Tony Blair retires…?
So what does Tony Blair stepping down have to do with us over here? Well, apparently, the way they get a new Prime Minister in England has changed a bit, as evidenced by this interview that aired on BBC2:
So what does Tony Blair stepping down have to do with us over here? Well, apparently, the way they get a new Prime Minister in England has changed a bit, as evidenced by this interview that aired on BBC2:
Back in 1961, cartoonist Dan DeCarlo created a newspaper strip called Josie. Unsuccessful at selling into that crowded market, it was picked up by Archie Comics , and the feature evolved into Josie and the Pussycats. Dan based the lead character on his wife, Josie as sort of a different look at the Archie environment. He also created Sabrina The Teen-Age Witch and, with Stan Lee, Willie Lumpkin.
One thing led to another, and in 1970 Josie and the Pussycats was picked up by CBS as a Saturday morning teevee show on CBS. Dan received nada. He died in 2001.
On September 18, Warner Home Video will release Josie and the Pussycats: The Complete Series. Whereas we will probably never know if Dan’s estate receives a fair cut – the courts have ruled the estate is not legally entitled – at the very least the box set includes a documentary discussing Dan’s work on the feature.
ComicMix was out in force this past weekend at the MoCCA Arts Festival, but life happened while we were busy making plans to tell you all about it. So here’s a teaser photo montage of crowd shots to whet your appetite.
We hope to be back later with a more substantial rundown.
In entertainment, as with so many other subjective phenomena, many of the old clichés come into play, the main ones being "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" and "I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like." While one purpose of entertainment may be to seize on the universal in order to create a bond between creators and audience that explores or delights in our common humanity, it’s also a fact that everyone brings their own unique experiences to bear on their chosen entertainment, so different people can often have very different reactions to the same creation.
And this is fine, if it’s understood. But people often also use experiences to reinforce their preconceived notions, and the more extreme or emotional their experiences have been, the more adamant the reinforcement. This is true whether the subject is religious, political, scientific, cultural, whatever. Our unique prisms color our perceptions, and always will.
Let’s look at the most recent example from the political blogosphere, involving a pundit named Melinda Henneberger who wrote a New York Times op-ed about why Democratic candidates should abandon one of their current core values and risk losing their base in an effort to perhaps maybe possibly woo a few people who don’t much care for their core values anyway. One reason a lot of liberal bloggers have come down hard on Henneberger, besides the absurdity of her premise, is how she backs it up:
"Over 18 months, I traveled to 20 states listening to women of all ages, races, tax brackets and points of view speak at length on the issues they care about heading into ’08. They convinced me that the conventional wisdom was wrong about the last presidential contest, that Democrats did not lose support among women because ‘security moms’ saw President Bush as the better protector against terrorism. What first-time defectors mentioned most often was abortion."
On its face this is an anecdotal confession, with no more solid evidence to support it than anyone else getting on a soapbox or pulpit or keyboard and backing up their personal agenda based on things they’ve been told in private conversations or email, made even more nebulous by its deliberate vagueness. Upon deeper examination, it seems to be typical of "inside the beltway" know-it-alls who start out with a certain premise then deliberately seek out confirmation of that premise. As Avedon Carol observed, "where do you start when you’re actually looking for women to interview who were ‘first-time defectors’ to voting for a Republican in 2004?" And Tom Hilton notes that this is nothing new: "This, of course, is how it’s done in the exciting fast-paced world of professional columnizing. David Broder goes out among the Common Folk and finds a deep yearning for bipartisan compromise. Tom Friedman takes a taxi and learns that globalization is a force for good. And Melinda Henneberger talks — no, ‘listens’ — to women and discovers, amazingly, that they agree with her on abortion. They go out with an agenda and ‘hear’ whatever confirms it."
Kevin Smith is set to direct the CW pilot Reaper, a comedic drama about 21-year-old Sam Oliver, a slacker who learns that his parents sold his soul to the devil when he was born and now he must to pay the debt by becoming the Satan’s bounty hunter, retrieving souls escaped from hell. Michele Fazekas and Tara Butters (Law and Order: SVU) wrote the project; it film for two weeks in Vancouver, beginning March 12th.
f you think it’s hot where you are, wait until you dive into the first Big ComicMix Broadcast of the week, starting with news on Heroes, Stan Lee on The Hollywood Walk of Fame and our Must Buy list of comics and DVDs out this week … plus another add to our Summer Reading List and the Last Hurrah for the Queen Of Disco
Press This Button. Maybe itt’ll crank up the A/C, too!
I think Kyle Baker is the funniest man in comics. With the exception of the recently completed non-fiction Nat Turner, everything he¹s done has made me laugh, including the artwork for DC’s Shadow series and Vertigo’s King David. After the publication of his second graphic novel, Why I Hate Saturn in 1992, Ben is Dead, a popular e-zine, proclaimed "Kyle Baker is God." Since then, he¹s written and drawn for every major publisher, and his work has appeared in New York Magazine, Spy, Vibe, ESPN and more. He¹s adapted the Dick Tracy movie and Alice in Wonderland for comics. His graphic novels include You are Here, I Die at Midnight, King David, the previously mentioned Nat Turner, several collections of short pieces and a continuing series about his family, The Bakers.
