Tagged: First Comics

Insight Lands On Mars– 35 Years Later

  • News
  • November 26, 2018

NASA’s latest Mars lander, InSight, successfully touched down on the surface of the Red Planet this afternoon, surviving an intense plunge through the Martian atmosphere.

What you may not know is that Insight Studios, run by Mark Wheatley and Marc Hempel, got to Mars back in 1983 with First Comics, edited by Mike Gold. The entire series was collected in a trade paperback by IDW in 2005.

Real life imitates comics again! And congratulations to everyone at NASA!

Mike Gold: Suicide Squad, John Ostrander, and My Damn Good Luck

johnny-o-squad-logo-3169333Are you tired of all the comics-related movies this summer? I didn’t think so, but I do understand why some of the movie critics are. These poor bastards see a couple hundred movies each year, they have little choice over which ones they must review and after a couple years, the daily smell of hot popcorn must become cloying.

Still, a couple of these writers have become complete assholes about it. Fine, fine. It is a great tradition among the professional critic set to cast their noses so high in the air you’d think they’d drown in a drizzle.

Having just seen The Killing Joke in a real movie theater – that part was cool – I’m only a couple days away from seeing Suicide Squad­ at the New York City screening. I’ll be joining my friend, frequent-collaborator and fellow ComicMix columnist John Ostrander, creator of Amanda Waller and the concept of The Suicide Squad.

This will be a highly personal experience for me. John and I have been friends for 45 years now, which speaks highly of his astonishing tolerance. Amanda Waller and Company first got on their feet in my apartment in Evanston Illinois before I returned to DC Comics in 1986. John and I were plotting the Legends miniseries and, since Bob Greenberger was my assistant way back then and he and John had been kicking some ideas around we decided Legends would provide a great launchpad for the Squad.

We really weren’t sneaking John in through DC’s back door, although that image pleases me. When Dick Giordano offered me the job of senior editor, he was hoping that I would bring John and some of my other First Comics collaborators to the company, or, in many cases, back to the company. This was no surprise: it was exactly the same deal, with the same hopes, that DC’s then-executive vice president Irwin Donenfeld made with Dick when he was editor-in-chief at Charlton nearly 20 years previous.

John and I met because we were comic book geeks. We both were at a party dominated by people in Chicago’s burgeoning theater scene, which gave us the likes of John Malkovich, Laurie Metcalf, David Mamet, Dennis Franz and Joe Mantegna. In fact, John co-wrote the play Bloody Bess that starred Franz and Mantegna. When I arrived, the party’s host recognized me and semi-snarlingly said “Oh, we have a couple of other comic book fans here” and I was escorted to a lonely couch where us fanboys couldn’t infect the others. John was sitting on said couch, and we hit it off immediately.

Friendships come and go; the really good ones can exist forever and endure long periods of limited co-existence. I am lucky to have John in my life as a constant – our friendship never lacked personal contact despite my moving from Chicago to New York, back to Chicago, and then back to New York (well, Connecticut, really). John has also moved around, calling Chicago, Connecticut, New Jersey and now Michigan his home. We share emails almost daily, phone calls frequently, and in-person visits whenever possible (in the comic book racket, that can be with alarming frequency given the now-12 month convention season), often over amazingly great barbecue. John and I have shared our good times and our bad, the worst of which for each of us being the death of our respective wives thirteen years apart.

John Ostrander has always been there for me, and that is why I am looking forward to the Suicide Squad premiere.

Even if the film breaks.

Mindy Newell: It Doesn’t Know It’s A Game

American Flagg

Joshua/WOPR: “Shall we play a game?”

David (Matthew Broderick): “Love to. How about Global Thermonuclear War.”

Joshua/WOPR: “Wouldn’t you prefer a good game of chess?”

David: “Later. Right now let’s play Global Thermonuclear War.”

Joshua/WOPR: “Fine.”

General Beringer (Barry Corbin): Mr. McKittrick, after very careful consideration, sir, I’ve come to the conclusion that your new defense system sucks.

McKittrick (Dabney Coleman): I don’t have to take that, you pig-eyed sack of shit.

General Beringer: Oh, I was hoping for something a little better than that from you, sir. A man of your education.

Officer: Sir, it’s the President.

McKittrick: What are you going to tell him?

General Beringer: That I’m ordering our bombers back to fail-safe; we might have to go through this thing after all.

David (Matthew Broderick): “Is this a game or is it real?”

