Tagged: comics

MICHAEL H. PRICE: The Long Shadow of Boody Rogers

305_4_01-6254468People and events of consequence cast their shadows before them, never behind. Oklahoma-born and Texas-reared Gordon “Boody” Rogers (1904 – 1996) owns one of those forward-lurching shadows – an unlikely mass-market cartoonist whose oddball creations anticipated the rise of underground comics, or comix, and whose command of dream-state narrative logic and language-mangling dialogue remains unnerving and uproarious in about equal measure.

I had discovered the artist’s more unsettling work as a schoolboy during the 1960s, via the used-funnybook bin of a neighborhood shop called The Magazine Exchange. One such title, Babe, amounted to such an exaggerated lampoon of Al Capp’s most celebrated comic strip, Li’l Abner, as to transcend parody. (One lengthy sequence subjects a voluptuous rustic named Babe Boone to a gender-switch ordeal that finds her spending much of the adventure as Abe Boone – almost as though Capp’s Daisy Mae Scragg had become Abner Yokum.) Such finds drew me back gradually to Rogers’ comic-strip and funnybook serial Sparky Watts, a partly spoofing, partly straight-ahead, heroic feature about a high-voltage superman.

Rogers resurfaced in my consciousness quite a few years later. A college-administration colleague showed up one day around 1980 sporting a canvasback jacket adorned with cartoons bearing an array of famous signatures – Al Capp and Zack Mosely and Milton Caniff among them. The garment proved to be one-of-a-kind.

“Oh, it’s my Uncle Gordon’s,” my co-worker explained. “Kind of a family heirloom, I guess – something his cartoonist pals fixed up for him on the occasion of his retirement. He lends it out to me, now and then.”

Okay, then. And who is this “Uncle Gordon,” to have been keeping company amongst the comic-strip elite?

“Oh, you’ve probably never heard of him,” she said. “He was a cartoonist, his ownself. Went by the name of ‘Boody.’”

Not Boody Rogers?(Yes, and how many guys named Boody can there be, anyhow?)

“None other. So maybe you have heard of him?”

Well, sure. Used to collect his work, to the extent that it could be had for collecting in those days of catch-as-can trolling for out-of-print comic books and newspaper-archive strips.

So, uhm, then, he’s a local guy?

“Well, not exactly right here in town,” answered my colleague. “But he lives not far from here” – here being Amarillo, Texas, in the northwestern corner of the state – “over to the east. Do you ever get over to Childress? You ought to drop over and meet him.” (more…)

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Big Two Head Honchos Together

Snapped this photo yesterday afternoon:

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Some interesting faces there, including Tom Brevoort, Mike Carlin, Peter David, Ivan Cohen, Steve Wacker and… wait a second…

olympus-digital-camera-19Why, it’s DC Comics President+Publisher Paul Levitz and Marvel’s EIC Joe Quesada, mere feet away from each other. And they say the recent meetings involving Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are historic! (Yes, DC’s EIC Dan DiDio was there as well, and wound up sitting in the row in front of Quesada, but you’ll have to take my word for that as I don’t have a photo.) What could bring all these comics luminaries together? We’ll have the full report later today.

MICHAEL DAVIS: Game Over

super_mario_64_01-9409709michael-davis200-5541101I have the greatest respect for the Sony company, but I have major issues with the way they handled the PS3 launch. So, to my friends at Sony: I still feel you are one of the greatest companies on the planet and it’s because of that I write this.

You should have known better…

Not so long ago in a galaxy real real close there was a giant named Nintendo. They were the undisputed champions of the video game world. They ruled the gaming world with their Mario Brothers Franchise and related games. So successful was Nintendo that the words Super Nintendo and Mario Brothers became part of the American lexicon.

So, there they sat secure in the knowledge that most of the market share for video games was theirs. One day a little guy named Sony showed up. Sony was known for televisions and stereos, not video games. So when they showed up with a new platform – the disc format – Nintendo, as they say in the hood, could give a (insert bad word).

No, Nintendo just sat idle while this “Play Station” chipped away at the big giant’s castle. Years before Sony had learned a bit about under estimating the competition. Back in the 70s they developed a video device called Betamax. It was the first affordable home video recorder. Well a year later other companies developed a VHS format and said to Sony,  “Hey Sony, share your Beta format with us and we will hook you up with our VHS format.” Sony, as they say in the hood said “You can kiss our (insert bad word here).

Well, the rest of the industry went about their business and developed VHS leaving Sony holding the video format that America did not want. So you would think they would have learned their lesson.

You would think.

Anyway, as I was saying, Nintendo was so secure in their complete dominion of the video game market that they paid no mind to the little disc driven Play Station. Nintendo could have paid a little more attention to the disc format, but no!! They figured that the entire world would stay with them. They could have met the challenge head on developing a disc system of their own, but NOOOOO the world would stay with them they were *NINTENDO!

