Getting Respect, by Dennis O’Neil
Well, it is certainly a superheroic weekend here in New York, and maybe where you are, too. The latest Batman flick has already set one box office record and who knows what others it may yet conquer? The second Hellboy movie is still kicking box office butt. And a while ago, I was paging through the Arts and Leisure section of my Sunday New York Times when I saw a familiar face staring up at me from a photo: my old colleague Frank Miller, grim and determined looking. The accompanying story was about Frank’s writing and directing of The Spirit movie, based on work by yet another old friend, the late Will Eisner, produced by yet another old friend, Michael Uslan. (Good heavens! Whom don’t I know?)
Last week, the loyalists among you, if any, will remember that I strongly recommended a book titled The Ten Cent Plague, by David Hajdu. Since then, I’ve recommended it in conversation a couple of times, and may do so again. Damn good book. One of the points Hajdu makes is that comics were the outsider’s medium: the first bunch of creators and promoters were primarily Jewish, guys who had trouble getting work elsewhere. This is one of the reasons the Establishment may have felt threatened by the four-color trash sprouting from the newsstands like crab grass on a lawn; these were not their kind of people and who knows what kind of anarchy these grubbies might promote, given the opportunity? Decent folk practically had an obligation to put them in their place!
When I entered comics, about a quarter century into their history, the field was still dominated by outsiders, or anyway at least ex-outsiders. As for my cohorts… maybe one of the writers who came into comics at about the same time after I slithered in may have been destined for a respectable career in respectable institutions among respectable citizens, but the rest of us were hippie-rebel, anti-establishment types. If that hadn’t been true, why were we there? Comics publishing didn’t have an established career path, there didn’t seem to be really serious money to be made, at least at the editorial level, and Lord knows we weren’t reputable; only a decade or so earlier, our chosen endeavor had been crucified in magazines and on editorial pages and even in congressional hearings. We weren’t exactly bracketed with axe murderers, but you probably wouldn’t want your daughter marrying one of us.
Right up front this week, let’s publish our (forgive me for shouting) RECOMMENDED READING: Danny Fingeroth’s Write Now Magazine from TwoMorrows.
Over the past few years, I’ve come to believe that not everyone gets the same education, even if schools and transcripts are identical. Some folk mentally compartmentalize: church goes here, family here, school stuff here, life in general there. So when they pass tests on what they’ve heard in classrooms, and at the end of a span of time, usually16 years and some august personage hands them a rectangle full of fancy lettering, they’re done with it. No more schooling, and no learning above what’s needed to live comfortably. Schooling in its compartment yonder, not touching this compartment, which is where we live.
Sunday afternoon. Two hundred and four days left before he gallops on back to Texas and that consarn brush that always seems to need clearing.
As I begin to type this, on a rainy Sunday afternoon, there are only 211 days left before someone else lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, near the Potomac. I tell you this, not because it has anything to do with what follows, but to perhaps lend a note of cheer to your hour.
I don’t know when I first saw an English edition of Barefoot Gen. It was probably sometime in the mid 70s, when I was editing for the modest enterprise that has become the mighty Marvel Entertainment. In those days, a lot of stuff crossed editorial desks and we read most of it, if not all. So: Japanese comics? Sure, I’ll give it a look. It was probably my first experience with manga and I remember feeling a mild taste of cognitive dissonance – a perceived disconnect between subject and form. (I am choosing to ignore, because it’s a bit off-subject, the hybrid of cartooning and illustration that’s most superhero art.)
Vinnie Bartilucci said it better than I did. Commenting on a couple of columns that asked, sort of, if the science in comics should be real, Vinnie wrote, “… once a writer chooses to mention actual, proper science, he should get it right.”
The following will be about a column I didn’t write and it’s Vinnie Bartilucci’s fault. But that’s okay. I forgive him.
We were the Squires of Science, my friend Mike and I were. He went to public school and I was a sixth- or seventh grader at St. Louise de Marillac, but that didn’t keep us from palling around together, watching Tom Corbett, Space Cadet on his family’s television set and doing chemistry set experiments in his basement. Actually, I don’t remember doing many experiments – we squires weren’t really much into real science – but Mike, who was good with tools, made us a plaque and, well…we believed in science. Maybe not as much as I believed in the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, but still a lot.
