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Ed Catto: The Spirit at 75, part 2

a-spirit-eyes-6890497

In last week’s column I started to explore some of the history and issues of managing a brand in its 75th year. As I mentioned, I have had the privilege of managing several brands with long histories, most notably Oreo. I know how tough it can be to keep a brand respectful to its roots, yet relevant for today’s passionate consumers.

1-the-spirit_347_the_school_for_girls-2224479This week the San Diego Comic-Con will be celebrating the 75th anniversary of Will Eisner’s The Spirit, so I was eager to speak with The Will Eisner Foundation’s Carl and Nancy Gropper. And it made sense because they also live the same town as I do – and we have a fantastic local restaurant for breakfast meetings. And I love breakfast.

I was curious how the Groppers got involved with the foundation, and Carl explained that Will Eisner was his uncle. Growing up, Carl lived in New York City and Eisner lived in White Plains. On weekends, Carl and his brother would visit their uncle in “the country” and sleep over on a pullout couch. Initially, he had no idea who The Spirit was, but he and his brother would stay up late discovering a curious treasure: hardbound collections of the actual Spirit newspaper stories. This was in the fifties, after The Spirit’s weekly adventures had ended.

2-spirit-lorelei-8727523They both were enthralled with their uncle’s adventures of The Spirit. But they felt like they were the only two Spirit fans in a world that had forgotten the hero.

“Who else knew about the Spirit?” Carl said. “Our friends didn’t. It was ancient history. We were 5, 10 or whatever. There were no <reprinted> collections in those days. We might be reading comics, but they were Superman and Batman.” Nancy agreed and added that she was a fan of Archie and Veronica at that time.

Carl explained further that during this period, Eisner was focused on “running the business”, meaning his studio, PS Magazine and the booklets he’d regularly create for Fortune 500 companies. “He was a businessman. Man, was he a businessman!” said Carl.

3-pgell-4132002Essentially, Will Eisner didn’t maintain The Spirit “as a brand” for this period. In fact, Carl suggests that it wasn’t until the release of Jules Feiffer’s classic book The Great Comic Book Heroes, which featured a segment on the Spirit, that the public “relearned” about the Spirit. This classic collection was one of the early “real books” about comics. Feiffer started it with a wonderful essay and then reprinted early adventures of heroes such as Superman, Batman, Captain America and … the Spirit.

Seeking to understand Uncle Will through his nephew’s eyes, it’s no wonder that Eisner was leaving The Spirit behind and exploring new things. One of the great qualities about Will Eisner, according to Carl, was his continuous experimenting and pushing things forward. “He believed the medium could do anything”, said Carl.

4-great-comic-book-heroes-feiffer-8726813And Eisner was also eager to expand his relationships to include others who were trying new things. For example, Eisner forged a relationship with Dennis Kitchen. Carl told the story how at one of the old Phil Seuling comic conventions, Dennis Kitchen was hoping to meet Eisner, only to find out Will was actively looking to meet him.

Eisner created his first graphic novel, A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories in 1978, and then continued to produce nineteen more graphic novels. All the while, he returned to the Spirit for an occasional illustration or project.

5-spirit-and-batman-detective-comics-600-p65-2643954Nancy paused a moment to remark about the type of person Will Eisner was, and fondly remembers him as very warm and kind. She recollects that Eisner was very modest and had no idea about of his substantial contributions to the industry. “It isn’t by chance that the Eisner awards are named after Will. In our opinion, he’s the best person to be acknowledged for this,” added Nancy.

But for the here and now, just how does a brand celebrate a 75th Anniversary? The Eisner Awards at San Diego Comic-Con this Friday, the annual “Oscars-style” ceremony for the comics industry, will embrace the anniversary theme. The annual San Diego Comic-Con Souvenir book will spotlight the 75th Anniversary with a gorgeous Michael Cho illustration on the cover, and Spirit articles and artwork within. And after the San Diego Comic-Con, Geppi’s Entertainment Museum in Baltimore, a leading venue of pop culture, comic and graphic novel art, will feature a Spirit exhibit. (More details on that soon!)

6-sdcc-cover-spirit-cho-7854468How do they define where to take the brand in the future? “We’re only trying to do what Will would’ve wanted to do, ” said Carl.

