Tagged: Green Arrow

Little Ditty About Danny and Fred, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • December 25, 2007

Danny and Fred were the last two kids in their grade to still believe in Santa Claus. 

 
Danny had first believed in Daddy, but he stopped when Daddy began to yell a lot, and drink whiskey, and throw things. So Danny could believe he had a father, because he could see a man coming and going, but he stopped believing in Daddy. 
 
But he still believed in Santa Claus. Santa Claus would never yell or throw things or drink whiskey, and besides, he brought presents and all Danny had to do was be good, which he was anyway. Fred, who lived next door, also believed in Santa, though he and Danny never discussed the etiology of it, so Danny didn’t know why Fred believed. He didn’t care, either.
 
Then, when Danny was fourteen, Father, who was once Daddy, came into Danny’s room on Christmas Eve and pulled Danny from bed and hustled him into the front room, where the Christmas tree was. Father sat Danny down on the sofa and got a big cardboard box from a closet.
 

(more…)

Because it’s Christmas, by Michael Davis

  • News
  • December 21, 2007

24382_thumb-1397986Last week I told a bittersweet Christmas story and this week I was going to give my Christmas list of stuff that I thought would make good gifts.

Then…

I remembered the young lady I met in an airport a while back. I never got her name but she told me she wants to be a comic book artist and has no friends. She is a bit overweight and is being picked on at school because of that. She has a less than supportive family. Trust me, when I say “less than supportive” I’m being KIND.

I wrote about her in my column and related a story from my childhood that I hoped she would read.

I know what it’s like to that kid. I may not have been overweight but there were years when I felt I had no real friends. It’s the roughest around the holidays at least I had the support of my family…well most of my family.

So once again, my friend, this is for you. It’s a bit rough but trust me, it turns out OK.

My stepfather was an alcoholic and because of that I did not take my first drink until five years ago. I was under the impression that he was my real father and I did not want to go down the same road as him.

Get this: the way I found out that he was not my real father is an aunt of mine got mad at him and told me.

(more…)

More of My Favorite Things, by Elayne Riggs

  • News
  • December 19, 2007

elayne100-5596635The combination of my temporary unemployment and inclement weather has enabled me to catch up on my DC comp box reading, so I can finally pick up where I left off a few weeks back. Mind you, I was looking at October books at the time and since then the November box came in. Still, a couple of the same caveats apply as last time — I haven’t seen the comics from the last few weeks, which gives me a bit of a headache when Robin gets his Suicide Squad advance comps and the issue in question (#4, in stores now) cross-references an important plot point in a Checkmate issue I’ve yet to see. So a lot of these observations will be about the issue prior to the one most comic fans have already seen, but in most cases the artists are the same.

Also, as before, I won’t cover every artist who did a good or serviceable job, just the ones I considered my very favorites of this most recent batch. Any omissions are not to be taken as an assumption that I didn’t like other stuff. And yes, I’m still talking more about how the art affected me viscerally than using technical vocabulary, which makes these more overviews than reviews per se. I miss full-on reviewing, but I just don’t seem to have the time any more.

While I stopped at the letter "F" last time, I wanted to mention a couple books which hadn’t come out at the time. Onward, then:

(more…)

Driving The Big Boat, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • December 18, 2007

Maybe we ought to retire the word “hero” and designate the characters whose needs and actions drive the story, more technically and accurately, as “the protagonist.”

(You’ve guessed that we’re continuing our incredibly prolonged discussion of the evolution of superheroes?  Good.)

As mentioned in an earlier installment of this blather, the word “hero” is derived from the Greek and means, roughly, “to protect and serve.”  (Lest anyone think I’m a scholarly dude who actually knows Greek…I wish!) The problem nowadays is defining exactly how the protection and service is to be accomplished.  In other words, what kind of person do you admire, and why do they do what they do?  Who do you favor mor e– Mother Theresa or the late Colonel David Hackworth, our most decorated combat veteran?

I never met the good nun, but I did spend an hour or so with Colonel Hackworth once and liked him very much.  I don’t think I would have enjoyed Theresa’s company a whole lot.  But maybe she was the more heroic of the two, if we count heroism as doing deeds that take courage and accomplish long-term good.  Going out every day to deal with disease and poverty…it must have taken guts and it can’t have been easy.  Easier than facing enemy guns?  I have no idea what measurement we can use to quantify such things.  Maybe there is none.

