Weird comics synchronicity. My cousin Penny met and married a guy named Ken Landgraff – and no, I had absolutely nothing to do with it. Some of you may Ken through his work for Marvel and DC back in the day when he drew Nightwing and Flamebird, Hawkman, and Wolverine. He also worked in the studios of Gil Kane, Rich Buckler, and Howard Nostrand, and he drew for Screw magazine. Kenny’s a very cool guy, and we’ve had mucho conversations about comics and pop culture over the years.

So there I was last week, out on Lawn Gisland (that’s Long Island for you non-New Yorkers) celebrating Rosh Hashanah with the family, imbibing lots of fine drink and dining on a cornucopia of fantastic food, laughing and just plain getting silly, when Ken asked me “Did you really put a used Tampax on the door of an editor at DC?”

And I was feeling no pain, as they say, and I just stared at him and went, like, “What the fuck are you talking about?”

Ken said that he had been told by – and I promised him I wouldn’t tell anyone who had told him this, so I’m leaving that person’s name out of this column – that I had taken a nicely bloodied Tampax and attached it to the door of some editor at whom I was pissed. He didn’t say if I had left a note or not.

Quick aside here. I just called Mike Gold and asked him if he had every heard this story about me. “No,” he said. “But under certain circumstances I would find that admirable.”

“That’s disgusting!” I said to Ken. (Also just now to Mike.) “Urggh!”

After making a face and blinking a few times, I said to Ken, “You’re serious?”

“Yeah.”

“Kenny, you don’t really think I would do something that disgusting, do you?”

“Well…”

Okay, I think to myself, we’ve all had a few too many here. Don’t get mad.

I said, “Kenny. My dear cousin. Have you ever known me to be bothered with signs and symbols when I’m pissed off? Have I not always been the first one on the soapbox with a bullhorn yelling fuck off! for the whole world to hear?”

“Yeah.”

Case in point. Check out my interview with Gail Simone in which I relate the story of how my comics career almost came to a very abrupt end if not for Marv Wolman. (Attention K-Mart Shoppers and All Aspiring Comics Pros: Do Not Try This At Home!)

Screaming fuck you and other assorted colorful catchphrases is not something to be proud of. Well, maybe a little. Depends on the circumstances. Sometimes telling someone to fuck off is exactly the right thing to do. Like when I was fired from a hospital for being Jewish.

Yep, you read that right, boys and girls. Li’l ol’ me and my yiddishkeit blood offended my anti-Semite bigot of a head nurse, who trumped up charges against me. How do I know this? Because my so-called friends at work told me that she would call me “kike” and “Hebe” behind my back. I call them my so-called friends because when I asked them to go to the administration with me to report this, everyone backed out, not wanting to “get involved.” This was before this modern age of what’s called “zero tolerance rules” at work.

Anyway, the bigot took me downstairs to a meeting with the administration, who offered me a chance to resign. Guess what happened when I brought up the bigot’s use of language about me? They gave me a blank piece of paper, said, “we’ll give you a few minutes to think about it. We’re sure you’ll do the right thing,” and left the room. I took that paper and wrote on it in big letters f-u-c-k y-o-u!!!! and walked out.

That’s an example of a circumstance in which the use of colorful language is appropriate and needed.

I don’t think using colorful language to a DC editor, especially when you’re just starting out, is the wisest thing to do. You may disagree with me, but frankly, I was lucky I didn’t get my ass kicked down the elevator shaft; besides, stories of your use of colorful language, or about how you hung a used Tampax on an editor’s door, will follow you around.

All the way to a Rosh Hashanah dinner with the family decades later.

And then you’ll stop wondering why offers of work dried up.

TUESDAY MORNING: Emily S. Whitten

TUESDAY AFTERNOON: Michael Davis

Secret Agent X back cover art/design: Rob Davis

Airship 27 Productions has shared the back cover of the upcoming fourth volume of its popular SECRET AGENT X pulp anthology series. Edited by Ron Fortier, Secret Agent X Vol. 4 features stories by Bobby Nash, Jarrod Courtemanche, Kevin Noel Olsen, and Frank Schildiner. Back cover art and design by Rob Davis.