 

Box Office Democracy: Terminator Genisys

If you have somehow made it this far without seeing the last theatrical trailer for Terminator Genisys then I urge you to stop reading this now and go see the movie. There is a terrible spoiler in the previews for this movie and if you’re still pure in this regard go and don’t look back. Everyone else stick around because I am pissed.

(more…)

The Back Half of Scary Go Round by John Allison

John Allison has spent most of the past twenty years chronicling an ever-proliferating series of strange events in and around the small British town of Tackleford, somewhere in darkest Yorkshire. More impressively, he’s done all of this in public, on the Internet, most days of the week, for free. And he’s done it in comics form.

First up was Bobbins , which I haven’t made a serious study of yet, but was in the traditional newspaper strip-comic format and focused on the staff of Tackleford’s City Lights magazine, with perhaps some supernatural eruptions. After Allison closed that down around the turn of the millennium, he launched a new series with a somewhat overlapping cast of characters called Scary Go Round , which itself ended in 2009. SGR was formatted like a comics page, which made it easier to collect in book form and (possibly) allowed Allison to write more complex stories and include more of his quirky humor and details in each update. It also was clearly fantasy: characters visited Hell, were turned into zombies, and battled giant monsters to save the world. (Though Allison’s offhand tone and character-based plotting turned all of those elements into something very different from what you’d expect.) That strip was entirely collected into eight volumes, though — in the way of the webcomic — it’s also still all available online, as are Allison’s other strips.

For the next round of stories, Allison switched format again, to a double-tier newspaper style, which gave him a similar number of panels per page to SGR but with a more compact feel. That strip was called Bad Machinery , and it followed up the end of SGR to focus on two “teams” of tweens at the local school, who solve mysteries in competition with each other. Allison still includes supernatural elements, but they tend to be more subdued in Machinery than they were in SGR, making his stories better controlled and more focused on characters. He also clearly designed Machinery for eventual book publication, with long story arcs that each fit cleanly into a single book. (See my reviews of the three Machinery books to date: one , two , and three .)

Allison has also made a number of related print comics in various formats over the years — including Expecting to Fly , which appeared online first — and there’s a 2013-2015 run of Bobbins , just to confuse things even more. Since Machinery in its turn ended last year, he produced a transitional story called “Space Is the Place ” (with part of the Machinery cast going to a space camp in Wales). And he’s also been writing a monthly comic called Giant Days — confusingly, this is also the title of a major SGR storyline, plus an earlier sidebar print project — for a different art team, which may or may not have a Tackleford connection. (I haven’t seen it yet, since it’s only in floppy form so far.)

So Tackleford is a place that Allison knows well, and has been telling stories about in a variety of ways for a long time. It’s his Yoknapatawpha County or Castle Rock — the core of a world that extends out to many places. With that said, though, Machinery feels more focused on Tackleford than SGR did — maybe because the main characters of Machinery were kids, and limited in their ability to go other places and do other things.

I’ve been a fan of Machinery for a while, but only recently started diving back into Allison’s archives. The first four SGR collections are currently unavailable to most readers in book form — I believe ebooks are still obtainable in the UK, but not elsewhere due to a stupid recent tax law in that backwards country — but books five through eight are still out there, most easily obtainable in the US from Topatco . And so that’s how I got those books — Great Aches, Ahoy Hoy!, Peloton, and Recklessly Yours — and finally read a big wodge of SGR for myself.

What strikes me most about this slightly-less-formed version of Allison’s world is how consistent he’s been in his concerns: his stories have focused on smart, sarcastic women with a goal in mind — Shelley Winters as the exemplar for SGR, Charlotte Grote for Machinery, with plenty of others including Amy Chilton and Dark Esther — in a world of slightly slower, bemused men who end up along for the ride.

Unlike the Machinery books, each SGR volume collects a number of stories, adding up to about eleven months for each book. (More or less, to allow for full stories in each one.) Allison also includes notes on each storyline and some sketches and similar material at the end of each book, in the old way to entice freebie online readers to actually pay money for something.

These books, covering the strips from early 2006 through the end in late 2009, show serious growth in Allison’s art style, from a cleaner version of the look he began SGR with in 2002, drawn on a computer, through a hand-drawn middle period and a brief “hand-drawn, but much bigger originals” period before settling back onto the computer. (Where I think he’s stayed ever since.) The first story of Great Aches is in that early, flat-computer-color style, but everything else has a energetic hand-drawn look which well suites Allison’s frenetic characters and zigzag pacing.

