Tagged: ComicMix

MIKE GOLD: What Makes America Great

  • News
  • June 11, 2007

mikegold100-4105627These are the most important words ever written:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

That’s the First Amendment, in its entirety. It’s elegant, isn’t it? But did you notice what word isn’t there? Look again.

The word is “except.” There’s no “except” in the First Amendment.

That’s what makes the United States of America great. It’s where we separate the wheat from the chaff. The democracies from the dictatorships. The good from the evil.

Ask around and some people will tell you that the Supreme Court ruled the First Amendment doesn’t give you the right to shout fire in a crowded theater. If the utterer is smart, that quote will be attributed to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. The problem is, it’s bullshit, twice-over.

Number one: in ruling on the case of Schenck v. U.S. in 1919, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., wrote: “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.” The emphasis here is mine; those critical words are usually left out of the debate. You’ve got to be lying, and you’ve got to actually cause damage. However…

Number two: Schenck v. U.S. was overturned by the Supreme Court in 1969 in the case of Brandenburg v. Ohio, which ruled that speech could only be banned when it was likely to incite imminent lawless action, such as a riot. The majority noted yelling fire outside a building to prevent people from entering is quite different from encouraging people to stampede out.

The Constitution doesn’t say “but in case somebody figures out a way to allow people to get their words heard by a whole lot of other people all at once, a federal agency is going to appoint a brilliant comedian to figure out which seven words can never, ever be uttered, no matter how inadvertently, no matter how pointedly, and no matter how necessary or how puerile they may be – and we’re going to fine the shit out of people who ever use those words.”

Last week, ComicMix’s Glenn Hauman, a First Amendment freedom fighter of the first order and with the street cred to prove it, ran a piece about how a federal appeals court ruled against the FCC in their fining broadcasters for the dissemination of inadvertent obscenity. In his article, Glenn substituted asterisks for the vowels in the dirty words. I know Glenn; that reflects his highly tuned sense of irony. Glenn’s also a very considerate guy: he doesn’t want to get you in trouble if you’re reading ComicMix at work and your boss sees the naughty stuff. I’m not quite as considerate.

It’s Glenn’s prerogative as a writer, so I didn’t fuss with his choice. The fact is, when you see “fck” you read “fuck.” When you see “sht,” you read “shit.” When somebody indulges in euphemisms, people know exactly and immediately what the bad words are. But you’re not going to get Battlestar Galactica on the air unless you say “frakkin’.” And, no doubt, pay Yosemite Sam his royalty.

It’s ridiculous. It’s hypocritical. Even if these words had any meaning or any shock value any more, there is no reason to be so judgmental. People who think ill of those who use cuss words yet drive while on their cell phone are a much bigger threat than those who are subjected to their self-righteousness.

About 20 years ago, DC Comics’ editorial honcho Dick Giordano assigned me the task of representing the company at the redraft of the much-hated (and now completely impotent) Comics Code. Yep, Dick has a fantastic sense of humor. At the meeting, one of the first things I asked for was a list of the dirty words that can’t be used. Fair is fair, I pointed out. Marvel’s rep, the much-missed Mark Gruenwald, agreed. Since we were Marvel and DC combined, we got to assign the editors from Harvey Comics and Archie Comics the task of coming up with the list. Okay, that was sophomoric, but if you knew either Mark or me, you’d get it and you probably do anyway. A week or two later, Al Harvey and Victor Gorelick came in with a great list.

They passed the list around and we debated the merits and demerits of the words, adding a few that Al and Vic missed – the very few, actually; it was an extensive list. Then we all exploded in laughter at the astonishing bullshitness of the situation. One of the editors – I won’t reveal which – said “What’s the difference? The Code censors are going to ignore all this anyway.” Which is exactly what happened. Immediately.

We censor in the name of the Children. You know, those Children who are raised in nunneries, who, if they were never exposed to television or radio or literature or people like me, would be good, pious and safe. The kids who presently live on Earth-53. We divert everything with which we are uncomfortable into the “oh, no, we’re doing it for the Children” file. That’s a lot of crap. If you raise your kids honestly with good, sound values, if you teach them right from wrong and you show them how to be strong and the ways to stand up for those values, you won’t have anything to worry about. Stop hiding behind the kids.

There’s plenty of stuff going on to worry about. Language doesn’t make the cut.

