Tagged: comics

DENNIS O’NEIL:Continued stories continued some more…

  • News
  • June 26, 2007

Now, where were we…?

Oh yeah. We were discussing continued stories and I was telling you that continued characters have been around a long time, since the classic Greek dramatists at least, but continued stories were a pretty recent phenomena. You might recall my claim that Julie Schwartz and Stan Lee introduced them to comics, but they already existed in radio drama. One form I didn’t mention, but am pleased to do so now, were the “chapter plays” in movie theaters, which I suspect had some influence on the early comics guys. You can probably rent some examples of these at your local video store, but in case you don’t want to bother…

They were continued movies, these chapter plays, also called just plain serials, with a plot that played out over between ten and fifteen installments. Each segment ended with the hero or another sympathetic character in dire trouble, about to plunge over a cliff or be impaled on spears at the bottom of a pit or like that. (Check out the Indiana Jones films, which were partly inspired by the serials, to get an idea of the kinds of scrapes these folks got themselves into.) Then, the segment would end with the suggestion that you come back the following week to learn what happens. The idea was, you, the breathless kid in the front row, would just have to return to witness the good guy’s miraculous escape or, if you were a bit twisted, you hoped you’d watch him get offed.

If you have ever suffered through one of my comics writing classes, or were lucky enough to take a Robert McKee film writing course, you know that some professional wordsmiths set a lot of store by structure, and that the most reliable structure is called the three act structure. (For more, and better, on this, see the recommended reading below.) I’m not about to presume to teach a class here, but most briefly – the three-act structure: 1, Something happens to cause the hero to act. 2. The problem gets complicated. 3. The hero resolves the problem.

Obviously, this narrative strategy won’t work for a story that’s stretched out over a whole lot of chapters, with a lot of climaxes, so the serial guys evolved what I call the “one-damn-thing-after-another” structure. Which is: the good guy and the bad guy(s) have a lot of clashes, which end inconclusively until one of them doesn’t. The good guy wins, virtue triumphs, everyone lives happily ever after.

A story doesn’t necessarily need to be multi-chaptered to be one-damn-thing-after-another; you could probably use the construction for a 10-pager. And it’s not necessarily a bad structure; a storyteller with sufficient ingenuity might make it work, though I usually advise students not to try this at home. What, structurally, it has going for it is this: it ain’t dull. Something big and, presumably, exciting, happens at least once per chapter and that keeps things moving.

We’ll get back to this topic next week.

RECOMMENDED READING: Story, by Robert McKee

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.

The Case of the Chemical Syndicate

  • News
  • June 24, 2007

shadow9cov-1407425Every so often historians find something that appears to be the final piece to a puzzle.  Comic book historians have certain mysteries or questions they’d like answers to.  Recently, Anthony Tollin and Will Murray pinpointed the source material that helped inspire Bob Kane and Bill Finger to create the character of Batman.  The results can now make people further consider how much of Batman is Kane and how much is a result of the popular culture of his day, providing fodder to be reimagined in a new medium.

Comic Mix talked with Tollin, a longtime comic book veteran, who has been producing new facsimile editions of The Shadow and Doc Savage for the full details. 

Greenberger: Tony, for those less familiar with your name, give us the short hand background on your career in comics and old time radio.

Tollin: 20-year DC career, beginning as proofreader, then assistant production manager/color coordinator, then cover colorist for a decade and interior colorist of Green Lantern (15 years), Justice League of America, Superman, Crisis on Infinite Earths, The Shadow Strikes, Doc Savage, The Phantom, etc.  Also co-colored Batman and Detective Comics as a team with Adrienne Roy through much of her 16-year run on the titles (190 issues of each, not to mention The Brave & The Bold, Batman and the Outsiders, Shadow of the Bat, Robin, etc.) And also work at Disney, Topps, Marvel, National Lampoon’s Sunday comic section parody, PS Magazine for Murphy Anderson. Also wrote 70-plus old-time-radio historical booklets for Radio Spirits and the Smithsonian Historical Archives, scripted Stan Freberg’s When Radio Was for six years, and co-authored The Shadow Scrapbook with Walter Gibson.

