Tagged: DC Comics

Fate gets real

4094830691-5473050Steve Gerber reports his Doctor Fate series, already announced, solicited and then rescinded, will be appearing in a new double-length, double-feature book along the lines of DC’s recent Mystery In Space and Tales of the Unexpected titles. It should be coming out in September.

Personally, I think this is good news. It’s quite rare for me to get excited about still another plow-over of an old superhero, and Doctor Fate had some good runs over the decades. But Gerber and Fate seemed like a perfect match, and I look forward to his new series once again.

(Artwork copyright DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.)

 

Heroes in 90 seconds

  • News
  • April 25, 2007

Thanks, Wired!  A minute and a half video of the only scene in which I’d probably have had any interest from Monday night’s Heroes (even though former DC writer Chuck Kim penned this one). But come on, was the 15-second ad preceding it really necessary? Isn’t a 6-to-1 program-to-ad ratio a bit high? (Or is my math off?)

MARTHA THOMASES: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

  • News
  • April 21, 2007

3178_2_001-7722403The horrific events this week at Virginia Tech have elicited the usual pompous political rhetoric about the evils of Hollywood entertainment – violent video games, rap music, movies and television are to blame. “Our kids are being trained to be murderers,” thunder the politicians. “They learn to shoot at their enemies instead of reasoning with them. They become calloused by this violence, which dehumanizes others. Let us regulate this evil, lest our children slaughter us in our beds.”

Except that’s not how it works. If the media were that effective, we would all be effective code crackers, physically fit from our active lifestyles, enjoying out fabulously large New York apartments. That’s what the non-violent media teaches.

I’ve been a non-violent activist since high school, where I regularly risked expulsion by distributing an anti-war magazine. I dropped out of college for 18 months to work with the War Resisters League, and I now serve on the Board of Directors for the A. J. Muste Institute (http://www.ajmuste.org). Doing this work, I’ve met a lot of people who are deeply and thoughtfully concerned about popular culture, and think it degrades people. After decades of rational and reasonable conversation, I need to disagree.

In Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence, author (and sometimes comic book writer) Gerard Jones examines why children enjoy playing at violence, and why it can be a good thing for them. If I may grossly over-simplify an entire book into a few sentences, he says that children play to work out their feelings, including anger, frustration and helplessness. It’s far better to pretend to kill the monsters with rayguns or laser beams than to hit another kid because he’s got better stuff in his lunchbox than you do.

Kids aren’t the only ones who feel this way. As a human being and a New Yorker, I face frustration dozens of times a day. The traffic lights are slow, the tourists don’t know how to walk down a city sidewalk so other people can pass them, my neighbors don’t clean up after their dogs. I think about killing them all the time. Because I’m an adult, and because I understand that actions have consequences, I don’t do these things. Instead, I watch Kill Bill or read Punisher.

I also understand that other people have feelings. This understanding did as much to shape my politics as anything else – I saw people on television, dying in Viet Nam, realized I didn’t want to die, and the people I saw, even the Communists, probably didn’t want to die, either. From there, I could see that the people making the decisions to go to war weren’t the ones fighting, but they and their friends were getting rich. (more…)

MARTHA THOMASES: Why I love the Legion

  • News
  • April 6, 2007

legiona2-3909744

It was in early 1980 when I realized what I geek I had turned into. The night before, I had a dream. My dream was not the inspirational kind like Martin Luther King, Jr., nor the poetic kind that Neil Gaiman would later spin into a career that brings happiness to millions.

I had a geek dream.

In my dream, the Ramones tried out for the Legion of Super-Heroes, and were turned down because Legion rules didn’t allow for more than one person to have the same super-power, which, in this case, was being a Ramone. I no longer remember precisely who turned them down, but I do remember Bouncing Boy suggesting they join the Legion of Substitute Heroes. Joey wanted to, but Dee Dee refused.

Then I woke up.

I read my first Legion story in Jamestown, New York, visiting my grandparents in the late 1950s or early 1960s. I had what must have been an Adventure comic, with a story about the adult Legion of Super-Villains fighting Superman, and the adult Legion of Super-Heroes joining in. My grandparents, while lovely people, were very boring, and I dove into that comic as a way of avoiding Lawrence Welk on television. Luckily, this eight-page story had plenty to mesmerize a young girl. Cosmic King versus Cosmic Man! Lightning Lord versus Lightning Man! Saturn Queen versus Saturn Woman! The villains had regal names while the heroes had descriptive names. Clearly, ego and a class system must be what turned people bad.

Over the next several decades, I read as many Legion stories as I could. I loved the variety of powers these kids had (Matter-Eater Lad!), and that they had a meetings where they could gather and sit behind desks, with title cards that explained their abilities, in case they forgot. (“I’m Invisible Kid, but I don’t know what I do. Oh, here it says on my name-plate. I can turn invisible!”)

But mostly, I loved that they had a clubhouse.

