Tagged: Lois Lane

Martha Thomases: Wonder Woman, Goddess of What?

Hera help me, but I think I have to write about Wonder Woman again.

I know, I know. I already wrote about the new team of Marilyn and David Finch in which I said “She is supposed to be strong and independent and a peaceful warrior, not armored eye candy.”

The second issue wasn’t much better. It involved a rather convoluted effort to (re)create the original, Donna Troy Wonder Girl, but in a way that made her grim and gritty and probably the pawn of an evil, power-hungry crone. As a power-hungry crone who doesn’t like to think of herself as evil, I found this to be a personally distasteful plot development.

Still, I recognize that I don’t represent a significant part of the audience, so I thought I’d give it one more try. Open-minded… that’s what I am.

By the first page of issue #38 (current run), I knew this would be my last issue.

If you haven’t read the story, Diana is not only Wonder Woman but the new God of War as well, so there are lots and lots of battle scenes. The story opens on Themyscira, where the Amazon army fights a big, bad monster.

With bare midriffs.

Not the monster. It is, I presume, naked, but covered in scales and shadows. Most of the Amazons, however, leave their bare skin fully exposed. They might have metal bras, and possibly metal thongs to protect their sexy bits, but otherwise, they are naked. It also seems that the higher one’s military rank, the more clothing one is entitled to wear. No one, however, gets to have any protection on her thighs.

Am I supposed to believe that this is what a warrior society does when faced with danger?

It’s not even lazy. It would take nothing more than a different choice by the colorist (and/or whomever supervises the colorist) to make a bare torso look as if it were covered with armor. I have to believe that someone thought it was titillating for the Amazon cannon fodder to be semi-nude.

There are other ridiculous and incoherent parts to the story. Diana is haunted by nightmares and wakes up in a bed with bloody sheets. Every woman on this planet who is lucky enough to sleep on sheets has had this experience. I would imagine that writer Meredith Finch has had this experience. However, rather than being something normal, an event that requires nothing more than a trip to the bathroom for a tampon (or its Amazon equivalent), it’s presented as being a Portent of Things To Come. I find this almost as difficult to believe as bare-belly fighting.

Later in the story, a female television news reporter is doing a story from Peru. Her head is covered as it would be if she was a Muslim woman, or a Catholic woman in a church. She could be Muslim and this is an attempt to bring in more diversity to the landscape of the DC Universe. If that’s the case, it is haphazard. Perhaps I’m over-reacting, but it took me out of the story.

Especially since I thought the reporter was Lois Lane. And then I realized I thought that because she was a female reporter with dark hair, and other than that, looked like every other female character in the story. Why is Lois Lane there? If it isn’t Lois, what’s the news agency? How did they find out about the big, superhero emergency?

I don’t think I’ll ever find out, because I don’t intend to buy any more issues by this particular creative team. Please tell me if it ever gets any better.

 

Mindy Newell: Je Ne Suis Pa Charlie Hebdo

sobig-2004266Yesterday I had a thought – which I do have on occasion.

I have always considered myself a “socially conscious” comics writer. This means that, if you look over my body of work, you will notice that I have told stories that, in one way or another, reflect “real world” events and the consequences of those events on my characters. Notably, of course, in my 1986 Lois Lane mini-series about child abduction and abuse, “When It Rains, God is Crying” (coincidentally edited by ComicMix’s Robert Greenberger when we were both working for DC, he an editor and me a freelancer), but also as far back as “Moon River,” my first story in New Talent Showcase, an admittedly tyro effort to portray the outcome of a closed, dictatorial society on an individual. And of course there was “Chalk Drawings,” which I co-wrote with George Pérez for Wonder Woman, which was a story about suicide.

These efforts do not make me Edna Ferber (a member of the Algonquin Round Table, a group of renowned and influential New York City writers, critics, actors, and wits who gathered at the Algonquin Hotel every day for lunch from 1919 to 1929), whose “socially conscious” novels include, among others, So Big (1924), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize, Show Boat (1926), which was adapted into a musical by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein, and Giant (1952), which was made into a movie directed by George Stevens and starred Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, and James Dean – his third and last role before his death by car accident – who did admirable jobs in a no-way-was it-as-good-as-the-novel script adaptation. So Big was about the war between art and finance, Show Boat was about the racism between black and white and its price, while Giant dealt with the racism between brown and white, the antipathy between cattle ranchers and oilmen, and, as well, the clash between liberalism and conservatism. All are issues we face today.