Mike Gold is editor-in-chief of ComicMix.com. Be afraid, be very afraid…

A June tune to make you swoon

  • News
  • June 10, 2007

Sooner or later our ComicMix columns will be on automatic front-page accessibility.  Until then, I’ll be here just about every Sunday to round ’em up for you:

And congrats to Mellifluous Mike Raub on reaching his Big ComicMix Broadcast #50 and beyond!:

Now back to my own never-ending catchup…

MARTHA THOMASES: Gangster of Love

martha100-8677944This may come as something of a shock, but tomorrow night is the last episode of The Sopranos.

Now, I’m not the world’s most dedicated fan. I came late to the party, not tuning in regularly until the second season. I tend to be suspicious of critical darlings, afraid they might be uplifting and good for me, or depressing and bleak. However, in this case, my husband and my son were both enthusiastic, I recognized the name of creator David Chase from The Rockford Files, and so, one night, I didn’t get out of my chair when the distinctive theme song came on.

It would be nice if I could say that I was hooked on the brilliant acting, the profound scripts, even the incredibly realistic portrait of middle-class values in New Jersey. That would be a lie. I tuned in to watch Michael Imperioli, because I thought he was really cute.

Over the years, though, I got sucked in. Watching these characters week in and week out (not counting the breaks that lasted over a year) helped me to identify with them. No, I’m not part of organized crime, but I, too, tend to offer my loved ones food when they come to tell me about their problems. I’m not a hired killer, but I’ve been angry enough to want to take someone out to the woods and leave them there.

Serial fiction, like soap opera, comics and Harry Potter books, are especially good at enmeshing the audience with the cast of characters. What The Sopranos has done so well with the form is to take people who are evil, who kill and steal, and make them so mundanely human.

When I read a Superman comic every week, I feel like I’m spending time with a friend I’ve known since I was five years old. He’s in the media in a major media market, probably knows a bunch of the same people I know. Bruce Wayne has a penthouse in midtown, and is a big part of the city’s party circuit, a beat I’ve covered. The Legion of Super-Heroes is like a big dorm, and I lived in dormitories through high school and college.

So, even extremely unrealistic comic book characters present no challenge to me. I can bond with them no matter how inane nor how two-dimensional the writing. Even though they have super-powers (or at least super-human self-discipline), I can find things in common that make it possible for me to relate to them.

But Tony Soprano? He lives in (gasp!) New Jersey! He works in a strip club. Both of those things put me off, even before we get to the guns and the beatings. Carmella wears a lot of make-up, has lunch with her lady friends a lot, and seems to care about jewelry. These are not qualities common to my friends or me. How do I relate?

(more…)

ELAYNE RIGGS: The awesome factor

elayne200-1708262I haven’t talked that much yet about being what my life is like being married to one of the relatively few lucky and talented people able to make a living as a comic book artist.  There are a few reasons for this, among them being stuff I’m not allowed to reveal in a public forum because of various confidences.  (For instance, it’s driving me nuts not being able to talk about Robin’s next inking assignment, and ComicMix readers will understand why once it’s been officially announced.)  I walk a fine line between wanting to crow about the comics I see in their formative stages and realizing that any specifics thereof will often require massive doses of pre-approval before I talk about them.

But I can still indulge in generalities, one being a topic on which I’ve briefly touched before — the blurry line between being a fan and being a pro.  Today I want to talk specifically about dealing with pros from a fan’s point of view.

What brought this on was my musings after attending the Dave Cockrum memorial last week.  I was acquainted with Dave and Paty from the days when they used to appear at NYC comic shows, mostly the Fred Greenberger ones but I think they were also at some of the “church cons” that Mike Carbonaro held before those shows moved across the street from Penn Station.  When Dave was at the VA hospital a bus ride away from my apartment, I visited him once in the bitter winter because it was the right thing to do, not because he was This Big Name.  I’ve been lucky enough to get to know a lot of luminaries from those old cons as people and friends before I really knew any of their work.  And I remember when I used to mention their names in Usenet posts, the way I’d mention other friends and acquaintances, I’d often receive nasty accusations of “name-dropping” from my fellow comic fans, with an attitude of “how dare she talk about these Names as though they were — people!”

