So okay, we can get our superhero fix without leaving the house. (And isn’t this what we all desire? And pass the chips…) SyFy’s Alphas, which is watchable, is back doing its weekly thing and this week we’ll see the debut of Arrow, based on a character who’s been around for 71 years. I mean, of course, Green Arrow created by Mort Weisinger and George Papp and, shall we say, “inspired” by The Green Archer, first a novel by Edgar Wallace and later a movie serial, and further inspired by the success of another costumed vigilante, Batman, who was getting mighty popular along about 1941.

I know very little about the television incarnation of – let me confess – my favorite arrow slinger beyond this: the TV folk are using the character’s first origin story, which has Oliver Queen, one of those soigne millionaires who littered the pop culture of the pre-war era, shipwrecked on a deserted island and learning to be a whiz with a bow in order to survive. That’s what I know. I don’t want to know more.

We are saturated with information about our entertainments and I wonder if that doesn’t get in the way or responding to them as evolution intended. We know that this actor is feuding with that actress and they’re both mad at the producer and… I guess we can still perpetrate a willing suspension of disbelief (which your English teacher told you was vital to enjoying fiction). But maybe such suspension doesn’t come as easily as it did in the pre-information age and maybe we bring to the story expectations fostered by show-biz venues which influence, for better or worse, how we respond to what we’re being shown. Maybe it’s becoming a chore to bring to the enterprise what some meditators call “bare attention” – simply responding to, and being amused by, what’s there in front of us. As for being surprised by plot twists and the like, once a staple of light drama… good luck!

Am I blowing smoke? If I am, I’m blowing it into a fan.

I used to enjoy Mel Gibson movies. But I can’t, not any more, not after his anti-Semitic ravings and espousal of Neanderthal Catholicism, all of which was thoroughly reported in the media.

A few months ago, I saw a Batman movie. I thought it was a fine movie and I still think so. But I knew that Talia – let me confess – my favorite daughter of a maniacal mass murderer, was in the story somewhere and I kept trying to jump ahead of the screenwriters and guess exactly when she would appear who she would turn out to be. (I was wrong.) Yep, nifty flick, all right, but maybe my enjoyment of it was just a bit dimmed.

On the other hand…Marifran said that if she’d known that the cult portrayed in the fine new film The Master was based on Scientology, she would have enjoyed it more.

It is not a one-size-fits-all universe.

But, dammit, I know that there’s information about Arrow available on the net. And I’m not going near it.

FRIDAY: Martha Thomases

Art: Diana Leto

New Pulp Author Martin Powell and Diana Leto, artist of The Halloween Legion visit the Earth Station One podcast to spill all the spooky secrets behind the world’s weirdest heroes. The Countdown to Halloween Interview with Martin Powell & Diana Leto begins at 0:34:28 on the podcast.

Earth Station One Episode 132: Dexter and Other Serial Killers–
ESO continues the Countdown to Halloween with a psychotic episode! Mike Faber, Mike Gordon, and Bobby Nash are joined by Jessa Phillips, Jason De La Torre, and Dan Rynn to reveal the demented, deranged, maniacal, and downright freaky schizoids we admire. I mean condemn. Or rather those we identify with, and by that I mean we highly disapprove of. And speaking of straightjackets, we chat with Martin Powell and Diana Leto about their Halloween Legion project and they each take a twisted turn in The Geek Seat. Plus, the usual crazy Rants, Raves, Khan Report and Shout Outs.

Join us for yet another episode of The Earth Station One Podcast we like to call: Dexter and Other Serial Killers at www.esopodcast.com
Direct link: http://erthstationone.wordpress.com/2012/10/10/earth-station-one-episode-132-dexter-and-other-serial-killers/

Unless you haven’t been paying your electric bill, you probably are aware that the first James Bond movie, Doctor No, was released a half-century ago this week. You might not be as aware that several months earlier DC Comics released the comic book adaptation as part of its Showcase series. Editor George Kashdan said he didn’t understand why DC picked up the book except for the fact that the artwork was in hand and the rights must have been cheap.

