For all you Bones fans out there, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment kicked off a contest this week for fans via the show’s official Facebook and Twitter channels.
https://twitter.com/BONESonFOX
https://www.facebook.com/Bones

Fans can ask their questions using the hashtag #BonesFanEvent and show producers will select their favorites to be included on the forthcoming “Bones” Season 8 DVD and Blu-ray that is set to be released later this fall.

Beginning April 8th, fans will also be able to submit videos to be included on the upcoming DVD and Blu-ray through the official social channels and www.BonesFanEvent.com using #BonesFanEvent.

Video options include:

1. Explain why you are the No.1 “Bones” fan
2. In 60 seconds or less, recap “Bones” from Season 1 to the present

For more details, visit www.BonesFanEvent.com

Flying high at www.lance-star.com

Written by Bobby Nash
Art/Colors/Letters by James BurnsLance Star: Sky Ranger © Bobby NashClick on image for a larger view.

It’s not quite the way Stan would write it. Super Villain vs Super Hero and the result – somebody gets pregnant. Meet Jourdan Gibson (aka “DarkStar”) star of SUPER KNOCKED-UP, a red hot web series already in its second season. Plus more with Brian Fuller on bringing HANNIBAL to network TV, and Robyn Schneider returns to start Talking Dr Who again.

Take us ANYWHERE! The Point Radio App is now in the iTunes App store – and it’s FREE! Just search under “pop culture The Point”. The Point Radio  – 24 hours a day of pop culture fun for FREE. GO HERE and LISTEN FREE on any computer or on any other  mobile device with the Tune In Radio app – and follow us on Twitter @ThePointRadio.

Mad Men starts its sixth season this weekend. I won’t be able to see it because I’m out of the country, but my cat sitter has strict instructions to set the DVR, so I expect to be up to speed anon.

I am psyched.

The last season ended in 1967. I’m not sure whether this new season will pick up immediately after the last one left off, or if it will jump forward a year or two. In any case, the late 1960s were a time when any average Tuesday had more drama and conflict and human interest than all of the 1980s combined.

The advertising for this new season, at least as seen in the posters in the subway, hint at some of the challenges we can expect to see. Buttoned-up Don Draper versus a chaotic world.

To me, it looks like a Vertigo cover, circa 1998.

Which brings me around to comics, and the points I want to make this week. For as long as I can remember (which doesn’t include the late 1960s, by the way, because that’s what the late 1960s were like for me), comics fans have bemoaned the fact that comics don’t advertise. If only comics reached out to people the way books/movies/television do, we’d have a mainstream medium.

I don’t think it would make any difference. Comic companies don’t know how to advertise.

Let’s look at an ad for an upcoming series I anticipate eagerly, the new Constantine, written by Jeff Lemire, with art by Ray Fawkes and Renato Cuedes. John Constantine is one of my favorite characters.

The ad shows Constantine sitting in a graveyard, slouched against a tombstone with his name on it, smoking a cigarette. There is a vase of red roses at his feet. Zombie hands are reaching for him, and there is a drooling zombie behind him. A skull rises from a grave to his left. There is a logo above his head, and above that is the line, “Playing with magic always comes with a price…”

It’s a terrible ad.

If you didn’t know anything about the character, or the creative team, what would this tell you? It seems to depict a guy who is so lackadaisical about the undead that he can relax with a smoke. Where is the tension? Where is the drama?

What’s in it for me?

The best advertising suggests a benefit for the consumer. It elicits an emotional response (and if you don’t believe me, watch any episode of Mad Men in which Don Draper explains things to the client). Perhaps my dishes will be cleaner, my vacation more glamorous, my beer-drinking nights more fun. Successful advertising for entertainment promises me emotional highs and lows, laughter and/or tears. It promises me that I will experience something I’ve never had before.

Perhaps DC assumes that, since the ad is running in their books, the reader knows who the character is, and what the creative team can do. Perhaps they think this information is enough to motivate someone already familiar with the work.

After all, the Mad Men poster I praised earlier is just a picture of Jon Hamm walking down a city street. In this case, however, the average media consumer knows about the show, and even if that person doesn’t watch it, Jon Hamm is regularly in movies and other television shows, reaching an audience outside the show’s usual demographics. By using a master of advertising illustration from the same era as the show, the ad evokes the time period. The composition implies a tension that is at odds with the soft colors of the background.