It seems far simpler for many fans to think of pros as abstracts on whom they can project their own entitlements than to interact with them as fellow human beings.  And whether this consists of treating fictional characters as more important than the real people who create and work on them, or erecting pedestals and shrines to the objects of your affection, the result is much the same. (more…)

MIKE GOLD: The Sound of Crisis

mikegold100-8278367If you’ve been taking careful notes while reading my sundry ComicMix entries, no doubt you’ve noticed I’m quite a fan of audio drama. There are a lot of reasons for this, the least of which is that I prefer driving to all locations within a thousand mile radius instead of subjecting myself to the massively frustrating incompetence and arrogance of our air transportation industry.

Ergo, I have a lot of time to listen to stuff in my car, particularly around convention season (May through April, each year). I’ve got a six-disc mp3 player buried in my little 2005 Ford Focus hatchback, which means I can program enough sound to drive from Connecticut to California without actually changing discs. I (literally) just got back from a round-trip to Chicago, my most frequent location, accompanied by my patient wife Linda and my beautiful daughter Adriane. All three of us are comics fans.

Usually, I program a Nero Wolfe adaptation – brilliant stuff, wonderfully produced – and one of Big Finish Productions’ full-cast original Doctor Who shows. And some other stuff – lots of music, some comedy (Firesign Theater, Jack Benny, or in this case The Marx Brothers), maybe a podcast or six. But this time, I was armed with GraphicAudio’s adaptation of Greg Cox’s novelization of the DC Comics miniseries Infinite Crisis.

All three of us had read the original miniseries, all three of us had read much of the sundry miniseries that lead up to Infinite Crisis, and all three of us figured that by listening to this adaptation we might, this time, actually figure out what happened in the miniseries. Not that it really matters, as we’ve lived through 52 and One Year Later and World War III and now Countdown and we’ll probably sucker down and read Final Crisis after that. After all these years, DC still has problems maintaining a cohesive thought.

The GraphicAudio adaptation is only the first half of Cox’s book, and is clearly labeled as such. The second half will be out soon; it was listed in last month’s Diamond catalog. The adaptation is neither full-cast audio nor a straight-forward spoken word reading. There is a narrator who dramatizes the narrative (hence his title), but when it comes to the actual dialog each character has his or her own voice. With original music and full sound effects, it works quite nicely… although I did have to get over my initial disappointment that it wasn’t a full-cast audio theatrical production.

I hadn’t heard any of GraphicAudio’s other work, although there is a heck of a lot of it. They adapt many paperback action-hero series such as The Destroyer and The Executioner (and others), and if the quality of these productions matches their Infinite Crisis, I might check a few out.

We were particularly impressed by the production itself: the original music and the sound effects were appropriate and gave the two-dimensional world of original audio much needed depth. They summarized all of the various miniseries that led up to Infinite Crisis in the three minutes before the opening credits, which was all that was necessary to provide the backstory. (more…)

Beat the heat and read

This little homebody has had enough of running around in The City.  Sometimes you just have to stay home and collapse before facing another workweek, and what better way to relax than with another reading of some fine ComicMix columns?:

And some listening to Mellifluous Mike Raub‘s most recent podcasts?:

And by phrasing everything in the form of a question?

BEA Day 2 pictorial

I’m getting way too old for this.  Nonetheless, had I the energy to walk around and the time to have planned ahead (a must!), I would have loved Book Expo America even more.  It’s been at least 15 years since I’ve been to this trade show (the last time I attended it wasn’t even called BEA), and it’s as exhilarating as ever.  Whoever believes nobody has any interest in books any more needs to be dragged to this show.

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The ComicMix contingent was out in force for this one.  Pictured here are Mellifluous Mike Raub, Head Honcho Mike Gold, and Spin Queen Martha Thomases.  Not pictured are Kai Connolly and Glenn Hauman.  Expect any info from these folks to be far more valuable than my meager photos, as they got info and interviews galore.

olympus-digital-camera-21

More than ever before, comics and particularly graphic novels are firmly ensconced in the pantheon of publishing, and enthusiastically accepted by show attendees.  Lots of emphasis was put this year on graphic novels for kids, and Harold Buchholz and Jane Fisher were doing their part to expand that — do check out their Kids Love Comics website!  I also had my photo taken a bit later with Harold and Colleen Doran, who warns me it’ll be up on her site when she gets home.  It was terrific to see so many Team Comics people at this show! (more…)

MARTHA THOMASES: Last Man Standing

martha100-5988441When I was a teenager, the environment of my hometown became poisonous. To save me, my parents sent me to an alien environment that seemed to be a universe away, filled with people so different from me they might have been a different species altogether. No one knew anything about my home, nor about my people’s civilization and customs. Instead, I had to hide my true self until I understood how I fit in and what I had to offer the strangers with whom I lived.