Several months before that, the people who actually produced the comic book – Classics Illustrated’s British division – released the adaptation as issue 158A of their series. This explains why DC’s comic had the look and feel of a Classics Illustrated title. Just to complicate matters, Dell Publishing released Doctor No in Europe as an issue of its Detective Stories title.

At the time, I couldn’t care less. I was an 11-year old comics fan and, like most my ilk, a voracious reader. The Showcase issue had a text piece that discussed Ian Fleming and his super-spy creation. The next time my parents schlepped me out to Marshall Field’s department store I sought out the paperback novels only to discover they cost an unheard of 50¢ apiece. Most paperbacks were 35¢, some were still 25¢. I reluctantly passed, but I kept an eye out for the movie. I almost forgot about it when Doctor No finally came out.

Like an amazingly high percentage of baby boomer men and near-adolescents, James Bond was the coolest guy I’d ever seen on the big screen, and I immediately became a fan. By now I was actually 12 and able to afford a 50¢ paperback, but I couldn’t find Fleming’s Doctor No. I settled for Live and Let Die, and I was enthralled.

Over the next several years I devoured every Fleming novel, even reading the new ones as they were serialized in Playboy (I looked a bit older than my age, particularly if I didn’t buy it along with my week’s comics). I was in line for the debut of every subsequent movie, and I followed the James Bond newspaper strip in the Chicago American. The latter was a British strip that quite faithfully adapted Fleming’s books, and in my mind most of those adaptations were better than the books themselves. Here’s a fun fact: Modesty Blaise creator Peter O’Donnell wrote the Doctor No adaptation. But I wondered why DC didn’t do any more adaptations.

So did Carmine Infantino when he became publisher. In 1972 he discovered DC had a ten-year option on Bond, and that option was about to run its course. He approached Jack Kirby and his old pal Alex Toth and probably others, but then something terrible happened: Sean Connery announced he was quitting the series. Carmine let the option expire.

Clearly, DC would have made a fortune off of 007 had they picked up the series when the second Bond movie was made. Or even the third, Goldfinger, which truly launched the mega-fad. But the company was starting to doll itself up for a sale and the folks in the trenches were busy with the imminent launch of the Batman teevee series.

Perhaps the most popular heroic fantasy figure in movie history, James Bond never achieved an on-going comic book series. Many movies were adapted, some by guys like Mike Grell, Tom Yeates, and Howard Chaykin. A handful of original mini-series and one-shots were released, but nothing more.

The movie series went on and on and on, but most Roger Moore entries were more reminiscent of Adam West than of Sean Connery. The series started to improve after Sir Roger outgrew the part and Barbara Broccoli took over as producer, and Daniel Craig’s reboot in 2006 brought new hope and great entertainment to the masses. As Adele fans know all too well, the next Craig Bond flick, Skyfall, comes out in a few weeks.

But I got to tell you, as a baby boomer Bond boy, I feel greatly cheated.

An Alex Toth Bond comic?

Damn.

THURSDAY: Dennis O’Neil

The great television series Naked City used to close each episode with the famous tag, “There are eight million stories in the Naked City. This has been one of them.” It’s very compact size and dense population means people are intersecting in new and unusual ways all the time. This has given rise to some wonderful fiction such as Kissing in Manhattan and some less memorable fare such as the recently released film 30 Beats. Using a heat wave as the through-line the heat is also a metaphor for the sexual tension between ten various New Yorkers. Structurally, it owes a great deal to Max Ophuls’s La Ronde but never comes close to its brilliance.

