Author: Mindy Newell

Friday was a miserable day in the New York City metropolitan area. Slashing rain, blustery winds, and c-c-c-cold. It was a day made for staying in your pajamas and just vegging out in front of the TV, watching The Dick Van Dyke Show and I Love Lucy on TVLand, popping in DVDs of the original Dallas (nobody has ever played the villain we hate to love – but do – better than the late, marvelous, wonderful Larry Hagman as J.R. Ewing), and eating too much of stuff that is bad for you, potato chips being my particular poison.

So what was I doing, getting up at 6 AM so that by 8:30 I could be walking with Alixandra and Jeff to the PATH station to take the train into the city? Why was I fretting that Alix wasn’t dressed warmly enough and that her hair was wet? After all, the woman is 33, old enough to deal with inclement weather on her own. Why was I feeling sorry for Jeff, who was struggling with an umbrella that threatened to either lift him into the sky like Mary Poppins or poke his eyes out? After all, Jeff is a Ph.D and a college professor and certainly wise enough to know that an umbrella turning inside out is the last thing you need on a windy, rainy early April day.

We were on our way to Alixandra’s third sonogram appointment.

No, nothing is wrong with my daughter.

The complete opposite.

I’m going to be a grandma!!!!!

So nice to be able to tell you all some good news this week.

I’ve actually known since the beginning of February, when I sat on the first sonogram, which Alix and Jeff* had placed on the backseat of the car for me to find. (We were on the way down to see my parents.) I said, “Oh, I’m sitting on something,” and fished it out from underneath my ass, realized it was some kind of photo, and tried to hand to Alix in the front seat, saying “I don’t think I creased it,” while my daughter and her husband cracked up.

“You’re such a dodo,” said Alix. “Look at it.”

I did. And what was my reaction?

Frankly, it didn’t register for a moment.

Then I said…

“Holy cow! Is this what I think it is? Is it real?”

Which only made them laugh harder.

Me, too.

A little while ago, Jeff came by so that we could exchange sunglasses – I was at their house last night, and inadvertently went home with Alix’s pair of shades. We chatted, and then Jeff asked me about the column, and I said, “don’t talk to me about it, I don’t have a fucking clue what to write about.” Yeah, yeah, I know, nice way for a soon-to-be grandma to talk, but hey, the kid’s gonna have to get used to me. (Only kidding, I will be toning down my use of colorful language around the child, at least until he or she is three months.)

He said, “Write about the baby’s first footprints,” which is what I said at the hospital when Alix and Jeff were given a picture of the baby’s…well, first footprints. (So tiny, and, yes, all ten toes are there.)

“But it has to be comics-related.”

“Oh, well…”

“Unless you think of sonograms like a graphic novel.”

“There you go.”

And you ask where writers get their ideas.

John Ostrander has written in his column here at ComicMix several columns (and wonderful columns they are!) about the art of writing, of plot building and character development. Well, if you think about it, a sonogram is a story arc – complete with pictures! – that begins with a something that looks like a walnut – Alix’s words, not mine – and over a nine month period, follows the walnut’s journey, or metamorphosis, into full-fledged “babyhood.” You can even imagine the little walnut – I think I have stumbled upon a nickname for my grandchild, in the same way Pa Ingalls called Laura “half-pint” – quoting from Joseph Campbell’s Hero With A Thousand Faces as he or she tries to put into words that will make sense to us who have forgotten what’s it’s like grow from a clump of cells into a sentient being…

“I had to climb a mountain. There were all kinds of obstacles in the way. I had now to jump over a ditch, now to get over a hedge…”

Or, to misquote Shakespeare…“All the world’s a page, And all the men and women merely characters…”

Alix and Jeff, you didn’t know you were authors, did you?

Just don’t call me Bubby.

*Alixandra Gould and Jeffrey Gonzalez are expecting their first child at the end of September. A Libra! He or she will need some balance with a bubby like me!

TUESDAY MORNING: Emily S. Whitten

TUESDAY AFTERNOON: Michael Davis

Last week’s column didn’t happen because I received a phone call at about 10 A.M. last Sunday from my mom. My dad was having another “episode,” his third. Meaning his brain was short-circuiting once more. It’s called “complex partial seizure disorder,” for the medically less-literate out there.

