It’s funny. In my adult personal life there was a time that I simply did not see color. I was just as likely to hang out with a white guy as a black guy. I still listen to all types of music and in fact after a lifetime of thinking it would never happen I’m starting to get into country music.

Yeah. Hell has indeed frozen over.

99% of my Facebook friends are real friends. I rarely “friend” people I don’t know. The overwhelming amount of people whom I’m a friend with are white. The overwhelming amount of people I’m in business with are white. I’m the only black guy on my block.

I like bagels and lox. I love The Beatles. I adore classical music.

I’ve dated many and almost married two white girls.

The first white girl I almost married broke it off because her family did not want her to marry me. Her family that she was very close to refused to let her marry me. I just assumed it was because they did not think I was a good enough guy. It was ten years later that the girl who broke my heart called me and said she was sorry for her actions ten years earlier and that’s when I found out the real reason.

It was because her father “Did not want his daughter marrying a nigger.”

That’s what I get for asking. “What exactly did he say” for over an hour.

She explained to me that her mother and father would disown her if she continued to even see me. How like a bad movie is that? Who the hell does that happen to in real life?

Me.

Up until then it never occurred to me that she broke up with me because I was black. I believed her when she told me that she just fell out of love with me. She contacted me because she had married some guy and it was he who suggested she make the call. She told him how terrible she had felt for all those years and he said to get it off her chest.

Man, that reminds me…how I loved that chest.

After the call she suggested we meet for lunch. At first I was hesitant, I had a hell of a time getting over her. I thought if I met with her my feelings may return and then I would never get over her again. But against my better judgment I went to have lunch with her. The moment I saw her I realized I was over her for good.

The bitch got fat.

I’m talking huge.

That was one fat bitch. How fat? I had four hundred dollars in cash and a Gold American Express card on me and I was starting to wonder if I could afford lunch.

That fat.

Yes, I’m well aware that “bitch” is a horrible thing to call a woman and yes I am over her but I’m still a wee bit bitter and I’m making a point but more on that later.

Today, I wish the fat bitch well. OK, maybe I’m more than a wee bit bitter. That moment with, let’s call her, oh I don’t know, fat bitch, was the moment when I started thinking about race in my adult personal life.

I grew up in a housing project that was 99.9% black. When I was a kid every person in my life was black.

All my music, friends and family were black and getting blacker everyday. And by “blacker” I mean my future seemed to me to be more of what my past was, black. There was nary a day when I did not think about race. That all changed when I entered the High School of Art & Design, the best high school in the universe. Trust me on that, I am the Master of The Universe so I know these things.

I went from hating gay people and not trusting white people and assuming I would always exist in a black only world to a person who just stopped seeing color. That was until that lunch with fat bitch 20 years later.

If you know anything about my work you know that the vast majority of stuff I do features African-Americans. Currently I’m working on projects about the Underground Railroad, Jackie Robinson and a book called, “Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Black People But Were Afraid To Ask.”

I also do non-black theme projects such as the book “The Littlest Bitch” with David Quinn (in it’s 3^rd printing and currently in development as a animated show…plug!) , that’s a real book; you can look it up on Amazon (another plug!) and see for your self.

For the most part I still do not see color in my personal life. I’m aware of it. I’m very vocal about it when I see racism but if you are a person in my life you are there because you are you not because of your race.

That’s my personal life.

In business I’ve always seen color and working in Hollywood I’m blinded by it.

In my opinion there is an abundance of racism in the entertainment business and, yes, that includes comics.

Now, this is not going to be a series of how the white man continues to fuck me because I’m black. I’m sure to some it will seem that what I’m going to write about with the way I went about setting this up.

Nope. This is the point I’m going to be making is this; racist decisions are being made by good people who have no fucking clue that their actions are racist.

What’s that I say? Try the following example on for size…

I’m convinced that I’m not disrespecting women by calling one a fat bitch because I’m bitter. I’m convinced that all women know that I’m not disrespecting them.

But, did I not just call a woman a fat bitch?

Get it?

End Of Part One.

