Tagged: Batman

DENNIS O’NEIL: “No wizard left behind”

  • News
  • July 24, 2007

At the end of last week’s exciting episode, the cute schoolteacher and I were involved in a tense debate about which showing of the new Harry Potter movie we would attend. (Yes, we media people do have lives that throb with excitement.)

We decided, and went.

The schoolteacher, who really does carry Potter devotion to an extreme, at least in one Muggle’s opinion, was enthralled. The Muggle – me – thought it was a pretty good summer flick. I’m a Muggle who can enjoy some good, old-fashioned, British Acting-with-a-capital A, and the Potters are full of A-list thespians. (There may be a pun in there somewhere, but, trust me, it’s not worth the effort needed to find it.) I think British movie acting is still partly influenced by its grandiloquent, stage-bound forebears, and that makes it appropriate to material that is the antithesis of realism, much as Brando’s naturalistic Method acting was appropriate to Tennessee Williams’s realism.

But the Pottery pleasure the teacher and I could share equally began when Dolores Umbridge entered the story. Miss Umbridge, splendidly embodied by a pink-clad Imelda Staunton, is an educational bureaucrat whose saccharine exterior conceals a heart of bile. She’s a stooge for the local politicians whose mission is to insist on a largely useless curriculum and on tests which accomplish nothing except make it impossible for real educators to do their jobs.

“No wizard left behind,” I whispered to the schoolteacher, who nodded vigorously.

I don’t know much about J.K. Rowling, Potter’s creator, but I do know that she must have been writing the novel on which the current movie is based about seven years ago, and that she works and lives in England. Those facts make it unlikely that in conjuring up Miss Umbridge she was commenting on and/or satirizing the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind farce. So maybe art was anticipating life. Whatever the reason, Miss Umbridge could step from fantasy into the real life milieu of those involved in the president’s – ahem – educational efforts and feel right at home.

Spoiler alert!

Miss Umbridge gets hers, though it appears that she survives to be rotten another day, and I rejoiced. I think schadenfreude is a pretty crummy emotion when it’s directed toward people we know, but it’s perfectly acceptable, and maybe even expected – maybe even desirable – when aimed at creatures of the imagination. And despite what the schoolteacher might want to believe, J.K. Rowling does write fiction.

RECOMMENDED READING: The Assault on Reason, by Al Gore.

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: Potter’s End

  • News
  • July 19, 2007

ostrander100-7365603We’re at something of a cultural crossroads.

On July 21, Saturday, the last new Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows, will be published. With this, J.K. Rowling completes her story and a literary phenomenon is completed. Yes, I know there are two more movies and scads of related tie-ins still to come but the story itself will be complete. We’ll know how it ends.

I have a mistrust of anything that labels itself an “instant classic.” It suggests adding water to a half-baked idea, mix, and you have something for the ages. For something to be classic, time must pass. The work must speak to more than one generation. In the 1920 and the 1930s, the detective Philo Vance was all the rage; today, virtually nobody has heard of him, let alone read him.

All that said, I do think the Harry Potter books have the potential to become classics, to be read and loved by future generations. There is a timeless quality to them; they create their own separate but accessible world; and – as with all truly great children’s literature – they are accessible to adults as well as children. I’m 58 years old; I write GrimJack and have written things like Wasteland. I’m a fan of hard-boiled noir detective fiction and, yes, I’m a Potter-head as well.

What is going to decide whether or not the Potter books become classics or not, I think, is going to depend on how author J.K. Rowling winds up the series. I have nothing but respect for Ms. Rowling; she went from being a single mother on welfare when she wrote the first Potter book to being worth more than the Queen of England as she winds up the series. By the end of the summer, they’ll have to start inviting her to G8 meetings. On a simple commercial level, the writer in me is in awe.

The writer in me also admires her clear-headed vision of herself and of her work. I’ve dealt with fans, my own and Star Wars fans, and while I love them I know how fanatical some can get. There can be this sense of identification with a work to where they can feel entitlement or ownership even above the creator his or herself. On a video, I heard Ms. Rowling address this and say, pretty close to verbatim, “Is it important to me what the fans think? Absolutely. Should it change one word of what I’m doing? Absolutely not.” For the record, I think Ms. Rowling is spot on.

As I was saying, however, whether or not the Harry Potter books go on to become a classic or a flash in the pan will depend on this final book – on how she winds up the series. That ending must satisfy everyone, young readers and older ones alike, who have made an emotional investment that spans years. That doesn’t necessarily imply a happy ending; the movie Casablanca doesn’t have a “happy” ending in that the two lovers, Rick and Ilsa, are together. But, boy, does the ending satisfy the viewer.