The stories are a bit sillier and more anarchic than Machinery, and Allison’s notes make it clear that he spent this period making it up as he went along, diving into long stories without necessarily having a clear idea of how he’d get to the end. But even if the stories are somewhat shaggier and less formed, they’re still Allison stories, with unlikely turns of plot and deflation always waiting in the wings. And his dialogue was whip-smart from well before this period, full of witty asides and great cross-talk that always feels plausible enough while still not conforming to the way real people ever did or would talk. (That is a good thing: people talk badly almost all of the time. Fiction is to make things better and more interesting.)

So, in conclusion: John Allison is awesome. Buy his books, read his comics, enrich him with your dollars and pounds and more exotic currencies. Start here, start with Bad Machinery, go crazy and drop all the way back to the beginning of Bobbins in 1998 to get the full John Allison experience from the beginning. It’s all good. 

Note: I’m not including the usual Amazon links this time, because that’s a very bad way to read and/or buy Allison’s older work. You can get the Bad Machinery books there if you want, but the others are available other places more easily. And, honestly, for a webcomic you should just read a bunch of it online first — surely we understand that by now?

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

John Ostrander and the Vampires of Gettysburg

KrosWar is always a horror story. Terrible things are done and people kill one another in violent ways for what must have seemed very good reasons to them at the time. Sometimes, not always, the war is necessary. Opposing Hitler and the Nazis in WWII was necessary; wasting lives and dollars in Iraq was not.

The Civil War seemed necessary and inevitable. The United States was lurching towards the conflict since the country was founded. As Abraham Lincoln said in his “House Divided” speech on June 16, 1858 (a speech considered by many to have lost Lincoln the Senate election in Illinois that year), “I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.” The issue would have to be settled and settled in blood, in war, with horror.

This past week we observed the 152nd Anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, the climatic battle between the forces of the North and the South. The war would go on until 1865 but at this point it became a war of attrition. The South was not going to win after Gettysburg. The killing, the horror, would go on.

The Battle of Gettysburg is also the setting for Tom Mandrake’s and my new project, Kros: Hallowed Ground. Coincidently, we launched our Kickstarter campaign on the eve of the anniversary. (You can find our Kickstarter right here)

Oh… and we added vampires.

You might ask yourself, “Why did you do that, John and Tom? Surely the events of that great battle are dramatic enough on their own.” They are, and don’t call me Shirley.

The difference is that we’re not telling the story of the Battle of Gettysburg; we are using the Battle as the setting and the backdrop for the story we are telling. The Battle of Gettysburg is a huge tale and has consumed many, many books from different authors in its telling. While you can tell the story from many different perspectives according to who you focus on, there is no one character of the battle that can be called  the main protagonist or antagonist. That’s not ideal for graphic fiction; you want one central character around which the story revolves. That’s what we’ve done.

“But why vampires?” You are insistent on that, aren’t you?

I’ve long been interested in what I call narrative alloys – combining elements of one genre with another. Robert E. Howard created Conan and other sword-and sorcery works by combining historical fiction and what was referred to as “sword-and-sandal” with supernatural stories, especially monsters. When I created GrimJack, I smushed together sword-and sorcery with hard-boiled noir detective fiction. When creating Agents of the Empire in Star Wars, I combined James Bond with Star Wars.

In combining the Civil War with horror fiction, I’m hoping to underscore the horror that was the Civil War. Too often I’ve read fairly bloodless accounts that focus on dates and names, troop movements and the order of battle. I think your skin should crawl when you read about the Battle of Gettysburg. We give you two Battles of Gettysburg; one by day and one by night. The concept is that Civil War battles would call to vampires who, like carrion birds, descend on the battlefield when the cannons and the rifles fall silent. The vampires come to feed on the wounded. Imagine for yourself the horror you would feel if you were badly wounded and still lay upon the ground where you fell and then, in the dark, a monstrous creature comes to suck the remaining life out of you and you are helpless to stop them.

That makes my skin crawl and I’m betting it will do the same for you.

Our protagonist is a vampire hunter – a dampyr – named Kros. This time, however, he discovers that he cannot fight alone and soldiers from both the North and South must come together to fight a greater evil that may literally consume them and everyone they care about. I want the reader to see the Battle through new eyes and to feel it viscerally. Tom Mandrake will make that happen. He is doing the best work of his storied career; his art creeps me out sometimes and I know what’s coming!

