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.
There’s a lot to like about the contradictions surrounding award-winning writer/artist Jeffrey Brown (I Am Going to be Small). His intensely personal work isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when considering properties destined to become action figures, but that didn’t stop Devil’s Due Publishing from licensing the characters from 
In today’s brand-new episode of 
After a pretty unambiguously down second season, the NBC show Heroes is looking to get the magic back from its debut season that marked it as the network’s most important show.
If you watched the first full trailer for Frank Miller’s upcoming adaptation of The Spirit, you could be forgiven for thinking it had little more than the title in common with Will Eisner’s comic series.
There are more than a few mysterious elements coming up at Comic-Con this week, and one of the big question marks hovers over the return of Greatest American Hero, the goofy superhero TV show from the ’80s.
The hit BBC series 
is now in its fourth season on the Sci-Fi Channel, and since we’re all big fans here at ComicMix, we’ve decided to kick off an episode-by-episode analysis of the reinvigorated science-fiction classic.
Meet and greet the best talent online and on paper! Here’s the schedule for artists signings at Booth #2308 — ComicMix and Insight Studios. Please stop by and say hello!
