Tagged: Batman

DENNIS O’NEIL: On The Road Again

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  • August 21, 2007

Jack Kerouac’s novel On The Road is 50 years old.

“And this has exactly what to do with comics?” demands the snotty guy in the corner. Well, actually, not much, but maybe if we stretch, a little something. Patience, please.

If you know people my age, or a bit younger, you may have heard On The Road stories. Mine is pretty banal: I was fairly unhappy at school (I was always fairly unhappy at schools, except when I was actively miserable) and I read and had my mind altered by Kerouac’s book which is, among other things, a paean to travel and the highway. So, one morning, I went down to breakfast, borrowed about forty bucks from my father and, blowing off university exam week, got on a bus for New Orleans.

Once there, I didn’t do much: checked into a Y, hung out, walked around, had a friendly lady on Bourbon Street offer to teach me everything about life for only five dollars. I kind of guessed what she was talking about and, being the Good Catholic Boy that I was, politely declined. Then I boarded another Greyhound and went home. No hitchhiking, not that trip, though there was plenty later. (And, by the way, don’t try this at home. Hitchhiking in the 50s and 60s was not without hazards, but not nearly as dangerous as it is now.)

“Did someone mention comic books? This column, this whole dern website, is supposed to be about comics.” The snotty guy in the corner again. Okay, be at peace, brother, and give me another paragraph or two.

Kerouac was, as I’m sure everyone except the guy in the corner knows, the most famous and visible member of a loose confederation of novelists, poets, and musicians that became known as The Beat Generation. I’ve never heard, or read, any of them even evidencing knowledge that comics existed. But they were contrarians that believed that most conventional wisdom was erroneous, that genuine American values involved peace and understanding and, incidentally, that maybe mainstream literary and critical folk – the Establishment – did not own the last word on artistic matters.

Jump ahead a few years to the mid-60s and here we are, on college campuses, and what are the bright rebels reading? Well, a few – those who still wear ties on Sunday – are still delving into Catcher In The Rye, and a few more are grokking Stranger In A Strange Land, but the real nonconformists, the bright ones, are into comics, particularly Marvel comics.

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JOHN OSTRANDER: My Way Or the Highway

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  • August 16, 2007

ostrander100-5932297I’m not going to tell you that I’m an expert on marriages and relationships because that would be a gol-durned lie, but one item of contention seems to pop up regularly between men and women who are cohabiting.

Leaving the toilet seat up or down.

It may be an issue in same-sex relationships; I don’t know. I have heard quite a bit of it between male-female cohabitants to the point of it being a cliché’. It was, however, a real debate that I and my late wife, Kim Yale, had. Her argument was that if she went to the bathroom in the middle of the night and the toilet set wasn’t down, she would fall in, get wet, and then I was certain to be woken up to hear about it. My response is that if I went to the bathroom in the middle of the night and didn’t look down, I’d pee all over the seat. If I had to do check, why not her? Her response was that the seat could get gross and it was the guy’s responsibility. My response – well, my full response would get me a severe talking to by the women on ComicMix. Let’s just say I’d didn’t think she was any more fragile than I was and we both had the responsibility to make sure the seat was where we needed it to be. We never reached agreement on the topic.

These days I keep the seat and the lid down for two separate but very good reasons. One is that I read that, when you flush, a fine spray of toilet water – and any particulate matter in it – rises from the bowl and settles over the area, including toothbrushes. Plus, our cat Windy has a tendency to play full immersion Baptist in the toilet bowls in the lid is up.

The first reason alone would’ve reason enough for me. If Kim had hit me with that one, I would have had to concede the point. At the time, I didn’t feel like conceding the point because her argument didn’t make sense to me. It didn’t fall-in with my way of thinking.

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DENNIS O’NEIL: Spoiler Alert!

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  • August 14, 2007

Spoiler alert! Spoiler alert! Spoiler alert! Danger Will Robinson! Alarums and excursions! Better watch out, better not cry, better not pout…Beware! Mayday! Here there be dragons! Detour, there’s a muddy road ahead…

Okay, enough of that.