Nor am I Laura Z. Hobson, whose 1947 Gentlemen’s Agreement attacked post-World War II anti-Semitism in the United States. It was made into a film produced by Darryl F. Zanuck, who, according to Wikipedia, was approached by Samuel Goldwyn and other Jewish filmmakers. They asked him not to make the film because it could “stir up trouble,” and feared that Hays Code enforcer Joseph Brown would not allow the film to get by the censors because of his openly known anti-Semitism. But Zanuck essentially said, “Fuck him,” and the film went on to be nominated for eight Oscars and to win three – Best Picture, Best Director (Elia Kazan, no stranger to controversy), Best Actor (Gregory Peck), and Best Supporting Actress (Celeste Holm). Just a brief aside here: in my not-so-humble opinion, John Garfield should have won a Best Supporting Actor for his role as Dave Goldman, a Jewish WW II vet and best friend to Gregory Peck’s main character, journalist Phil Schulyer. Oh, and young Dean Stockwell (Quantum Leap’s Admiral Al Calavicci and Battlestar Galactica’s Brother John Cavil) played Schulyer’s son.

But, getting back to my original sentence, in which I said I had a thought…

Am I still listed in the phone book?

Of course it sounds silly. I mean, who uses a phone book these days?

But the point is, how easy am I to find?

And the answer is: All too easy.

So what if I offended someone out there? Certainly in these past two and so years I have stated my opinions loudly and frequently. And I’ve done the same on my Facebook page.

Is it that inconceivable some one could decide to meet me in the parking lot at work, or in front of my apartment building, or even in my apartment? Some one with a pathological chip on his or her shoulder and a knife or a Luger or a Kalishnikov?

Or maybe while I’m shopping at the Jewish deli?

No, I’m not inflated with self-importance.

No, I am not Edna Ferber or Laura Z. Hobson. Neither am I Lawrence Wright or Bob Woodward or Carl Bernstein. I’m not Maureen O’Dowd. I’m not Rachel Maddow. I’m not Chris Matthews or Ed Schultz. I’m not Megan Kelley or Sean Hannity or Ann Coulter. I’m not Jon Stewart. I’m not Steven Colbert. I’m not Louis Black or John Oliver or Bill Maher.

I’m not Thomas Nast. I’m not Art Spielgman and I’m not Jules Feiffer. I’m not Nigar Nazar of Pakistan.

I’m not Alan Moore or Neil Gaiman or G. Willow Wilson.

I’m not Mike Gold or Denny O’Neil or John Ostrander or Marc Fishman or Martha Thomases or Michael Davis or Emily Whitten or Bob Ingersoll.

I am Mindy Newell.

Je ne suis pa Charlie Hebdo.

But I could be.

We all could be.

And so could you.

 

Martha Thomases: Not For Kids Anymore

thomases-art-130329-6063655As Blondie says, “Dreaming is free.”

Which is lucky for me, because I have a rather frantic week, and not a lot of original ideas for a column. Sure, I could write about the John Stewart scandal (or non-scandal, depending on which rumor you believe,), but I am late to that party. I could write about some obscure book that deserves more attention, but I am behind in my reading.

My sub-conscious came through for me.

Last night, I had one of my recurring dreams in which I still work for DC. Sometimes in these dreams I no longer work for DC, but sneak into an office and pretend I do. And sometimes, I even wear clothes. I can’t remember which of these scenarios was at play this time, but I remember getting a memo from Jenette Kahn about some new publishing initiative.

In my dream, I ran to my son, the genius writer, about the opportunity this afforded us. We had two ideas worth pursuing.

The first, and more interesting, was a graphic novel about an upper-middle-class teenage white girl in Georgia in the 1980s who is, unbeknownst to her or anyone else, the reincarnation of Mohammed Ali. I don’t think we should let the fact that Ali is still alive get in the way of the fact that this would be awesome.

However, since my subconscious apparently has no literary taste, in my dream I urged we concentrate our attention on an on-going series, The Legion of Jimmy Olsen. It would be like the Legion of Super-Heroes, but set in the present, not the future, and feature all the different characters Jimmy has morphed into over the years. You would have your Turtle Boy, your giant, your caveman Beatle, even your girl.

