Author: Dennis O'Neil

The Real Hero, by Dennis O’Neil

Deju vu all over again? Why, sure.

About 19 years ago, I was being pulled into the summer movie/blockbuster season anticipating two of the myriad entertainments soon to be playing at a theater near me. One was Tim Burton’s second Batman flick, with Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman and Danny Devito as a particularly nasty Penguin. Oh, and Michael Keaton in his final appearance as the Caped Crusader. (Back then, although he was not a barrel of laughs, he may have been just an eensy-bitsy too cheerful to qualify as a Dark Knight.) Batman was soaking up most of my professional life – I was editing the comic books – and I was writing a comics version of the screenplay, and so I had a distant, tenuous but real interest in the movie. And anyone who’s ever been involved with a Major Motion Picture knows that there is an excitement to such projects that ripples outward to touch even us at their distant edges. (Which may be why working in movies seems to be, for many, so addictive.) In sum: yeah, I was awaiting the Batman flick with more than idle curiosity.

But what I was really waiting for was Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Batman was my job; Indy was my hero. I may have been associating him with an earlier hero, Mr. Paladin, who was the central character in a once-popular, 30-minute TV western called Have Gun, Will Travel. What No-First-Name Paladin and Indiana Jones had in common, besides impressive looks and charisma, and the ability to look good riding a horse, a powerful sense of right and wrong, and great prowess in combat with either fists or weapons, was this: They were smart. More – they were readers! And more – they were even intellectuals!

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Wrath, by Dennis O’Neil

Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this one…

Harry is homeless. Once, he was a successful venture capitalist with three lavish homes, a beautiful wife and a charming daughter, but then he lost his money in a bad real estate deal, his wife ran away with a televangelist, and his daughter started living with a crack dealer and not answering her phone. While panhandling near his old office, Harry met an friend who knew of a deal that would restore Harry’s fortune – hundred percent, guaranteed – and with his bank account restored, Harry was sure he could reclaim his family and his lifestyle. The problem was, Harry needed a thousand dollars to get in on the deal and he had no way to get it; his credit was maxed out and no one he knew would lend him another cent. He’s now passing a church, his head bowed in misery, when he sees a thousand dollar bill laying in the gutter. He can’t believe it! He is saved! He bends over to pick up the bill and…he’s hit by a truck. Laying there alone in the filth, Harry knows he’s breathing his last. He looks up at the sky and cries, “Why?” And a voice booms from beyond the clouds, “Because you piss me off.”

One of my favorite jokes and one I’ve been thinking of this weekend because, somehow, I’ve run afoul, again, of my old foe Crankus, the spiteful god of technology. Ol’ Mr. Macintosh in front of me has been acting up and the gentleman, polite but not terribly helpful, at the Mac store wasn’t exactly sure why. Larry and his friend Perri graciously offered to reinstall the Microsoft Word program, because I don’t trust myself with even elementary technological tasks, and so far, so good.

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Marvel Millie and Me

  • Uncategorized
  • April 29, 2008

xxx1-3015233So the third New York Comic Con is one for the annals and I have stopped twitching.

It was, at its Saturday afternoon height, a cauldron of mad, chaotic energy. (And wasn’t it dangerous? Couldn’t all that energy, confined and concentrated by four walls, affect the hearts of atoms and cause the forces that bind them together to disintegrate us all into quarks that would join the neutrinos in spewing through the universe?) That’s okay, for me, in small doses, and maybe in large doses for you, especially if you’re young and new to the megacon scene.

I won’t bother describing the event for you. If you frequent this site, you probably already have all pertinent information. Instead, a tiny, personal note:

Every one of the panels on which I sat was interesting and, I was happy to see, well-attended, which hasn’t always been the case in huge cons, where it sometimes seems that the exchange of currency is more important than honoring and discussing and learning about an art form. But the absolute, stone, hands-down high point came early, on Friday night, when I shared a stage with Peter Sanderson, who moderated, and Gary Freidrich, Joe Sinnott, and Stan Goldberg. Except for Peter, we were all veterans of Marvel’s early days, before the company became Marvel Entertainment and attached its logo to vastly expensive motion pictures, soon to play at a multiplex near you, back when it just published comic books – all kinds of comic books, not just the superhero kind – and there were no multiplexes in which to show ridiculously costly films, even if such films had existed.

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The Holy See in NYC, by Dennis O’Neil

  • Uncategorized
  • April 22, 2008

Well, the Holy Father has certainly been all over the media this past week, hasn’t he? Just a while ago, I looked, briefly, at Benedict celebrating Mass in no less a venue than Yankee Stadium – lots bigger than the biggest cathedral – and judging from the shots of the stands, it was a sellout crowd; I wonder if the Yankees themselves attract so many spectators, even when they’re against the Red Sox.