You can get a peek at all this at our Kros: Hallowed Ground Facebook site and, of course, the Kros: Hallowed Ground Kickstarter site.

Tom and I are editing ourselves on this which you might say makes us unsupervised. We intend to make Kros: Hallowed Ground the way we want it to be. What we want is to make your skin crawl.

Fans willing, we’ll do just that.

 

Marc Alan Fishman: What To Do At A Bad Comic Con

 

San Diego Comic ConA week ago Unshaven Comics had the pleasure to attend a convention in flux. The promoters – good, honest people – take this show to several smaller town and cities across our neck of the woods over the course of the year. I won’t divulge their name, nor the specific towns. Suffice to say the con was more or less akin to the conventions of yore versus the now-typical megacon. A single space occupied mostly by vendors, with a solid dozen or so independent craftsmen, creators, and miscellaneous geek-adjacent business-folk.

To their detriment, the convention grew from a single day endeavor to two. In doing so the minimal crowds that came were basically split. Twice the days meant twice as much transportation costs with little in the way of measurable sales increases. And because I like to be fully transparent about the plight of the indie creator: we sold less books at this show than the same show put on for a single day back in December.

It was, to Unshaven Comics’ till, a bad show.

But I’m forever an optimist – looking for a silver lining even when I need not go through the motions. When a show is not up to snuff, what do you do if you’re there to make money? Some slash their prices and attempt to break even with their sunk costs. Others cut bait and go home early. Unshaven Comics subscribes to the “make lemonade” methodology. We dig our heels in, enjoy the few victories we get, and we use the time to make strides at future shows.

So, what of those few victories? For us this past weekend, it was being able to take the time to really get into a deep discussion with someone who bought our book. It was having the ability to produce some extra sketch cards to fill our sample books to entice future commissions. It was being able to get up and talk to plenty of the other artists and vendors in attendance and network. In doing that, I now have a pile of business cards with potential for adventures down the line; a podcast looking to have us on right when our future crowdfunding campaign launches, a vendor who will be able to produce us some amazing cosplay materials, another who can assist us in producing some affordable up-sell merchandise, and lastly an artist who committed to producing a pin-up for the aforementioned campaign. Now, I’d certainly call that a win in the face of a loss!

If I can digress fully (kinky, eh?), allow me to end on an anecdote that reassures me that my commitment to being an indie creator will always be about the journey not the destination. During the show, a little girl came poking around my side of the table, as I was coloring in a sketch card. “Excuse me. Could you please make me a Fennekin?” One quizzical look later, and her mother came to translate. Fennekin is a Pokemon, and her daughter wanted a sketch card. Money was exchanged, and I assured my li’l fan that it’d take about 45 minutes for me to complete it.

“May I please stay and watch you draw?” she cooed. Oy the feels! “Of course!” I exclaimed. She then stood, stiff as board, locked to my left side, not even a foot from my drawing board. I propped my iPhone up with a reference picture, and she helpfully tapped it “awake” anytime the display dimmed. Whilst I tinkered away at her card, she proceeded to tell me everything and anything I wanted to know about Fennekin.

When I finished the card, I happily handed it over. She beamed from ear to ear, and thanked me. She would never have cared about The Samurnauts. She wanted a piece of art of her favorite cartoon. I obliged. And in doing so, I know that for at least a little while… she will treasure something for far longer than it ever took me to make. It’s a small and important victory not for my ego… but for my spirit. The joy I see in my own son was reflected back in a girl who herself was likely only three years older than my own boy. This moment to her, will be one for Bennett in hardly a blink of an eye.

With a genuine moment like that to cherish, who am I to say it was a bad show at all?

 

The Point Radio: Why LA SLASHER Is Bloody Real

We finally make it on set of the SyFy series KILLJOYS and the cast explains why this is a show you should be spending your summer watching. Plus reality TV gets a bloody visit from the LA SLASHER. Director Martin Owen talks about this much buzzed about new indy film.

We are headed to ComicCon., Follow our reports direct from the floor here #ThePointSDCC  and follow us on Twitter now here.

The Law Is A Ass

Bob Ingersoll: The Law Is A Ass #363: SPIDER-MAN WATCHES A JUDGE GO FOURTH AND STULTIFY

backgroundWell, at least this time the judge had a reason for getting the law completely wrong.