No one really knows why this is happening to him; before this started last Christmas Eve, he was in remarkable health for a man of 90. The only drug he took on a regular basis was one of the statins –anti-cholesterol drugs – and that was on a preventative basis. His blood pressure runs about 110/70, his heart rate about 65; his only major medical problem has been the deterioration of his eyesight because of macular degeneration and he was responding remarkably well to the treatment. Yes, he had had prostate cancer, but that was 30 years ago, and when his Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA) level rose, he started the androgen deprivation therapy and it dropped to 0.003 or something, i.e., normal.

So this week once again my dad lay in a bed in the ICU at Cooper University Hospital – big kudos to the staff there!!! – only this time he was intubated because the ambulance didn’t take my mom with them and I was driving like a bat out of hell down the NJ Turnpike and my brother (an MD at “the Coop”) was vacationing on Puerto Rico so there was no one to tell the trauma team that my dad is DNR and the protocol when a patient comes in having seizures is to intubate to ensure a patent airway.

Yesterday, exactly one week later, Dad woke up again. He was extubated this morning. He’s very weak, but he knew where he was, and he knew all of us. He also ate ice chips, a cup of Haagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream, Jello, and a ¾ of a bowl of chicken broth. The plan is to get him out of bed tomorrow. We’re going to take it from there.

So driving home I thought about my dad and this column and I thought about the portrayal of infirmity and illness in the super hero world. I had plenty of time because I again got stuck driving north on the Turnpike between Exit 7 and Exit 8A – a stretch of about 21 miles – in bumper-to-bumper, crawling traffic. It’s a section of the iconic NJ Turnpike that has been undergoing reconstruction for the last three years or so, which makes it prone for Delays Ahead: Be Prepared To Stop alerts, and I swear I think people slam on their brakes just to read the signs. What is it about one fender-bender that causes miles and miles of back-up?

Anyway…

The first picture in my mind was of Silver Age Superman gasping and choking and weakened as the radiation from Kryptonite, usually held or manipulated by Lex Luthor – poisoned him, finally turning him as green as the Wicked Witch of the West, indicating that death was near, just in a few panels. Kryptonite worked fast, unlike what happens to ordinary humans when exposed to radiation. Ordinary humans, exposed to radiation, don’t even feel it at first. The amount of time between exposure and the first signs and symptoms depends on the amount of radiation that has been absorbed. The first thing that usually happens is nausea and vomiting; headache and fever can also occur. After that, an individual with radiation sickness can have a period of remission, in which there is no apparent illness and the individual feels fine. Then the more serious problems start: hair loss, weakness, dizziness, bloody stools and vomit, weight loss, low blood pressure, fucked-up blood counts, cancer….a slow, painful, and debilitating death.

I guess Superman puking and having bloody diarrhea and going bald, getting infections and cancer and dying a slow, painful, and debilitating death wouldn’t have gotten past the Comic Code Authority back in the day.

Barbara Gordon, a.k.a. Batgirl, shot by the Joker in Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke (1988), was paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair – but through the talents of ComicMix’s own John Ostrander and his late, wonderful wife, Kim Yale, we watched Barbara go forward with her life: although initially (and realistically) portrayed with a reactive depression, Barbara comes to see that her life is not over. Gifted with a genius level IQ, a photographic memory, and possessing expert computer skills (including hacking) along with graduate training in library sciences, Barbara transforms herself in Oracle, an “information broker” to law enforcement agencies and the super-hero community. She also hires Richard Dragon (co-created by ComicMix’s own Denny O’Neil), a martial artist, to teach her combat and self-defense skills.

Gail Simone took the ball that John and Kim handed her and ran with it in Birds Of Prey…until, after DC’s 52 reboot, Oracle never existed and Barbara was mysteriously back on her feet. This – rightfully, im-not-so-ho – pissed off a lot of fans, because Barbara Gordon as Oracle was the preeminent role model for those living with disabilities. However, Gail has done a magnificent job with the post-Oracle Batgirl, allowing the character to go through PTSD secondary to her disability and recovery – although, as we all know, DC seemed to have a problem with that a few months ago. Luckily, DC recovered from that particular illness.