* Note: Please feel free to add your own ominous sound track whenever you see NINTENDO!

They were the leaders were they not?  No one could catch them they were NINTENDO! They were so sure that their brand was so strong that they ignored the up start Play Station. Well it was soon evident that Play Station was the coolest thing on the planet.

And Nintendo heard what they thought they never would.

Game Over.

You would have thought that Nintendo would have quickly learned their lesson and converted to a disc system at the moment when Play Station kicked their ass.

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Comics borrowing TV production styles

The New York Times has an article about the new trend in comics of TV writers coming in and acting as producers, with the series development being more like what comes out of a writer’s room. Focus is given to Paul Dini, TV and animation vet and currently big kahuna behind Countdown:

Mr. Dini was a writer and story editor on Season 1 of “Lost” and a consultant on Season 2, and says that the same skills will come into play in the comics. “As a story editor in television, whether it’s live action or animation, I’m really the one responsible for the overall direction of the story,” Mr. Dini said in a telephone interview. In “Countdown,” he said, “each week I go over the beats of the upcoming issue with the editor and the writers.”

If new ideas arise, he amends the series’s outline before writing the script. He then reviews the final script before it is sent to the artist. Once drawn and given dialogue, it is reviewed yet again. “We have to make sure the tone is right and that we’re keeping the ultimate vision of the story line,” he said.

And of course we have an even more extreme example in Joss Whedon doing what he calls Buffy The Vampire Slayer: Season Eight in comics:

The origin of the series is simple enough: “I had an idea for an eighth season and I knew they wanted to start the comic,” said Mr. Whedon, who created Buffy in a 1992 film that preceded the television series.

“I knew there wasn’t going to be another venue for it, so I started to work,” he said.

The series was originally planned for about 24 issues, but will now be closer to 40 or 50. Mr. Whedon is writing the opening story line, while other writers will step in for smaller story arcs, but everyone will be working toward an already planned ending.

“They all have my sort of manifesto, which I update constantly,” Mr. Whedon said. “And I’ll sit down with the writers so that I can fold their stories into the bigger picture.”

This control over the series’s overall vision is why he is billed as executive producer. “It’s a nonexistent title in comics, but it best fits what I’m doing,” he said. “Everyone goes through me. It doesn’t take as many people, but it sometimes comes as down to the wire to produce a comic as it does a TV show every week.”

Not mentioned is how the show Heroes is borrowing concepts back from comics production, with their Origins series coming out shortly.

DENNIS O’NEIL: Two-Fers, part one

dennyoneil10020-7843397Mr. Robert Joy, of DC Comics, informs me that Green Arrow and Black Canary are getting married this summer. Allow me to assume a Victorian mien and sniff, “About time.”

How long have they been “going together” anyway? I guess that depends on whether we’re talking about the first Black Canary, Dinah Lance, or her daughter, Dinah Laurel. I confess: I’m no longer sure who was involved with whom, or when, which may mean that senility is knocking at my door, or that the continuity has become a tad confusing.

Well, I am sure of one bit of Black Canariana, and that’s that the hot mama, Dinah Lance, the original Canary, was an alien – even more alien than Superman or the Martian Manhunter. At least The Man of Steel and the green detective from the red planet were of this universe. Not so, Dinah: In one of Julius Schwartz’s annual teamings of the forties superheroes, whose club was called the Justice Society, and the new superheroes, whose club was The Justice League, we saw Dinah’s husband, Larry Lance, die. So grief-stricken was the Canary that she followed the Leaguers into another dimension to insure that she would be free of anything that could remind her of her late spouse. I mean, think about it: another dimension! That makes Superman’s migration from (I guess) another galaxy seem pretty paltry. And the Manhunter’s trip from Mars? Another planet, not only in the same solar system, but one of Earth’s nearest neighbors? Pah! Hardly worth mentioning.

Those annual teamings of the superdoers of different eras is what’s really interesting (and, incidentally, the point of this blather, if it has one.) The reason is this: the stories ran over two issues. If you were born before, oh, say, 1966, you might be asking, so what? Because if you’re that 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. The reason, someone back then told me, was that publishers couldn’t be sure that just because a certain newsstand had this month’s issue of Detective Comics, there was no assurance that it would carry next month’s. Comic book distribution was a hit-or-miss affair in which those involved paid attention to the number of comics entrusted to a given retailer, but none at all to individual titles. Funny animals, superheroes, wacky teenagers – made no difference. It was all just product.

How, then, was Mr. Schwartz able to perpetrate his annual continued stories? I once asked him this and his answer was that he just did it, and no one ever complained. Stan’s answer would be different. I remember that he said somewhere – in his autobiography? – that doing continued stories saved him the trouble of having to think of so many plots – and there, my friends, speaks a true professional!