We’re talking The Amazing Spider-Man #16.1 (16.1? Seriously? What’s with the odd-ball numbering in comics nowadays? We’ve had zero issues. Millionth issues. Fractional issues. Now decimal point issues? I should adapt Life of Pi to a comic book mini-series and number the issues 3.1, 3.14, 3.141, 3.1415, and so on.)

In the aforementioned and strangely numbered Spider-Man comic, Detective Teddy Rangel obtained a search warrant for a building based on a tip he received that it was a hideout of wanted crime boss Lonnie Thompson Lincoln, a.k.a. Tombstone. The New York Police Department, with the help of Spider-Man – because, after all, it was his comic – executed said warrant and arrested Tombstone and his men. Had this been Hawaii Five-O, the story would have ended when Danno booked em. It wasn’t Hawaii Five-O. It wasn’t even the revival. So the story didn’t end there.

Eight days later, Judge Anson Howell– who was to judges what Thurston was to millionaires– granted Tombstone’s motion to suppress the evidence. He ruled the search warrant was defective so the search was invalid and all the evidence obtained during said search was inadmissible.

As decisions go, that one was more questionable than “Put Your Daughters to Work Day,” which never really caught on the way that other day did. It’s true that ever since 1961 and Mapp v. Ohio, the states have lived under the exclusionary rule; a rule created by the Supreme Court that says when police obtain evidence in violation of the Fourth Amendment, that illegally seized evidence must be excluded from trial. One would think that evidence seized under a defective search warrant would be suppressed. And one would be right, if the world had stopped in 1961. It didn’t. I know because I’m waaay older than nine.

Since it’s inception, the exclusionary rule has been less popular than Justice Scalia at a gay pride parade. Over the years, the Supreme Court chipped away at the exclusionary rule by creating exceptions to it. Lots of exceptions. Ever since 1984, the year not the novel, when the Supreme Court decided United States v Leon, the country has had a “good faith” exception to the exclusionary rule.

The good faith exception says that if the police execute a search warrant in good faith and later it turns out that the search warrant was defective, then the evidence obtained during the search should not be excluded from trial. The Leon court reasoned that the exclusionary rule exists to prevent the police from violating the Fourth Amendment, because they know evidence won’t be admissible, if they do violate it. However, if the police believe in good faith that they obtained a valid warrant, then they didn’t violate the Fourth Amendment. It wasn’t their fault that a neutral and detached magistrate issued the warrant in error. So suppressing the evidence would not further the the exclusionary rule’s purpose of preventing police misconduct, because there was no police misconduct. For that reason, evidence obtained by good faith reliance on a search warrant that turned out to be defective should not be suppressed.

In the case of The People v Tombstone – yes, I know it’s actually The People of New York v. Lonnie Thompson Lincoln, but who wants to keep typing The People of New York v. Lonnie Thompson Lincoln? – Judge Howell should not have suppressed the evidence seized from Tombstone’s hideout. Even though the search warrant to have been defective, the police executed it in good faith and the good faith exception required that the evidence be admissible.

There are some exceptions to the good faith exception. One is if the police lie in their application for a search warrant and mislead the magistrate who issued it, then they know that warrant was defective They knowingly got the warrant in bad faith so can’t rely on its validity in good faith

So, did Detective Rangel obtain the warrant in bad faith by lying to the magistrate? Possibly. In fact, I’ll say probably. Detective Rangel’s source was the super villain crime boss Mr. Negative. It’s not likely that either the law or the order part of the criminal justice system would put much stock in what Mr. Negative said, as it would rather put Mr. Negative in the stocks. So it is likely that Detective Rangel claimed his source was an anonymous informant who had supplied him with reliable information in the past rather than admitting it was Mr. Negative. Judges routinely issue search warrants based on similar reliable anonymous informant representations.

If the basis of Tombstone’s motion to suppress the evidence was that the source who tipped Detective Rangel wasn’t reliable, Rangel would have had to testify at the hearing to vouch for the reliability of his source. I suspect that was the basis of the motion, as Judge Howell based his ruling on the fact that Rangel – who had been shot in the line of duty, was in a coma, and ultimately died – couldn’t testify and verify his source’s reliability.

If Rangel did lie about his source and misled the judge who issued the search warrant then he acted in bad faith. That bad faith would be imputed to the rest of the police department. So, if Judge Howell ruled that the good faith exception didn’t apply, he would have been correct.