And now Power Girl, a.k.a. Kara Zor-L, a.k.a. Karen Starr, has breast cancer. Although I’m sure the intentions of the creative team are good and positive and totally above-board (and I do hope none of the creative team has had any kind of personal experience with breast cancer), somehow the cynic in me is smirking. Maybe because Power Girl has always been drawn with gi-normous bubble boobs that burst out of her costume like Mt. St. Helens blowing their tops? It’s like Sharon Tate’s character in The Valley Of The Dolls getting breast cancer. (Google or read the book or stream/rent the movie to get the reference.) It’s saying that the one thing that lifts (pun intended) Power Girl out of the crowd of super heroines are her mammary glands, so let’s mess with those.

It would have been more interesting to me if Sue Storm got breast cancer, or Lois Lane (isn’t she dead?), or even Wonder Woman.

Or what if Reed Richards, or Johnny Storm, or Bruce Wayne, or Hal Jordan, got breast cancer? Men get breast cancer, too, you know. More and more frequently, by the way.

I just hope the creative team does it research. And not just solve the problem of “how do we treat a woman who has breast cancer if she’s indestructible?”

That’s just so comic-bookey.

Breast cancer is real. People can end up in the ICU, hoping to get better, fighting to get better.

Just like my dad.

TUESDAY MORNING: Emily S. Whitten

TUESDAY AFTERNOON: Michael Davis

Patiently standing in the checkout line at Stop & Shop today (which was mobbed because tomorrow is the first night of Passover) I did what so many of us do – browsed the covers of the tabloids. Kim Kardashian has gained more than 40 pounds during her pregnancy. And here I didn’t even know she was enceinte! Kate Middleton, who is also pregnant, fell while attending a royal function because her heel got stuck in a grating! (Oh, no!) Jennifer Aniston reveals her wedding dress! (Somehow I doubt that.)

And then my eyes fell on a special Star magazine edition called Star Trek Collector’s Edition: Into Darkness Special.

Yeah, I couldn’t resist.

It features such things as “100 Greatest Star Trek Moments” (which were strangely not listed in order) and “The Women Who Rule Outer Space” with pictures of Jeri Ryan as Seven of Nine and Jolene Blalock as T’Pol on the cover (but no Katherine Mulgrew as Captain Katherine Janeway inside?..

Which gave me the idea to list some of my favorite and most hated Star Trek what-nots. So, in no particular order:

Best cliffhanger – ST TNG, Best of Both Worlds, Part 1. “Mr. Worf – Fire!” Everybody hold your breath for a week.

Worst resolve – ST TNG, Best of Both Worlds, Part 2. “Sleep, Data.” So incredibly anticlimactic.

Best episode – ST TOS, The City on the Edge of Forever. Edith Keeler dies as she is supposed to. The universe wins. The Nazis lose. So does Jim Kirk.

Best line – ST TOS, The City on the Edge of Forever. “Let’s get the hell out of here.” No histrionics from Bill Shatner. Perfect delivery.

Best Captain – Oy. I’m not going there.

Best First Officer – Spock.

Worst. Episode. Ever. – ST TOS, Turnabout Intruder. Total histrionics from Bill Shatner. Also sets back women’s liberation 3,000,000 years.

Best Chief Medical Officer – ST TOS. Leonard H. McCoy, M.D. The good doctor also makes an appearance in the pilot episode of The Next Generation, in which he irascibly tells Data that he sounds like a Vulcan, even though “I don’t see any pointed ears on you, boy.”

Most Wasted Character – ST TNG. Deanna Troi, Ship’s Counselor. Tell your troubles to the bartender, says Guinan.

Sexiest Character Male. – ST TOS, first season. Bill Shatner, you were one hot Canadian Jew!

Sexiest Character Female. – ST TOS. Yeah, I know, if you’re of the opposite sex – from mine – you’re going to say Jeri Ryan, she of the silver catsuit. Me, I’m going with Nichelle Nichols.

Coolest Villain – ST DS9. Gul Dukat. A villain of dimensions.

Best Vulcan – ST TOS and ST TNG. Sarek

Best Human Wife to a Vulcan – ST TOS. Amanda

Best Lt. Saavik – Kirstie Alley. Did Sam Malone know that Rebecca was a

Vulcan?

Best Couple – ST DS9. Lieutenant Commander Worf and Chief Science Officer Lieutenant Jadzia Dax.

Best Bajoran – ST DS9. First Officer Major Kira Nerys.

Cutest Navigator – ST Voyager. Ensign Tom Paris.

Best Episode – ST TOS, The City on the Edge of Forever. With apologies to Harlan Ellison, I think the aired episode is better than his original teleplay.

