According to some recent news, the sun seems to be bouncing stuff off an invisible, planet-sized object near Mercury. Of course, the smarty-ass scientists have an explanation – don’t they always? – something about how the pictures are processed. Other, more sensible, people have speculated that the invisible thing is a spaceship hidden by a cloaking device, maybe spying on us from two planets away. (Really big binoculars?) I’m afraid that misses the mark, too. The obvious answer is…Santa’s sleigh! Think about it – a cloaking device. Of course. That explains why we’ve never seen it. And the size of a small planet (which is still pretty big)? Well, it can’t exactly be tiny, not when it carries all those toys for good girls and boys.

Now, it’s true that as I look about me I don’t see many good girls and boys. None, in fact.  So maybe the invisible sleigh is full of lumps of coal to be put in the stockings hung by the chimney with care, assuming anyone hangs stockings anymore.  This could be glad tidings. If the coal comes from Mercury – and surely it might – why, we might just have ourselves a source of clean energy.

Isn’t it grand when truth meets science?

***

About 15 years ago, give or take, a movie-involved bearer of my DNA put a video cassette into our VCR and showed us a short cartoon that was going around titled, just a bit sacrilegiously, Jesus vs Santa. The plot was simple: the Jolly Old Elf and Our Lord and Savior duke it out to determine who’s the king of the holiday. I forget who won and that isn’t really important (and herewith I resist the impulse to launch into a diatribe). What is important, or at least interesting, is that the two young guys who perpetrated the cartoon were (and are) named Trey Parker and Matt Stone and what played in our living room was the predecessor of Comedy Central’s champion half-hour, South Park.

The story probably doesn’t have a moral, or even a point, but if you really need one, you could try, You just never know, do you?

***

Jerry Robinson, a man I was proud to know, is gone. Others have celebrated his achievements and accomplishments, his generous spirit, his activism, and his art. I have nothing to add.

But, thinking of Jerry, I remembered a quotation from Raymond Chandler’s Simple Art of Murder: “He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world”

That was Jerry.

RECOMMENDED READING: Jerry Robinson, Ambassador of Comics. By N. Christopher Couch.

FRIDAY: Martha Thomases

Like most popular culture websites, we noted the passing last week of Jerry Robinson. Ours had a bit of a personal touch at the end; that’s what makes ComicMix ComicMix. While I was writing the piece I heard the announcement of Jerry’s death on CBS radio. While I was impressed, I wasn’t surprised: the major comics icons get noticed these days, and Jerry certainly was, and is, a comics icon. But such wasn’t always the case.

I first saw a major to-do about the passing of a comics great when ABC-TV noted Jack Kirby’s death back in 1994. For several years prior to that the passing of an occasional comic book creator was noted in the local obituaries but significant folks like Bill Finger didn’t get national play. We weren’t important enough. We were still part of the throwaway culture; adults who read comics were considered morons. Or professionals… but only after Fredric Wertham was toast.

Kirby not only made the network news, he was chosen “Man of the Week” or whatever the segment was called at the time. That meant two things: ABC-TV already had footage of Jack in their library (a bigger deal at the time as teevee networks were only beginning to digitize their files), and the comics medium had finally earned enough respect for producers to deem one of our greatest creators as worthy of such an honor.

From that point, respect for the comics medium continued to grow. Batman instigator Bob Kane received his due and then some, Will Eisner’s passing was well-noted… to name but two. In my eyes, more than all the reviews from the intelligencia, more than all the decent comics-based movies, the national coverage of the passing of our greatest has given validation to the art form.

I read five newspapers every day, one of them a national paper, one the local Norwalk Connecticut paper. Each of these five covered Jerry’s passing. Each and every one. All but one gave the story coverage with a photo and/or art.

A few days after publishing their obit, the New York Daily News did an editorial (above). Okay, Jerry’s Sunday newspaper strip was run in that paper for several years – but that was many decades ago, and if you read their editorial they play up Robinson’s comic book work. He may have created The Joker, but he did not create The Batman. Bill Finger and that other guy did that.

That’s pretty cool. Jerry most certainly deserves the additional recognition, and so does the comic art medium.

And we deserve it, in part, due to Jerry’s contributions to our craft.

THURSDAY: Dennis O’Neil