Col. Hackworth did what he did repeatedly and must have often known what he was getting into and, presumably, chose to do it anyway.  But I’m wary of heaping too many accolades on folk who, in a military situation, do one brave thing because…

(more…)

Superman #2 – A Christmas Story, by Michael Davis

  • News
  • December 14, 2007

I LOVE CHRISTMAS!

I love it, love it LOVE IT! It’s by far my favorite time of the year. When I was a kid my mother would always make sure we had a great Christmas no matter what. My mother had two jobs and was going to school year round. I learned years later that she always took a third job around Christmas. So I have a LOT of Christmas stories some good some not so good but most involving comics.

 

Here’s one.

When I was 10 I traded my cousin Greg all the money I had in the world (three dollars) for seven golden age comics he had found in an attic. Among those books were Superman #2, an All-Flash, a Captain Marvel and some others I don’t recall. I remember Superman #2 vividly because this was the age I started to trade comics and the number on the issues were very important to me and this was a Superman comic! I loved those comics, they were my most prized possession. I don’t think anything since has been able to match my pride of ownership for those books.

That year my mom sent my sister and me to Alabama for summer vacation. Yeah, send the little black kids from New York To Alabama for a vacation. That’s great. That’s like sending your dog to Michael Vick’s house for some exercise.

Well by some miracle we survived that summer and I survived the HORRIBLE wait to see my comics again. I am not kidding. I LOVED those books and because they contained Superman #2 I was BMITH (Big man in the hood).

Before I go on I should mention that the way we got to Alabama was by car. Yep, two days and two nights in the back seat with my SISTER! So when we finally got back to the states, (to us Alabama was like ‘Nam) I made a bee-line for my room and my beloved stack of Golden Age joy! The moment I entered my room I knew there was a problem. I could see my floor! For any 10 year to be able to see their room’s floor is a terrible omen of dire things to come. Where were my toys? Where were my baseball cards? (more…)

The Evolution of the Superhero, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • December 11, 2007

redfox-8337995And on we plod, continuing our seemingly interminable discussion of the evolution of superheroes. This week, let’s leave the capes and masks and other such accoutrements, and the “super” prefix, in the trunk and concentrate on the hero part.

First, a little oversimplification.

Heroes come in two models: the authority-sanctioned kind, as embodied by King Arthur’s posse, Beowulf, and James Bond, to cite just three of many possible examples, and the loners – the cowboys, the private eyes and, yes, most superdoers.

Conventional wisdom has it that the first kind were dominant throughout most storytelling history – were, in fact, integral to the “monomyth” described by Joseph Campbell. Again oversimplifying: ultimately, the result of all the hero’s roving and adventuring was benefit to his community. And, bowing once more to conventional wisdom, the second kind, the loners, became prominent after the First (don’t we wish!) World War when belief in the essential goodness and wisdom of humanity’s leaders became…well, challenging.

I dunno…the cowboy archetype was well-established before the war broke out in 1914, and it, in some ways, was the model for the private eyes and other rogue justice-dealers. I guess you could argue that the defining event of America’s nineteenth century, the Civil War, made the citizenry wary of Authority, and that wariness grew for maybe a hundred years as media technology made our immediate ancestors aware that if a person was in the market for some really ripe corruption, the statehouse was the place to look..

(more…)

Jasmine, by Michael Davis

  • News
  • December 7, 2007

About a year and a half ago my very good friend Giselle Fernandez (yes that Giselle Fernandez) called and asked me to dinner because she wanted me to meet a young lady named Jasmine.

Never one to pass up free food, I said yes. Truth be told if Giselle would have said; “Michael, Bigfoot is in my backyard break dancing, can you come over? I think you should meet him.” I would have believed her, dropped what I was doing and gone to her house.

I love Giselle Fernandez. She has been like a sister to me since the moment I met her. In the often BS world of Hollywood she is exactly what she appears to be, a warm, SUPER talented, genuine person. Trust me, that is as rare in Hollywood as a bacon eating Muslim. I still think she was robbed when she was on Dancing With The Stars a few seasons ago.

Giselle’s husband John is also a great guy…dammit!