No, I’m not Supergirl. I understand how you could be confused, because the resemblance is striking. However, I did find myself in a similar situation to Kara Zor-El. Instead of being a Kryptonian from Argo City sent in a rocket ship to Earth, I was a Jew from Ohio sent to an Episcopalian boarding school in Connecticut. Instead of being part of the majority as I was at my public school in Youngstown (there were so few kids in class during the High Holy Days that they could bring comics to school!), I had to go to chapel five times a week while the priest swung incense.

Many of my classmates had never seen a Jew before. Others, more worldly, would say things to me like, “You’re from Ohio? I have a friend in Wyoming. Do you know her?” For the first time in my life, I wasn’t part of the majority culture. I learned what it was like to be a minority.

There’s a lot to be learned from the majority culture.  Not the least of it is learning where you, as a minority, fit in. You learn your place. You learn how to get by. You learn another point of view, that of the majority.  That’s what taught in school. That’s what you see on television and in movies.

If you’re lucky, you take your experience as a minority and use it to understand how other minorities feel. You know what it’s like to be on the outside, looking in. In my case, as a Midwestern Jew, I could imagine how it would feel to be African-American, or gay, or Asian. I could take my own experience as a minority to imagine the experience of people who were other kinds of minorities.

Fiction helps. For example, when I read Amy Tan’s The Joy-Luck Club, I read about a society where, no matter what you did for your parents, it wasn’t enough, and that it was more important in a marriage to find a husband with money than with imagination. I was convinced that being Chinese felt just like being Jewish.

Comics help even more, if only because they are produced more quickly than novels. In The Legion of Super-Heroes, we can see how Chameleon can shape change to fit in – but chooses not to. Princess Projectra tried to hide her snake form at first, but learned to exult in it. The theme of three X-Men movies has been a metaphor for the dangers of the closet, of hiding your true self to pass for straight or, in this case, non-mutant. (more…)

Groth vs Ellison: The Fantagraphics side

At New York’s Book Expo America today, Fantagraphics publisher Gary Groth took time out from a busy schedule with booksellers, rights agents and talent to talk to ComicMix‘s Martha Thomases and Mike Gold briefly about the upcoming arbitration session to settle Harlan Ellison’s lawsuit. We asked why he wasn’t able to go to Los Angeles for the May 29 session, as originally scheduled. "I’m a single father.  My son turns 13 tomorrow," he said.  "I just couldn’t go to Los Angeles then to New York in three days." Fantagraphics is headquartered in Seattle.

Does he hope the arbitration process will work?

"Yes, I obviously have some hope or I wouldn’t spend the money or take the time to fly down."

Is the process binding?

"It’s binding if we agree on an arrangement we can both sign off on. I don’t know what that would look like. It won’t involve any money damages, because there is no money. That was a condition of our agreement to participate.

At the booth, Fantagraphics was distributing postcards urging interested parties to view the court documents at http://www.fantagraphics.com/support-html.

Groth was in New York promoting a wide variety of Fantagraphics projects, including the Pogo series we mentioned previously and their boxed-set tribute to Bill Mauldin’s classic World War II feature, Willie and Joe. The latter is scheduled for February.

Jack Kirby gets his due

61tigqfq5ol-_ss500_-4905996Few people had the privilege of knowing comics legend Jack Kirby the way Mark Evanier did. Therefore, it is only fitting that Mark was the man selected to pen Jack’s definitive biography.

stuntman1-3577896Kirby: King of Comics will be released this October in a 224 page hardcover edition, complete with a pull-out poster designed by Alex Ross, at a price a lot lower than that of any of Kirby’s Masterworks or Archives editions, a mere $40.00 retail. Normally, I’d be writing up the bit about who Jack Kirby was in case you don’t know the way I was taught in journalism school, but I can’t imagine anybody reading something called ComicMix who isn’t familiar with The King of Comics. But in case you want to brush up, Mark did an excellent job on his own website.

Tons of art and inside information and produced with the full cooperation of the Kirby estate, Mark Evanier’s Kirby: King of Comics is going to be an early Christmas for comic fans old and young.

Artwork copyright by their respective holders.

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