My last two columns generated a certain amount of off-topic political discussion, which is 1) exciting and 2) frightening. The fright stems from the fact that political discussions got us kicked off this site four years ago.

The excitement comes from proving something I have always believed. Feminists claim the personal is political. I think the arts are political, too. You may have a different opinion. It depends in your definition of art. I think art is something created by an artist that makes you see the world in a new way.

Forty years ago I had surgery, and was lying on my parents’ couch zonked on major pain killers. I was reading Dune, watching the Olympics and the political conventions. I couldn’t tell which was which. Maybe that’s because Dune is a mind-blowing book. The sequels never moved me as much. Perhaps it was the drugs, or maybe they need world-class diving in the background.

Different people with different perspectives can find enjoyment in the same entertainment. The Hunger Games, which seemed to me to be a reasonably populist and feminist fable, has made over $200 million as I write this, and I doubt all those ticket-buyers are part of the Occupy Wall Street crowd.

Comic books would seem to be an All-American form of entertainment. Especially superhero comics. Truth, justice and the American Way. Upholders of the law who best criminals and ne’er do wells. And yet, those of us who consider ourselves rebels and/or leftists have found plenty that resonates.

Superman is an undocumented alien. The X-Men are scorned because they are a minority, born different from the rest of us. The Legion of Super-Heroes imagines a future in which we not only survive, but learn to use science to live in peace. Mostly.

Often it is the sensibility of the writer that makes a story resonate politically. Twenty years ago, when Bill Clinton was running for his first term, Louise Simonson and Jon Bogdanove supported his candidacy. Dan Jurgens did not. If you were reading Superman comics then (when one storyline ran through four different titles, each published a different week of the month), you might have been able to pick out their different points of view.

There are people who share my political beliefs whose work I don’t like, and people with whom I disagrees whose work I read avidly. There are writers like Jamie Delano, who I mostly love but whose work I like less the more I agree with him.

We have an election ahead of us this year, and I hope that, as a nation, we can debate issues on their merits, and not descend into the kind of lies and distortions that frequently foul our discussions. And I hope comics do their part, presenting different issues and different perspectives through the prism of graphic fiction.

I think Superman is a Democrat. How about you?

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman Goes To The Big Show

September 8, 1966 was a pretty big night of television for fans of the fantastic. NBC ran a sneak peek of several new shows a week prior to the formal premiere of the prime time season. At 7:30, Ron Ely first swung on a vine across trees as Tarzan while an hour later, Captain James T. Kirk confronted the Salt Vampire on the first airing of Star Trek. While the latter has gone on to great international fame, the former series has always been somewhat eclipsed.

Warner Archive, bless their souls, has rectified that by releasing the complete first season of the two season series. You can find the first fifteen episodes on four discs comprising Tarzan Season One, Volume One while the remaining sixteen episodes are available in the second volume. Warner has done a nice job cleaning the prints and the show looks pretty darn good. (more…)

Whenever my old employer, DC Comics, reprints some of my ancient work, it’s gratifying, particularly if what’s reprinted is one of the “socially relevant” stories Neal Adams and I did in the early 70s, but it can be a little disheartening, too.

The problem is, the stories are for the most part still relevant, and what does that say about the state of the nation? Environmental upset? Yep, still got it. Racism? The folks down in Florida could tell you about that. Addiction? That lovely singer is no longer with us. Overpopulation? Hasn’t improved. American Indians? Some of the nation’s worst poverty is found on reservations that don’t house casinos.

As one of Bill Maher’s guests said on his show last week, it seems unbelievable that birth control could be a factor in presidential politics in the in the twenty first century. I mean…birth control?

But occasionally a glimmer of light shows through the gloom. So let us smile and extend a salute to Batwoman.

Digression: Batwoman and I go way, way back. Fact is, I killed her 40-something years ago. Why? Don’t remember, exactly. Her demise was almost certainly a plot point in the days when comics stories were largely plot-driven, and she must have seemed to be good cannon fodder: a character who, although she was in the continuity, hadn’t done much in a long time and if we needed a snuffee, and I guess we did, she was a good candidate. I do regret ending her offstage; she probably deserved a death scene at the very least.

End of digression: Batwoman is back. Wait – make that a Batwoman, who has the same name(s) as the original, but a different lifestyle. She’s a redhead and…oh yeah, a lesbian. Big deal? In our world, it kind of is since, from the beginning of mass-marketed comics, redheads were forbidden.

Just kidding: it’s gay people who could not grace our little sagas and in this we were one with most other media. In television and most movies, sex of any kind was antiseptic – all those cardboard kisses! – and gay sex was way outside the limits. And if gayness was an element in a story, as in some of Tennessee Williams’ film material, it was no more than hinted at and its practitioners were going to suffer plenty before the last reel.

In comics? Well, one of the characters John Byrne created for his series Alpha Flight was gay, but not too obviously; John’s editor knew of Northstar’s orientation, but I’m not sure anyone else in the editorial department did, not at first. (I’m informed that later creative teams pulled Northstar further out of the closet.) And a couple of years back, Marvel let us know that the ol’ rannie from the western titles, the Rawhide Kid, was gay, news that managed not to shake any foundations. But on the whole, the Kid and Northstar and a few others, including the revamped Question, in private did icky stuff that wasn’t mentioned, except, maybe, in he gutters.

