Tagged: Elayne Riggs

ELAYNE RIGGS: Baseball, comics and all that jazz

  • News
  • July 11, 2007

elayne200-9141497It’s said that there are only a few established art and entertainment forms that America can truly call its own — baseball, jazz music and comic books.  It’s a bit of a hubristic statement, not surprising coming from a country as relatively young yet as vast as our own.  It almost sounds as if we’re trying to convince ourselves of our own cultural relevance — even more so because we realize that each of these things has its roots elsewhere.  But hey, so do most of us.  And just as this “nation of immigrants” has brought disparate peoples into a “melting pot” atmosphere wherein their contributions have mixed to form a melange all its own, so have jazz, comics and baseball taken previously existing elements and turned them into something new and unique.

Now, I don’t know much about jazz, so I leave that topic for someone more savvy than me to tackle. But speaking of tackling, George Carlin has a famous monologue where he contrasts the essential natures of baseball and (American) football, so I thought it would be interesting to compare baseball to “mainstream” (i.e., primarily “Big Two”) comics. I believe the two have more things in common than many people may realize. Both are team efforts in which individuals can excel and stand out, but which have the best outcome when everyone involved is working toward the same goal (in baseball, winning the game; in comics, telling the story). Both have bullpens and wacky nicknames (as Stan Lee well knew), and both have equally enthusiastic fan bases. And while the split between baseball fans and comics fans has always been presented as a “jocks versus nerds” scenario, both of those stereotypes have been pretty well dismantled in recent years. Despite American baseball still not being gender integrated (but hey, it only took a century from its inception to integrate the game racially) it boasts male and female aficionados of a wide age range. Despite American mainstream comics being largely created by and targeted to straight white post-adolescent males, they too have drawn in male and female readers and admirers of all ages.

There’s something quintessentially welcoming about the game, and the literature, of amazing visual possibilities and poetry – something that can’t be squelched by all the talk about contracts and exclusives and all the business stuff that’s extraneous to spectators, that’s beside the point of what happens between the white lines or the black borders. We all know it’s there, and admit it has its place, but that it’s more the realm of the voracious media who need their daily dose of sensationalist copy and crave the breaking story even when it’s a non-story. Mountains are made from minutiae – is this pitcher healthy? What about that book’s lateness? Did he really sign a 2-year contract for that much money, and will it include his creator-owned work? Was he on steroids when he drew that or what? (more…)

ELAYNE RIGGS: I want to believe

elayne200-6362335“We’re never gonna beat this if belief is what we’re fighting for.” – John Mayer

As Americans gather today to commemorate the signing of the Declaration of Independence 231 years ago, many of us find ourselves in quite a different place than we believe our founders envisioned for this country.  Each day brings more tragic results of the radicals currently in power thumbing their nose continually at Benjamin Franklin’s observation that “Those that would give up essential liberty in pursuit of a little temporary security deserve neither liberty nor security” and frightening the populace into constant submission so they can retain this ill-gotten power.  (Hang on — creating a climate of fear, isn’t that what terrorists try to do?  Guess that means They’re Winning.)  And without the assurance that our government will (or even can) do its job of seeing to the well-being of its citizens, many Americans do what people in their situation have done for centuries — they turn to institutions they believe will care for them, mostly institutions that “answer to a higher authority” in which they believe.

We’ve been talking a lot about perception and belief on ComicMix this past week.  First Mike Gold tackled how people misperceive personal threats to their way of life when no such threats exist.  For the life of me, I cannot imagine how these ideas get into their heads, and neither can anyone in the all-pervasive corporate-sponsored conservative-pandering media.  Then I talked more about subjectivity and how some folks amazingly find the exact “evidence” to support their pet beliefs, rather than the other way around (using actual scientific procedure to observe first and then create a theory based on those observations).  And the capper was John Ostrander’s column about dogma, rigid belief systems (whether religious or no) whose adherents will brook no dissenting opinions.  The danger of dogma is the same as that of any fanaticism — that subjective perceptions are suddenly presented as objective ones, and individual beliefs replace reason and compromise with authoritarian systems such as theocracies.

And it ought to be obvious that theocracies are not Good Things in pluralistic societies because they leave no room for diversity of opinion. (more…)

ELAYNE RIGGS: Jesus in the clouds

  • News
  • June 27, 2007

elayne200-3030740In entertainment, as with so many other subjective phenomena, many of the old clichés come into play, the main ones being “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” and “I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like.” While one purpose of entertainment may be to seize on the universal in order to create a bond between creators and audience that explores or delights in our common humanity, it’s also a fact that everyone brings their own unique experiences to bear on their chosen entertainment, so different people can often have very different reactions to the same creation.