Anywho, I get to this dinner at this swanky restaurant on Sunset Blvd. and there at Giselle’s table sitting quietly among some real heavy Hollywood playas was Jasmine. Jasmine is very pretty singer from Fiji. Giselle told who ever was sitting next to her (I think he was the head of some mideast oil generating country) to move and I was seated next to Jasmine.

She and I started talking and in the brief hour or so that we spoke I learned a lot about this beautiful young lady. One of the many things I learned was…she did not have a clue, but she was not stupid.

She had come to Hollywood with a real following from Fiji, gotten the attention of a manager and had set out to take the American music world by storm. She told me how her manager was “setting up deals for her.” I asked “what deals?” She said nothing had happened yet but he was working on it. (more…)

Nudity and the Editorial Process, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • December 4, 2007

3202470258-9273812In my dotage, I’m coming to believe that a little adolescent rebellion is usually a good thing, and if the rebellion creeps a year or two into full, card-carrying adulthood, that’s okay. Much after the fact, I learned of some things my kid did in his Greenwich Village youth: I’m not sorry he did them and I’m glad I didn’t know of them until much later.

(As for myself…let me note that the principal of my high school told my mother after graduation that they never, ever wanted to see me again. I must have done something…)

Father does not always know best and either does Mother. Like generals, they’re fighting old wars and kids are caught in new wars, which means the kids have to find their own way, which is a process of experimentation, which means that Junior and Pops can’t and shouldn’t march in lock step,

We will now retire the military metaphors and explain what any of this has to do with our current topic, the evolution of superheroes.

(more…)

Is it me, or are they just stupid? by Michael Davis

  • News
  • November 30, 2007

This was supposed to be a lighthearted article about the wonderful time I had at Mid-Ohio Con and the “Geek List” my ComicMix colleagues and I came up with there. You know, Best Creative Team, Lee & Kirby. Best death of a superhero, Captain Marvel, etc. We came up with many great categories and it would have made for a great article, so great in fact I threatened my follow ComicMix columnists with death by DEATH RAY if anyone wrote that article but me. It’s only fair as I started the Geek List off with the first question.

Anyway that was supposed to be the article, but then I had the misfortune to discover a copy of Southwest’s Airlines Spirit Magazine from June 2006.

On the fourth and fifth page of that magazine, there is an ad for a children’s hospital. In that ad there is a photo of a young black kid on his bike. He is smiling and up beat.

He is also in front of a street sign. You know what street he is on?

He’s on PLANTATION VALLEY DRIVE.

Who in the world poses a black kid in front of a street sign that says PLANTATION VALLEY DRIVE?

What, was Coon Ave too far away? To much traffic on Jungle Bunny Road? Construction on Watermelon Lane? (more…)

Is Iron Man Mike Hammer? by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • November 27, 2007

schepper__mike_hamme_60417h-4232768So where we at?  For the past month or so, we have, in a scattershot and disorganized way, been discussing the various elements involved in the evolution of superheroes.  I don’t think we’ve come to any conclusions worthy of being preserved for the ages, nor should we: things change, darnit. But maybe a little tentative upsumming would not be inappropriate.

Upsumming:

Haberdashery: There is currently a trend away from putting superdoers in costumes, though the big bucks movie heroes are still wearing the suits and, judging from the films I know about that are in development, this will not change in the foreseeable future.  But most entertainment consumers — I’m excepting comics fans here — get their heroism, super and otherwise, from television and maybe because of tv production hassles, costumes aren’t common.

Powers: We’ve agreed (haven’t we?) that for a long time the superbeings of mythology and folklore got their powers from some supernatural agency: they were gods, or demi-gods, or friends of ol’ Olympus,  or something.  Or they were agencies of darkness — black magicians of one kind or another.  Then science became the rationale, most famously with Jerry Siegel’s extraterrestrial origin of Superman.  Last, and decidedly least, there was technology allowing the good guy to do his  stuff. And now…well, it’s anything goes time.  Look at the current television offerings: we have a superhero private eye whose abilities are due to his vampirism, which we can call magic; a technology-enabled superhero(ine); and a whole bunch of peripatetic whose gifts have “scientific” explanations, or so it currently seems.

(more…)

Categories

Archives

Everything you need to make great comics!

comicmix-pro-300x69-2

Nucleus X

Bookshop Zaks