But Judge Howell was still incorrect in suppressing the evidence.

Remember how I said that Detective Rangel was shot in the line of duty? Well, like Rangel himself, I was guilty of leaving out an important detail or two. What I didn’t tell you was that Rangel was shot by one of Tombstone’s men, when Tombstone and his men opened fire on the police officers who were executing the warrant. (Important safety tip, when the police are executing a search warrant, you don’t get to execute the police.) As soon as Tombstone and his men started shooting police officers, they broke several New York state laws. Not the least of which was NY Penal L § 120.11, aggravated assault upon a police officer.

The police had probable cause to arrest Tombstone and his men for their crimes. The police didn’t need an arrest warrant because they saw the offenders committing the crimes. When the police see people committing crimes, they have probable cause to arrest the offenders immediately and don’t need to obtain an arrest warrant first.

The police had the right to arrest Tombstone and his men for shooting the police. Tombstone and his men were in their hideout when they were arrested. That means the police were entitled to search the hideout as part of a search incident to arrest.

Search incident to an arrest, that’s another one of those numerous exceptions to the exclusionary rule I talked about earlier. When the police make an arrest, they are allowed to search the surrounding area for their own protection. So when the police arrested Tombstone, they were allowed to search the hideout incident to that arrest to make sure that there were neither more people nor more weapons in it. Judge Howell erred when he granted Tombstone’s motion to suppress. It didn’t matter that the search warrant was defective, the search didn’t violate the Fourth Amendment because it was as a lawful search incident to arrest.

So why did I say that the judge had a reason for getting the law completely wrong, if he suppressed evidence that should never have been suppressed? Because Judge Howell was corrupt. Tombstone was bribing him. And that was his reason for getting the law completely wrong.

Hey, I never said the judge had a good reason.

Martha Thomases: Stupid People and Irresistible Knowledge

Kurtzman

Banning books is stupid.

I mean, you probably already oppose book banning. It violates the First Amendment. But I’m not talking about the law or morality. I’m talking about the stupid.

All summer, ComicMix and The Tweeks will be urging kids and parents to read graphic novels that are being banned from school libraries.

Here is my experience with being a kid and reading a banned book. I was in the fifth grade, ten years old, and my mom saw a feature on The Today Show about kids who were so smart that they read books written for adults, like John Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage and To Kill a Mockingbird. Not to be outdone by any other mother in the world, she promptly went to the Youngstown, Ohio public library and took both books out for me to read.

I chose to read the novel. It was shorter, and it had a story.

At that time, we were allowed to bring our own books to school to read in free periods, if we finished our work. So I did. When my teacher, Miss Jones, saw what I was reading, she sent me home.

That event changed my life. My parents were so angry that they took me out of public school and sent me to the only non-parochial private school in town. From there, it was a short step to boarding school, an elitist liberal college, and a northeastern urban ivory tower existence.

Here’s the thing: I had no idea what Miss Jones was so upset about. The book was, in fact, a little bit advanced for me and I missed out on a lot of the main plot points, the racial themes, the attempted rape. When someone asked me what it was about, I said, “It’s about a girl who dresses up like a ham, and also there are Negroes.”

(In the early 1960s, that was the polite term.)

Banning a book makes it irresistible to a kid, especially a teenager. There were only a few things that could make me want to read something in high school:

1) The author was attractive

2) Cool people were reading it

3) Someone told me I couldn’t.

Those first two, actually, might still be part of my criteria. It certainly explains my devotion to Will Self.

Because they had been banned, I read books by Henry Miller, which I loved, and by Charles Bukowski, which I didn’t like much. I read radical books about women’s bodies and how they work. I read comics with character that not only didn’t have capes, but often didn’t have any clothes.

Parents who support book banning in school libraries say they are protecting their children from ideas with which they disagree. They think that, if their children don’t read those books, they won’t stray from their parents’ moral compass.

It doesn’t really work like that. Maybe those parents will get a few months of peace and quiet, but not much more.

My parents, civil libertarians that they were, didn’t stop me from reading what I wanted to read. I mean, they weren’t going to go out and get me hard-core porn or vivid depictions of slaughter (other than what was on the news every night), but they didn’t mind if I read things they didn’t like. We talked about it. That’s what the dinner table was for, talking about those things. That’s what we did on long car rides (besides playing “I Spy”). And while I don’t agree with everything my parents believed (nor did they necessarily agree with each other), I didn’t stray very far, and I respect those differences.