Shall we seek meaning here? Dare we posit that a) this pope is super-beloved or b) the church he leads is making a comeback or c) both of the above?

I’m reminded of an evening in Chicago, about 20 years ago, that I shared with a comic book artist and an actor. I don’t remember exactly why we were thrown together, but it probably had something to do with a convention. The actor was featured in a movie I’d recently seen and kind of liked, though I don’t recall having any strong reaction to this particular man’s performance, which probably means that I thought it was all right. As a dinner companion, sitting across he table at a Chinese restaurant, he was nice enough – chatty and just a bit gossipy, without any hint of malice. Not a stupid man, but he didn’t dazzle us with his intellect or wit, either. An okay guy. And, midway through the evening, I found myself trying to make him like me. It seemed important that he like me. Why? The only answer I have is that he was a celebrity. His image was on thousands of screen. Passersby recognized him. He was privy to really big, major-honkin’ celebrities.

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The Shadow’s Web, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • April 15, 2008

With the kind permission of Anthony Tollin and Mike Gold, this week’s column is an adaptation and condensation of an introduction I’m writing for a forthcoming edition of Mr. Tollin’s repackaging of the original Shadow novels. No formal recommended reading this time, but the volume in which the much longer version of what’s below will appear – Shadow #19 – will be on sale in the latter half of June.

Let us, for just a little while, indulge our wish that the great mythic and fictional heroes did and do exist. We are told – and remember, we’re in believer mode – that a diligent historian named Maxwell Grant was privy to the life and thoughts of a mystery man who, though he was probably born Kent Allard often assumed the identity of Lamont Cranston, one of those gentlemen of wealth and leisure who seemed to proliferate in the 30s, the years of the Great Depression, and become almost extinct after World War Two. We are assured that many years ago, while traveling in the Orient, that he acquired certain extraordinary skills – they might even be termed “powers” – and that these aided him in the activities of another of his personae, the relentless and dreaded nemesis of crime known only as The Shadow.

Now, let us entertain a hypothesis. It’s possible, perhaps even probable, that our eastern sojourner, during his investigations, came across reference to Indra’s Net, perhaps while thumbing through a yellowing old volume he found in a bookshop located in a winding Calcutta alleyway. (Would the book have been written in Hindi? Likely. Would Mr. Allard have mastered enough of that language to read it? Again, likely.) Being the ever-curious investigator he had to have been in his salad days, Mr. Allard would have made further inquiries regarding this “Indra’s Net.”

Here is what he might have learned:

In Svarga, the realm of the god Indra, there is a network of gems arranged in such a manner that if a person looks at one of them he sees all the others reflected in it.

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On Beowulf and Catechism, by Dennis O’Neil

  • Uncategorized
  • April 8, 2008

In days of yore, when cowboys and dinosaurs roamed the land and I was an undergraduate in a Jesuit-run university, not knowing exactly what one was supposed to do in a university, much less what the heck I, a butcher’s kid from north St. Louis, was doing at a university, I had what Friedrich Nietzsche might have called a “slave morality.” That is, I felt powerless and I resented and mistrusted every authority figure on the horizon, even the ones who were trying to help me.

Watching the movie version of Beowulf reminded me of one episode in my inglorious academic career.

Somewhere along sophomore year, an English prof assigned a paper to be titled “Beowulf As An Allegory of Redemption.” (I don’t know if that repeats her capitalization. If not, I apologize.) Well. I didn’t think so. Oh, I could, and did, write the paper using some kind of tortured rhetoric/logic/whatever, then, for a creative writing class, I did a paper called “Three Blind Mice As An Allegory of Redemption,” using the same rhetorical devices. The point was, of course, that you can use rhetorical sleight-of-hand to prove anything you want. The subtext was, of course, “They’re bullshitters”– the they being anyone older, more credentialed, better-looking than a butcher’s kid, and maybe anyone who wore a tie. These degree-waving poltroons will twist anything into a Catechism lesson: so my declaration might have gone.

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The Writes Of Spring, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • April 1, 2008

As I sit down to write this, I’m less than five hours from midnight on March 23rd and so it might be appropriate to wish you a Happy Easter, or Happy Pasha if you’re an Oriental Christian, or Happy Purim. Or maybe I should give a shout-out to Aphrodite, Ashtoreth, Astarté, Demeter, Hathor, Ishtar, Kali, Ostara – all deities who were celebrated around the spring equinox and, as far as my extremely limited and unreliable knowledge goes, all of whom were connected to fertility, which figures: Spring equinox = end of winter = new life = let’s have a party.