I don’t think we’ve exhausted this subject so – you guessed it! – you can consider what you’ve just read as Part One, to be continued…

RECOMMENDED READING: God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, by Christopher Hitchens.

Batman, The Question, Iron Man, Green Lantern and/or Green Arrow, and The Shadow, as well as all kinds of novels, stories and articles.

Dennis O’Neil is an award-winning editor and writer of comic books like

Reuben Awards announced

The National Cartoonists Society handed out their 61st annual Reuben Awards at their dinner in Orlando, Florida this weekend. The winners of this

year’s awards are:

othpastis-9123772 NEWSPAPER COMIC STRIP: Stephan Pastis, Pearls Before Swine

COMIC BOOK: Gene Luen Yang, American Born Chinese

GAG CARTOONING: Drew Dernavich

MAGAZINE FEATURE/MAGAZINE ILLUSTRATION: Steve Brodner

BOOK ILLUSTRATION: Mike Lester

NEWSPAPER ILLUSTRATION: Laurie Triefeldt

TV ANIMATION: Craig McCracken

FEATURE ANIMATION: Carter Goodrich

GREETING CARD: Carla Ventresca

ADVERTISING & ILLUSTRATION: Tom Richmond

EDITORIAL CARTOON: Mike Ramirez

NEWSPAPER PANEL CARTOON: Hilary Price, Rhymes With Orange

Bill Amend (Foxtrot) won this year’s overall Reuben Award. The Reuben was named after comic strip legend Rube Goldberg, creator of the wacky sequential invention strips, among many other features. Previous recipients have included Milton Caniff, Al Capp and Alex Raymond.

Artwork from yesterday’s Over The Hedge by Michael Fry and T Lewis. All rights reserved.

Kesel and the Jets

nationaltriumph-5484738In the category of "familiar names in not so familiar places," editor Barbara Randall Kesel (late of CrossGen, Dark Horse and DC) has a new gig — overseeing a comic entitled The National Triumph League, which will be cowritten by New York Jets fullback Darian Barnes.

The Jets’ official site is already publicizing this venture, including an interview with Barnes where he discusses the comic (about 4:50 into the video) and mentions their nascent web home. 

A bit more from the book’s colorist, Jason Embury: "The National Triumph League is the story of super powered teams, battling to capture villains in a competitive environment for points, and deals with the real life issues concerning the pressure and notoriety of being a professional athlete and life in the public eye.  A fun new twist on standard superhero fare."  Barnes is cowriting the book with Josh Goldfond, and the art will be by Jim Muniz, with coloring by Embury and lettering by Jason Hanley.

Barnes notes that the book is still looking for a publisher, but one assumes that a professional NFL player won’t have any trouble funding this kind of enterprise.

MICHAEL DAVIS: I’m with the band… not.

michael-davis100-9345750I am a huge believer in personal choice. I think that you should be allowed to make up your mind freely on all matters. If you don’t like something you have every right to say so. If you do like something then you have the right to say that also. You don’t have to believe what I believe and vice versa.

For the most part I’m a liberal.  Well I’m a liberal except when it comes to violent crime, then I’m so conservative it hurts. Get it? Violent crime? Hurts?

No?

I firmly believe that if you commit a violent crime you should rot in jail or rot in Hell. If it were up to me, first you would rot in jail, then you would rot in Hell. But hey, that’s my belief. You can believe in rehabilitation if you want to, but let me see you hire that convicted murderer when he gets out of jail. Me? Oh hell no. Now that I think of it, I’m very conservative on many things. The reason I have not joined the conservative ranks fully is because they tend to want to tell you what to think. Usually it’s under some “moral” banner. They also throw God in the mix a lot.

Funny, as much as they bring up God, they never bring up “free will.” That seems to never make the moral argument. Also, some seem to think that their God is the God. That’s OK but why can’t I believe that my God is the true God without them calling me wrong or wanting to change my mind? Failing both, some conservatives would want me to simply disappear.

I think that whatever you believe is your right and if I disagree that’s all it is, a disagreement. We don’t have to go to war as some countries do. I think that disagreeing on faith to the point of war is the single stupidest thing on the planet. I frankly don’t believe that Allah has a problem with Jehovah.

So I hope it’s clear from my too long intro that I believe people should think for themselves. So, why don’t they?