Expect cover art and interior illustratior announcements soon.

JukePop Serials has posted the first chapter of James Hutchings new story, The Case of the Syphilitic Sister on their site.

The Case of the Syphilitic Sister is a detective / superhero story set in a two-fisted version of the 1930s. With an innocent girl dead, America’s finest superheroic detective agency must find and destroy a sinister cult.

You can read the first chapter (with more to come) here.

Writers, JukePop is looking for original, previously unpublished novel/serial starts and short stories with the potential for serialization across the following genres: adventure, american gothic, crime, cross-genre, dystopian, fantasy, horror, mystery, paranormal, sci fi, sci fi western, slipstream, steampunk, superhero, thriller, and young adult. Or, if you think you’ve invented a genre feel free to submit that too!
Learn more about submitting to JukePop by visiting their submissions guidelines page at www.jukepopserials.com/home/submissions.

Movies are full of great lines and memorable quotes. Some are even wise and insightful, but some are just filled with stupid wisdom. I have in mind John Wayne’s line in John Ford’s 1949 western classic She Wore A Yellow Ribbon: “Never apologize and never explain – it’s a sign of weakness.”

It sounds great and even may make sense within the context of the story; Wayne’s character is a military commander and the troops need to obey the commanding officer without question so apologies and explanations could interfere with that. Unfortunately, some people take it out of context and take it literally and try to apply it to everyday life.

I have in mind the GOP and Mitt Romney over the past few weeks. The candidate shoots from the lip about the death of our ambassador in Libya in order to score political points. He gets his facts wrong. Then a surreptitiously filmed video made at a $50,000 a plate fundraiser for Romney held in Boca Raton emerges. In it, among other things, he dismisses 47% of the electorate as lazy and dependent on the government and says they will never vote for him. If you missed it, you can see it here.

The best “explanation” Romney made on the latter was that he phrased it “inelegantly.” Someone in the GOP camp has taken John Wayne’s movie wisdom very much to heart: never apologize, never explain. It’s a sign of weakness. The title to Romney’s 2010 book is “No Apology.” It’s also part of what appears to be the GOP strategy: attack, attack, attack. They’ve also taken to heart a line from the movie Patton: ‘We’re gonna keep fighting. Is that clear? We’re gonna attack all night, we’re gonna attack tomorrow morning. If we are not victorious, let no man come back alive!”

To my mind, that’s the problem. Your opponent is not just a political opponent; they have become the enemy who must be vanquished at all costs. These political operatives engage in a political equivalent of a scorched earth policy. Anything that might be of use to the opponent must be destroyed by any means possible.

Last week, the Veterans Jobs Corp Act of 2012 failed to pass in the Senate. The GOP justification for it was that they didn’t feel it was properly funded; the war that put these soldiers in harm’s way and that the GOP okayed was also not properly funded but that was all right. The GOP also kept up their filibuster that prevented Obama’s $447 billion dollar jobs program from even reaching a vote.

The basic reason for both failures is that the GOP doesn’t want anything that might reflect well on President Obama this close to the election. Never mind that veterans might benefit, never mind that ordinary middle class citizens might benefit, the key was to make sure that the President didn’t benefit. The GOP announced four years ago that they intended to do everything they could to make Barack Obama a one term president and they have worked hard at it. They will never apologize for that because, to them, that would be a sign of weakness, as would compromise.

Except – apologies are not a weakness. No person and no nation is 100% correct 100% of the time. When you have done or said something wrong, the brave thing, the strong thing, is to apologize for what you’ve done wrong. Ali McGraw’s character in Love Story famously said, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” Anyone who has been in love, who has been in a relationship, knows this is another bit of stupid wisdom. If you’re stubborn, if you have to be always right, then good luck to you and that relationship. The political equivalent seems to be “Politics means never having to say you’re sorry.” That’s also boneheaded.

Look, I’m not naïve. I was raised in Chicago and I know how rough and tumble a game politics can be. I understand that, if you don’t get elected, you can’t institute any of the changes or programs that you think would be good for the citizens of this country. However, if your only goal is to get elected, to beat the opponent by any means necessary, then you have no program, you have no vision, for this country other than winning. All you’re going to have is the next election and you’ve provided the next opponent with the game plan and blueprint for how to conduct it – win by any means necessary. All you can then do is keep fighting and governing falls by the wayside.