The cast is headed by sexy Paz de la Huerta (Boardwalk Empire) and Lee Pace (Pushing Daisies), and the film was written and directed by Alexis Lloyd. The cast also includes Condola Rashad, Justin Kirk, Thomas Sadoski (The Newsroom), and Jennifer Tilly. Its tag line, “New York City, in the heart of summer: a heat wave transforms the city into a tropical zone. Ten characters are drawn, one after the other, into a ring of love and desire, each one caught beyond his or her control in a chain reaction of seduction, impulses and self-discovery” is certainly catchy but the execution leaves a lot to be desired.

Given the rich possibilities, it’s a shame the film runs a lightweight 88 minutes and doesn’t really bring any of the characters to real light or allow them any depth. As a result, there’s a lot of sweat and plenty of exposed skin, but you’ve seen better on any late night Cinemax production.

Out today from Lionsgate Home Entertainment, it’s billed a comedic romance but the comedy is fairly tame and the romance is of the heaving bosom variety. There’s the older woman (Ingeborga Dapkunaite) seducing the virgin (Ben Levin) at a spa only to learn she was hired by dad to be his first sexual experience. While a cliché situation, Lloyd allows their inner thoughts to come through, making this awkwardness somewhat sweet. It also promises this could be a good little film, but then we’re shown she was only inspired this one time. The rest is a series of clichés without redemption as character A meets up with character B and after sex, character B hooks up with character C and frankly, the characterizations are as flat as this description. That the core cast is between 25-35 also steals chances for some interesting comparisons among the generations.

There’s the tarot reader helping the young man overcome erectile dysfunction with the aid of some crystals and the chiropractor who gets it on with one of his patients. Every encounter between characters culminates in sex, without fail, and each exchange robs the actors of a chance to actually invest any emotion and feeling into their characters. There’s far too much sex (believe it or not) and nowhere near enough depth.

It’s always a shame when a film about sex is just the sex and nothing about those who commit the act. A more adult approach would have taken this concept, heat wave and all, and really made the audience melt.

Despite the massive mainstream success of comic-to-screen adaptations like Marvel’s [[[The Avengers]]] and DC’s [[[The Dark Knight Rises]]], there hasn’t been much serious scholarship or long-form journalism around the superhero comic book industry in the last few decades. Any time a newspaper or magazine takes a crack at it, the stories tend to be ego-inflating looks at how a chosen few grizzled visionaries (usually Stan Lee and only Stan Lee) created an entire industry out of whole cloth and had the time of their life doing it, while publisher-sponsored histories tend to focus on the characters, rather than the creators.

And it’s the creators who are key to the new book Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, wherein author Sean Howe mercifully forgoes the breathless “Excelsiors” and “Face Fronts” of the officially-sanctioned or poorly-conceived histories of years past for an extremely thorough and immensely accessible look at the comic publishing titan’s history, from the early days of Timely and Atlas all the way through the company’s purchase by Disney in 2009.

What Howe demonstrates, knowingly or otherwise, is that much of the dialogue around superhero comics today is nothing we haven’t gone through before. Marvel Comics: The Untold Story characterizes the House of Ideas as being stuck in something of a loop: Creators wrest creative control from editorial one way or another, until Marvel’s skittish owner (from Martin Goodman to New World Pictures to Ike Perlmutter and others, depending on the year) pressures editorial to exert more control in an effort to protect the licensing viability of the company’s stable of intellectual property.

To that end, while Howe rightfully devotes plenty of the story to Jack Kirby, his chronic mistreatment and marginalization by Marvel editorial and corporate, his legal struggles against Marvel, and his increasingly strained relationship with Stan Lee and odd reconciliation later in life, he also spends plenty of time on Howard the Duck creator Steve Gerber and his disillusioned self-imposed exile to independent comics. Howe’s reporting and narrative paints Gerber as the poster child for the creator’s rights movement, abused by a callous corporate comics publisher and denied the copyright to his own creation.

