Author: Martha Thomases

In the last week, DC Comics has made me exhausted. I can’t keep up with my own outrage.

At first report, DC reportedly drove off J. H. Williams and W. Haden Blackman from the pages of Batwoman by decreeing that Kate Kane could not marry Maggie Sawyer, a storyline that they had been developing for more than a year.

How could this happen? DC had always been a leader in creating a diverse universe, or at least it did during my tenure there. We were so LGBT-friendly that I was able to work with GLAAD to get an awards category established for comics and graphic novels when they gave out their yearly prizes. And now they’re going all reactionary? That made no sense. The Internet rumor that they were doing this to suck up to Orson Scott Card made even less sense, and, happily, turned out to be complete paranoid speculation.

Was I going to have to boycott DC Comics, which I’ve been reading for 55 years?

Then, as it turned out, the news story was more complicated. The editorial edict was not against gay and lesbian marriage, but all marriages. I don’t think this is what we had in mind when we wanted marriage equality. The editorial theory is that a married hero can’t be interesting, but instead must be miserable and lonely to have a dynamic emotional life with a lot of story opportunities.

I understand what they’re saying here, but I think it’s lazy. It would be like saying that a hero can’t have a successful career, because poverty has more dramatic potential. However, having an editorial edict about marriage does make it easier to manage the stories from a brand perspective, as potential Hollywood blockbusters. Hollywood loves single heroes, considering them to be sexier and more appealing to the coveted 14-25 male audience. It’s letting marketing trump editorial, and, even worse, it’s letting paranoia about movie marketing trump comic book creativity.

Batwoman is currently one of my favorite books. It’s one that I show people who don’t think they would like superhero comics. Even when the story isn’t necessarily to my taste (Killer Croc doesn’t interest me that much), the artwork is always lushly gorgeous, the lay-outs intriguing, and the characters both enigmatic and engaging.

While I don’t know J. H. Williams, I consider myself to be a huge fan, and it upsets me to see him and his colleague treated so poorly. Editors are an important element of the creative process, and nothing I say should be considered anti-editor. However, it’s bad management for editorial to swoop down and demand changes at the last minute, especially on a story-line that was already approved. It’s no way to treat talent. It’s no way to run a company.

Was I going to have to boycott DC Comics, which I’ve been reading for 55 years?

The latest news as of this writing is that Mark Andreyko will take over Batwoman. I enjoy his work a lot, and, while I don’t think we’ve met, we’re Facebook friends and we seem to share a sensibility. I’m curious to see what he’ll do with Kate Kane, so I guess a boycott isn’t really an option, at least not for me at this point.

Here’s the thing. It’s been taking me longer and longer to read my comics every week. The pile will sit there for days, waiting for me to get interested. I’m writing this on Monday, and the “Villains Month” books have sat there since Wednesday. I’m not sure I care anymore. Treating artists and writers like cookie-cutters has made reading the books a chore. I don’t have to spend money for more chores. Chores surround me, for free.

Nagging about chores is something that ruins a lot of marriages. Way more than being the hero.

FRIDAY AFTERNOON: Michael Davis (honest)

SATURDAY MORNING: Marc Alan Fishman

There was a time when it was assumed that people who read comics were not very smart. They couldn’t understand a book without pictures, despite the opinion of Lewis Carroll, as expressed by Alice. This opinion began to lose ground in the 1970s, and by the 1980s, when Art Spiegelman published Maus, some people began to think that comics were for people who were too smart.

During my time at DC, I saw a parallel development among schoolteachers and librarians. When we first start displaying our wares at book shows, we initially faced skepticism. As comics stories like “The Death of Superman” made the news, and more serious work, like Sandman, got reviewed in mainstream media, these professionals began to understand how graphic story could get students and library patrons excited about reading.

For the most part, comics have played only minor roles in classrooms. The excellent “For Beginners” series has covered about a bazillion topics. This September, NBM gets into the act with an American edition of a Dutch book, Science: A Discovery in Comics by Margreet de Heer. It is available in paper and pixel.

I could use a book that would explain science for the not-so-smart types I described above in the first paragraph. I’m terrible at memorizing the periodic tables, and if I start to think about time and how to define it, I get dizzy. Alas, this book does not fix my head.