Best Episode – ST TNG, The Inner Light. Picard lives a lifetime in twenty minutes. He also learns to play the flute.

Best Episode – ST DS9, In the Pale Moonlight. Sisko and Garak maneuver the Romulans into war. Like Bush and Cheney maneuvered us into Iraq. Sisko suffers a moral crisis over his decision. Garak doesn’t. Neither do Bush and Cheney.

Best Episode, – ST Voyager – One Small Step. “The Yankees, in six,” Seven of Nine whispers to the dead to astronaut.

Best Episode – ST Enterprise – Carbon Creek. T’Pol’s grandmother gives the secret of Velcro to a financially needy college student. Let’s face it, they all pretty much sucked.

Live long and prosper!

TUESDAY MORNING: Emily S. Whitten

TUESDAY AFTERNOON: Michael Davis

 “The megalomaniac differs from the narcissist by the fact that he wishes to be powerful rather than charming, and seeks to be feared rather than loved. To this type belong many lunatics and most of the great men of history.”

Bertrand Russell

Why Is It Always About You? The Seven Deadly Sins of Narcissism:

1. Shamelessness: Shame is the feeling that lurks beneath all unhealthy narcissism, and the inability to process shame in healthy ways.

2. Magical thinking: Narcissists see themselves as perfect, using distortion and illusion known as magical thinking. They also use projection to dump shame onto others.

3. Arrogance: A narcissist who is feeling deflated may reinflate by diminishing, debasing, or degrading somebody else.

4. Envy: A narcissist may secure a sense of superiority in the face of another person’s ability by using contempt to minimize the other person.

5. Entitlement: Narcissists hold unreasonable expectations of particularly favorable treatment and automatic compliance because they consider themselves special. Failure to comply is considered an attack on their superiority, and the perpetrator is considered an “awkward” or “difficult” person. Defiance of their will is a narcissistic injury that can trigger narcissistic rage.

6. Exploitation: Can take many forms but always involves the exploitation of others without regard for their feelings or interests. Often the other is in a subservient position where resistance would be difficult or even impossible. Sometimes the subservience is not so much real as assumed.

7. Bad Boundaries: Narcissists do not recognize that they have boundaries and that others are separate and are not extensions of themselves. Others either exist to meet their needs or may as well not exist at all. Those who provide “narcissistic supply” to the narcissist are treated as if they are part of the narcissist and are expected to live up to those expectations. In the mind of a narcissist there is no boundary between self and other.

Sandy Hotchkiss & James F. Masterson (2003)

There are a lot of megalomaniacal, narcissistic bad guys in the comics world. Some of the classics are Wilson Fisk, a.k.a. The Kingpin, Johann Schmidt, a.k.a. The Red Skull, Victor Von Doom, a.k.a. Doctor Doom, and Lex Luthor, a.k.a.…well, Lex is so megalomaniacal and narcissistic he doesn’t bother with a codename. They’re the perfect foils for their arch-nemeses – and our heroes – Daredevil, Daredevil, Captain America, Reed Richards (and the rest of the Fantastic Four), and Superman.  And we like them, and sometimes we even root for them, because they reflect our unspoken and unconscious thoughts, desires, and dreams in a healthy, subliminal manner. Meaning that we’re all a bit megalomaniacal and narcissistic; otherwise we’d never get out of our beds to face the world. (Just as our heroes reflect our need to set right what we perceive to be wrong.)

But when pathological megalomania and narcissism invade the real world, we get Scott Peterson. We get Bernie Madoff (and what a perfect name for the guy who redefined the pyramid scheme). We get Jack Abramoff. We get Osama Bin Laden and the Ayatollah Khomeini.

We also get Dick Cheney, or as Jon Stewart calls him, “Darth Cheney.”

I watched The World According To Dick Cheney on Showtime this past Friday night. TWATDC is a quasi-documentary by R. J. Cutler (who is also responsible for The War Room, about Bill Clinton’s 1992 Presidential campaign), by which I mean that it is basically one long interview with the former Vice-President.

I wasn’t expecting a mea culpa, and there isn’t one, ala Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War. (See The Fog Of War: Eleven Lessons From The Life Of Robert McNamara, which won the Academy Award for Documentary Feature in 1993)

I mean, I always said that Dick Cheney was a scary guy, and that he was the Shadow President running a shadow government during Dubbya’s term of office.