But to Howe’s credit, he did a staggering amount of research for this history, and the book reflects it: For every controversial event or personality, Howe presents the other side the story. While the legendary Todd McFarlane-led uprising of superstar Marvel artists against editorial that would lead to the formation of Image Comics is well-represented, Howe’s interviews with Fabian Nicieza and Tom DeFalco tend to paint the Image founders as spoiled, self-entitled children. It’s a fine line to walk between presenting these views and endorsing either of them, but Howe walks it admirably. The sole exception here may be Howe’s representation of creators like Jim Shooter and Steve Ditko, but neither of them sat down with Howe for this book, and if Howe couldn’t find anybody at Marvel past or present willing to say much in the way of kind words about them, that’s hardly the author’s fault – but the sections devoted to the two legends tend to come off as extremely uncharitable as a result.

And while on the subject of Howe’s research, it’s clear that he didn’t take half-measures, and it’s a testament to his skill as a biographer that his frequent digressions into anecdotes about former editor-in-chief Marc Gruenwald’s office pranks, the secret revealed after John Verpoorten’s untimely death, Morrie Kuramoto’s friendly rivalry with fellow proofreader Danny Crespi, and other Marvel staffers don’t break up the narrative.

You may have noticed that I haven’t mentioned Stan Lee much, and that’s for a very simple reason. Possibly one of the more subtle, but daring, choices Howe makes is to downplay Marvel’s founding editor, painting him as an often-absentee boss who gave up on comics early in the company’s history and tried to parlay his status as the public face of a medium into a career in Hollywood and beyond. He’s a constant presence in Howe’s telling of the Marvel story, but often only in the background, making more of an impact as a showman and mascot than he ever did as an editor or writer. He’s not unkind to Lee, exactly, but he comes off as almost dismissive, choosing instead to focus on the struggles between the Marvel creators and editors actually publishing the books, and the company’s ownership – a struggle Lee hardly figures in to after leaving Fantastic Four, the odd lawsuit aside.

Howe’s documentarian writing style can sometimes come off as a little dry, and he only discusses specific characters and storylines in the context of Marvel’s business at that point in time and what it meant for the company. The infamous “Heroes Reborn” event, for example, is cross-examined in terms of Marvel’s relationship with Image and its demoralizing force in the Marvel bullpen, rather than the issues themselves.

In short, Marvel Comics: The Untold Story is thought-provoking stuff that has a lot to teach comic book fans new and old. But it’s definitely more Ken Burns than Morgan Spurlock.

I’m in Paris.

I’ve been here for a week and I must say it’s quite the experience. I’m on record as having said I hate the French so this is quite interesting. Allow me a moment to explain where that ‘hate’ sentiment came from…

About, maybe, 20 years ago I was at DC comics delivering some work. I was in the lobby having a running conversation with Clark Kent and using the free phone that sat next to Clark to call just about anyone and everyone I wanted to talk to at the time.

Mostly I would just call girls trying to impress them with the fact I was calling them from DC Comics where I hanging with Clark while I waited to have my important meeting with an editor who was just crazy about my work. It never really dawned on me until much later that unless you want to be in the comic book business or you are a fan of comics, no one and I mean no one is impressed with anyone who works in the comic book industry.

In my youth, let’s see 20 years ago I was five, I just assumed that everybody thought the comic book business was the place to be and the world was impressed with my being involved in it.

That is about as true as my Jewish heritage.

For the most part the industry was looked upon as a place where grown ups waste their hard earned degrees in art or literature drawing or writing ‘funny books.’

If you wanted respect in regards to your comic career that respect could only be found at a few places such as comic conventions, comic book stores, art schools or on movie lines waiting to see films like Star Wars or Raiders Of the Lost Ark.

I’d heard back then that in France and Japan comics were truly looked upon as a respected form of art. The only real and true American art forms are Rock and Roll (thank black people for that) jazz (ditto), the musical and comics. I admit not knowing who is responsible for the musical but I suspect that came from an enlightened white person, but for comics you can thank Jewish Americans.