And this is fine, if it’s understood. But people often also use experiences to reinforce their preconceived notions, and the more extreme or emotional their experiences have been, the more adamant the reinforcement. This is true whether the subject is religious, political, scientific, cultural, whatever. Our unique prisms color our perceptions, and always will.

Let’s look at the most recent example from the political blogosphere, involving a pundit named Melinda Henneberger who wrote a New York Times op-ed about why Democratic candidates should abandon one of their current core values and risk losing their base in an effort to perhaps maybe possibly woo a few people who don’t much care for their core values anyway. One reason a lot of liberal bloggers have come down hard on Henneberger, besides the absurdity of her premise, is how she backs it up:

“Over 18 months, I traveled to 20 states listening to women of all ages, races, tax brackets and points of view speak at length on the issues they care about heading into ’08. They convinced me that the conventional wisdom was wrong about the last presidential contest, that Democrats did not lose support among women because ‘security moms’ saw President Bush as the better protector against terrorism. What first-time defectors mentioned most often was abortion.”

On its face this is an anecdotal confession, with no more solid evidence to support it than anyone else getting on a soapbox or pulpit or keyboard and backing up their personal agenda based on things they’ve been told in private conversations or email, made even more nebulous by its deliberate vagueness. Upon deeper examination, it seems to be typical of “inside the beltway” know-it-alls who start out with a certain premise then deliberately seek out confirmation of that premise. As Avedon Carol observed, “where do you start when you’re actually looking for women to interview who were ‘first-time defectors’ to voting for a Republican in 2004?”  And Tom Hilton notes that this is nothing new: “This, of course, is how it’s done in the exciting fast-paced world of professional columnizing. David Broder goes out among the Common Folk and finds a deep yearning for bipartisan compromise. Tom Friedman takes a taxi and learns that globalization is a force for good. And Melinda Henneberger talks — no, ‘listens’ — to women and discovers, amazingly, that they agree with her on abortion. They go out with an agenda and ‘hear’ whatever confirms it.” (more…)

ELAYNE RIGGS: The last time I saw Paris

  • News
  • June 13, 2007

elayne200-5571070I think many of us suspect that there’s something fundamentally wrong with the fact that just about everybody reading this knows of the recent exploits of Paris Hilton.  If you’re at all attuned to media old and new, it’s nearly impossible to escape the breathless news about her latest adventures in crime and punishment, or at least the breathless reprimands the news media give themselves over the saturation coverage — although heaven forfend most of them stoop to using the first-person plural and actually assuming responsibility!  Even otherwise sensible pundits like Keith Olbermann (whose hard-hitting “Special Reports” many consider the modern incarnation of vaunted newsman Edward R. Murrow) can’t seem to stay away from peeping in on, and drooling over, daily celebrity hijinks.

Why the obsession? Well, the simple answer is ratings.  Just as sex sells, so does fame — particularly the doings of people who are “famous for being famous.” (Presumably they’re considered “fairer game” because, when well-known people with actual proven talents get into trouble, they tend to elicit more public sympathy based on those talents?) Sometime during the Reagan era, when cable was still young, the three major US news networks were acquired by corporate owners with little to no interest in providing public service, which was formerly understood and never questioned as being the point of news.  Those corporate owners decided to make loss-leader news divisions into profit centers, gradually closed down local bureaus all over the world, and news became just another commercial product designed to grab eyeballs and ratings.  With the proliferation of 24-hour cable news networks this downward slide into banality became an avalanche.

And it’s not like there isn’t enough interesting and entertaining stuff going on in the world to fill 24-hour news days. But even more important than ratings is the fact that corporate heads don’t want to take a chance on anything unproven or too far out of their comfort zone. The US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq is one of the more egregious examples of late; any opposition to continued and compounded illegalities in that region has been seen as not only out of the mainstream and therefore not fit for TV time, but as borderline unpatriotic and possibly treasonous to consider discussing in a public forum. Ironically, the few programs that have managed to slip through and present an alternative view to mainstream media war-whoops have garnered respectable ratings from an audience obviously weary of hearing only one side of things, the side that continually asks, “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?”