My curiosity is piqued. I can’t wait. Anticipation achieved.

The DC ad does none of this. And until our industry learns how advertising works (and, no, this doesn’t count), we don’t deserve nice things.

Saturday: Marc Alan Fishman

Sunday: John Ostrander

Carmine Infantino, the legendary artist, editor, and co-creator of the Black Canary, the Barry Allen Flash, Elongated Man, Deadman, Human Target, and Batgirl, and onetime publisher of DC Comics has passed away at the age of 87.

Carmine was born in his family’s apartment in Brooklyn, NY, on May 24, 1925. He started working for comics packager Harry A. Chesler during his freshman year of high school at the School of Industrial Art. His early career included stints on Airboy, The Heap, Johnny Thunder, the Golden-Age Green Lantern and Flash, and the Justice Society of America.

In 1956, Julius Schwartz teamed Carmine with Robert Kanigher to attempt to revive superheroes by creating a new version of the Flash in Showcase #4, an event which marked a beginning of the Silver Age of Comics. Carmine designed the streamlined look of the series, down to the familiar red and yellow costume. He also had famous runs on Adam Strange and Batman, ushering in the “New Look” in Detective Comics #327, complete with yellow oval around the Bat-symbol on his chest.

In late 1966/early 1967, Carmine was tasked by Irwin Donenfeld with designing covers for the entire DC line. Stan Lee learned of this and approached Carmine with a $22,000 offer to move to Marvel. DC Publisher Jack Liebowitz confirmed that DC could not match the offer, but instead promoted Carmine to the position of art director. When DC was sold to Kinney National Company in 1967, Infantino was promoted to editorial director, where he made artists Joe Orlando, Joe Kubert and Mike Sekowsky editors. New talents such as artist Neal Adams and writer Dennis O’Neil were brought into the company, and in 1970, Carmine signed on Marvel Comics’ star artist and storytelling collaborator, Jack Kirby, to a DC Comics contract.

Carmine was made DC’s publisher in early 1971, during a time of declining circulation for the company’s comics, and he attempted a number of changes. In an effort to raise revenue, he raised the cover price of DC’s comics from 15 to 25 cents, simultaneously raising the page-count by adding reprints and new backup features.In January 1976, Warner Communications replaced Carmine with magazine publisher Jenette Kahn, and he returned to freelance work, doing Spider-Woman, Star Wars, and Nova for Marvel and numerous stories for the Warren family of comics magazines. He returned to DC in 1981 on the Flash, Supergirl, Red Tornado, Dial “H” For Hero, and the Batman syndicated newspaper strip.

In 2004, he sued DC for rights to characters he alleged to have created while he was a freelancer for the company, including Kid Flash, Iris West, Captain Cold, Captain Boomerang, Mirror Master, Gorilla Grodd, the Elongated Man, and Batgirl. He wrote and contributed to two books about his life and career: The Amazing World of Carmine Infantino and Carmine Infantino: Penciler, Publisher, Provocateur. He appeared at conventions promoting these books up to the end of 2012.

Carmine was often quoted as saying his favorite character was Detective Chimp.

He won numerous awards over the years, including the National Cartoonists Society Award in 1958 for Best Comic Book and eleven Alley Awards, plus a special Alley Award in 1969 for being the person “who exemplifies the spirit of innovation and inventiveness in the field of comic art”.

The multitude of Roger Ebert obituaries were wrong. I knew a different guy.

The Roger Ebert I knew was this kid fresh out of college who, after about a year at the Chicago Sun-Times, was pressed into service helping high school newspaper editors improve their craft. I was sports editor at the Niles High West Word, and the guy painstakingly yet affably showed me a slew of techniques that immediately improved my work, stuff that I use to this day, stuff that, as an editor, I share with others.

Just a few years later, the Roger Ebert I knew befriended the “underground” newspaper that employed me, the Chicago Seed (our circulation topped out near 50,000 copies so I always put quotes around “underground”). I was up at the Sun-Times one day in the early 1970s when Roger came into the city room and was mobbed by his fellow staffers, all congratulating him for his just-published piece in Esquire Magazine. He laughed and handed out copies of a different magazine that also carried his by-line, saying he was much more proud of that sale. The magazine was a science fiction digest, Fantastic, edited by the brilliant Ted White. Some people thought Ebert was kidding. Those people were wrong.