Greenberger: And what about your fascination with The Shadow?

Tollin: I fell in love with the character in junior high, after previously reading Walter Gibson’s magic books as an amateur magician and ventriloquist.  Back then Shadow pulps were few and far between, so I rationed them, only allowing myself four chapters per day. This was back around the time of the Batman television series when Bats was often pretty silly. The Shadow embodies mystery and intrigue. Of course, Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams later brought Batman back to his dark and mysterious roots, but I guess I was a bit ahead of the curve. The magic of Walter Gibson’s shadowy creation is that it gave the hero the charisma normally reserved for the villain. The melodrama villain, parodied by Dudley Do-right’s Snidely Whiplash, was always the most fascinating and charismatic character in the play. Are we as fascinated by Jonathan Harker or Luke Skywalker as we are by Count Dracula or Darth Vader? Of course not! Gibson described The Shadow as a "Benign Dracula." In the conventional melodrama, the villain in black laughed evilly as he tied the girl down to the railroad tracks. Gibson turned that around, so that the menacing laughter and the arrival of the man in black represented rescue and salvation, not doom. The Shadow is a hero in black who owns all the power and charisma of the melodrama villain. That was, and still is, a brilliant innovation.

Greenberger: You’ve been researching the Shadow on radio and in print for years.  How did you finally discover this nugget?

Tollin: A few months back, Will Murray reminded me of Bill Finger’s quote that his first Batman "script was a take-off on a Shadow story." (from Steranko’s History of the Comics Volume One)  I kept thinking about it and it occurred to me that nobody had ever bothered to find out which "Shadow story" was lifted. I suggested that to Will over the phone one night, and with his assistance I had found the story in less than 20 minutes. Will and I each had ideas as to which stories it couldn’t be, so it became a process of elimination. We had both thought it would be a lot harder than it was. I had expected the lift to be less blatant. It turned out to be the same story with basically nothing changed. I mean, it was a chemical syndicate in both stories! Finger didn’t even change it to some other kind of business. And The Shadow is described as "bat-like" in the rooftop scene where Batman makes his first appearance in costume.

Curiously, it turned out to be the first Shadow novel not written by Walter Gibson. Neither of us recognized it as the inspiration for "The Case of the Chemical Syndicate" when we first read it back in the 1970s. And because we were both friends of Walt Gibson, we tend to spend a lot more time reading his 283 Shadow novels than Theodore Tinsley’s 27 novels.

Greenberger: What makes this story significant for comic book fans?

Tollin: Well, it clearly establishes that without The Shadow, there would be no Batman! Since the first Batman story was a start-to-finish lift of an earlier Shadow novel, it establishes that the similarities between the two characters were no accident. Bruce Wayne is wealthy young man about town Lamont Cranston. The friendship between Bruce and Commissioner James Gordon (whose name comes from The Shadow’s sister magazine, The Whsiperer) is no different from the relationship between Cranston and Weston. Batman’s talent for escapes also comes from The Shadow, since the first recorded Batman escape duplicates The Shadow’s in the same story. And the Shadow lifts continued in subsequent stories, even ones written by Gardner Fox, which gave Batman an autogiro, Bat-a-rangs like The Shadow’s cable-outfitted "yellow boomerang," and a suction-cup device for scaling walls … all Shadow gimmicks. Without the Knight of Darkness, there would be no Dark Knight.

It also raises questions about the extent of Bob Kane’s actual contributions to the feature that bears his creator credit. If Finger’s first Batman script was a blatant retelling of an earlier Shadow novel, and Finger also suggested the Caped Crusader’s bat-eared cowl, bat-scalloped cape, black-and-gray costume and utility belt, what did Kane personally contribute to the feature besides its title? And as to Kane’s claims that  Douglas Fairbank’s acrobatics in The Mark of Zorro were an influence, it now turns out that it was  movie-buff Bill Finger who regularly supplied  the acrobatic stills  of Fairbanks  to Bob Kane and his assistants.

