood documentaries and VHS rereleases. Eddie represented an era of Old Weird Showbiz that was fading away.

I thought about all of that this week when I finally got around to reading Tor Love Betty (1991), a brief, somewhat overlooked indie comic book that combines two pop culture legends of the mid-20th-century: fetish and pinup model Bettie Page (1923-2008) and Swedish wrestler-turned-actor Tor Johnson (1903-1971). There is no obvious connection between Tor and Bettie that I know of. I don't think they ever actually worked together on any projects. They may not even have been familiar with one another.

And yet, pairing Tor and Bettie somehow makes sense. The svelte, raven-haired model and the bulky, bald-pated wrester manage to balance each other out visually, just as Tor and Vampira did in Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957). More importantly, Tor and Bettie are unmissably remnants of another era, the kinds of "novelty" celebs you just don't see nowadays. They literally don't make 'em like that anymore. They're both such specific celebrities, too, and they can be reduced to a few iconic physical traits and remain instantly recognizable.

By the way, before you complain, I should explain that the real Ms. Page spelled her first name B-E-T-T-I-E, but this book has it as B-E-T-T-Y. I'm not sure if that was done for legal reasons or because the creators of the comic didn't know the actual spelling of the woman's name. Whatever the reason, I'm going to refer to the character in this comic as "Betty" and the real life model as "Bettie."

So what, exactly, do you get with Tor Love Betty? It's a modest but diverting 30-page comic book that describes itself as "Cheesecake, Humor, With a Teaspoon of Horror." That's not inaccurate. Apart from the front and back covers, the artwork is in black-and-white. Most of the material in this book is by cartoonists Mike Zagorski and Ron Murphy, but there are contributions from Angel Medina, Ralph Melgoza, Frank Kurtz, Hilary Barta, and the remarkable Mitch O'Connell. There are only two complete stories here, Zagorski's "Tor's Lament" and O'Connell and Barta's "Drive-In Dee-Lite." The rest of the issue consists of brief, basically plotless filler pieces, including some fake ads and pinups.

The back cover of Tor Love Betty.

The pièce de résistance here is "Tor's Lament," a ten-page story in which Ms. Page is retired from show business and trying to live a quiet life under the assumed name Mildred Mason. Tor is her handyman and gardener, and he lives in a little shack on her estate. Naturally, as you've probably guessed by now, the musclebound Swede is infatuated with his mistress but she keeps her distance from him... and from everyone else, for that matter.

One day, an unscrupulous reporter from Cheapskin magazine shows up at Betty's door and tries to pressure her into an interview. Tor chases him away, but Betty feels that Tor has overstepped his boundaries and chastises him. Later, after taking a restorative bubble bath, Betty investigates some mysterious footprints on her property and winds up being taken prisoner by someone who looks like Tor. Only it's not Tor! It's really the reporter from Cheapskin in a very convincing, full-body Tor Johnson costume! Guess who comes in to rescue our fair maiden at the end. Betty and Tor do not end the story as lovers but instead walk back to the main house in silence.

The other extended story in Tor Love Betty is "Drive-In Dee-Lite," a kitschy three-pager in which the model and the wrestler go out on a disastrous blind date. Tor takes Betty to a drive-in theater that's showing one of his own movies, Ed Wood's Bride of the Monster (1955). Unfortunately, Ms. Page takes an immediate dislike to Tor, and the entire date becomes a disaster when she dispatches him to the concession stand to get some snacks. Not only does Tor take way too long to make his purchase, his very appearance in public causes the other patrons to panic and flee the establishment. Oh well.

Although he's never actually acknowledged in the pages of Tor Love Betty, cartoonist Drew Friedman must have been a major influence on this book. Friedman is famous for his darkly satirical comics that use real-life showbiz figures (often comedians, musicians, and actors) and put them in stories that freely intermingle fact and fantasy. As Friedman has explained numerous times in interviews, he draws in a hyper-detailed, realistic style that tricks the reader into thinking these events may actually have happened. 

One of Friedman's most-frequent subjects in the 1980s was Tor Johnson. In such classic comics as "Tor Johnson at Home" and "Tor Johnson's Hollywood Tour," Friedman depicted Johnson as a simple, childlike oaf, galumphing his way through life, seemingly oblivious to his status as a monstrous outcast. Tor's speech pattern in these comics was obviously based on the way he spoke as a henchman to John Carradine's mad scientist in Boris Petroff's The Unearthly (1957). (Tor's famous line from that movie: "Time for go to bed.") All of that is in evidence throughout Tor Love Betty.

Tor Love Betty comes billed as an "adults only" comic, but I'd say it's PG-13 at most. There is no sexually explicit language, nor any actual sex scenes that I could see. The "nudity" is limited to a few bare bottoms (including Tor's!) and some cleavage. Mostly, what you get here are a lot of situations in which Bettie Page is scantily clad or is implied to be nude just out of our view. There are a few panels in which Ms. Page is tied up, as she so often is in her photographs, but that's really as far as it goes.

I've made it a mission to explore some Ed Wood-related comics, so I knew I would have to read Tor Love Betty eventually. There was apparently a second issue planned, but it never came to fruition. This is really more of a one-note comic that doesn't explore its gimmick very thoroughly. Once you've seen the cover, you know pretty much all you need to know about this particular work. It might have been fun to take Tor Johnson and Bettie Page and put them in an actual, book-length story. Anybody up for a Paul Marco Meets Tura Satana comic book? Could be a ripsnorter.