We recently had a chance to talk to Kyle and his oldest daughter, Lillian, herself a talented self-published cartoonist. At eight, she¹s written and drawn five books, most recently The Dumb People¹s Convention. Fans and fans-to-be can see her work at conventions this summer, where she will frequently share booth space with her father.
Lillian and I had just seen Spider-Man 3 the night before, and had a pajama party at my house.
Kyle: Any nightmares?
Lillian: No.
CMix: She wasn¹t scared. We talked about how everything is special effects and not real.
Kyle: Sometimes, she has nightmares after the movies.
CMix: The title — Babies and Kittens, your new book from Image (scheduled to ship in July). Why both?
Kyle: What¹s cuter than babies? Babies and kittens.
CMix: This is the second book that¹s being distributed by Image, after Nat Turner. What other projects do you have in the works?
Kyle: I¹m writing a book for Watson-Guptill, How to Draw Stupid. It¹s not a graphic novel, it¹s text with illustrations.
CMix: That sounds great, but it doesn¹t sound like something that would sell in comic book stores.
Kyle: There are at least two different audiences for comics these days. What sells the best at Barnes & Noble isn¹t what sells the best at a comic book store. They both think their market is the only one, and no one will buy what doesn¹t sell in their kind of store. I¹ve gone into a comic shop and asked why they don¹t have kids comics. They say, "Kids don¹t like Scooby-Doo." Of course kids like Scooby-Doo. What they don¹t is like most comic stores.
CMix: How do you feel about the competition from Lillian?
Kyle: She¹s very good at it. She¹s done five books.
CMix: Do you have a favorite?
Kyle: I like them all. They¹re all fun.
CMix: Lilli, are there comics you would like to read that aren¹t in stores?
Lillian: I like fairies. I¹d like to read a fairy comic.
CMix: Are there any?
Kyle: Disney and Nickelodeon have that market cornered. They do the cartoons.
CMix: There was that Terry Jones book.
Kyle: That had art by Brian Froud. He¹s done a lot of Lillian¹s favorite books.
CMix: What conventions do you plan to attend this summer?
Kyle: We did New York in February. I¹m going to San Diego (July) and I¹m doing Baltimore (over Labor Day). Check with Liz (his wife), she¹ll know the rest of the schedule.
CMix: It must be difficult to go with three kids.
Kyle: We used to fly all around the world with Lillian when she was a baby. She was one of those babies who would only stop crying if you walked her around the block in a stroller, and she wouldn¹t start to cry until I was completely set up to start signing books. The worst was Germany, where they went through all our bags. We were on a tour where we went from town to town, signing books. We ran all over Europe with twenty bags and a baby. Always racing for a plane or train.
CMix: Tell me about Special Forces? It¹s expected to appear monthly, starting in August. You were inspired by the story of the autistic teenager who was recruited into the armed forces. Is this a mini-series?
Kyle: The story can go on as long as the war does. Every generation has their own war comedy. There was Catch-22 for World War II, and M*A*S*H for the Viet Nam era. Everything in my book is going to be true things I read in the paper. Nothing could be funnier or more absurd than that.
CMix: You¹re going to get lambasted for that.
Kyle: I love reading bad reviews because they can¹t figure out how to attack it when it¹s true. Like with Nat Turner, nobody complained in the first volume, when all these black babies were getting killed. "Oh, that¹s accurate and profound," they said. Then, in the second half, when the white kids were killed, that was different. The same reviewers vcalled it "brutal." It was all historically accurate. It¹s what happened.
CMix: Lillian, do you want to be a cartoonist when you grow up, like your Daddy?
Lillian: Yes. Or maybe a doctor.
CMix: On your website (kylebaker.com), you have a lot of animation. Why aren¹t the studios throwing money at you to produce features?
Kyle: Not enough penguins in my stuff. I¹ve made a lot of money working for the studios. After Why I Hate Saturn, I spent two years working for Warner Bros, developing sit-coms that never got made. And I worked on the Loony Tunes movie. I got paid a lot of money. I don¹t care that I didn¹t get a single joke in the movie, because it¹s the most money I ever made.
CMix: Why didn¹t they use your jokes? You¹re the funniest person in the world!
Kyle: They want to see a script. If I write a script and it says "Sylvester falls in a pool," it¹s not funny. It¹s not funny on the page, but it will be funny in the execution. I¹ll do a storyboard, but they only understand what¹s typed. Most people can¹t even understand a storyboard. I kept doing my gags as doodles, and nobody knew what to do with them.
CMix: That¹s terrible.