What I’m warning you about is the ending of The Bourne Ultimatum, now playing at a multiplex near you, recipient of good reviews, maker of serious bucks and, in the opinion of residents of this house, a pretty good popcorn flick.

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MARTHA THOMASES: Hot Fun in the Summertime

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  • August 11, 2007

Summertime, and the livin’ is easy.  Fish are jumpin, and the cotton is high.  Or so I’m told.  Living in a major metropolitan area in the twenty-first century, I have to take such things on faith.

This summer, the fun times for someone like me are largely political.  The presidential election is over a year away.  The first primaries are six months away.  Nothing is going to be decided any time soon, so I can pretend it will all turn out for the best. 

I spent the summer I was 15 going “clean for Gene,” campaigning for Eugene McCarthy, who was running against Lyndon Johnson for the Democratic nomination on an anti-war platform.  Four years later, I ran as an alternate delegate for George McGovern. Four years ago, I nearly got arrested outside the Republican convention up the street from here.  Presidential campaigns are fun!

Which is not to say they couldn’t be much more fun.  The problem is that presidential candidates tend to be politicians.  They spend all their time hustling campaign funds, writing policy, and meeting the public.  They go on the Sunday morning news shows and show how serious they are.  They go on Oprah or The Daily Show with Jon Stewart to show they’re regular folks who can take a joke.

They don’t save the world from alien invasions.  They don’t even fight crime.

Presidential campaigns would be a lot more fun if, instead of Republicans versus Democrats, it was Marvel versus DC.   For example debates between:

 

Captain America and Superman on immigration reform.

Luke Cage and John (Green Lantern) Stewart on affirmative action.

Thor and Wonder Woman about the separation of Church and State.

Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne on the inheritance tax.

Storm and Aquaman on global warming.

The Punisher and Batman on prison reform.

Professor X and Green Arrow on family values.

The Avengers and the Justice League on national security.

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JOHN OSTRANDER: America, George Bush and … Marvel Comics?

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  • August 9, 2007

eagleflag-1890653I received an urgent, earnest e-mail asking me to sign a petition expressing my indignation at how the Democrats went belly-up once more to the White House bullying tactics and passed the Security Bill which limits our freedoms just so they won’t appear weak on security in the next election.

Sorry, gang, but the indignation ain’t in me this round.

It’s not that I don’t feel that the legislation isn’t an assault on our liberties or that is unnecessary and useless; I do. I just don’t think the Dems can be shamed into changing their vote at this point. Despite their pre-election rhetoric before the elections in ’06, they haven’t voted to end the war in Iraq or cut off the funding for it because they are more concerned about maintaining and widening their control in Congress and gaining the White House as well. That, more than anything else, is their real objective.

Power.

Same as anyone else in politics.

It’s turned into the political Catch-22. To do anything, you must gain power. To continue to have the ability to do anything, you must maintain power. Actually do anything and you risk losing power. So instead we get smoke, mirrors, theatrics, and power plays. That’s on both sides of the aisle.

The Bush Administration has, at least, understood the concept of using the power accrued; they’ve just made a terrible hash of it. Can we all agree that the WMDS were always an excuse, that 9/11 had nothing to do with Saddam Hussein, and that the Bushies knew it, know it, and didn’t and don’t care? The real basic premise of the Bush Neo-Cons was to get rid of a murderous dictator that even the other Arabs didn’t much care for and, in his place, create a functioning democracy that, by its success and example, would begin to change the face of the Mideast. 9/11 simply offered a justification. All in all, it was a seemingly laudable goal but it was attempted by a crew that didn’t know the language, didn’t know the culture or the people, and couldn’t be bothered to learn. There was no contingency planning. It was a perfect storm of arrogance and ignorance.