Also, Theodore Tinsley’s first Shadow novel mentions "bat-like" and "bats" on seven occasions. This is most unusual for a Shadow novel. One really has to ask, did this novel actually inspire Batman’s creation from the very start. I mean, it’s a bit of a stretch to assume that Kane and Finger came up with the idea of Batman first, and that it was a complete coincidence that the story Finger chose to imitate was comparatively crawling with bats.

 Of course, comic strips and comic books back then regularly lifted from what was hot in other media. Radio’s The Aldrich Family (and its Broadway predecessor What a Life, which first introduced Ezra Stone as Henry Aldrich) begat Archie Andrews. Frank Packard’s Jimmie Dale, The Gray Seal was lifted as the Green Hornet and The Phantom (before Lee Falk changed his mind and added the jungle motif four months later), while radio’s Chandu the Magician (with his girlfriend Princess Nadja) certainly influenced Mandrake and Princess Narda. And let’s not even mention the similarities between a certain Clark who is the Man of Bronze and promoted as "Superman" in 1934 house ads, and another Clark who was the Man of Steel. And, of course, it didn’t stop with the Golden Age. I’m sure it was no coincidence  that Barry Allen was a police lab scientist like the character of Ray Pinker on the then #1 TV series, Dragnet(or the police scientist played by Jack Webb himself in Dragnet’s film inspiration, He Walked by Night). There are plenty of similarities between Doc Savage’s Iron Crew and the Challengers of the Unknown, and also the Fantastic Four. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were both Doc Savage fans as teenagers. It’s probably no coincidence that the Fantastic Four are led by the world’s greatest scientist, and operate without secret identities from the top floor of a famous Manhattan skyscraper. And Ben Grimm and Johnny Storm are constantly insulting each other and picking fights just like Monk and Ham. The first generation of comic book professionals didn’t grow up with comic book superheroes, so they imitated the pulp superheroes of their own teenage years.

Greenberger: Is there anyway to know if Bill Finger and/or Bob Kane read The Shadow pulps at the time?

Tollin: Oh, yes.  Bill Finger confirmed it in the Steranko History.  He also admitted that "I patterned my style of writing after The Shadow…. It was completely pulp style." Kane acknowledged a Shadow influence in the text feature that accompanied "Gotham City Line-up," the 1964 "new-look" story that killed off Alfred Pennyworth. (Though of course he got better.) Bob Kane admitted reading hero pulps like Doc Savage when Finger loaned them to him, and also admitted, "We didn’t think anything was wrong with Batman carrying a gun because The Shadow used one."

Greenberger: What prompted you to begin the current cycle of reprints?

Tollin: The opportunity to bring Walter Gibson’s wonderful stories back into print, after a 22-year hiatus.  And the reprints have been as successful as I’d hoped. There are a lot of others who love these classic characters. One of the nice rewards is that most of the subscription checks and renewals are accompanied with "thank you" letters from people telling me how glad they are to be getting the stories in this double-novel trade paperback format. And everyone seems to really like the historical articles too. 

One thing I’m hoping to accomplish is to introduce readers to the real Shadow of Gibson’s novels. Too many comic fans and creators see The Shadow as a murderous executioner, which he certainly wasn’t in Gibson’s novels. People see the strong cover images of the blazing ’45 automatics and think that’s what the character is about. No, The Shadow is about mystery, deduction and misdirection. The Shadow’s powers of deduction are rivaled only by Sherlock Holmes and Nero Wolfe. (By the way, Gibson did know Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; they were introduced by their mutual friend, Houdini.) The Shadow is certainly well armed, usually carrying four ’45 automatics into battle. But he basically treats them as a soldier or police officer would, only using them when his life or an innocent’s is at stake. The Shadow is certainly not a bloodthirsty executioner (while his imitator The Spider certainly is).

I certainly hope the availability of these new reprints well help comic book and motion picture creators to get the character right in the future, and allow them to draw inspiration from more than just the cover paintings.

