About 25 years ago I was walking from a screening at a Third Avenue theater onto a bustling Manhattan street with a Time Warner executive. My companion thought the movie we’d just seen, a movie that would be opening in a few days, was too dark for a summer entertainment and so would probably fail….
So our national fingerwag has found its way through the mire of newsprint and cable television and into the Land of Comics. If you don’t know what I’m talking about you won’t hear it from me because I’m not joining the fray, my children, but it’s Obama’s fault. Just like that rewarring in Iraq is…
Time was, three-four decades past, that I wrote some fiction with environmental themes. There was a short prose story with no real villains; what the characters were contending with was an ecosphere that was completely decayed. Then there were the comic books. These, being heroic fantasy, sort of, did have villains – a genre requirement…
Journey back into history far enough, and look in the right place, and maybe you’ll come across the common ancestor of drama and spectacle. Something religious, maybe. And as recently as 2,000 years ago, give or take, if you were taking a break from whatever ancient Romans took breaks from and filling a seat at…
As I engage with the machine before me, it is the evening of May 26th – yes, Memorial Day, wherein we commemorate the most noble and glorious of human activities. And what else? Well, as you may have heard, Batman celebrates his 75th this year. Yes, the caped crusader, the dark knight, Bruce Wayne’s elseperson…
There is a bottomless pit and you have fallen into it and you plunge ever downward and you despair of ever seeing the light again… What we’re talking about, here, is the light that issues from your television screen when you’re watching a superhero show. Well, be at peace. Things aren’t so bad. It’s true…
Running around doing too much today, but if you’ve been enjoying our columns from Dennis O’Neil, John Ostrander, and Mindy Newell on the topic of heroes and superheroes, you might want to look at what Charles Stross has to say about it: Where do heroes come from? I will confess that I find it difficult…
Some 75 years ago I stuck out my head, decided I didn’t like what I couldn’t quite see yet, and protested, but it was too late to go back and so I’ve been occupying space and respirating ever since. Think 75 is a big number? Well, my component atoms popped into existence at about the…
…a man may smile, and smile, and be a villain William Shakespeare A lovely person with whom I once shared a wedge of life told me that the bad guys in my stories didnât get really mean until I began having frequent encounters with a colleague who would never have gotten even close to my…
The day is bright, the Earth is coming back to life – Tuesday was Earth Day, even there are a flurry of birthdays in the offing… I mean, you don’t really expect me to work, do you? So, instead of trying to be original (and good luck with that, mi amigo) we’re going to delve…
To the best of my knowledge, it was only done once before, and that was in 1912, when audiences were treated to a simultaneous telling of one story in two media, film and print. What Happened to Mary (a statement, not a question) was a serialized movie, the kind that was shown in sections, or…
You probably don’t know this because it almost certainly isn’t in any of the books about the comic book racket and it happened before most you were born — in the neighborhood of 50 years — and even if you’d been there, in the offices of Marvel comics when Marvel was part of a parent…