Joshua/WOPR: “What’s the difference?”

  • Wargames (1983), Directed by John Badham

Last week I watched Wargames on one of my cable channels, which was a weird bit of synchronicity because just a few days before, February 18th to be exact, the New York Times ran a very interesting article about that point on the graph where fiction and reality meet. It was called “‘Wargames’ and Cybersecurity’s Debt to a Hollywood Hack.”

Wargames, if you don’t remember – and I would be very surprised if you don’t, my fellow geeks – was a 1983 movie which starred Matthew Broderick as David Lightman, a high school student who is failing every class but also happens to be a genius computer geek in an era when it was not yet totally cool to be a high school computer geek. He accidentally hacks into the Cheyenne Mountain security complex known as NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) and its super computer WOPR (War Operations Plan Response). WOPR is programmed to run numerous nuclear war scenarios and their outcomes, but David, a computer game “connoisseur,” believes that he has hacked into a games manufacturer’s R & D system, and decides to play global thermonuclear war, which is listed along with other strategy-learning games such chess, backgammon, checkers, and poker. But the computer “doesn’t know it’s a game,” as David desperately tries to tell the military. WOPR is counting down to Armageddon.

Anyway, the article tells the story of how, on June 4, 1983, then-President Ronald Reagan watched the movie at Camp David. The following Wednesday, Reagan met with his national security team and 16 members of Congress to discuss the upcoming meeting with the Soviets about nuclear arms. There he asked if anyone had seen Wargames, gave a synopsis, and if such a thing was possible. Coming on the heels of his Star Wars speech in which he asked scientist to develop “laser” weapons that could shoot down Soviet (or other hostiles) ICBMs from space, everyone in the room was thinking, to paraphrase, “There he goes again.”

But as the meeting disbanded, Reagan held back General John W. Vessey, Jr., Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and told him to look the possibility of someone breaking into the nation’s high security and top-secret computer systems.

One week later, the General returned to report that the President’s question wasn’t so off the wall and out of the box at all. In fact, to quote the New York Times, what the General actually said was, “the problem is much worse than you think.”

Reality imitating fiction.

There must have been something in the air in 1983, for that was also the year that Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg hit the comic book shops. Published by First Comics – which was co-launched by Rick Obadiah and ComicMix’s own Mike Gold – Flagg takes place in the year 2031. The U.S. government and the boards of major corporations have moved to Mars, and the Soviet Union has collapsed because of Islamist fundamentalism. The new center of power is the Brazilian Union of the Americas and the Pan-African League. America is ruled by the “Plex,” an amalgamation of the U.S. government and corporations. The population of the United States is centered around massive centers of commerce termed Plexmalls; the “Plexus Rangers,” including former television star Reuben Flagg, enforce the law.

Okay, the U.S. government is still in Washington. The Soviet Union did collapse in 1991, but Vlad Putin’s “wannabe” Soviet Union has problems with the Islamic fundamentalists living in the border states. But, can you say “Citizens United?” The 2010 Citizens United Vs. Federal Election Commission case, brought before the Supreme Court – which voted 5-4 in favor of the plaintiff – changed the landscape of our political system. Although it was originally meant for non-profit corporations, the principal has extended to private corporations – our First Amendment right to free speech as been convoluted to money as people. As in, to quote Mitt Romney, “Corporations are people, my friends.”

So I watch the 2016 Presidential campaign with a besotted eye. It does seem like some dystopian science fiction movie or comic, doesn’t it? The Republican candidates are cursing like roughnecks, complaining about television make-up, throwing bottled water at each other, tweeting and trolling like sociopathic adolescents, and a billionaire head of a corporation is leading the polls. The Democratic candidates are a woman suspected of murder and of e-mailing top-secret information on a public server and a socialist Jew from Brooklyn who isn’t Larry David.

And the current President is keen on sending a manned mission to Mars.

John Ostrander: Back to the Beginning

Warp Play PosterWhen I get asked by earnest neophytes how to break into comics, my pat answer is “With a pick and a crowbar through the roof in the middle of a moonless night.”

Somewhat less than helpful, I know.

The truth is that I don’t know how to break into comics. I don’t think most of you can go the path I took. I had an old friend – Mike Gold, who you may have seen hereabouts – and he knew I loved comics and he had liked something I had written for the stage and offered me a chance. When Mike had first gone to NYC to work for DC Comics, I pressed on him a sample script I had written for Green Lantern. He dutifully did but the script didn’t go anywhere and it shouldn’t have. I was very keen but very raw in those days (although I did use elements of it eventually; writers are forever cannibalizing themselves).