There’s been a lot of speculation about how the series will end. Word has it that two of the series’ characters will die and that one of them could be Harry Potter himself. Since this is my last shot at it before the book comes out, I’m going to chime in with my own opinions/speculations. WARNING: SAID SPECULATIONS WILL NECESSITATE REVEALING EVENTS THAT HAVE HAPPENED IN PREVIOUS BOOKS. IF YOU’RE NOT CAUGHT UP AND HAVE SOMEHOW AVOIDED LEARNING WHAT’S HAPPENED AND WANT TO LEAVE IT THAT WAY, GO READ SOMETHING ELSE. NOT THIS.

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DENNIS O’NEIL: Do You Believe In Magic?

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  • July 17, 2007

Here it is Tuesday evening and we’re still debating. Should we go to the 11:59 showing of the new Harry Potter flick at the local 21-plex or catch one of the early showings in the morning?  Pros and cons on both sides.  But we will see the movie within the next 24 hours; count on it.

Although I’ve enjoyed the previous films, I can’t call myself a Potter fan.  I haven’t read any of J.K. Rowling’s novels, though I love Ms Rowling’s bio: single mom writing in a café becomes hugely successful author, celebrity, and megamillionaire within about a decade, without becoming a robber baroness.  But Marifran’s read the books.  Oh yes indeed.  And so have daughters Meg and Beth.  So I’m pretty up on the Hogwarts scene and when the final volume in the series arrives in a couple of weeks, I expect my conversations with my wife to be conducted in monosyllables until she reaches the last page and learns Harry’s fate.

I’m surprised that these things are so popular, as I was surprised at the resurgence of interest in J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings saga and the huge success of the movies made from Tolkein’s trilogy. The reason is, I thought we were past believing in magic. 

Oh, sure, you don’t have to actually believe in something to enjoy stories about it.  But we do have to be able to accept it on some level. It helps the willing suspension of disbelief your English teacher told you is necessary to the enjoyment of fiction if you can allow that what you’re being told about exists, or could exist, or at least might have existed. Hero stories are about as old as civilization, and the tale-tellers always supply a reason why their protagonists have extraordinary powers.  In classic Greece, for example, and later in Rome, superpowers were explained by their possessors either being gods, or half-gods, or children of gods, or gods’ special pals.  Then plain ol’ magic, origin unknown, was used to rationalize superhuman feats in folk tales like those in A Thousand and One Nights. 

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DENNIS O’NEIL: (Hey, Dude, ain’t he ever gonna git done yakkin’ about) Continued Stories

  • News
  • July 10, 2007

Last week, we were discussing the cons of continued stories, specifically what’s wrong with them, and we posited that they have a major problem in the difficulty new readers (or audiences) have in understanding the plot and characters. I said that there were remedies for this problem and now I’ll suggest, a bit timidly, that though remedies exist, nothing is foolproof.

Which brings us to the second difficulty with this kind of narrative, one closely related to the first. A potential reader who knows that the entertainment in front of him is a serial and that he’s missed earlier installments might think he’s come to the party too late, and so he won’t be tempted to enter it. Admittedly, this has more to do with marketing than stortytelling, but anyone who thinks that sales departments and creative departments aren’t entwined tighter than the snakes on a ceduceus isn’t paying attention.

There are probably more cons, but let’s let the subject rest with those two – we don’t want to beat anything to death, do we? – and proceed on to the pros.

Pro number one: Serialized stories build audience/reader loyalty. If you like the story you’ll want to learn what happens next and how the problems are solved and you’ll keep returning to satisfy your curiosity.

Pro number two (and this, to me, is the biggie): Serials present storytelling opportunities rare in other forms, if they exist at all. Continued narratives allow the storyteller to present a complex plot and a lot of subplots, as well as stuff that might not directly relate to the plot(s) but is, well, amusing.

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Too Many Bat-Baddies

Reports have been surfacing all weekend that both Two-Face and The Riddler will be joining The Joker in The Dark Knight, sequel to Batman Begins. If so, I hasten to point out that this is the sort of thing that killed the last round of Bat-films: too many villains.

One can hope that, at worst, we will see these guys in their pre-presumed identities.  Then the movie will choke on an overdose of foreshadowing, but  that beats the camera having to pick favorites for each shot. Nothing would beat two hours of Batman taking on The Joker, pure and simple.

Damn. And I really liked Batman Begins.