But, (Peter, next SDCC dinner is on me) I digress. So, as to the reason I started to hate the French…

As I was hanging with Clark and and running up DC’S phone bill I began to hear a fairly loud yet strange sounding voice, not strange as in I did not recognize the person (I didn’t) strange as in foreign.

Trust me, I know a bit about being loud but the loudness in this voice had a pleasing tone to it so I was intrigued as to the origin. The speaker was a French artist and he was talking to another French guy…in French.

They were having a grand time, talking in French and laughing really hard. When they paused a bit one of them turned to me and asked (in English) where the subway was. I told them then I asked what was so funny.

When I asked that, they looked at each other and started to crack up again.

Finally the guy who asked for directions said “Your American comics are light years behind where we are in France with our books.”

Oh, no, he didn’t.

“What,” I began in a slow and measured voice, giving him the benefit of the doubt that what he said was not what I heard, I mean he was speaking in a foreign tongue, “do you mean?”

Well, what he meant was what he said, which was in effect that American comic books sucked. Then he proceeded to tell me that America sucked also on a few fronts.

This motherfucker…

I let him finish then I reminded him ever so softly with respect in my tone that America created the comic book and America had the best writers and artists in the world…

You know, I remember exactly what I said (because I keep a journal) so I’ll just recount that…

“You are out of your pussy French mind! We created the comic book, we have the best goddamn artists and writers on the planet! You know how I know that? Nobody is making movies and TV shows out of your bullshit content motherfucker! As far as America’s standing in the world I remind you it was us that saved your butt when the Germans were peeing all over your punk ass, bitch!”

I had a bit more to say but it just so happened that Jenette Kahn walked in and invited me to her office… in other words she stopped me from bitch slapping that asshole and/or embarrassing myself further with my all too loud tirade.

So, that is the reason that I’ve hated the French all these years. That one incident tainted my judgment for decades. Over the last few years I’ve come to realize that a lot of my thought process was wrong, I’ve admitted that I’ve been an asshole on many subjects. The one thing I’ve never let go no matter how silly it was for me to hold on to was my hated of the French.

That moment in time with that pussy at DC really made me madder than most things had before or since. If you really know me or read my rants on Michael Davis World (plug!) you know that, that’s some kind of mad!

I was wrong.

I was dead wrong.

The French are decent people and as far as comics go they respect the medium like the art form it is. To this day in America the mainstream does not give the kind of respect to the comic industry that we deserve. Yes, it has gotten much better but still “I work in comics” will most likely get you little respect, if any, and may get you ridiculed or worse.

Not here in Paris.

Every bookstore not only has a huge comic book section, but every bookstore also displays comics in their windows. I’ve never seen the latter in the states. I’m talking real bookstores, not comic book stores.

Now. About their comic book stores…W O W!!The comic book stores here in France are off the freakin’ chain!

That means “incredible” to those of you that don’t know any black people.

I was asked for an autograph in a Paris comic book store. I thought the person asking thought I was someone else but no…

“ I think you are mistaking me for someone else.”

“‘Michael Davis? Milestone, oui? Etc., oui?”

Hell yeah, you French hottie you!!!!

No, I didn’t answer her like that but she was hot.

So, I was wrong and I was stupid not to see it before I came here. I’ll be here another week working on a project and before I leave I’m going to make it a point to talk to as many French people I can about comics. I also have another reason to now love the French they all seem to adore Obama.

I’m not kidding. They love that guy and hate Mitt.

Lastly, if by chance the French artist I met at DC all those years ago is reading this I’d like to say that you were right about one thing. The French are light years ahead of America when it comes to respecting the medium.

That said, you can still kiss my ass.

You don’t come in our backyard and talk shit about us no matter how cool your people may be.

U.S.A, motherfucker, U.S.A.!!

BTW, I was not kidding about sitting next to Clark Kent at DC. There was a life sized stature of old Clark sitting in the reception area and I’d sit there and make free phone calls. Those were the good old days…

WEDNESDAY: Gold… Mike Gold. A.K.A. Doctor Know