But, holy shit, man, it’s one thing to know it….

And it’s one thing to know it.

Know what I mean?

If you don’t, I suggest you watch The World According To Dick Cheney.

Go ahead.

I’ll wait.

Now you know.

I’ll take my pathological megalomaniacal narcissists in four-colors, please.

Not in the real world.

TUESDAY MORNING: Emily S. Whitten

TUESDAY EVENING: Michael Davis

I was thinking about heroines the other day, which led to thinking about fictional role models for girls and young women growing up over the last twenty years or so. Role models which, I think, have reflected the way American society thought about women during that same time period.

Heroines and role models with the names Buffy Summers, Bella Swan, and Katniss Everdeen.

On March 10, 1997, a series called Buffy The Vampire Slayer debuted on the fledging WB Network.  I thought it was based on the schlock movie of the same name that had come and gone in the theatres and occasionally popped up on the TV screen at 3 A.M. So I ignored it, even though, as a credentialed geek, I loved anything to do with gothic horror and vampires. But word of mouth and e-buzz finally got me to tune in sometime in the summer of 1997, when I caught a rerun. I think it was the one in which Xander is seduced by a giant female praying mantis, and the effects were, let’s face it, kinda cheesy, but…

Boy, was I wrong.

The central concept behind Buffy, as Joss Whedon has stated (and I’m paraphrasing) was to turn the horror movie concept of the dumb blonde chick who only cares about clothes, boys, and her hair and ends up getting sliced and diced for her sins upside down. Yes, Buffy Ann Summers started out as a “valley girl,” but Buffy was also something else…

“Into every generation a slayer is born: one girl in all the world, a chosen one. She alone will wield the strength and skill to fight the vampires, demons, and the forces of darkness; to stop the spread of their evil and the swell of their number. She is the Slayer.”

…and Buffy was that Slayer.

Buffy was a hero for the post-feminist age. She was the daughter of Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem, and Betty Friedan. Though at times she grew tired, though at times all she wanted was to be was that Valley Girl with nothing on her mind but clothes, boys, and her hair (“God, Mom, even just upstairs doing my homework!” – Season 2, Becoming, Part Two), she realized that it was up to her; and she not only accepted her responsibility, she embraced it.

And then came Isabella “Bella” Swan.

Twilight, the first in the book in The Twilight Saga, hit the bookstands in 2005, three years after Buffy left the airwaves. Many of the women I knew at work were reading it and adored it. So one day at Borders I picked it up and browsed through it. My first impression: How the hell did this writer get published? She can’t write for shit! My second impression: What a piece of crap! My third impression: Bella is the anti-Buffy.

Bella was the perfect character for the reactionary cultural shock caused by the shock of 9/11; she was Phyllis Schafly as a teenager in the early 21^st century. She didn’t argue, she was polite, and she was all about taking care of her father, an “abandoned” husband. But why did Bella’s mother and father break up? And isn’t Bella the least bit angry about the destruction of her family? Why does Bella come to live with her father? Does she feel deserted by her mother, who has remarried? Was her father a rotten husband?

Like America in those early days after the 9/11, we weren’t interested in answers. We wanted to create our own scenarios, and in Bella we found a character to fit our need to that, because Bella was a cipher. Bella was empty, because we were empty.

So Bella drifted. So Bella didn’t have any ambitions. Until she saw Edward Cullen, the sulky, withdrawn “James Dean” of Bella’s high school. And then she became all about him.

Swans mate for life.

I have a problem with the Twilight saga because Bella is always defined by men, not to mention the many subliminal messages within the story. To her father she will always be the good girl who takes care of him and the housekeeping, even though she lies to him constantly throughout the series, and most dramatically, in Breaking Dawn, when she does not tell him the truth about her new vampiric status and about Renessme, the daughter she and Edward conceived. Yes, in the first two seasons Buffy lied to her mother and kept things from her, but after the truth was revealed, the relationship between the two changed and evolved; there were repercussions, both good and bad. To Edward she is the girlfriend as the sacrosanct virgin; then she is the wife, whom Edward claims sexually; and finally, she is the mother of his child. To Jacob she is the girl who got away, until he “imprints” upon the infant Renessme, and isn’t that a creepy stance on pedophilia?

And then came Katniss Everdeen.