I’ve seen that kind of mixture before, on a much lesser scale, when Ron Perelman bought Marvel in 1989. With him came business types who were going to apply sound business theory to Marvel. Comic books were just another set of widgets and they would apply their Universal Business theories to make Marvel a combination of Disney and McDonald’s. (I’m not exaggerating or making this up; that’s what I was told by a Marvel insider at the time.) They took a company that had maybe 70% or more of a strong market and then bankrupted the company while nearly destroying the market. Again, a combination of arrogance and ignorance. Perelman and his people knew everything; they didn’t ask for the advice of people in the industry. They already knew better. Except they didn’t. They made choices that made everyone in the industry who did know something about how it was run start scratching their heads.

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DENNIS O’NEIL: One Upon A Time

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  • August 7, 2007

dennyoneil10017-7473629Once upon a time, way back, I was just a tiny bit afraid that the stepchild of American publishing wherein I labored, comics, would not be properly documented – that the right people weren’t being interviewed, the right information preserved. I needn’t have worried. Thanks largely to an army of scholars-without-portfolios – we called them fans – I think comics are likely to be the best documented art form in history. These people, and more recently the academics that involve themselves with popular culture, must have found sources of information completely unknown to me, and I applaud them for it.

Among my current sprinkling of projects is writing introductions for a collection of essays concerning what I guess we can unblushingly call the Batman mythos. More documentation and, I’d like to believe, welcome. The next intro I’ll do will be for a piece by Paul Lytle on Arkham Asylum. That name – Arkham Asylum – is familiar to Batman devotees and maybe to some folk not quite so devoted because it played a prominent part in the last mega-budget Batman movie. It is, for you who are not devotees and those who weren’t paying attention while you watched Batman Begins, the place where the criminally insane of Batman’s rollicking home town, Gotham City, are sent for incarceration and rehabilitation though, judging from results, the staff of the institution aren’t very good at either task.

But – here comes our big reveal, and I’m mostly addressing devotees, though the rest of you can stay – have you ever wondered where that distinctive name came from? Oh sure, the better read among you will recognize the word “Arkham” from H.P. Lovecraft’s tales – Arkham was the spooky burg where Lovecraft’s things went bump in the night. But who had the inspiration to associate it with the residence of Gotham’s host of loonies? I was pretty sure I knew, but, as you may remember, a couple of columns ago I trusted my memory and erred. So I sent an email. Here, in part, is the reply:

Our original conversation regarding where criminals such as the Joker and Two-Face should be incarcerated took place in March of 1974, when you and Len Wein were guest speakers at Jim Dever’s and my comics history course at the Philadelphia College of Art (now the University of the Arts). The first mention of Arkham was in your Two-Face story that appeared in Batman #258, which was cover dated September, 1974.

 

 – JCH

 

The JCH that signs the letter stands for Jack C. Harris, a veteran writer, editor, historian and, for the past decade, give or take, a comics writing teacher at the School of Visual Arts in lower Manhattan. Credit where it’s due – where it’s long overdue.

If Jack were here, I’d ask him to take a bow.

RECOMMENDED READING: Awareness, by Anthony de Mello. Those of you who look at this blather every week may have guessed that I’m not a huge fan of organized religion these days, largely because of the misuses to which it’s currently being put, and the book recommended above is by a Jesuit. Well, if the Jebbies who presided over my university years were like de Mello, I might lay some bucks on the alumni fund once in a while.

Dennis O’Neil is an award-winning editor and writer of comic books like Batman, The Question, Iron Man, Green Lantern and/or Green Arrow, and The Shadow, as well as all kinds of novels, stories and articles.

JOHN OSTRANDER: Pros and Cons

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  • August 2, 2007

ostrander100-7982546Well, seeing as last weekend was Spam Diego, I suppose it’s time to do my Convention wrap-up.