Kyle: I¹d rather do it and then sell it. That¹s what I did with The Bakers. If I pitched those Bakers ideas, no one would buy them. But when you see it, it¹s funny. I like to do humor because comedy is quantifiable. You can¹t argue about it. Either people laugh, or they don¹t, so either it¹s funny, or it¹s not.
CMix: So what do you do?
Now, where were we…?
Oh yeah. We were discussing continued stories and I was telling you that continued characters have been around a long time, since the classic Greek dramatists at least, but continued stories were a pretty recent phenomena. You might recall my claim that Julie Schwartz and Stan Lee introduced them to comics, but they already existed in radio drama. One form I didn’t mention, but am pleased to do so now, were the “chapter plays” in movie theaters, which I suspect had some influence on the early comics guys. You can probably rent some examples of these at your local video store, but in case you don’t want to bother…
They were continued movies, these chapter plays, also called just plain serials, with a plot that played out over between ten and fifteen installments. Each segment ended with the hero or another sympathetic character in dire trouble, about to plunge over a cliff or be impaled on spears at the bottom of a pit or like that. (Check out the Indiana Jones films, which were partly inspired by the serials, to get an idea of the kinds of scrapes these folks got themselves into.) Then, the segment would end with the suggestion that you come back the following week to learn what happens. The idea was, you, the breathless kid in the front row, would just have to return to witness the good guy’s miraculous escape or, if you were a bit twisted, you hoped you’d watch him get offed.
If you have ever suffered through one of my comics writing classes, or were lucky enough to take a Robert McKee film writing course, you know that some professional wordsmiths set a lot of store by structure, and that the most reliable structure is called the three act structure. (For more, and better, on this, see the recommended reading below.) I’m not about to presume to teach a class here, but most briefly – the three-act structure: 1, Something happens to cause the hero to act. 2. The problem gets complicated. 3. The hero resolves the problem.
Obviously, this narrative strategy won’t work for a story that’s stretched out over a whole lot of chapters, with a lot of climaxes, so the serial guys evolved what I call the “one-damn-thing-after-another” structure. Which is: the good guy and the bad guy(s) have a lot of clashes, which end inconclusively until one of them doesn’t. The good guy wins, virtue triumphs, everyone lives happily ever after.
A story doesn’t necessarily need to be multi-chaptered to be one-damn-thing-after-another; you could probably use the construction for a 10-pager. And it’s not necessarily a bad structure; a storyteller with sufficient ingenuity might make it work, though I usually advise students not to try this at home. What, structurally, it has going for it is this: it ain’t dull. Something big and, presumably, exciting, happens at least once per chapter and that keeps things moving.
We’ll get back to this topic next week.
RECOMMENDED READING: Story, by Robert McKee
Dennis O’Neil is an award-winning editor and writer of comic books like Batman, The Question, Iron Man, Green Lantern and/or Green Arrow, and The Shadow, as well as all kinds of novels, stories and articles.
The upcoming R-rated animated feature film Red Nails, based upon Robert E. Howard’s famous Conan story of the same name, has its voice cast in place.
Co-writer and producer Steve Gold notes in his blog Ron Perlman (Hellboy) has been cast as Conan the Cimmerian, Cree Summer (Ben 10, The Boondocks) as Valeria, Marg Helgenberger (Mr. Brooks, CSI) as Tascela, James Marsden (X-Men, Smallville, Buffy, Torchwood) as Techotl, Clancy Brlown (Lex Luthor in Superman: The Animated Series and Justice League Unlimited) as Olmec, and Mark Hamill (Star Wars, and virtually every decent U.S. animated show in the past decade) as Tolkemec.
Vic Dal Chele is directing Red Nails. There are tons of development sketches and storyboard art on their website; Mike Kaluta handled much of the development artwork, including the piece above.
Artwork copyright Swordplay Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved.
In the first part of our extensive interview with publisher Anthony Tollin (yesterday), we learned how a story that apepared in The Shadow Magazine some two and a half years prior to Batman’s debut, proved to me the template for the Cpaed Crusader’s debut in Detective Comics #27. This is fodder for the historians who have studied what Bob Kane and Bill Finger each brought to the table during the creation of DC’s second successful super-hero. The story will be publsihed this summer in the ninth volume of Shadwo facsimiles being publsihed by Tollin.
Greenberger: How will you celebrate this discovery in volume nine?
Tollin: Well, two double-novel pulp reprints a month is keeping me pretty busy, and this will only increase when The Avenger and some of the other S&S characters are added as quarterlies. I am expanding a Shadow coffee table history that I wrote a few months back. And at this year’s Friends of Old-Time Radio Convention, I’ll be directing an X-Minus One cast reunion. We’re thrilled that this year we’ll be reuniting the series’ scriptwriters, Ernest Kinoy and George Lefferts, who haven’t seen each other in 40 years. Kinoy of course went on to win an Emmy for his screenplay for the landmark TV miniseries Roots.
Artwork copyright DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.