TOMORROW: Tony talks about what other goodies can be found in this special issue plus some additional insights to DC Comics, Batman and the pulps’ legacy.

MICHAEL H. PRICE: Conan the Oilpatch Roughneck

  • News
  • June 24, 2007

price-brown-100-9872953Devotees of comics and the high-adventure pulp magazines know the story almost by heart: Before he had turned 30, Robert E. Howard, of Cross Plains, Texas, had staked out several prominent stations in American literature. He was a poet of Homeric promise, for example, and a contributor to the H.P. Lovecraft school of cosmic terrors – and a prolific South-by-Southwestern regionalist and steward of cowboy lore. And then some.

Had Howard lived past 30, he likely would have outgrown the shirtsleeves-fiction arena to find formal acceptance as a major literary figure. But the pulps – those cheaply produced mass-market publications that thrived during the first half of the 20th century – made an ideal proving ground, and a lasting monument to a talent too big to confine to a category.

A constant element is a sense of Howard’s nomadic upbringing in rural Texas, during a time when the first oil-and-gas booms were transforming much of the state into a barbaric land of violence and mercenary opportunism. In a recent book called Blood & Thunder: The Life & Art of Robert E. Howard, Austin-based scholar Mark Finn makes plain the influence that the boom-town phenomenon, with its brawling new breed of citizenry known as roughnecks, worked upon Bob Howard. 

Had he lived to become a more seasoned artist, Howard (1906-36) probably would not have outgrown his appetite for rambunctious adventure, whether or not he might have left behind the characters who had earned for him an eager and widespread readership. Such recurring characters include a trouble-prone Westerner named Jeopardy Grimes and the Puritan avenger Solomon Kane. To say nothing of Conan the Cimmerian, the barbaric warrior whose exploits have overshadowed the greater range of Howard’s work.

Conan remains an especially bankable attraction, 71 years after the author’s death. Dark Horse Comics offers a mounting series of new exploits, written nowadays by my old-time chum and blues-and-comics collaborator Timothy Truman. And many people still picture Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger with perhaps a smidgen of accuracy in terms of his Conan movies of a generation ago.

But Howard’s restless spirit is gaining ground on his fictional creation.

Finn’s Blood & Thunder (Monkey Brain Books; $19.95) represents more than a perceptive portrait. Taken together, separate biographical studies of Howard by Rusty Burke and Mark Finn form a persuasively definitive portrait. To a Southwestern region that has reawakened during the past several years to the possibilities of oil-and-gas exploration – a consequence of mounting natural-gas play within the Barnett Shale geological formation – Finn’s book is particularly valuable as an examination of an earlier Texas in the throes of boom-town mania.

“Howard remains to most an Oedipal figure who created [Conan] as a wish-fulfillment fantasy,” as Publisher’s Weekly has appraised Blood and Thunder. “Finn quietly and expertly demolishes these and other misconceptions [and] discusses Howard in the context of a populist writer whose dyspeptic view of civilization was forged in the corrupt Texas oil-boom towns in which he grew up.”

Every fictional character must have some basis in real-life observation or experience. Finn’s persuasive argument, interpreted from Howard’s published and private writings, holds that Conan, with his air of defiance, his appetites for mayhem and his “gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirths” (in Howard’s terminology) owes much to the oilfield social dynamics of the early 20th century – the upshot of abrupt industrialization.

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MARTHA THOMASES: I love my shirt

  • News
  • June 23, 2007

martha100-3391212When I left DC Comics in 1999, I stopped traveling to comic book conventions. I’d still go to the Big Apple shows and MoCCA Art Festivals to see my friends, but these take place in New York City, which, coincidentally, is also where my closets are. Now, for the first time in this century, I’m going to shows again.

At DC, those of us in the marketing department were required to wear t-shirts promoting the company’s characters, or with one of the company’s logos. At ComicMix, we wear our logos as well while we’re on duty. When I go to local shows to see my friends, I figure they already like me, and I’m not particularly going to make any new pals.

This is the long way to say that I don’t especially worry about my appearance at comic book conventions. Either someone has made that decision for me, or I was going to see someone who already had formed an opinion about me.