I go to this great Karaoke bar in L.A. The KJ (that’s the host) loves Elvis so someone in my Karaoke group suggested that we do an Elvis night for his birthday. The sheer venom that rocketed across the insuring emails made it look like Elvis took part in 9/11. This from a group of people I love hanging out with. These are good people. Every year I get invited to great New Years Eve Parties given by A-list celebrities. I prefer to be at this Karaoke bar because the people are just really cool. (more…)

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Grindhouse genre comics

3696_2_1-8829927Greg Hatcher has an incredibly fun essay up about what he calls grindhouse comics: comics that are so heavily steeped in the pulp traditions that they make your teeth ache. Think Blade before he went Hollywood, and then dial it down a bit:

And it was a pretty easy leap, talking amongst fans, to start kicking around the idea of grindhouse comics. But here we ran into a little bit of a snag. Because, really, to be fair, from their beginnings on up through the early 70’s, they’re ALL “grindhouse” comics. That’s just the way it was….

The short version — for the sake of boiling it down to something that I can use here, I’d narrow the definition of ‘grindhouse comics’ to the comics I thought of in my youth as the B list. Comics that were, y’know, just okay. These were the books that I knew I could walk in on any time, that I knew would achieve a base level of entertainment that I would enjoy.

But I would not ever worry about missing an issue of one of these titles. They’d be there waiting for me when I got around to them again and nothing would change: they’d still be fun, continuity-free, amusing ways to kill half an hour. They have that Roger Corman vibe, that cheerful sense of, yeah, this is just something dumb and completely without social merit. We know it. So let’s all stop thinking about Art and just have a good time. Floor it.

Truthfully they were what I read in between issues of the books I REALLY liked. Used to be, when your favorite book was hung up because the writer was taking too long to craft his brilliant epic or the artist was late AGAIN, we just bought something else and read that instead. I did, anyway. You get a hanker on for a comic book, you want a comic book, damn it. (Nowadays I think the alternative impulse buy’s gotten to be too expensive a proposition for most of us; we end up just taking to the internet and bitching about late books instead.)

Go take a look at the article to see what he’s talking about, and you might get a better idea as to why everybody is trying to remake those kinds of books today, from Astro City’s Dark Age to Waid & Perez’s Brave and Bold, which Hatcher points to as Exhibit A of a grindhouse book — which makes sense, as it’s a double feature and all.

Our idea of a great grindhouse comic: Revenge Of The Prowler.

Artwork copyright Price, Snyder III and Truman. All Rights Reserved.

JOHN OSTRANDER: That’s A (TV) Wrap Part 1

ostrander100-7854594It’s May which means, out in TV-land, it’s the final sweeps period of the season. Yeah, a few of the final shows have yet to air but I might as well look back on what I liked/disliked over the past season. This may not be what you watched, liked or disliked but, hey, it’s my column.

Battlestar Galactica. I finally succumbed and started looking in on the series. I’d been afraid that it would be too dense at this point, that there was too much backstory, to be accessible to late viewers like myself but I found I was able to pick things up as I went. Yes, it would be better if I knew more of the backstory and I plan on picking up the DVDs but I’ve gotten into the series. I’m not certain why finding Earth is such a good idea for these people or why so much of their culture seems to be very post-1940’s American culture but I’m willing to hang in and find out. Yes, I liked it overall.

Boston Legal. A tip of the hat to ComicMix head inmate Mike Gold for getting me to watch this series. Mary and I started watching late last season and it’s become one of our favorites. I was resistant because I’m not really a big David E. Kelley fan but this show causes me to laugh out loud. It makes brilliant use of some old pros – James Spader, Rene Aubenjois, Candace Bergen, and the simply amazing William Shatner – as it talks about current issues, goes consistently over the top, touches the heart and simply entertains me more than almost any other show in a given week.

Deadwood. Big fan of this show and I can’t tell you how pissed off I am that HBO didn’t let it continue. Yeah, they talked about two movies to finish it up but a) that’s not the same and b) I haven’t heard that those are actually going forward. Creator David Milch had said that the concept was the advance of civilization as seen through the focus of the town of Deadwood, South Dakota, originally a boom camp for the gold found in the hills nearby. Real historical figures intermingled with totally fictional creations much the same way real history was mingled with a lot of inventive writing (and serious profanity). It’s not a technique unknown to me; I did the much the same thing when I wrote my historical graphic novel The Kents. The show boasted some fine performances topped by Ian McShane’s incendiary Al Swearingen.

All that said, I have to confess that Season 3 turned out to be a disappointment to me. The through line was the gradual take-over of the town by George Hearst (given a dynamite performance by Gerald McRaney). Hearst was an actual historical figure, the farther of William Randolph Hearst who, in turn, was a model for Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, and that was both the attraction and the problem. The actual Hearst himself never visited Deadwood, so far as my researches showed, although he did wind up owning several big mines there.

The problem in Season 3, for me, was that it was headed for an almost apocalyptic showdown between Hearst and his men versus the citizens of the town who, although usually at violent odds with one another, were brought together by a common threat. The season built in tension to what should have been a staggering climax and then – Hearst simply decides to leave town. Go on to his next location. The tension dribbles away.

(more…)

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