The Hunger Games was published in 2008, as America was regaining its footing and starting to ask hard questions again about our society, hard questions with no easy answers.  And Katniss, the story’s heroine, asked those hard questions for us; she was our rebuttal to Bella Swan.

The book is set in a future North America in which there is only one nation, Panem, which is divided into districts; no individual countries exist. Long ago there was a rebellion; the center of Panem, known only as the Capitol, successfully put it down, but the 13^th district was obliterated, its people killed by the rebels before that happened. As a result, and as a continuing punishment to sap the will of the remaining population, the Capitol that one girl and one boy from the remaining 12 districts, each chosen by lottery, must participate in the annual Hunger Games, a brutal gladiatorial event in which the participants – called tributes – fight to the death until the last girl or boy is standing

16 year-old Katness Everdeen lived in District 12, the poorest of the districts with her mother and younger sister. Better at killing squirrels and birds than she is at expressing her emotions, Katniss does what she needs to do to keep her family alive and together. Intrepid, tough, and a skilled hunter, she supplements her family’s table with birds, squirrels, and anything else she can take down with her arrows or bargain for on the black market, despite the automatic death sentence for anyone caught foraging outside the district’s boundaries.  When her young sister’s name is pulled in the Hunger Games lottery, Katniss volunteers in her place.

In an article in The Nation, author Katha Pollit described Katniss as “a version of the goddess Artemis, protectoress of the young and huntress with a silver bow and arrows like the ones Katniss carries in the Games. Like the famously virginal goddess, Katniss is an independent spirit: she is not about her looks, her clothes, her weight, her popularity, gossip, drama or boys.”

Thematically, The Hunger Games is about fairness, morality, and the struggle to survive in a world in which the abuse of power is the norm. Katniss was the slate on which Suzanna Collins writes her thesis that the strong must always protect the weak and sick, the young and old; all those who cannot protect themselves. It was this moral coral that drove Katniss. She killed only in self-defense, to stay alive and to win the games for her mother and her sister, for the winners of the Hunger Games became celebrities, rewarded with a life of luxury and ease for themselves and their families.

Buffy and Katniss.

True heroines.

Bella?

Not so much.

TUESDAY MORNING: Emily S. Whitten

TUESDAY AFTERNOON: Michael Davis

Are you sick and tired of all the crap that’s going on down in D.C?  As in Washington, D.C., not DC Comics.

Believe it or not, me, too. Here is a breakdown of the last 4½ years of political discourse between our political leaders:

“You did it.”

“No, you did it.”

“I’m telling.”

“No, I’m telling.”

“That’s my ball.”

“No, it’s not, it’s my ball.”

“You cheated.”

“So did you.”

“I dare you.”

“I double-dare you.”

For Christ’s sake, grow the fuck up, children!!!!! Or take a lesson from The Avengers – beat the shit out of each other a la Iron Man and Thor, then realize you made a mistake and come together as a team to fight the real bad guy!

I missed the Oscars this year because I watched Tootsie and Kramer Vs. Kramer on Turner Classic Movies, part of their “31 Days of Oscar” routine. I did read and hear about them, though, especially McFarlane’s performance as host, and watched YouTube to form my own opinion. McFarlane’s comments about Jews really offended me. In fact, most of his spiel offended me. Although I do think he’s very smart, and I tend to agree with him when he’s on Bill Maher…to tell you the truth, I’d rather he’d stick to political commentary – I just don’t find him funny.

Reading Lawrence Wright’s latest book, which is about Scientology (Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, & The Prison Of Belief). Picked it up because I was so impressed with Wright’s The Looming Tower, which is about the radicalization of Bin Laden, the birth and growth of Al Quada, and 9/11. The later is highly recommended to understand what happened and to help put today’s politics in context – I believe we are still politically paying for the attack on the World Trade Center, and in that way, Bin Laden – may he roast in hellfire for eternity – was successful. The former book, however, is not as eye opening for me; I’ve always known that Scientology is nothing but a big scam set up by a hack science fiction writer who wanted to “get rich quick.”

Scientology is L. Ron Hubbard’s definition of “there’s a sucker born every minute.”  Scientology is a Seduction Of The Innocents and its victims need a good lawyer. Matt Murdock, where are you? Take these Kingpins on. Challenge the organization’s “church” status in court and get their tax-exempt status revoked. That would help a lot of the poor schnooks who have been taken in by the scam.

The Who have it right. Hope I die before I get old.