None of this is not to say I didn’t obsess over my appearance. I do. I worry constantly that people look at me and think, “Who let that fat old woman out of the house? Aren’t there laws against such public displays of cellulite? Is it really possible for flesh to sag that much in so many different places?” However, when going to a comic book event, I didn’t worry about these questions any more than I do when going to get a newspaper, or mail a letter.

To me, comic book conventions were a professional obligation. I presented myself as my profession requires, just as I wear a suit to meetings with journalists or clients, and a sweater to the yarn store. When a comic book convention is a social occasion, I’ll dress as my peers dress, perhaps taking the occasion to wear some cute shoes my friends can admire.

I do not consider conventions to make new friends. In fact, I never went to one before I worked at DC (except to go to parties when I first started working in comics, but, as a freelancer, I needed the free hors d’oeuvres). Even though I’ve been reading comics since 1958, I never socialized around them. Comics were something I liked, like rock’n’roll music, or blueberries. My friends were more likely to come from my political activism or the swim team or, later, from jobs or parents with kids the same age as mine.

Until recently, I’d guess most women at comic book conventions also didn’t worry too much about their appearance. As Heidi MacDonald has observed, most women at comic events were “dragalongs,” women who were attending because their boyfriends, husbands or sons liked comics, not because they were fans themselves. The best thing about going to a show used to be that there were never any lines for the ladies room.

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ROBERT TINNELL: Greetings From The Lunatic Fringe

  • News
  • June 22, 2007

chelationkid_logo-7560311

The seventies were a great time to be a kid. Anything seemed possible. By that I don’t mean so much cloning or a cure for cancer. I mean important stuff, like Bigfoot. Nessie. Visits from alien life-forms. Week after week, no less an authority than Leonard Nimoy himself appeared on my television, solemnly narrating case-after-case of paranormal and otherworldly encounters that, to my impressionable mind, were irrefutable.

Then, technology reared its ugly head. One-by-one, these quasi-cousins of Santa Claus began to disappear, picked apart by advances in computer science, digital photography, instant-access to massive amounts of research courtesy of the worldwide web, and not least, the growing cynicism that comes with age. Sure, some enclaves of paranormal-believers have held on – and even prospered – thanks to technology, particularly the ghost hunters. But in general, to be a believer in, say, UFO’s (and before the angry e-mails come in, I know, an unidentified flying object is just that – unidentified – and everyone should believe in that. I’m referring to spaceships carrying folks from other planets; Stephen Hawking messed me up on that) is to be marginalized. Visions of bearded, potbellied fellows in Area 51 ball caps spring to mind. In short order, these folks have been relegated to the margins, to the lunatic fringe.

Little did I know that one day I would be amongst their number.

It was not my belief in visitations by aliens from other worlds that consigned me to this intellectual wilderness. Rather it was my firm conviction that my son was rendered autistic thanks to something called thimerosal, a form of mercury, that was present in his vaccines (Note: there are also strong indications for some of these kids that the measles virus in the MMR shots is involved, as well as aluminum). I won’t go into mind-numbing detail about what he (and we) have gone through since his descent into the hell of autism – you can do that by reading my comic strip The Chelation Kid if you are so inclined.

What I do want to do is make you aware that with the government finally conducting some trials on the vaccine-autism connection, I’ve no doubt powerful interests (including Big Pharma and their various lap dogs) will be running a full-court press to marginalize those of us who dare to expose what has been done to many thousands of kids in the last several years. Let me lay a couple things on you: I don’t hate doctors and I don’t want children to be unprotected from things like polio or smallpox. The majority of the other parents of autistics I speak to feel the same way. A wonderful doctor saved my life. Another is helping us recover our son. By the same token, I don’t automatically defer to them as demi-gods. Going to school for a very long time doesn’t make you smarter than other people. It makes you better educated – to a point.

