Tagged: Denys Cowan

Is Hillary Clinton Really The Thing? By Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • August 12, 2008

I never talked to either Jack Kirby or Stan Lee about politics, so I don’t really have any idea where they stood on the subject. My guess would be that following their political spoor wouldn’t take you very far west and that they didn’t have much sympathy for the hippie-rebels of the 60s (and here allow me to blush and hide my face). After all, they and their parents (and my parents) fought for a place in the American mainstream because, finally, acceptance meant an increased chance of survival and for those outside the tribe, who suffered the Great Depression, not surviving seemed to be a real possibility. Then here came the snotty kids with their tie-dye and their girly haircuts and their wiseass slogans saying that a place in the tribe was not worth struggling for – in fact, the tribe itself was stinking of corruption.

Both generations were, in their own way, right; both had a piece of the truth.

Stan and Jack were – are – of the first of the two generations and so they were – are – probably politically a bit to the right of me and maybe you (and my parent and most of my siblings.) But events of the past week make me guess that their greatest creations were liberals. I refer to the Fantastic Four who, along with Spider-Man co-launched Marvel Comics, as one or two of you might have heard. True FF aficionados know, and perhaps relish, the tendency of the members of this supergroup to squabble among themselves. Two of the four, The Human Torch and The Thing, seem particularly apt to indulge in petty argumentation.

Remind you of any particular political group?

Yeah, right. Liberals. Witness the recent news: Ms. Hillary Clinton’s die-hard supporters are threatening to vote for John McCain, the Republican candidate, unless Ms. Clinton’s presidential aspirations are accorded full acknowledgement at the Democratic convention, which will be soaking up media time in about two weeks. This despite the fact that Ms. Clinton has already lost the nomination to Barack Obama, whose crew must be thinking harsh and uncharitable thoughts about the Clintonites.

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NYCC: A Post-Game Analysis

  • News
  • April 22, 2008

comicart2-4363435Fifty-nine weeks ago I slammed the first two New York Comic-Cons pretty hard, so it’s only appropriate that I comment on this year’s jamboree. The previous shows were held in February, so the mere fact that people waiting in line this year didn’t have to suffer in below-freezing wind chills is, in and of itself, a vast improvement.

The show was better organized, crowd flow on Friday and Sunday was almost manageable, and the convention staff from Reed Communications (not the volunteers, who were great) drifted more towards being hospitable and informed. In fact, they were neither hospitable nor informed but you could tell that this year somebody suggested being so might be a good idea.

Saturday was pretty much the same premise as last year: “What if you tried to squeeze the entire population of Manhattan into a phone booth?” They claim attendance records were broken and that would be nice to believe, but it would be even nicer if they were at a venue where they could actually obtain enough space so that people could walk down the aisles without getting bashed in the face by an endless number of backpacks and tripped by an equal number of light sabers.

I can’t help but wonder what the show would have been like if god hadn’t helped out. Passover started Saturday and the New York metropolitan area contains a lot of religious Jews. And the pope was in for the weekend, so a lot of Catholics were attending one or another event. In fact, it looked like he was on Frank Miller’s Dark Knight panel.

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Lost In ‘Lost’, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • February 15, 2008
[EDITOR’S NOTE: Denny’s column normally runs on Tuesdays, which is great because Denny e-mails it to me on Sundays. For some reason – and for the second or third time – his various e-mail accounts don’t seem to like my various e-mail accounts. We think we’ve straightened it out. Go figure. If computers were cars, we’d all be riding horses.

 

And now, Mr. O’Neil… -MG]

 

While I was sort of half-watching the two Lost specials our pals at ABC television were treating us to recently, I recalled the hot new trend of a couple of years ago. Serialized stories. Nothing resolved until late in the season. They came and they went, those shows, though there are a few survivors, of which my favorite, and apparently the favorite of millions of my fellow citizens (including you?) is the aforementioned Lost.
 
The purpose of the specials, which ran on consecutive evenings, was ostensibly to remind the Faithful of what’s been happening to those funsters on the island, and to clue in the non-Faithful, like me, people who just watch the thing for an hour’s easy amusement, as to what the hell the continuity is. (Another reason for the specials might have been the writer’s strike, now settled; clip shows like these eat up airtime at little cost and need no new material. Or am I being cynical?)
 

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