Not that I was at SD. Not this year. But I’ve been to quite a few over the years. In fact, I’ve been at any number of comic conventions, both as a fan and as a professional. Actually, always as a fan and, for the past 25 years, as a professional as well. But something can happen and I can turn back into a drooly mouthed fan boy at a moment’s notice. Some cases in point:

During my early years in the biz, my sometimes partner in crime and often evil twin Timothy Truman and I were at a Con together. Will Eisner was in attendance and neither Tim nor I could summon up the nerve to go say hello to him. We finally got on the courtesy bus taking us from the hotel out to the airport as said convention ended and the only other passenger was – Will Eisner. So he strikes up a conversation with us and we had a really great trip out to the airport. Will got off the shuttle first and Tim and I looked at each other and decided we were such idiots because we could have spent the entire weekend with him.

I think I’ve told the story elsewhere how at a Chicago Con I had to get Julie Schwartz (who I already knew and was a legend himself) to get me to introduce me to Jack Kirby because I was completely and utterly incapable of doing it myself because this was the goddam KING of comics, goddamit!

Likewise, at a San Diego Con, I had to get Murphy Anderson (another legend who I already knew) to introduce me to John Broome, the legendary writer. Mr. Broome, on being introduced, gives me the eye, looks me up and down and said, with mock severity, “Ah, the competition, eh?” No, Mr. Broome, I’d have to be in your league first.

Yes, there are others who can make me like that and, no, I’m NOT telling you who they are.

I’ve also met any number of friends at conventions. I think Michael Davis has talked about our first meeting; I know he wound up in the suite with Mike Grell and myself (and a few others) as Iron Mike watched the first episode of the Jon Sable, Freelance TV series that wound up being on for about two minutes one season. The TV show hasn’t lasted but I’m glad to say that my relationship with Michael has.

Another friend met at a Con was Aussie writer, Dave DeVries, who we designated “that mad Australian” as a result of that weekend. We keep in touch still and he’s a good mate. Dave’s also been a pal and a bane to Brother Grell and has one of the best bar stories about him I’ve ever heard. Dave, if you see this, get on the comment line and tell it. Or maybe we can get Grell to do it.

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Scott Shaw! Did you hear me? I said, “Scott Shaw!”

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  • August 1, 2007

picture-parade-1028720Now, more than ever, do we need Scott Shaw!’s Oddball Comics.

 

He has followed his bliss and ours to the last swap meet, the dustiest quarter box of mixed comics to save the comics that no one else would save.  We all know about the great comics that everyone’s mom threw out.  These are the comics that every self-respecting kid threw out.  The ones even our kid siblings wouldn’t save from the trash.

 

These are the comics that put the funny in funny book, both “ha-ha” and “peculiar.”  And fewer are the howlers put out as advertising tools than you’d think.  Most of the show are comics put out by entertainment professionals.  They’re just wrong.  For every genuinely, intentionally funny comic book cover over the years there must be a hundred that are so stupid, so venal, so slapdash as to be the dictionary illustration for “laughingstock.”

 

brain-boy-7118936Being in the hands of a seasoned performer like Shaw! is a relaxing pleasure.  You pick up the rhythm and laugh along as long as the schedule will allow.  He is the king of the slideshow side shows, a wonderful reminder of the great heights we attempt and the depths to which we can fall.  Here are freaks for geeks.

 

This is the first, maybe decisive verdict of history on these comics.  One look and the specialists in the field, that is, the entire audience, can’t help but laugh out loud.  There are fewer professionals in attendance these days, but that’s because they’ve all seen it, some since they’ve been in middle school. (more…)

DENNIS O’NEIL: Saturday Noon

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  • July 31, 2007

dennyoneil100-7400785Saturday noon, and it still hadn’t arrived. Voldemort’s work? Or the machinations of something a bit more prosaic – book ninjas, maybe, or gremlins? But no. We fretted in vain. At about three, the doorbell rang, and there he was – Mr. Delivery Man, bearing our own copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

(I don’t think a spoiler warning is really necessary at this point – is there anyone who doesn‘t know Harry’s fate? – but what the hell, consider yourself warned.)

Soon, Marifran was in bed, reading – yes – the end of the novel. I asked her if Harry survives and she said that he does. Whew. The next evening, daughter Meg phoned from Seattle. She’s already finished it, all 759 pages. Do all bank vice-presidents spend their weekends reading?