Despite the fact that since starting the strip, I’ve personally been tarred with a wide-reaching stereotyping brush, I’ll withhold from doing the same to the medical community at-large. In fact, I don’t even always agree with some of my peers’ assessments of medical professionals when it comes to the whole controversy. I think it’s a cheap shot to label that community as a bunch knee-jerkers beholden to orthodoxy and the status quo. Because in a lot of ways, they’re victims, too. Victims of something far more insidious than benign neglect or a short-attention-span or a focus on their particular field of medicine. Like these kids they are victims of the Big Pharma spin machine. The one that keeps telling you that a link between autism and vaccines has been disproved.

Look, you want to discount the anecdotal observations of parents who’ve had success treating their autistic kids through biomedical interventions, because you can only buy into the scientific method, I say “fine.” Hell, you’re probably right, strictly speaking. But ignoring a mass of peer-reviewed papers, based on studies conducted according to scientific-method, that very strongly suggest a causal connection between the vaccines and mercury, as well as the existence of an epidemic? Well, that’s flat out denial or ignorance or lying. Take your pick.

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MICHAEL DAVIS: Fade To Black

  • News
  • June 22, 2007

michael-davis100-3637577I fully realized that the article I wrote last week was at some times petty and juvenile. I was furious and I forgot that the best way to make a point is a well thought out lucid argument. At one time I may have suggested some people in the Genarlow Wilson case were racist and because of that I wrote that “white women love me.” This was simply not right.

I was wrong and I apologize. In my attempt to strike a nerve with the people in the case I lashed out but I was totally wrong to say that. I was wrong and I hope that those people I lashed out at will forgive me.

The fact of the matter is white women don’t love me…they REALLY love me!

Dudes! I can’t keep them off of me! I’m thinking of changing my name to Mandingo (they love that) and seeing if there’s any money in this!

Yeah, I’m still a wee bit bitter over the whole Genarlow Wilson and Paris Hilton thing. To all my friends’ black and white, all jokes aside I’m just trying to get those morons in Georgia to lose some sleep at night. That way they can share in a little of what Genarlow Wilson is enduring.

I was going to write this particular column last week but I got caught up in the Genarlow Wilson and Paris Hilton debacle so here it is a week later and I hope it’s still relevant.

By now we have all seen or heard about The Sopranos series ending show. The vast majority of the world hated that ending. Me? I thought it was a cop-out UNLESS they are planning a movie. Then I get it. If they are not planning a movie then HBO should change its name to simply B.O., because that ending stunk.

HBO is a funny little network. No one doubts that they do GREAT TV. In fact The Sopranos would not (could not) have been done on any other network. If the show were picked up by ABC then Tony Soprano would have been played by Tony Danza or some such actor. It was The Sopranos that really lit the fire under the rest of the TV world. I remember NBC did a Soprano rip. It was called Kingpin. Everybody in that show looked like supermodels. Even the hit men were wearing Hugo Boss suits. That show went bye bye faster than Barry Allen. Why? Because as I have said a million times: Americans are not the idiots some TV executives think.

Rather or not you like the ending or not it sure did make an impact, this morning I watched a Hillary Clinton parody of the ending on the Today show.

Wait a moment.

Did I just say that Hillary Clinton, the front-runner in the race for President did a Sopranos parody? Love or hate the ending (or love or hate Hillary) you have to respect the power of a television program that can do that. As I said in my very first column my readers would always know where I stand so let me be clear: I hated the ending but I love Hillary. Why do I love Hillary? Well if we elect her we get Bill as a bonus! Why did I hate the Sopranos ending? Because unless there is going to be a Sopranos movie then that was not an ending. It was a big slap in the face of America by a great producer who wants to be considered an artist.

For the most part television is not an art form. It is an entertainment medium. Yes there is great TV and yes there can be some shows, movies etc. that can be considered artistic but TV is not an art form.

Art by definition is an individual who creates something for no other reason except to see it created. They do it because they have a desire to share their vision with the world. Anytime someone pays you to create a product where the sole purpose is to garner ratings, that is not an art.