Celebrity news falls deeply into these people’s comfort zone.  Not only are corporate owners all rich (and mostly straight white men, which usually goes without saying but not here), but they often socialize with other rich people, many of whom are also celebrities. They want their public to care about the lifestyles of the rich and famous because they lead those lifestyles, and like to believe the public cares about them as much as they care about themselves. (more…)

ELAYNE RIGGS: The awesome factor

elayne200-1708262I haven’t talked that much yet about being what my life is like being married to one of the relatively few lucky and talented people able to make a living as a comic book artist.  There are a few reasons for this, among them being stuff I’m not allowed to reveal in a public forum because of various confidences.  (For instance, it’s driving me nuts not being able to talk about Robin’s next inking assignment, and ComicMix readers will understand why once it’s been officially announced.)  I walk a fine line between wanting to crow about the comics I see in their formative stages and realizing that any specifics thereof will often require massive doses of pre-approval before I talk about them.

But I can still indulge in generalities, one being a topic on which I’ve briefly touched before — the blurry line between being a fan and being a pro.  Today I want to talk specifically about dealing with pros from a fan’s point of view.

What brought this on was my musings after attending the Dave Cockrum memorial last week.  I was acquainted with Dave and Paty from the days when they used to appear at NYC comic shows, mostly the Fred Greenberger ones but I think they were also at some of the “church cons” that Mike Carbonaro held before those shows moved across the street from Penn Station.  When Dave was at the VA hospital a bus ride away from my apartment, I visited him once in the bitter winter because it was the right thing to do, not because he was This Big Name.  I’ve been lucky enough to get to know a lot of luminaries from those old cons as people and friends before I really knew any of their work.  And I remember when I used to mention their names in Usenet posts, the way I’d mention other friends and acquaintances, I’d often receive nasty accusations of “name-dropping” from my fellow comic fans, with an attitude of “how dare she talk about these Names as though they were — people!”

It seems far simpler for many fans to think of pros as abstracts on whom they can project their own entitlements than to interact with them as fellow human beings.  And whether this consists of treating fictional characters as more important than the real people who create and work on them, or erecting pedestals and shrines to the objects of your affection, the result is much the same. (more…)

ELAYNE RIGGS: On owning one’s errors

elayne200-8887329“Sorry seems to be the hardest word” – Bernie Taupin

As I alluded to in last week’s column but didn’t have the space nor desire to go into at length, the comics blogosphere isn’t the only place wherein disagreements among feminists have cropped up lately.  From time to time debates occur as well amongst political liberal and progressive feminist bloggers who otherwise agree on many major principles and actions.  The latest example is the talk about whether blogger Jessica Valenti’s new book Full Frontal Feminism is inclusive enough of the experiences of women of color (certainly not an unfamiliar argument in the comics scene either, as Cheryl Lynn ably demonstrates).

The discussion is a bit involved for anyone coming into it without any background, although Feministe blogger piny has a helpful collection and timeline of sorts here), but I mainly wanted to talk about how Feministe’s Jill Filipovic posted to the critiques of her glowing review of Jessica’s book, as I think it’s a good example of how to graciously acknowledge when one realizes one has wronged others, and apologize accordingly.  You know, what we used to call civility.  The relevant excerpts appear at the end of this column — and that’s just her introduction! (You can read the whole thing here.)

Now granted, Jill is fairly well known and respected in the feminist blogosphere, but at the moment her real-world influence is somewhat limited. Can you imagine anyone in an actual position of power and privilege crafting that kind of a response? (more…)

ELAYNE RIGGS: The Golden Age of ComicFest

elayne200-5677311The crazier my responsibilities get (yes, I’ve missed posting here as well) and the more I lurch toward the Big 5-0, which I will now commemorate near year’s end without a father and without a best friend, the more I yearn for simpler times. Of course, “simpler” is as relative and subjective a term as they come. In political parlance, it usually means “a time in the hazy past whose values were clearly espoused on fictional TV shows that we can no longer distinguish from reality because they either filmed before we were born or they encompass the way we wish things were or should have been,” which explains a lot about our current administration because it’s never a good idea to consciously try to fit reality to fiction, whether you’re talking about Father Knows Best or 1984 or even Star Trek.

In a personal sense, “simpler” usually means “before my life had as much heartache and difficulty, and when there were supportive pillars that I always thought would be there.” And it’s weird, because “always” isn’t always as permanent as we seem to think it is.