Everyone makes mistakes. I have my own thoughts and beliefs that I try to put into practice but I never assume they were written on tablets of stone and handed down to me by a deity. I do the best I can and, when I’m wrong and see that I’m wrong, I try to apologize. I’m not as good at it as I should be. I do, however, approach things with the possibility that I could be wrong and a philosophy of never apologizing, never explaining, attack attack attack, does not allow for that possibility. And that’s why, in my opinion, it’s stupid wisdom.

To quote Dennis Miller back when he was more sane, “I could be wrong. . . but I doubt it.”

MONDAY: Mindy Newell

As far back as when Tom Baker announced he was leaving the title role of Doctor Who, and at every period of transference since, tabloids would float the “rumor” (a word which here means “collection of words concocted out of thin air”) that the new Doctor might be a woman.  And with it would come the requisite shaking of heads and rending of garments, not to mention the follow-up news articles with headlines that all circled around “Nurse Who?” and the like.  People associated with the show, if ever actually asked, would rarely deny such stories, because as soon as you do that, the publicity train stops, and who wants that?  So we get an infuriating round of winks and “You never know”s and another cycle of articles from people on both sides explaining why either it could or should never happen, or that not only should it happen, but the time is right.

It’s a question that couldn’t be rationally asked about almost any other fictional character.  You can swap stars and characters out of a show – the longer a show goes, the easier it becomes.  M*A*S*H, CSI, the list goes on. You can even re-cast main characters; James Bond has gone through a half-dozen changes already. But to suddenly turn a well-known male character for a female (or vice-versa) would normally be ridiculous.  But in the world of science-fiction, anything can happen.

One of the sublime wonders of The Doctor is his ability to regenerate – to completely change his form, his personality, and most importantly, the actor playing him.  It’s what’s allowed the show to continue for going on fifty years, changing tone and direction with each change of main actor.  And with each change, a growing part of the audience asks the question that Chris Claremont used to ask so often when creating comic characters; “Is there any reason this character can’t be a woman?”

The simple answer is no.  When Matt Smith took the role, as the Doctor did a quick anatomical inventory, he felt his long hair and thought for a moment he’d regenerated into a female.  A couple years later, Neil Gaiman set the concept in stone – he created The Corsair, another renegade Time Lord whom The Doctor knew very well.  He described him as a “A good man… a couple of times a good woman”. So there it is, a Time Lord can change their gender during regeneration. You gonna argue with Neil Gaiman, cause I’m not.

The current Doctor, Matt Smith, while assuring us that’s he’s not going anywhere anytime soon (and quite right too, IMHO) has gone on record that he thinks there’s any number of actresses who would make a fine Doctor.  In an interview with The Mary Sue, he named Charlize Theron specifically.  Late last year, Helen Mirren famously announced that she’d love to play the role as well.

Some people forget that showrunner and Twitter-bailer Steven Moffat has ALREADY brought us a female Doctor.  In his Comic Relief story The Curse of Fatal Death, after burning through a staggering number of regenerations, The Doctor finally stands as Joanna Lumley, co-star of Absolutely Fabulous (and for those of us who care to show their age, Sapphire and Steel and The New Avengers). Yes, it was a comedy adventure, and out of continuity (I assume), but the moon did not fall from the sky when it happened.

So we’ve got the “can” out of the way.  We now advance to the more complicated question…should he? The show has been amazingly good about representing same-sex relationships.  From the beginning of the new series we’ve seen numerous characters in various “non-traditional” pairings, all portrayed as being spectacularly unimportant to the plot.  The underlying message, if one had to spell it out is “There are a lot of the people in the universe, and some of the like men, and some of them like women, and it doesn’t make them any more good or bad as people.”  So surely making the main character a woman would make that message even more powerful – it doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman, you can still make an amazing difference in the world.

Of the people who argue against such a change, the arguments tend to circle around a small number of talking points.