It does something better.

deHeer traces the history of science from the ancient Egyptians to Richard Dawkins and beyond. She covers all the sciences: biology, geology, physics, astronomy, chemistry and so on. She describes scientific inquiry from the time that science was as hunch-based as religion (when it was assumed there were four elements, and the earth was the center of the universe) until now. Not only does she cite the times when scientists proved each other right, but also the times when they proved each other wrong.

She does this with charming drawings, with two characters who walk through the millennia, and interact not just with historical science, but with the people affected by their discoveries. It deftly shows that there is more to history than a list of kings and battles.

A lot of fundamentalist types, especially creationists, like to point at the errors other scientists have found in the work of Darwin, and claim that since his original theory of evolution was flawed, that means God created the world in six days a few thousand years ago. That’s not how science works. Real scientists never take “Yes” for an answer. They always seek to disprove an old theory, or prove a new one. When science proves something is false, it is as much a vindication for the scientific method as proving something is true.

If you have a curious kid in your household, you could do worse than get her this book. Even if that kid is 60 years old.

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman

SUNDAY: John Ostrander

Kick-Ass 2 opened and I’m very psyched. Loved the comics. Loved the first movie. Even liked the Wanted movie, although it isn’t as sharp and funny as the book.

You see, I’m a big fan of Mark Millar. I’ve followed him ever since he wrote Swamp Thing with Grant Morrison, and, as DC’s Publicity Manager, I had to explain to people who he was. And while I haven’t read absolutely everything he’s written, nor have I loved absolutely everything I’ve read, he always engages me with his characters, entertains me and, in places, makes me laugh.

So it surprised me when I read this.

To be sure, I’m not surprised that there is a backlash against someone who is commercially successful in a popular art form. There are always those people, desperate to be cool, who affect disdain for anything popular. There is a subset of this group, who claim to have liked the person/band/actor/director’s work before, when they were unknown. I, myself, am capable of rambling on pretentiously about the first time I saw Talking Heads, when they were a trio.

That’s not what I’m talking about here. Instead, a (reasonably) well-respected magazine, The New Republic, did an overview of Mark’s work and didn’t like what they saw. They spoke with some people who defended Millar, and with some who criticized him. Mostly, the article focused on sex, violence and rape.

Of which there is a lot in Millar’s work. To quote from the article:

“Laura Hudson, the former editor-in-chief of the popular blog Comics Alliance and a senior editor at Wired, thought that scene was deplorable, but typical of Millar. ‘There’s one and only one reason that happens, and it’s to piss off the male character,” she said. “It’s using a trauma you don’t understand in a way whose implications you can’t understand, and then talking about it as though you’re doing the same thing as having someone’s head explode. You’re not. Those two things are not equivalent, and if you don’t understand, you shouldn’t be writing rape scenes.’”

Laura Hudson is someone I admire and respect. When I say I disagree with her, it is not my intention to dismiss her point of view (and I’m aware it can sound like that in print, when you can’t hear my tone of voice or see my evocative hand gestures). Having said that, I suspect we’re having a similar problem when we read the stories. I don’t pick up a tone in the work that celebrates actual violence or rape. I see those actions being used to define characters. Unlike Laura, I don’t think women in the stories are raped solely to motivate men. I think rape is used to show how awful the person is who commits it.

Is this a comic book problem? John Irving writes books that are full of raped characters and the men who love them. Most contemporary critics consider him to be a feminist, or at least an ally to feminists.

(And this will probably be the only time anyone ever discusses Mark Millar and John Irving in the same article.)

Writing about something – even illustrating something – is not the same as endorsing it. I’ve been involved in the non-violent movement for social justice for more than 45 years, yet I enjoyed these comics a lot. I’m tickled by the cartoon violence, in no small part because I know that no actual humans are involved. This may be because of the tone I infer from the stories, or because, as Scott McCloud describes, we each supply our own interpretation of what happens between the panels.

We bring our lives to comics in a way that’s different from other popular art forms. Maybe this is why we can differ so profoundly in our reactions to what we read. In my version, Mark Millar is sort of kind of related to Chuck Jones by way of Francis Ford Coppola.

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman

SUNDAY: John Ostrander

Do you have to do much business travel? I tend to go for long periods without it, and then have to do a whole bunch. It can be fun, but it’s also, you know, business. I’m staying in a strange place, seeing people I don’t see at home, eating foods I don’t usually eat at hours when I’m not usually eating. And, unlike when I’m working at home, I have to keep my pants on when I do it.