Fast forward a few years. Mike left DC to return to Chicago and eventually co-found First Comics with Rick Obadiah. The first comic that First Comics was going to print was an adaptation of the play Warp!, produced by the legendary Organic Theater of Chicago. The play trilogy described itself as “the world’s first science fiction epic-adventure play in serial form”. The director and co-writer, Stuart Gordon, freely acknowledged that he was very influenced by Marvel Comics. (We’re talking late 60s, early 70s Marvel. The primo stuff.)

I was – and am – a huge fan of Warp! Heck, I was a huge comic book geek at the time as well. Peter B. Gillis was hired to adapt the play but I got a call one day from Mike (who was now supreme editor and High Poohbah of First Comics) asking me if I would like to try my hand at writing an eight page back-up story.

Of course, I said yes.

And so began the process of picking one of the characters from Warp!, figuring out a story, working out the plot, breaking it down into page and panels, doing it and re-doing it, learning the tricks of the trade as I went. I had written plays which are similar to comic-book scripts but comic book writing has its own practices and demands. I’d write it up, Mike would give me notes, I’d re-write it, I’d get more notes and so on until one day Mike finally called me and congratulated me – they were going to use my story as the back-up feature in the first issue of Warp! which was going to be the first comic published by First Comics.

“Oh,” I replied, “great. Uh … do I get paid for this?”

“Of course, you sap,” Mike replied and gave me the page rate.

As a side note, I’ll mention that at that point I hadn’t written anything for a year or more. I felt I had a bad case of writer’s block. I discovered that there’s nothing like getting a paycheck to dissolve a writer’s block.

I went on from there to write more back-ups. Then I got Mike Grell’s Starslayer as a regular assignment and from there I originated GrimJack thus creating my career or sealing my fate, whichever you prefer.

The fact that I have a career is largely Mike Gold’s doing. As my first editor, he taught me not only the tricks of the trade but how to be a good writer. When Mike returned to DC, he brought me with him. Thanks to Mike, I got the job plotting Legends which was the first big DC crossover following Crisis On Infinite Earths. It may not sound like so much in these days of constant company wide crossover events but it was big back then. (Len Wein did the dialoguing and John Byrne did the pencils.) At Mike’s suggestion, we debuted Suicide Squad in the pages of Legends.

Mike also famously drafted me into doing Wasteland (we brought Del Close along). It was Mike’s idea and I wasn’t sure about it or at least my doing it at first. However, Mike is persuasive and I’ve learned when Mike has an idea to just say yes; at the very least, it will be interesting and potentially it will be some of my best work (as with Wasteland).

Mike has also been a very old, very loyal, and very good friend.

It boils down to this – if you like what I’ve done with my career, hey it’s all due to me.

If you don’t like what I’ve done, blame Mike.

Mike Gold, Disturbed

Magnus

The most disturbing thing that happened to me in comics – non-violent, that is – occurred more than 30 years ago during the early days of the real First Comics. In fact, it didn’t even happen to me directly. It happened to then-associate editor Rick Oliver. That’s how disturbing it was to me.

We had published a story, damned if I remember what it was, about evil robots doing what evil robots do – murdering humans and generally raising a ruckus. That’s been a popular theme over the years, and if you think about it that’s just what Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Bill Gates were talking about last August when they were talking about the dangers of artificial intelligence. As an aside, any time that kind of brain trust agrees on anything, I pay attention. But I digress.

A gentleman called us quite perturbed that we published such a story. Actually, perturbed isn’t quite the right phrase. Hysterical would be more accurate. He went apeshit because we did a story that violated (actually, ignored) Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics. In case you’re not up on such things, those laws go exactly like this:

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

An admirable plot device, and Dr. Asimov held to it consistently for decades… in his fiction. Fiction. He never said it was science fact. Actually, he did say he wasn’t the guy who came up with it, that it was something writer/editor John C. Campbell said to him in December of 1940. On the other hand, Editor Campbell claimed that Author Asimov already had the Three Laws in his mind. But I digress. Again.

If this were an in-person conversation at a comic book or a science fiction convention, the caller would have been arrested and taken to a mental ward for observation. Seriously; he was that upset. When Rick told me about the call, I had newfound gratitude for Alexander Graham Bell.