YOU’RE JUST TRYING TO MAKE A STATEMENT Sadly, no matter how good an actress they would find, no matter how good the stories, there would absolutely be a part of the audience who would insist that the only reason the change was done for some socially-motivated reason, likely involving the phrase “Political Correctness.”  It’s the same argument made in comics when a character is brought back as a new gender, ethnicity, lifestyle, etc.  The argument seems to rule out the idea that the new/changed character could possibly be good, based on that ulterior motive.  Any storyline or even dramatic moment that involves something unique about being that type of person is quickly pointed at as “proof” that the character exists solely to further the various agandae of that group, and any other group they can associate them to.

There’s an inherent issue with this argument, in that it suggests an attempt to diversify the types of characters out there must by definition be based on “cramming them down our throats” and not simply an attempt to show that there are more types of people out there, some bumpier than others. It can be tempting to make those characters ciphers for getting a writer’s pet viewpoints across, yes, and when proselytizing takes precedence over entertainment, the show can suffer. But considering how well the show has already brought alternate partnerships in with no massive shift in tone, I suspect this issue would not be a problem.

THAT’S NOT WHO HE IS The character has been a man for almost five decades – he sees himself as male, his friends, the universe in general see him as such.  For him to become female is too large and fundamental change to the character, one that the characters in the narrative world, and certain the ones in the real world, could not accept.  This is more an argument based on tradition than anything else, a general sense of what the character “is”, and an attempt to change that is more than they wish to stand.

It’s rather like “New Coke Syndrome” – when the soda chose to change its recipe, they experienced a pushback from the public far more than they’d expected.  It wasn’t a problem with the taste – indeed the new formula tested better than the original.  It was a basic resistance to a change to something people knew, and simply expected to be there.  People who hadn’t drunk Coke in years were coming out against it.  They realized it wasn’t the soda people were coming out for, but the memory of it, the way it affected their lives.

The people who make this point would likely be as against the idea of making The Doctor an American, or if they chose to change the look of the TARDIS.  It’s BEEN that particular thing for so long, that to suggest it be changed is simply unthinkable.

IT’D CHANGE TOO MUCH Smith very cogently pointed out in the aforementioned interview that a female Doctor would result in a dynamic change in how he (she) interacts with the world.  “It would change the role,” he explains, “because she would be a woman so when you put her in a room full of men, it’s a different scenario than if you put a man in a room full of men, because she’s a different sex.”  This is not, I believe, necessarily a bad thing.  It could very definitely challenge the writers to find ways to combat that mindset with the people she meets, or result in creating a character so strong and forceful that she just takes control of a room so quickly, the question of “who the heck are you?” tends to get forgotten. Indeed, that’s exactly how the character works now.

BOYS DON’T WATCH SHOWS WITH GIRLS IN It’s an old chestnut, but it’s been stated as gospel since time immemorial, and no matter how many examples disprove it (where my bronies at?) it’s seen as an inarguable fact by marketing and programming executives alike. The idea is that young boys (the primary audience of the series) will “only” watch a show with a male lead, in the same way girls “only” watch shows with a girl lead, preferably wearing a tutu, and with a talking lhasa apso as a sidekick.  Of course the problem is, Doctor Who is a show with very strong female characters, sometimes stronger than the male ones, and it doesn’t seem to have affected the audience much at all.

From a narrative and social point of view, there’s very little that seems to be stopping such a move.  Sadly, the real reason we likely won’t see such a change is based simply in money.  Change is risky, and the larger the change, the greater the risk.  Switching to a female lead would be quite risky indeed.  No matter how questionably valid each of the above arguments are, they are all held by some people, and likely Auntie Beeb have a better idea of how many than anyone outside of Television centre ever could.  And they likely have good estimates on what sort of an effect such a change could have on the audience, and until their research shows it’ll have almost no negative effect at al, we’ll not see such a dramatic move made.

Odds are it’ll happen someday, if the show stays on long enough.  And odds are there will be a hue and cry, and everyone will tune in, just to see what happens.  And in a perfect world, they’ll be so impressed that they’ll be back the next week.  And who knows, someday we might be reading articles on whether or not it’ll make sense to to switch back to a male character.