Or…let’s let one stand for all and just celebrate the goddess whose name gives the holiday it’s name: No less an authority than The Venerable Bede, an early Christian scholar, wrote that Easter was named after the Saxon goddess Eostre, and if you can’t trust the Venerable Bede, well…

I like Easter, and tomorrow I may do something celebratory, even if it’s only to walk in the park down the road. (Yeah, us old guys really know how to tear it loose.) It’s a real holiday, as evidenced by all the ways it’s been celebrated over the millennia – see the goddess list above – and I think that means that it acknowledges and celebrates something deep in our collective culture, our life on this planet, probably our genomes. The catalogue of such holidays is short: there’s the various festivals of light that occur around the winter solstice – Merry Christmas, all – and around the fall equinox that generally involve harvests and eating, and Easter, et. al. All happen at seasonal changes and all involve the Basics: birth, death, light, dark, and survival.

You don’t have to believe in the literal truth of a mythology to accept the realities that underlie it.

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Our Comics Community, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • March 18, 2008

Things are fanning out all over.

But before we go any further, let me explain and, while I’m about it, issue an OFA, or Old Fart Alert.

Back in the day – now you begin to understand the reason for the OFA – part of the fun of attending science fiction and comics conventions was seeing stuff like outtakes and blooper reels and old movies and especially old serials, entertainments virtually unavailable anywhere else. Another pleasure was listening to other fans who were In The Know reveal secrets, or at least semi-secrets, about the actors and artists and, yes, even writers whose work we enjoyed and was the raison d’etre for the whole she-bang.

Now…bloopers are shown on network television, as are outtakes, and one major international star has, for the last decade or so, incorporated them into the films themselves. And although nobody, to my knowledge, is showing serials regularly, a cable channel used to and somebody almost certainly will again and even if that doesn’t happen, these crusty old flicks are easily buyable, or rentable, or, maybe, available at your local public library. As for other kinds of old movies…Well, let’s just say that I’ve filled in some of the gaps in my appreciation of Rocky Lane, Lash LaRue, Wild Bill Elliott, the Durango Kid, and the indomitable Sunset Carson by watching the Westerns Channel from the comfort of my living room.

Insider info? It’s practically a national industry, only they call it gossip and push it at us on television and in the magazines I read in doctor’s offices. Push a lot of it, I might add. And most DVDs have material in addition to whatever movie’s on them and these, too, frequently feature gossipy tidbits, though never scandalous ones.

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Generic Respect, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • March 11, 2008

reeve-dreams-4-3273602Don’t bother putting on airs, Messrs. Man (Super and Bat); you’re nothing special, not any more. These days, you’re just two more members of a rather large club that includes cowboys, cops, private eyes, combat soldiers and guys who fly space ships to other planets and solar systems and galaxies. Serial killers who slice and dice sexy teenagers are in the club, too. And critters that are normally harmless but mutate into gigantic sociopaths.

While you weren’t looking, you’ve become a genre.
 
Of course, if we want to get sniffy about definitions, you always were, in comic books. Almost from the beginning, here were cowboy comics and detective (or Detective) comics, and monsters and spaceship jockeys were early joiners, too. And you guys, the superheroes. You were the most popular and emblematic, of the comic book good guys, but you had peers.
 
Movies were another matter. Oh, you guys showed up on what was called The Silver Screen pretty early in the form of serials or, if we want to get fancy, chapter plays intended for the Saturday matinees, which were populated by kids who, in my memory, made a hell of a lot of racket. Even there, you were a bit of an aberration, outnumbered by the gumshoes and gunfighters, and not deserving, apparently, of cinematic and dramatic niceties. And, while there were cowboys and sleuths aplenty in the movies made for after-dark showings to the kids’ moms and dads, no superheroes ever made the leap to, ahem, serious entertainments.
 

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Primary Sources, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • March 4, 2008

bill_everett-8634197In days of yore – my yore anyway – I briefly wondered if my particular literary backwater, the writing of comic books, would be properly remembered. It seemed to me that young snots such as myself were getting attention – interviews and the like – and the guys who were around at the beginning, the guys who virtually created the form, were pretty much ignored, although many of them were still alive and frisky.

I needn’t have worried and I didn’t, which is good because, even more than most worry, this variety would have been a waste of time.

I do wish there had been more interviews with…oh, to cite the first name that pops into the shopworn old psyche, Bill Everett. And I don’t remember ever reading a Q and A with Carl Burgos: if none exists, too bad. Even Bill Finger doesn’t seem to have left many historical footprints, and some of what we know about him comes from people like me, whose memories are emphatically not to be trusted.

Having said all that: comics are undoubtedly the most documented medium/art form in history. They came to their early maturity just in time to benefit from the explosion of media and distribution, and the belated realization that every art form was pop culture once, and none are prima facie inferior. And guys like Gerry Jones know how to use the information sources available and have the patience and literary skill to put the pieces together.

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