Like every other Chicago institution and individual, The Seed had its favorite pizza joint: Pat’s Pizza, on Sheffield about a half-mile north of our office. We shared this passion with Roger, and I would often – surprisingly often – run into him there. The guy knew his pizza joints.

Like his competitor and broadcast partner Gene Siskel, Ebert had strong passions towards the comics medium. When, in 1976, I was among the handful of people who organized the first Chicago Comicon, Roger called to ask if I could line up an interview with Harvey Kurtzman, one of our guests-of-honor. Even though I was familiar with his interest, I was taken aback. In 1976, if the press covered comics at all the headline always contained the words “pow,” “zap,” and/or “crash,” and focused on the imbeciles who would pay $35.00 for a 20-year old piece of crap. Ebert saw comics as an important storytelling medium and Kurtzman as one of its most important auteurs, a view with which I strongly agree. He was one of the first reporters to take us seriously. He was most certainly the first Pulitzer Prize winning reporter to bestow the light of credibility upon our medium.

I more-or-less lost touch with Ebert when I moved out to New York and he became tied up with his television show and his movie festival and such. But I never forgot that important push he gave me back when he was only in his early 20s. And I am forever grateful.

Roger Ebert died Thursday of complications from cancer, after a half-century of a career that can best, and most succently, be described as “two thumbs up.”

Thanks, Roger.

…if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things

The quote above is from Raymond Chandler’s superb essay, The Simple Art of Murder. If you’ve never read it, do yourself a huge favor and do so, right now. Google the title and read Chandler’s prose and then come back to me. I’ll wait.

Hi. You’ve finished reading Chandler and here you are, and yes, you owe me one.

But now I want to bollix the discourse by disagreeing with Chandler. I agree with almost everything Chandler writes in the essay – almost, but not all. “...if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things”? Um, no. But it’s a qualified no. If we’re discussing a fictional man, then okay, let Chandler’s claim stand. I think most writers and critics and teachers would agree that consistent behavior is a constant – in fiction. But does it apply to real life? Maybe not. The engines that run we noble humans are deep and complicated, and the rules they follow, if any, aren’t easily visible. Ol’ Charlie there, he can be a Fearless Fosdick in one situation and a whimpering poltroon in another and does even Charlie know why?

The event in which I participated last week might prompt these musings. It was held in SoHo, my old stomping grounds, and it ostensibly celebrated…well, maybe “celebrated” isn’t the right word: Let’s say that the event recognized the 148th birthday of Dr. Fredric Wertham, author of Seduction of the Innocent and big kahuna among the witch hunters of the early 1950s. His book, and the congressional hearings of Senator Estes Kefauver, with the approval of a sub-posse of clergy and editorialists, decimated the comic book business, put hundreds of decent citizens out of work and, arguably, lamed an art form.

Boo and hiss, Dr. W., you stinky old psychiatrist.

We comic book guys have tended to demonize Wertham for sixty-plus years. But last week’s give-and-take yielded information about Wertham that may have been new to many in the room. He fought for public school integration. He provided psychiatric care for residents of Harlem for a quarter a session, or a dime. He seemed to be a decent and useful professional. Until he wandered into comic book land.

Carol Tilley, a librarian at the University of Illinois, was one of my co-panelists in SoHo. Ms Tilley performed the useful, and much overdue, task of actually digging into Wertham’s papers. She discovered that Wertham faked much of the “research” he used to bolster his accusations. So…this successful and respected and charitable man of science cooked the books. A couple of columns ago, I speculated on his possible motives and reached no conclusion, and although the SoHo event was interesting and informative, no conclusion was reached there, either.

We can call Dr. Fredric Wertham a man of honor. He just wasn’t a consistent one. Maybe he should have been fictional.

Friday: Martha Thomases

Saturday: Marc Alan Fishman

The end is near! Part 8 of Lance Star and The Crown of Genghis Kai, a 10-part webstrip by Bobby Nash and James Burns is live at www.lance-star.com. New strips every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

Written by Bobby Nash
Art/Colors/Letters by James Burns
Lance Star: Sky Ranger © Bobby Nash
Click on image for a larger view.