Take my Golden Age of Comics. A writer once opined that everyone’s Golden Age of Comics is 12. Not for me. For me it began in my mid-20s when my first husband, Steve Chaput, got me hooked for good on indies and, thanks to Crisis on Infinite Earths, the new streamlined DC Universe. (My best friend in college, the late great Bill-Dale Marcinko, tried mightily to get me interested in late-70s Marvel fare, but it was all too soap-opera’y for me back then. In those days I hated the idea of soaps. Nowadays I can’t wait for the next episode of Ugly Betty. Go figure.) By 1993 Steve and I had discovered online fandom, which still consisted mostly of folks in the CompuServe Comics and Animation Forum (yep, this was pre-Usenet; I wouldn’t make my first tentative posts to those comic groups until 1994), and we were making plans to help out our friend Vinnie Bartilucci (who had actually introduced us to the wonders of email and suchlike) with the running of the Greatest Comic Convention Ever. (more…)

ELAYNE RIGGS: Forward into the past

elayne200-3491864The comics industry stands at an exciting crossroads. International acceptance of graphic literature is starting to have a positive effect on how Americans see non-superhero genres, as manga saturates teen audiences and award-winning autiobiographical novels like Fun Home and Persepolis enthrall adults. When you factor the geek contingent into that, as even the superhero genre (the one most non-comics readers associate and conflate with the medium itself) gains mainstream acceptance in blockbuster movies and hit TV shows, it would seem to be another Golden Age for the artform. The future of print and online comics looks healthier than ever.

So why is so much of the comics industry still mired in the past?

Take Previews, for instance. Now, Diamond Comics distribution and comic book retailers do many things right. Diamond’s comic store locator provides a valuable service, and Free Comic Book Day (this Saturday, don’t forget to peruse your local store with someone “new” to comics!) has become a much-anticipated event. And I suspect Previews isn’t as much a problem as a symptom of a wider dilemma facing brick-and-mortar specialty stores caught in the timeline between the demise of newsstand and mom-and-pop outlets (where many of today’s adult readers bought their first comics) and the promise of mainstream bookstores and targeted online purchasing.

Personally, I think the root of the problem is non-returnable product. (more…)

Zippy on Jay Kennedy

  • News
  • April 9, 2007

Well, here’s something you don’t see everyday.

As our Elayne Riggs noted last March 16th (check it out on our search engine), King Features Syndicate Comics Editor Jay Kennedy died at the age of 50. Tributes were offered by cartoonists all over the world, but perhaps the most unusual and one of the most heartfelt appeared in today;s  strip, by Bill Griffith:

zippy_the_pinhead-7301894

It’s a little word-heavy, even for Zippy, so you might want to check out a larger version at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer‘s website, seattlepi.nwsource.com/fun/zippy.asp

 

ELAYNE RIGGS:The impersistence of memory

  • News
  • April 4, 2007

elayne200-1041945As many readers doubtless know by now, my father recently died due to injuries he sustained in a car crash. Dad always said that Las Vegas drivers were the most dangerous in the country, and he was right. While I’d be happy to talk about Dad at length in person, I won’t take up ComicMix space by expounding on anything at length here.  It’s all been too draining.

I’ve just returned to the outside world from a week spent with my mom and youngest brother at his home in NJ (not far from where Dad is buried), engaged in the Jewish tradition of “sitting shiva” where friends and relatives visit to pay their respects and remember the lost loved one.

One of those visitors was my remarkable childhood friend Rachael, whom I discuss at greater length in my personal blog. Rachael’s sharp recollection of our bygone play days highlighted my mounting frustration at a condition I’ve been noticing for awhile now — my fading memory.

My uncle analogizes what’s happening to a locked file cabinet for which I’ve misplaced the key, and I agree. The memories are stored in my brain somewhere, I’ve just temporarily lost the ability to access them. And so I’ve learned workarounds.

Take pop culture, for instance. Unless I keep meticulous records of the comics I read (which I did during my Usenet days when I reviewed lots of books each week), I don’t vote in any annual polls of the year’s best. We received our Harvey Awards nomination ballot in the mail today, which went right into the circular file. It’s not that I didn’t want to nominate folks, and it’s certainly not that there weren’t any outstanding comics and tremendous talents around last year. It’s that I wouldn’t be able to call any to my brain; nothing sticks with me. Which doesn’t really bother me — it’s not that important that I retain fiction in my head, because it still exists independently of my mind in an accessible, tangible form. I can always pick up an old book or rewatch a DVD, and if by some chance I make the time to re-experience any bit of fiction, I’ll be delighted by the details all over again. (more…)

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