Now, Batwoman. Last week she received a media award from the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation and nobody’s making any secret of the recognition.

Call it one of those glimmers I mentioned earlier. And be grateful for it.

RECOMMENDED READING: Free Will, by Sam Harris.

FRIDAY: Martha Thomases

Of all the characters Dan Ackroyd played on Saturday Night Live back when the show was actually funny and clever, my favorite was a guy named Leonard Pinth-Garnell, a tuxedoed teevee critic who hosted segments called, alternatively, Bad Playhouse, Bad Cinema, Bad Ballet, and so on. Whereas the premise was obvious, the ambiance was brilliant. Pinth-Garnell was an über-snob, the kind who pontificate with their noses so high up in the air you’d think they’d drown in a light drizzle.

Needless to say, damn near everybody who ever applied letters to opinions has a bit of Leonard Pinth-Garnell in him, her, or it. Some of us try to keep him locked up in a dark corner of our brainpans, but he keeps on popping up on our shoulder like the devil that torments Donald Duck, or, more to my point, Tom Hulce in Animal House.

Then the Internet came along and freed our inner-Pinth-Garnell. Now we had a forum where we could say anything. Of course, with great power comes great dues and we have to subject ourselves to comments from the masses. As I see from elsewhere on the Wild Wild Web – certainly not here at ComicMix, where I have come to regard our commenters as family – some responses can be quite abusive.

Well, what goes around comes around.

The problem with criticism is that, categorically, it’s like shooting ducks in a barrel. It’s simply too easy to criticize someone for doing something you didn’t like. Of course, when you do you’re pissing off all those people who did like your target. Doubtlessly, you are aware of the famous aphorism known as Sturgeon’s Law: “ninety percent of everything is crap.” This led to my own definition of a cynic: “he who believes Sturgeon was being conservative.”

Here’s something that confirms your suspicion: occasionally, some critics (never me, of course) often are exploiting their target so they can get their audience all riled up and generate a lot more page-site hits, which inure to the benefit of the advertising revenue. My dear friend, author Max Allan Collins, once referred to this technique as “tossing a hand grenade into the audience and then throwing your body on top of it,” and nobody does that with a bigger smile on his face than Mr. Collins, my generation’s version of Richard L. Breen.

Such criticism is among ComicMix’s raisons d’être. Whereas I do not impose these (or hardly any other) standards upon our sundry columnists and commenters, I strive to be informative in this acre of bandwidth. I like turning people on to cool stuff they might not have come across, or, better still, they were considering but hadn’t decided upon. Like all writers I admire a well-turned phrase, particularly my own. The reason why I never got a vanity plate is because back in my First Comics days Rick Oliver and I saw a car license that read “BLIND.” I can’t beat that one.

Occasionally, we all come across an unavoidable target: one so well promoted that commentary is necessary to preserve the greater societal sanity. This is often known as “the Emperor’s New Clothes,” or “What is Frank Miller doing next?”

Yeah, a little Leonard Pinth-Garnell every once in a while sure is good for the soul.

THURSDAY: Dennis O’Neil and Batwoman

NOW AVAILABLE AS AN EBOOK!

Puttin’ The Monthly Back into Pulp with Sci-Fi, Mystery, and Good ol’ Masked Vigilante Action, PRO SE PRESENT #8 hits the streets, adventure blasting from both barrels!

Van Allen Plexico’s exclusive epic novella ‘Hand Of The Machine’, featuring HAWK, his latest creation, concludes ! Kevin Rodgers takes us into the terrifying state of mind…or reality….known as ‘Paranoia’ and New Pulp’s Best New Writer of the Year Chuck Miller shares another tale of his wild and wacky hero, The Black Centipede, starring in ‘Funeral for a Fiend!’ With mind blowing art work provided by Sean Ali and Rowell Roque, PRO SE PRESENTS #8 is almost too much Pulp to handle! Available for the Kindle on Amazon, for the Nook on Barnes and Noble, and for other formats on Smashwords!

Artwork © Jamie Chase

Art: Jamie Chase

New Pulp Author Martin Powell offered a first glimpse at the prehistoric world of Pellucidar as envisioned by artist Jamie Chase, for the upcoming graphic novel based on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ classic sci-fi adventure, At The Earth’s Core.

At The Earth’s Core is written by Martin Powell with art by Jamie Chase and is fully authorized by ERB, Inc. Coming soon from Sequential Pulp Comics and Dark Horse Comics.

You can learn more about Sequential Pulp Comics at http://www.sequentialpulpcomics.com/
You can learn more about Dark Horse Comics at http://www.darkhorse.com/

All Pulp congratulates to Nancy Holder, writer of Moonstone’s New Pulp Domino lady comic book series on winning a Stoker Award for Best YA Book for her novel, The Screaming Season.

Get the full list of winners at http://www.stokers2012.org/.

Congratulations to all of the Stoker Award winners.

Learn more about Nancy Holder at http://nancyholder.com/.

Pre-orders are now available for the audio dramas of HONEY WEST and DOMINO LADY at http://audiocomicscompany.com/. Visit the site for more information on these cool new audio dramas.