TUESDAY AFTERNOON: Emily S. Whitten and that Deadpool Thing

WEDNESDAY MORNING: Mike Gold Snarls

He has posted much and interviewed many upon his own website at
http://seanhtaylor.blogspot.com, but now The Free Choice E-Zine grants New Pulp writer Sean Taylor his moment in the spotlight and ask him a few questions about Zombies, Robots, Rick Ruby, and more.

You can read the full interview at www.thefreechoice.info/2012/05/farm-fresh-within-these-pages-portrait.html

You know what they say. Moms. Can’t live without em…

Um. Right.

In honor of all the wonderful women without whom we wouldn’t be here, today’s column is about moms. Specifically, a mom with a kid who happen to have X-ray vision, the power of flight, is invulnerable – you know.

This über-mom, is, of course, Martha Kent, nee Clark.

Martha was a country woman, wife to a farmer. She loved her husband Jonathan, but sometimes she wondered why she married him. The guy never wanted to go anywhere. He had been in the Army and already “seen the world.” Martha read the travel section of the newspaper and dreamed of Paris. They didn’t have any kids, so “the world’s our oyster,” she would tell him. Metropolis was about as far as he would go. Then one day, literally out of the sky blue, a baby boy crashed (also literally) into their lives. Martha’s husband wanted to take the kid to the police, but Martha took just one look into those baby blues and she was hooked. “Uh-uh, Jonathan,” she said to her husband. “We’re just going to mosey on down to the local orphanage, give the kid to them, and come back a few days later to take him home. That way nobody will question how we got a baby when everybody knows in this one-horse town I can’t have one. Sheesh, you can’t pass gas after Sunday dinner without old man Corsino telling everybody in church the next week.”

So that’s what they did. They were lucky nobody else wanted the kid.  (Now that would have been a whole ‘nother story – probably the “imaginary” kind.) In between they went over to the next town where there was a Babies ‘R’ Us and bought a crib and a changing table and boxes of Pampers, the start of going into parenthood hock. They decided to name the kid Clark, ‘cause that was Martha’s maiden name, and also they wanted the boy to be made fun of by all the other kids in school ‘cause Clark is such a dorky name.

A few months later Martha was vacuuming – Jonathan did the laundry, so it was a fair exchange – and went to move the couch, where all the dust bunnies lived. Baby Clark wanted to help mommy, so he picked the couch up. Martha went to the liquor cabinet and poured herself a stiff one.  When Jonathan came back from the lower 40 for lunch, he found an empty bottle of Johnny Walker Red and his wife in a drunken stupor. When she came to she had a hell of a headache and a hell of a story. Jonathan called Doc Newman who told him new mothers are under a lot of stress and to just take it easy with her. The doctor then hung up and called his wife and told her that Martha Kent was nuts.

Mrs. Newman called the Women’s Bible Study Group. At the next meeting Martha wondered if her Arrid Extra Dry had given out, ‘cause everybody was treating her like she had the bubonic plague or something. Except for Mrs. Lang. “I know just what you’re going through, Martha,” she said. “Sometimes I just want to take Lana and throw her out the window.” She gave Martha the number of her psychiatrist and some of her Xanax.  “Just to tide you over until you get an appointment with him, Martha. You’ll love him. The man is simply amazing.”

Martha went home and told her husband that he had a big mouth. Then she said, “I’m going to prove it to you.” Over Jonathan’s objections she woke up Clark, who started crying. She put him down next to the couch. Then she got out the vacuum cleaner and started cleaning.

“C’mon, Clark,” she said to the screaming infant. “Show Daddy how you helped Mommy yesterday.” Clark kept crying, dirtied his diaper and did not cooperate.

By the time Clark was in kindergarten Jonathan had apologized to Martha a million times for not believing her and had even taken her on a trip to Paris to make up for it – bringing Clark along of course, because where the hell could they find a babysitter for a kid who flew? Jonathan wanted to home-school Clark, but Martha said the kid needed “socialization.” Anyway, she got a job as a teacher’s assistant to keep an eye on him.