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JOHN OSTRANDER: Backing Into The Future

  • News
  • June 21, 2007

ostrander100-2156678The new Suicide Squad miniseries got announced this last weekend and noted by many, including here on ComicMix. The series was always a cross between Mission: Impossible and The Dirty Dozen and will be again. I’ve always tried to give it a “real world” feel, even going back to its origin. And sometimes the “real world” pulls a fast one.

When I proposed the Squad, there was some concern that the premise – that the U.S. government would hire bad guys to undertake missions considered to be “in the national interest” but needed deniability – seemed a little “out there.” In between the time that the proposal was accepted and we got our first issue out, Irangate broke – where the government was using bad guys etc etc – and made us look like pikers. It looked like we were cashing in on the story rather than inventing an edgy and daring scenario.

That continued through the Squad’s run. I would read the papers and try to extrapolate events from them, concoct possible and likely scenarios and try to fit the Squad around them, and the real world would get there around the same time the issue came out. I was successful enough at one point that a friend contacted me one January wanting to know where I was setting the Squad that summer. She was preparing her summer vacation plans and wherever I was sending the Squad she wanted to avoid.

In truth, I’m not much of a seer. I simply apply what I know from writing plots – formulating a sequence of events that would lead to a given event/moment and then extrapolating the most feasible series of events that might follow from said event. I apply this method to what I see in the world. Very useful in plotting or dealing with characters; a little scarier when dealing with real-life situations.

For example, a couple of weeks ago I did it in a column concerning the sudden death of bees. Others, such as Al Gore, are doing an admirably scary job looking at climate change (a.k.a. global warming). I remember once when I was teaching a writing class at the Joe Kubert School – yes, I was teaching writing to artists – I gave an assignment on scanning the future. We started from a given factoid: oil is not a renewable resource. At some point we will cross the line where we will have taken more oil out of the ground than there is left in it. Some speculate we either already have or will within the next ten years. At that point, oil has to start becoming a scarcer commodity. Given our current rate of consumption, there are some who think the oil will give out around 2030.

We started to explore what that would mean. Not just higher costs for driving your car or heating your home but what the impact would be in other areas. For example, as the cost of transporting goods goes up so does the cost of bringing in food outside the local area. Everything then costs more from the clothes you wear to the food you eat.

Plastics are made from petroleum and as petroleum becomes scarcer, the cost of plastics goes up. Think of everything – EVERYTHING – you use that depends on plastic use – on CHEAP plastic use. The cost, of course, gets passed on to the consumer. That’s a given.

With all this, I asked them to contemplate what happens geopolitically. As oil becomes scarcer and control of it literally dictates what happens to a country’s economy, who will do what in order to control access to the oil? I don’t mean just this country; there are up and coming players as well. Hungry players.

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The Second Big ComicMix Video Podcast

Here’s your big chance to see comics creators Mike Grell and Timothy Truman as they talk about their new Jon Sable Freelance (Ashes of Eden) and GrimJack (The Manx Cat) graphic novels — and you’ll be able to preview pages of finished art from these two upcoming tomes! It’s the second Big ComicMix VIDEO Podcast, up and at ’em for your consideration.

All you have to do, as usual, is PRESS THE BUTTON!

 

 

 

 

DENNIS O’NEIL: Continued stories (continued)…

  • News
  • June 19, 2007

dennyoneil10013-1076167(If) you’re…young; you don’t remember a time when continued stories were rare. But until Stan Lee made them standard procedure at Marvel in the 1960s, they were next to unheard-of.

Those words seem familiar to you? Certainly not, unless you read this department’s blather three weeks ago, when I began a discussion of continued stories in comics, where they – the words – appeared in a slightly different form. And in reprinting them, in a column which is – let’s face it – a continuation of a previous one, I’ve tried to deal with a paramount problem writers face when doing continued narratives: clueing in readers who either don’t remember the earlier stuff or are new to the series.