MARTHA THOMASES: Mansion on the Hill

martha100-4981614Every weekend, when I walk by the newsstands, I see cover stories in gossip magazines about Brad and Angelina, Jennifer, Reese, Lindsay, Britney and others. Although I only read these magazines at the hairdressers, I am fascinated by the lifestyles of people I will likely never meet. On Sunday, I enjoy the Real Estate section of The New York Times, looking at pictures of homes that can cost tens of millions of dollars.

And then, there are my favorite comics.

Batman has always been one of my favorite characters, at least in part because of Bruce Wayne. I am moved by the image of that little boy, watching his mother’s pearls scatter on the street as his parents are murdered. As a child, I was afraid the same thing could happen to my parents. As a parent, I wanted to spare my child from that tragedy.

bruce_wayne-2660942(To his credit, my son wanted to do the right thing. “Don’t worry,” he assured me when he was five years old. “If you’re ever gunned down by criminals, I promise to avenge your death.”)

Most of the people who have written Batman over the years have concentrated on the Caped Crusader and his underground Bat Cave, not the billionaire playboy who lives in the manor above. Most of the more recent writers believe that Bruce Wayne is the disguise, that the little, traumatized boy grew up to be Batman, not Wayne.

That premise allows for many interesting stories, and I understand that it’s more fun to play with the driven, rage-filled Batman, the character with the high-tech equipment and the regimen of martial arts training. A person who fights bad guys is more likely to work in stories that require a beginning, a middle and an end than a single man rattling around in a mansion.

Except …

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JOHN OSTRANDER: Fireworks

ostrander100-5980790It’s America’s birthday and what better way to celebrate than with fireworks? Yeah, I know – the Fourth of July was yesterday but if your neighborhood is anything like mine, people have been setting things off since last weekend and will probably continue through this weekend. So let’s see if we can set off a few here.

I hold these truths to be self-evident.

Item: Democracy is a radical experiment and one that could still fail. The notion that all men – and, as we have come to understand it, all women – are created equal and are endowed with certain inalienable rights was certainly a radical notion in a world where the right to rule came by birth or by force of arms. Instead, we maintained that People could, should, and had the right to govern themselves and the right of any government to rule rested within the consent of the People. That’s just crazy talk – or so much of the world in the late 1700s thought. That was chaos – anarchy. Heck, it scares a lot of people today and that includes our own citizens, a lot of whom would be more than willing to trade freedoms (well, certainly OTHER peoples’ freedoms) for a little more security for themselves and their own. In the overall scheme of things, folks, two hundred twenty five years is nothing. We blow it and it’ll just be noted as an interesting aberration.

And we’re really close to blowing it. Voting is a pain and we can’t be bothered to turn out in real numbers even for the Presidential elections; we abide rigged elections and voting machines; we let ourselves be led like lemmings by polls and attack ads.

I’m not a political innocent; I was raised in Mayor Richard J. Daley’s Chicago. I know the difference between political theory and political reality. We, the People, increasingly vote for appearances rather than bother to look at issues. We assume that, because America has been around for two hundred years, it will be forever. History says the odds are way against that. We are an experiment and the results are not yet in, folks.

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DENNIS O’NEIL: Continued stories revisited yet again…

In last week’s installment of what some of you may be beginning to think is an endless blather, when I was discussing movie serials I neglected to mention that serials were among the first non-comics forms to use superheroes. During that decade, lucky young popcorn eaters could see Superman, Batman, Captain America and, in my opinion the best of them all, Captain Marvel in the continued chapter plays that were a staple of Saturday matinees. (That probably doesn’t exhaust the list, but memory is not my greatest gift… At least I don’t think so…) Having seen some of the above-mentioned entertainments, and having, within the past two weeks, seen the Spider-Man and Fantastic Four movies, I realize that the serial makers were born too soon.

Because, let’s face it, some of the serialized costumed do-gooders look kind of silly. That’s because the directors lacked the technology to make them not look silly. It takes an army of costumers, model makers, CGI wizards, animators and, probably, guys whose jobs I’ve never heard of to produce, on the screen, what cartoonists produced with ink on paper in large quantities for lousy pay. Of course, we comics readers had to bring some of our own imaginations to the artists’ static, silent images, but that was okay, we could do that.

Consider the preceding two paragraphs a digression, please. And now we return to our regularly scheduled topic –

What about these continued stories, anyway? Good or bad? Pro or con?