Most of us understand that there are whack jobs out there (I’m sorry I don’t recall the politically correct phrase for “whack jobs”), and we’ve all seen more than a few hanging out around our Great Comic Book Donut Shop. This gentleman didn’t recognize that the Three Laws were merely a good idea and a great fictional plot device. Hell, he didn’t even recognize we had yet to create robots that are useful enough to need the Three Laws. Today, even drones have human controllers.

He desperately needed to get a life… and probably some lithium. But he represents a danger that we see in all of us who are passionate about our hobbies. You see this sort of thing at media conventions all the time – fans who are disappointed that actors aren’t as familiar with their work as they are. Plenty of times I’ve heard fans say that one actor or another was stupid (or worse) because he/she/it didn’t remember some minutia from a teevee series from many years past.

So. Why am I reminded about this now?

Simple. The fourth Republican debate was on teevee last night.

My Friend, Rick Obadiah

rick-obadiah-150x150-9427053My friend and the man who co-founded First Comics with me 34 years ago, Rick Obadiah, died Sunday night. He was at the gym, and when he got off the treadmill he had a massive heart attack and was dead before he hit the floor.

Sorry for the abruptness. That’s how I’m feeling right now. I’m not going to write this as a traditional obit. I’m really sick of doing that, Rick was too good a friend and, besides, I’m alone in a Holiday Inn in Richfield Ohio right now.

I will tell you that, in addition to being First’s founding publisher, Rick had been an advertising executive and was the former producer for Stuart Gordon’s Organic Theater Company, having worked on such plays as Warp and Bleacher Bums as well as the television and movie adaptations of the latter.

Most recently, he was the president of Star Legacy Funeral Services company – the folks who, among other things, compress their clients into artificial diamonds or shoot their ashes into space. All that was actually pretty cool.

Rick had a fantastic sense of humor and would have appreciated the irony in his dying at the gym. Of course, he also would have pointed out that he would have preferred not to be dead. And Rick would have been shocked to see the incredible amount of responses on my Facebook page his passing received in such short period of time. People remember First Comics – the real First Comics.

Last year, Rick reread a lot of the old First titles and was pleased to see how well they held up. He took a lot of pride in that, for which I am very grateful.

Rick’s funeral will be on Friday August 21, 11:00, at the Derrick Funeral Home 800 Park Drive in Lake Geneva WI.

This Sunday, August 23, we will be doing a special tribute to Rick at our Chicago Comics History panel at Wizard World Chicago, at 12:30.

 

John Ostrander: Wonder(ful)Con 2015

Last weekend, while my column was here, I was not. I was an invited guest at WonderCon out in Anaheim, CA, and I had a great time. It reminded me of San Diego Comic Con (who owns WonderCon) back before SDCC got so huge and overwhelmed with media stuff. WonderCon was mostly about comics and that felt very cool.

My duties were pretty light – two panels and two hour-long autograph sessions and one video interview. I didn’t have a table (my own fault) so I had a chance to walk around unfettered and unsupervised and see what I wanted. I didn’t realize fellow ComicMix columnists Jen Ernst and the Tweeks were also in attendance or I would’ve made an effort to get together with them and say hello and exchange stories about Mike Gold.

One of the big impressions I had was the sheer amount and quality of cosplayers in attendance. Every corner of fandom was there – comics, Doctor Who, Star Trek, Star Wars, every sf movie or TV show you could think of. Some were mash-ups of different groups, such as Princess Merida (Brave) as a Jedi. I was dazzled.

What I initially thought was an interesting cosplayer turned out not to be a cosplayer at all. A guy with a bullhorn outside the security gates was haranguing everyone; turns out he was a Westboro Baptist-type preacher going on about sin and Jesus and the devil; I wasn’t listening very closely. Side observation: why do so many of these preacher types go on about the devil so much? They talk more about him than Jesus, it seems to me.

Anyway, his church also had some placards up with red letters against a yellow background with variations of “Jesus is Lord.” My second day there I saw one such sign inside the security barrier and wondered how they got past the guards. Then I realized it was being held by a Stormtrooper, probably from the 501st, and in red letters against a yellow background it said, “Vader is Lord.” Well played, 501st; well played.

I got to see some of my fellow professionals during the Con; my fellow Legends scribe Len Wein was there and we exchanged heart surgery notes. I had a triple bypass last October but Len had a quadruple bypass only six weeks before. (He’s so competitive.) I would not have been at the Con in his shoes and I hope all the fans really appreciated his being there. Len is one of the nicest guys in the biz and goes that extra mile for the fans.