There is a difference between continuing characters and continuing stories. Continuing characters have been with us a very long time. Even if you ignore the many tales of the various gods and goddesses, those rascals, you can find a continuing character as early as 428 BC, give or take a few years, when Sophocles followed up his smash hit Oedipus Rex with a sequel featuring the same poor bastard, Oedipus at Colonus. Then, over the centuries, there have been various adventures of King Arthur’s knights and other heroes. But these were not continued stories, not exactly. An adventure or episode ended and the characters went into Limbo and reappeared to solve new problems and encounter new hassles. That kind of storytelling continued through the invention of high speed printing, which made books relatively cheap and accessible at about the same time that a lot of people were learning to read.

107_4_0060-1620829Which brings us to the pulp magazines, a publishing form that began about 1910 and was one with the dinosaurs by the middle 50s. A lot of these cheaply produced entertainments featured continuing heroes. (We’ve discussed perhaps the greatest of them, The Shadow, in this department earlier, and I won’t be surprised if he gets mentioned here again.) Meanwhile, over in another medium, movies were also featuring continuing heroes, ranging from that loveable scamp Andy Hardy to a legion of bad guy quellers, including noble cowpokes and suave detectives. And…in yet another medium, that newfangled radio was presenting weekly dramas about cowboys and detectives and police officers and even federal agents, like the movies only more often. And…here might be an appropriate place to mention comic strips, which began doing stories, as opposed to daily jokes, in 1929 with Burne Hogarth’s comic’s adaptations of Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan, and since the introduction of Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy in 1931, were sometimes stretching plots over many weeks.

Those were continued stories featuring, of course, continuing characters. But there were others…Oh my goodness, look! We’re almost at the limit of our allotted word count and we have so much more to discuss. I suppose I could go on for a couple of paragraphs more, but that wouldn’t begin to exhaust the topic, so I guess we’ll just have to – yes! – continue this next week.

RECOMMENDED READING: The Creators, by Daniel J. Boorstin

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.

Artwork copyright Tribune Media Services. All Rights Reserved.

MICHAEL DAVIS: My Fair Lady

  • News
  • June 15, 2007

michael-davis100-8678770What the flying FISH is wrong with this country? Some ass wipe D.A in Georgia put a black teenager named Genarlow Wilson in prison for ten years. This kid did not kill anybody or rob anybody nor did he rape anybody. He did what teenagers have been doing since caveman days; he had consensual relations with another teenager. So this A-student star athlete was sentenced to jail for 10 years.

10 years?? An A student? Star athlete? Never in any trouble, his whole life in front of him. So he and another teenager do something a zillion other teenagers do and he gets 10 years in prison????

What the Hell is wrong with this country? Or is it just some idiot racist D.A. using his power to kill some kids dream and life. No. I don’t think you should “do it” when you are kids. But they were kids – that what kids do!! Did he rob some body? Did he kill somebody? Did he rape somebody?

NO!

He had consensual relations with another teenager. Oh by the way it was not the “act” that they did. No, they fooled around but did not do the ‘”act.”

Wrong? Yes. Is this what teenagers’ do? Yes.

Hey, judge and D.A of this Georgia case. Could you not give the kid community service, or 30 days or something that reflected the fact that this kid (these kids) were just being kids? No. You and your self-important moral ideals had to teach an A student a lesson by putting him in jail for 10 years. Why did you prosecute him in the first place? Had a bad day? This payback for O.J?  Nothing on TV that day? Had a fight with the wife? Had a fight with your sister? By the way, I hear that may be one fight, you backwoods moron.

What does putting a teenager in jail for being a teenager accomplish? What? Who are you sending a message to? And what is your message? Could your message be “We are just really stupid and are still pissed that we lost the Civil War?” Is that the message?

If by some miracle when you were a teenager you had a girlfriend and you guys got a little freaky, do you think you should have gone to jail?

What crime are you punishing? What evil have you stopped? You have stopped a young bright kid from living his dream. You have stopped a young bright kid from becoming a useful part of society. Instead you have put him in jail where he will learn a helpful lesson. That lesson is that justice is NOT colorblind and you the judge and the jury have used your power to ruin a good life.

I ask you again, what does putting that kid in jail accomplish?

What? What? WHAT? (more…)

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