Even better, I know how to form an opinion myself.

There are some books on the list of banned graphic novels that might not be appropriate for every child to read, and parents should be responsible for protecting their children from those books. For example, I think that a five-year old would not grasp Maus, and might be upset by it.

You know what I would do if that happened? I would take the book away from him. I would tell him he could read it when he was older.

I wouldn’t stop anyone else from reading it. Nobody should.

 

Tweeks: Teen Beach 2 Because Disney

Full Disclosure:  We are obsessed with Disney Channel musicals.  And who can blame us?  It looks like a lot of people (of all ages) are too. Disney knows what they are doing with the genre and according to the Disney Channel last Friday night’s Teen Beach Movie 2 was its biggest cable TV original movie of this year & the most-watched TV telecast in nearly 2 years in the youth demos.  It was watched by 7.5 million total viewers — and only 3.2 million were kids (6-11), 2.8 million tweens (9-14) in the Live +3 ratings.  There were 13.3 million total viewers during the weekend encores.  That kind of makes the sequel to 2013’s Teen Beach Movie starring Maia Mitchell & Ross Lynch a definitive summer event for our demographic.  If you want to be able to have something to talk to kids, tweens & teens this summer (besides our #ComicMixChallengedChallenge) our video will tell you all you need to know.  Though if you also love a good musical movie or have a soft spot for Frankie & Annette beach movies, we bet you’ll enjoy this too — at any age.

Dennis O’Neil: Is Superman Super-Smart?

superman

Yeah, I’ve heard that Superman is super smart as well as super all the other stuff he’s super at, but I don’t know. I can’t recall a single instance where he thought his way past some obstacle. More likely, he’d just uproot the obstacle and toss it to somewhere like Jupiter. Maybe he is really bright and it’s just easier to toss a problem to Jupiter than cogitate about it. But the question is there.

I mean, if he’s so smart how come he can’t remember his own name? You ask how I know that he can’t? (Maybe you’re not so smart?) It’s that big S on his chest. The darn thing serves on purpose other than that of forcing script writers to jump through hoops explaining why it’s there. And why is that? Could it be that the S is a prompt for those times, after a long bout with Kryptonite, say, when the Man of Steel needs a little help in the memory department. A quick glance at the torso and… oh, yeah, S. I’m Superman. Now if only I could recall what I’m faster than…

Allow me to escort you out of the world where we treat Superman like someone who actually exists and into the present moment, where/when we will let ourselves wonder why Joe Shuster, the guy who did the visual part of creating Supes, decided to put the S where it is in the first place. I looked at the earliest drawing I could find and yep, there it is, the S, encased in something that resembles an arrowhead. Present at the beginning, albeit in a pre-evolved form. What inspired teenage Joe to add it, that Cleveland summer’s day some 82 tears ago?

Both Joe and his writer-collaborator, Jerry Siegel, are gone and, I think, they weren’t nearly as often interviewed as they should have been, so, barring some new information, we’ll probably never know what was in Joe’s head. The best guesses I’ve heard regarding superhero suits, is that they were inspired by circus costumes and/or the illustrations in the science fiction pulps that Joe and Jerry almost certainly read.

Seems reasonable. But: no thoracic initials in those clothes. And none on the Phantom’s wardrobe, either. The Phantom’s creator, Lee Falk, later said that the Phantom’s outfit was inspired by the movies’ Robin Hood. Wherever it came from, it certainly is a recognizable superhero costume. But no dorsal P. Falk debuted the Phantom in 1936 and so his masked jungle dweller beat Superman into print by about two years. But Superman was created as a newspaper strip in 1933 and languished until Joe and Jerry peddled it to Max Gaines for use in one of those new funny book magazines. So the Phantom likely didn’t influence Superman and vice versa.

But the meme Joe and Jerry created, the costumed superman, influenced dozens – hundreds? thousands? – of later creations, a number of whom had something on their chests. No initials: that element of the meme was not widely imitated. But lanterns, lightning bolts, bats, stars, and my favorite, sported by a character named E-Man, Einstein’s E=MC2. Yep, world’s most famous equation, right there below his collarbone.

Ah, but does any of this mean anything? Well, does it?

 

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