Dan Jurgens stopped by while I was having breakfast on Friday ,which was nice. I later stopped by his table and we shot the shit about some of the old days at DC.

I also met up with Barbara Randal/Kesel/Kesel Randal/Randal Kesel/whatever. We ran into each other outside the Convention Hall and that is a very difficult trick to pull off. The odds against meeting anyone you know at one of these things is astronomical.

Barbara, I and my late wife Kim Yale were good friends back at DC when Kim worked there and it was still headquartered in NYC. Barbara has hardly changed at all and that should be illegal. I myself am old and weathered and show my years as any decent person should.

I went to a panel that Barbara was moderating called “What Does an Editor Do” which was fun, quick paced, and informative. A really good panel. During Q&A I asked her and her panelists who was an example of a good editor in the past. Barbara nailed it with her answer: “Archie Goodwin.” Boom! There it is. Great writer, great editor.

I also met some other professionals for the first time – Marc Andreyko and Tom King. Marc you may know from his version of Manhunter, which starred Kate Spencer. Kim and I had worked on a Mark Shaw Manhunter series so that gives us a bit in common.

We were both hanging around the Con booth for different reasons and I was trying to think of some way of introducing myself without sounding like a dweeb. Evidently, he was doing the same and we finally broke the ice and had a great conversation.

You may know Tom King from his current work on Grayson as well as his novels. He came up to say hello and introduce himself during one of my autograph sessions. A really nice guy and I enjoyed meeting him; he confessed he was a little nervous about meeting me. (I can give him names of people who can tell him how and why I am not so impressive.) I told him stories about how I dweebed out in meeting some of those pros I revered (Jack Kirby, John Broome, and Will Eisner). Tom and I got along fine after that.

Both Tom and Marc mentioned how my work on Suicide Squad really impacted them. That always surprises me when I hear that. These guys are hot, young and very good writers. All false modesty aside, I’m sometimes surprised that people remember what I did; I was just trying to do my best at the time. Like I always do.

The two autograph sessions went very well. Both lasted an hour each and I was busy right through each hour. I got to chat with some of the fans and see some of my old work which was sort of like seeing old friends. A couple of the fans had my very first work which was an eight page story in the back of the first issue of Warp, the first comic from First Comics.

The two panels were fun. One was my solo panel – all about me, a subject I know fairly well and can talk endlessly about. It was a relatively small crowd so I had them all move down to the front of the room and I sat on a chair in front of them and we just chatted. I told stories, held forth about writing, and everyone seemed to have a good time.

The other panel was about working on Star Wars and the room was packed. I shared the podium with several of my fellow workers and we fielded answers from the crowd. Towards the end, I asked the audience a question, one that I felt went to the very heart of Star Wars.

Did Han shoot first?

The answer was a deafening “Yes!”

Damn straight.

A good Con, all in all. I want to thank everyone connected with it and thank them for inviting me and taking really good care of me. I had such a good time I’m hoping to go back. If I have the money, I would pay my way.

And for those who know me, you know that’s a high compliment.

 

Review: Four Books for Pre-Adults

I had a pile of books more-or-less for kids, and thought: why not review them all together? And so I will:

[[[Flight Explorer, Vol. 1]]]
Edited by Kazu Kibuishi
Villard, 2008, $10.00

The popular [[[Flight]]] series, officially for adults but containing a lot of all-ages stories, has spun off a younger sibling. The cast of cartoonists is pretty much the same, and the editor is still Kibuishi, but this book is shorter, cheaper, smaller, and contains many more characters seemingly designed to headline a series of stories.

The stories are all fairly short – there are ten of them in a book just over a hundred pages – long enough to introduce what mostly seem to be series characters and given them a situation to deal with. The cover-featured “[[[Missile Mouse]]],” by Jake Parker gets the most adventurous, and will probably be the most appealing to the boy audience. (There’s nothing obviously aimed at the girl comics-reading audience – or maybe I mean nothing trying to poach some of the manga audience – though there are several strips with female protagonists, like Ben Hatke’s “[[[Zita the Spacegirl]]].”

The art is still mostly clean-lines enclosing solid colors – an animator’s palette – though the book gets more painterly towards the end, in the pieces by Ben Hatke, Rad Sechrist, Bannister, and Matthew Armstrong. It’s all quite professional and fun – all in all, a great book to hand to an 8-12 year old interested in comics.

(more…)

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