(more…)

DENNIS O’NEIL: Who knows what evil lurks…? Part 1

  • News
  • April 3, 2007

Meet Anthony Tollin.

I did, more than 30 years ago, at DC Comics. Anthony was tall, friendly, didn’t look like a New Yorker, and wasn’t. He came to Manhattan from Minneapolis in 1973, worked a couple of jobs, and then landed at DC, where he stayed for 20 years, proofreading, color-coordinating, helping Jack Adler manage the production department – necessary chores, done well away from the spotlight, that transform the raw materials of artwork and script into a printed artifact. Along the way, Anthony got married, and divorced, moved to another state, and when he retired from DC, settled in Texas, where he lives and single-parents his lovely and gifted daughter, Katrina.

If you talked to Anthony much, you soon discovered that he had a number of pop cultch enthusiasms, not the least of which was comic books. But his real passions – I don’t think the word is too strong – were always The Shadow novels, mostly written by Walter Gibson under the pseudonym Maxwell Grant and published in the 30s and 40s in the pulp magazine format, and old radio shows, particularly the crime and adventure programs that were the first cousins of the pulps and comics. If ever I had a question about either of these subjects, Mr. Tollin was always my first go-to guy. I never needed a second.

Those passions are still part of the Tollin gestalt, and now he’s found a new way to both share and make a living from at least one of them. Since July, a company Anthony started has, in partnership with something called Nostalgia Ventures, been issuing reprints of The Shadow books. The price is $12.95, quite modest considering that in one volume you get two novels and reprints of the original illustrations, a feature that’s both unusual and, I think, a real value-adder. The book that’s on the desk next to my computer would certainly be mistaken for one of the old pulps – same size, same kind of cover and font – until you picked it up and found that, in fact, both the cover stock and the interior stock are considerably better than anything that bore the original work. Inside, there are the novels, plus a couple of pieces by Will Murray, another expert and go-to guy, and an adaption of a Shadow radio show.

And as a comics fan you should care… why?

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MIKE GOLD: You say you want an evolution…

  • News
  • April 2, 2007

wonder-woman-6594318I like Martha Thomases’ idea of 365, as reported on ComicMix yesterday. A full-length comic book story each and every day for a year. Now that would be an event.

Sadly, most such comic book events aren’t worth the effort, let alone the price. The stories are overblown, their effects on their “universe” temporary – either in the sense that they will be countermanded or, at best, castrated in the next such event.

(Hmmm. There’s a phrase I’ve never written before. “At best, castrated.”)

By the time they’re over, most events turn out to be nothing more than marketing gimmicks, and an endless sea of marketing gimmicks doth not a universe make. As of this writing Captain America is dead but Bucky is alive – something he’d managed to avoid for over 40 years. As Denny O’Neil pointed out in his recent ComicMix column, death has no permanence in comics. As a plot point, it is hackneyed: it may have collectibility, but it has no credibility.

Wonder Woman has been redefined, resurrected, rebooted, and retold differently so many times since 1965 (arguably her first real reboot) that I’m surprised she doesn’t bump into Tony Soprano at her shrink’s office.

Of the two major universes, Marvel’s is the most consistent – but only by comparison to DC, whose universe had to be cobbled together retroactively by combining the efforts of five publishing houses over 70 years: DC, All-American, Quality, Fawcett and Charlton – and maybe Fox, depending how you, ahhh, look at Phantom Lady. But by and large, in the past couple decades Marvel’s change has been evolutionary and not stop-and-start-over. Spider-Man went step by step from being a four-eyed high school wallflower with a secret identity to becoming a publicly known married-to-an-actress superhero and, oh yeah, menace to his nation. Marvel never stopped and said “Oh, now everything you know is wrong; this is the way it is and the way it will be until we need to burrow into your pockets again.”

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Keep your eye on the body

  • News
  • March 7, 2007

dailynewscapdead-5664270I got a note from a long time comic book reader on Wednesday. He was incensed that Marvel disgraced themselves by killing Captain America. Worse, they did it sneakily, without telling the retailers this was the issue so it sold out to the fan boys before the general public could see the bloody body for themselves.

Marvel certainly got a nice boost from the coast-to-coast coverage Captain America’s death received.

But, is Captain America – Steve Rogers – really dead?

It used to be that a death to a major character was a major event. Writers would find themselves running out of interesting stories to tell with a character and decided to shake up the title character’s life by killing off a familiar face. Spider-Man writer Gerry Conway has always said that’s why Gwen Stacy had to go.

That happened time and again, at both DC and Marvel and it made the fans uneasy, since you never knew what would happen next. That certainly helped sell comics for a while. Then, killing the title character seemed the next logical step. Jim Shooter and Jim Starlin helped pioneer that with the Death of Captain Marvel graphic novel and then there was the phone in stunt that saw Jason Todd, the second Robin bite the big one.

(more…)

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