Let’s begin with the obvious con. If you come in late, maybe you’ll have trouble understanding the story. There are remedies for this problem. The serial makers mentioned in the opening digression showed the last minute or so of the preceding chapter before getting on to new material. The old radio serials used a similar technique, and a lot of current television shows begin with a voice over intoning something like, “Previously, on Your Father’s Moustache…” and then we get brief takes of the scenes that will escort us into the new action.

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The Unseen Shadow!

  • News
  • June 29, 2007

weisingershadow-copy-7461246The Shadow, everybody’s favorite seminal pulp crime-fighter, has been getting a lot of play here at ComicMix – largely in anticipation of volume nine of Anthony Tollin’s series of Shadow reprints to be released in about three weeks. In case you missed the story and are short on time, this volume reveals in detail how the first Batman story was a point-by-point rip-off of a previously published Shadow saga.

So, on the lighter side, today we offer two alternate views of crime’s nocturnal nightmare. The black-and-white piece is by long-time fan and historian Russ Maheras and poses the question "What if The Shadow had been a 1960s Mort Weisinger comic?" This isn’t quite as odd as it might seem: Weisinger, of course, was the classic Superman comics editor of the 1950s and 1960s (and story editor of the original teevee series), and Superman creator Jerry Siegel wrote The Shadow comics for Archie during this period. Russ captured the style of Mort’s books to a tee.

silver_age_shadow-copy-8978565The color piece, by Dial B For Burbank’s Robby Reed, suggests the cover design of a 1960s Shadow Annual as if Street and Smith published it in the style of DC Comics’ 80-Page Giants. Dial B For Burbank is one of the most innovative pulp-and-serial sites I’ve seen, and we appreciate his allowing us to share an  advance look at the art.

The Shadow is copyright Advance Magazine Publishers, Inc., Condé Nast Publications, Inc. All Rights Reserved. They know what evil lurks in the hearts of fans!

Thanks to Russ and KK for the swell stuff!

JOHN OSTRANDER: My Karma Ran Over My Dogma

  • News
  • June 28, 2007

ostrander100-9734591In my 25 odd (sometimes very odd) years in comics, I’ve had a chance to be associated with certain books/characters/concepts and produced work of which I’m very proud such as GrimJack, Suicide Squad, The Kents, Wasteland, and others. With some – such as GrimJack and Suicide Squad – I’ve had a chance to go back again recently and re-explore them which offers different challenges, new perspectives, but also familiar pleasures.

One series that I’m not certain I could revisit is The Spectre. At the time, the book was an examination of theological issues, questions of redemption and of punishment, and the concept of God. All along with some truly exemplary and horrific art courtesy of Tom Mandrake. It had a great run and is one of the highest points of my career, in my own opinion, but at the time I wrote it I was still something of a believer. I was a lapsed Catholic (for me, RC meant Recovering Catholic). I didn’t hold with the hierarchy or the theology of the Church but I guess I believed in the general outline – Jesus the Son of God, died for our sins, came back from the dead, and so on. Certainly I believed that sin existed and that redemption was something that was possible. It was from all this that my questioning in Spectre emerged.

These days – well, I’m more of an agnostic. I got my doubts. It began when I asked myself a basic writer’s question – who were the gospels and epistles written for at the time they were written? Who was the anticipated audience? Not us – they were very much written for their age. The Second Coming was expected within the audience’s lifetime.

From there I learned to see the texts in the social and political contexts of their time; these helped shape the writings as much or more than theology. Finally, I came to see that we project on God and or the Devil many of the things that are within us. Above all, I came to understand that the things in which I thought I believed were things that I inherited or that had been drummed into me (sometimes literally) when I was a boy.

Even in grade school, there were some questions. Sister Mary Tabernacle Door Half Open taught us that the Holy Trinity consisted of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit – a bird. A dove, to be exact. As an image that made no sense to me. Shouldn’t it be Father, Son – and Mother? Didn’t that make more sense? S’ter (all the nuns had their names shortened down to an abbreviation of their rank – S’ter) was not amused and informed me that if I kept up that kind of thinking I was bound for Hell. Worse, I’d get sent home with a note to my mother which was a far more immediate peril and one that I understood on a deeper, primal level. Hell was a concept; my Mother was real. I stifled my heretical ways for a long time.

As a result, I’ve come to be very leery these days of dogma – stated beliefs of an organization or individual, religious or not, that are uttered with an authority that does not invite question or contradiction. It’s where thought processes stop. It is where truth is assumed to be obvious or ordained. I’m right because I say I am. I have either God or logic or something to back it up but there it is. These days, I’m seeing dogma all over the place including some I didn’t expect.

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