And then there is staying in hotels. The good parts: I don’t have to clean up after myself, I can try new shampoos, and if I get a king-size bed, it’s so big it’s like sleeping on the ocean. The bad parts: no kitty, the towels aren’t big enough, and there is nothing to read that I haven’t brought myself. Also, even with a big bed and a gigantic bathroom, I can feel closed in after a while.

So I was delighted to read in The New York Times that a variety of hotels, from highfalutin’ boutique inns to affordable chains, have added libraries to their list of amenities.

It would be nice to say that the hospitality industry has decided to encourage reading for the sake of the public good, to improve the literacy of the American traveling class. However, as the article states, the purpose of the library is to encourage customers to spend more time in the hotel’s lobby and bars, buying food and drink. At the same time, some of the hotels are making deals directly with publishers to promote their titles, even allowing customers to take the books home and return them during their next stay.

This is an incredible opportunity for comics. And by comics, I mean graphic novels.

If I’m in the lobby of a hotel looking for something to read, the most likely reason is that I’m tired, and I want something to occupy my attention while I’m eating or having a drink. I travel with my Kindle, but maybe I don’t have the attention span to stare at words (usually because I’ve been staring at words for hours already). A self-contained graphic novel, with a whole story, can engage my imagination without causing eye-strain.

In general, I don’t want to start up a conversation with strangers when I go to a hotel bar or restaurant. However, if I was so inclined, a graphic novel is a much better ice-breaker than a prose book. It’s easier to point to an image in a conversation than to read a narrative description. And it’s easier to share a book with a spline than a pamphlet.

It’s also easier to find an audience for books with spines. A businessman (or woman) enjoying some downtime might not want to read about a guy in spandex, but might get a kick out of the source of that new movie he’s heard so much about.

To my mind, the best publisher with whom to make a deal is Abrams Comic Arts. A bar where people are talking about Mars Attacks, My Friend Dahmer and The Carter Family is a fun place to be.

If I was managing a hotel near the Baltimore Convention Center, I would be checking this out.

SATURDAY MORNING: Marc Alan Fishman’s Main Woman

SUNDAY MORNING: John Ostrander

Has it really been more than 35 years since the debut of Omaha, the Cat Dancer? That’s why it says in the introduction to Volume 8, the last of the collected series, just published by Amerotica, an imprint of NBM.

Way, way back in those pre-Internet days we found our comics by happenstance. I was lucky enough to live in New York City, and had six or seven different comic book stores within a couple of miles of my apartment. If one store didn’t have a particular title, it was likely another store would. More to the point, it was possible for someone like me, an engaged but not maniacal fan, to find a book that was totally new to me. I hadn’t read any pre-publication hype. I might not have heard of the creative team. But I could stumble upon something, and it could bring me joy.

Such was the case with Omaha, the Cat Dancer. I can no longer remember when I read it first, but I know I was on-board from the beginning. The artwork was so graceful, the characters so credible, that I barely noticed that they were anthropomorphic animals.

Omaha was infamous in its day for its frank sexuality. The characters had sex, often, and not only as a variety of gender combinations, but species combinations as well. Dogs and cats, living together! When a Chicago comic book store, Friendly Frank’s, was busted for selling an issue in 1988, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund was formed.

And yet. And yet. It’s hard to imagine a combination of explicit sex and character development that would be less gratuitous. The characters in Omaha have sex because they are complicated, adult characters who do things that complicated adults do. It’s part of their lives, just like sleeping, eating, going to work, taking a walk, or breathing.

There is also a fair amount of political activism in the lives of the characters. As citizens of Mipple City, they get involved in elections and zoning issues. It’s a refreshing flashback to a time when community involvement was something adults took for granted, like sex, meals, walks, etc.

Oh, I had my quibbles. I’ve never entirely bought into the perspective that strippers are agents of revolutionary change. I kept trying to figure out if the species of animal chosen for each character had any kind of racial or ethnic or class distinction. I found it awfully convenient that a lot of characters ended up being related to each other.

But, really, I meant it when I said those were quibbles. Omaha is a wonderful character, and Omaha is a wonderful series.

The new volume is the last, containing the issues that weren’t completed at the time of writer Kate Worley’s death (too soon) from cancer. Her husband, James Vance, completed her work along with Reed Waller, the artist on the series from the get-go. The transition, to me, is seamless.

There won’t be any more. That’s a shame. But we have these eight volumes, and you should get them. Now.

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman

SUNDAY: John Ostrander