Wolverine is lucky to have an adamantium skeleton and regenerative powers…my dad had another seizure/stroke a month ago. He’s not coming back from this one. Not really. My mother is physically and emotionally a wreck, on the verge of stroking out herself. The delivery of health care in this country is a disgrace. It’s in the control of the banksters and the insurance companies and price gougers, who get rich off of the sick while reimbursements from Medicare are being cut down to nothing, and since staffing is the biggest expense that medical organizations face, hospitals and nursing homes are forced to use the axe, the result being that patient care is dangerously compromised.

I can’t think of a super-hero from whom we can take a lesson on this one, who can fight this.

Can you?

TUESDAY MORNING: Emily S. Whitten

TUESDAY AFTERNOON: Michael Davis

“I grew up reading superheroes where the most important element of that name was ‘hero’ rather than ‘super.’ But, lately, a number of the books from the big two superhero publishers, DC and Marvel, seem to have forgotten the hero part of the name.”

My friend and fellow writer Corinna Lawson, the woman some of you may know as the Geek Mom who writes for Wired, wrote those words in her latest piece, entitled “The Cliffs of Insanity: Putting the Hero Back in Superhero.”

It struck a deep chord in me.

“The Death of Captain America” (Captain America #25, March 2007) scared me and deeply bothered me. It seemed to signal the defeat of American idealism, the loss of belief in this country’s basic precepts of life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and freedom for all. And worst of all, it seemed to me that Marvel was telling its readers, most importantly the kids of America, that there was no future here, that the dream was over.

It was an allegory; Marvel seemed to be telling us, for the death of America.

Oh, I think I understand why this story was written. Darkness had overtaken this country, starting with the Supreme Court deciding the election of the Bush administration, ignoring the people’s right to vote or to have their votes recounted or retaken. And the Bush administration, led by Darth Chaney, was such a causally evil administration, ruining the careers and reputations of anyone who got in their way, including people like General Colin Powell and outed CIA agent Valerie Plame, and casually lying to the American public and suckering them into an unneeded and unnecessary war in Iraq, while letting the perpetrator of 9/11, Osama Bin Laden, escape from Tora Bora because the administration could use him and Al Quada to continue to scare the public into accepting the erosion of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Yeah, I got it. It did seem that America, the America I grew up in, that, even with all its continuing problems, the America that promised hope to the world, was dead and buried.

There is a reason why totalitarian and oppressive governments attack the arts and kill writers and artists and sculptors and ban plays and books and movies. Because the arts are where ideas flourish, where the flicker of hope, of what should be, stays alive. Most of us do not think of comics as part of the arts, but they are, combining both the written word and illustration in one format, and as art I believe that comics both affect and reflect society, and are capable of promoting ideas and initiating discussions.

Return Of The Jedi (which would have been a better movie if Luke had been corrupted by Daddy Vader, and Leia and Han had to save him, and then Luke could have saved his father). Ben-Hur. The Searchers. The Bridge On The River Kwai. Watchmen. Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Angel. Battlestar Galactica. Ultimately, all these stories are about the rich and complex nature of good and evil, of love and hate, of triumph and tragedy. Great stories are about anger and hate, lost and found souls, corruption and redemption.

Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces, which George Lucas used in telling the story of Luke Skywalker in the original Star Wars movies, is about the monomyth of the world’s cultures throughout history, which is the journey of the hero:

The hero starts in the ordinary world, and receives a call to enter an unusual world of strange powers and events – the “call to adventure.” If the hero accepts the call to enter this strange world, the hero must face tasks and trials – a “road of trials,” either facing these trials alone or with assistance. At its most intense, the hero must survive a severe challenge, often with help earned along the journey. If the hero survives, the hero may achieve a great gift – the “goal or boon” – that results in the discovery of important self-knowledge. The hero must then decide whether to return with this boon – the “return to the ordinary world” – and often faces more challenges on the return journey. If the hero is successful in returning, the boon or gift may be used to improve the world – the application of the boon.”

Once upon a time, our comic book heroes took this journey.

Now?

As Corinna wrote, “But, lately, a number of the books from the big two superhero publishers, DC and Marvel, seem to have forgotten the hero part of the name.”

I agree, Corinna.

Too many of our comic heroes have lost their way.

TUESDAY MORNING: Emily S. Whitten

TUESDAY AFTERNOON: Michael Davis