When Clark was in high school Jonathan didn’t want him to play any sports because he said it would be “unfair,” but Martha told him to shut up and told Clark to go ahead and try out for the football team. “Just don’t score too many touchdowns,” she said. “And let yourself get tackled once in a while.” When the other mothers wanted her to sign a petition banning football because it was “too dangerous,” she told them that football was as American as apple pie. Martha was very proud of Clark, but he had a crush on Lana Lang, who was the daughter of Mrs. Lang. Martha had never forgotten how Mrs. Lang had run around telling everybody that Martha refused to go to her shrink.

So Clark and grew up and became Superman, the Man of Steel, the hero of the world, the embodiment of the American dream of justice for all.

And he owes it all to Mom.

TUESDAY MORNING: Michael Davis Goes Black!

TUESDAY AFTERNOON: Emily S. Whitten Loves Deadpool!

He was a curmudgeon who didn’t have children, didn’t especially like children, and yet was probably the most noted children’s book writer and illustrator in the past fifty years, J.K. Rowling notwithstanding. He was Maurice Sendak and he died May 8^th at age 83 after a stroke.

Sendak was famous for many books, especially Where The Wild Things Are, a favorite in our house. I got my Mary the full set of the McFarlane figurines and we saw and liked the movie version (many people didn’t but we did, nyah nyah).

He was infamous for books like In The Night Kitchen because its hero is a young boy named Mickey who falls out of his night clothes and runs around naked. As Lewis Black might put it, “Some people see pictures of a little boy’s wee-wee and it makes them want to cry.” It’s gotten the book put on the American Library Association’s “100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–1999.”

Banning In The Night Kitchen. Some people need to grow up. Still, if you’re not pissing some people off, you’re not doing it right. Sendak did it right.

Maurice Sendak had a diversity of styles. I have a collection of the two-volume set: The Juniper Tree and other tales from the Brother Grimm, translated by Lore Segal and Randall James. The illustrations are incredibly detailed and are often strange and reflect the source material magnificently. In the same style he also did The Light Princess and The Gold Key, both written by George Macdonald and they are beautifully realized as well. The latter is a particular favorite of mine. In the aforementioned In The Night Kitchen, the story proceeds from panel to panel like a comic book or, perhaps more aptly, like a comic strip: specifically, Little Nemo In Slumberland.

Sendak produced films, including the animated special of his work Really Rosie, and did sets for operas including Mozart’s The Magic Flute (Sendak cited Mozart as one of his great influences along with Walt Disney’s Fantasia.) He was part of the National Board of Advisors for Children’s television Workshop during the development of Sesame Street. He had a rich and prolific mind.

As I get older I get crankier, and so I can appreciate Sendak’s curmudgeonly side. He demonstrated it earlier this year in a wonderful two part interview that he did with Stephen Colbert and that you can watch here and here.

To note Sendak’s death, Colbert played a few additional pieces from the interview this week. My favorite was when Colbert compared Mozart to Donald Trump and Sendak instantly replied, “I’m going to have to kill you.” Funny, funny stuff and I think it was one of Colbert’s best interviews.

Sendak had a concept of mortality from an early age with his extended family dying in the Holocaust. I’ve also known about death from an early age with deaths in my extended family, attending wakes and funerals. Maybe there’s something in Sendak’s art and writing where that comes through and it speaks to me.

Sendak claimed that he didn’t write for children; he wrote for himself and that was part of his genius. As with all good children’s literature, the work speaks not only to children but the child in all of us. We see and we respond on a deep instinctive level. Everyone I’ve known has had a child alive inside of them – not always for good effect. In other words, our inner Max. I have several children inside of me and some of them are brats knowing only that they want what they want when they want it. Sendak knew and celebrated them as well.

Sendak may be gone but his work is there and so the best parts of him are as well. We can still meet our Wild Things and have a wild rumpus in the pages of his books. I wouldn’t be so bold as to say that Sendak would be pleased by that; Sendak was too much of a curmudgeon. I think he would nod and then go back to listening to Mozart.

Just don’t compare Mozart to Donald Trump because, then, Maurice Sendak would have to kill you.

MONDAY: Mindy Newell, R.N., CNOR, C.G.