What kind of people are these? What sort of mutated family did I marry into?

Me, I plan to wait for the movie. But I’m glad the book’s doing well. Better that gobs of money go to J.K. Rowling, who comports herself with some dignity, than to yet another deluded, sad young woman who calls attention to her desperate self by displaying what, in gentler times, would be seen only by her mate or her gynecologist.

Of course, not everyone is profiting by Ms. Rowling’s success. Independent bookshops, in order to compete with chains and on-line venues, are selling the book at such steep discounts that their profit is slim to none. And news reports tell us that just because a lot of kids are reading the Potter series doesn’t mean that they’ll read anything else. Apparently, Harry’s sui generis and after Deathly Hallows, it’s back to the tube for many.

But surely some kids will try other printed entertainment, once Harry teaches them that what’s printed can, in fact, be entertaining. Or so those of us who worry about the future of these United States can hope. Al Gore’s new and excellent book, The Assault on Reason (which I recommended last week) tells us that “…the parts of the human brain that are central to the reasoning process are continually activated by the very act of reading printed words…the passivity associated with watching television is at the expense of activity in parts of the brain associated with abstract thought, logic, and the reasoning process…An individual who spends four and a half hours a day watching television is likely to have a very different pattern of brain activity from an individual who spends four and a half hours reading.”

So, my understanding of Mr. Gore is, reading is not virtuous because it’s what grandma and grandpa did for fun, but because it stimulates a part of the brain that may be both underused and useful.

Is Harry Potter our new, albeit fictional, messiah? Well, no. We don’t want to take it that far. But given the current crop of wannabe saviors, we could do worse.

RECOMMENDED READING: Understanding McLuhan, by W. Terrence Gordon, illustrations by Susan Willmarth.

Dennis O’Neil is an award-winning editor and writer of comic books like Batman, The Question, Iron Man, Green Lantern and/or Green Arrow, and The Shadow, as well as all kinds of novels, stories and articles.

JOHN OSTRANDER: Apres Harry

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  • July 26, 2007

ostrander100-2266346Well, wasn’t that an exciting conclusion to the Harry Potter saga?! And who could have seen that twist coming? You know, the one . . . the one where he . . . I mean, she . . . I mean they . . .

Okay, at the time I’m writing this I haven’t yet read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. It hasn’t been released yet. I won’t go near the sites that purport to have the text and published it online. Through the miracle of weekly deadlines that have been shuffled about because of the impending San Diego Comic Con (or Spam Diego, as I like to call it because that’s usually how I feel after the end of it if I go to one – a can of Spam), I get to pretend that the last Harry Potter has been read and probably consumed and can ask the burning question on everyone’s lips:

Now what?

The Harry Potter books took us to an alien world – England, to begin with, which is alien enough for most of us on this side of the Pond. (I once demanded of my good friend and excellent artist Steve Pugh why did the English persisted in driving on the wrong side of the road in their country. Steve smiled kindly and gently told me it was to confuse the French and we poor Americans simply got caught in the middle. “Well,” I said, “ so long as there’s a good reason . . .” Where was I? Oh yes – alien worlds.)

It took us into the world of magic and English academia; it’s hard to say which is stranger to Americans. It gave us a new experience vicariously, through the joy of reading. I once heard film critic Roger Ebert remark that one of the things he looked for in films – and one of the things he really liked about the original Star Wars – was when it took him to a new world, gave him a new experience. Or, I would add, make what we know seem new or give us a different perspective so it feels like a new experience. The Potter books, in my opinion, succeeded on both levels.

So, the Potter story is now complete. It’s a closed world. The remaining movies will translate that experience to the medium of film but it won’t be altogether new. Assuming, gentle reader, you want something more in that line, where can you go? I, like many others, have a few suggestions drawn from my own reading experience. Assuming that we take it as a given that they are not Harry Potter nor are they trying to be Harry Potter, they may be books that you’d enjoy.

They are also not intended as children’s literature, so don’t think of it as a sharing experience with the kids.

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