All at the same time.

I would buy that series in a heartbeat. Wouldn’t you?

The New 52 doesn’t have a lot of Jimmy in it. There isn’t even much Lois Lane. They show up to take pictures or report on some Superman exploit or another, but that’s about it. Grant Morrison had Jimmy doing a bit more, as a friend to Clark.

Even Grant couldn’t work in any Turtle Boy.

As the comics audience has aged, publishers have tried to respond with more mature offerings. They don’t think their readers need a character like Jimmy with whom to identify. Today’s superhero reader, they think, needs stories where the universe is at stake every single issue.

This is a shame, because we could use somewhat less constant cosmic apocalypse, and a bit more whimsy.

And gorillas.

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman

SUNDAY: John Ostrander

 

Dennis O’Neil: Superman, Spider-Man, and the God Particle

oneil-column-art-120719-1801460First, the good news. Scientists are prepared to say that, definitely, god exists.

Now the bad. (He) (she) (it)…oh dang, there are really no appropriate pronouns for a concept that transcends the very idea of gender. Let’s settle for “they” and start again: They – the god thingies – are called “Higgs bosuns,” nicknamed “god particles,” and they permeate the universe. And without them, nothing could exist, could ever have existed. (Unless, that is, there’s a kind of reality we can’t comprehend, and we’re not exactly willing to rule that out, but we’ll never know and anyhow, who cares?) Although physicists have been seeking the Higgs for a half-century because the accepted model of the universe indicated that the things had to be there, it wasn’t until July 4 that they were prepared to say, yep found it. I understand that there was some celebrating in the Land of Labs.

Me, I got my science fix when I went to see The Amazing Spider-Man at the local monsterplex and, later, caught a few minutes of Superman on the tube: the first big-budget Superman, released in 1978 and hyped with the line, “You’ll believe a man can fly.” (For the record, I didn’t.) That flick has flaws, but it’s pretty good, especially for something made when Hollywood was just beginning to learn how to make these kinds of entertainments. The only part I really dislike is the ending: the graphics, though they tell the story, are pretty crude compared to what’s preceded them. And the science…oh woe – the science. (If you want to consider this a spoiler alert, suit yourself.) Lois Lane dies in an earthquake and Superman flies counterclockwise around the Earth and thus – ready for this? – reverses time and goes back to before Lois died and happy endings all around.

Reverses time, does he? By flying counterclockwise. Uh huh.

Nothing in the Spidey flick is quite so nettlesome, but in this reinvention, the film folk chose to explain Spidey’s ability to shoot webs huge distances and make them, apparently, as strong as the occasion warrants the same way Stan Lee and Steve Ditko explained it in the first Spider-Man comic book story, way back in 1962: A teenage Spidey, who gets really good grades in science class, having acquiring amazing powers after being bitten by a radioactive spider, goes home and, you know, tinkers around and comes up with a gadget that a) does the web shooting stuff and b) is compact enough to be worn like an oversize wrist watch.

So: if he commanded such technology, why didn’t he use it for much greater good than he could achieve as a costumed vigilante and, incidentally, plunk his saintly Aunt May down in some swell digs?

For the same reason that Superman didn’t use his godlike time reversal stunt to undo every single bad thing on the whole planet? (I mean saving Lois was nice and all, but…war! Famine! Disease!)

Of course, this kind of story is basically fantasy and, I guess, we all have a private setting for our willing suspension of disbelief. I complain about plot devices that violate the story’s own “reality” and haul us out of the fiction while we try figure out how we’re supposed to accept what we’ve just seen.

Since, in superhero writing, there is a long tradition of writers using whatever’s in the zeitgeist at the moment, I expect we’ll be seeing some costumed dogooder involved with Higgs bosuns pretty soon. I hope I don’t have to mangle my willing suspension of disbelief to enjoy the story, god particle or no god particle.

FRIDAY: Martha Thomases

 

Monday Mix-Up: “The Brave And The Bold: The Lost Issues”

  • Uncategorized
  • October 31, 2011

brave-and-bold-batman-and-super-grover-300x450-4565534The patron comic book of Monday Mix-Up has always been The Brave And The Bold, a comic book that delighted in mashing up weird combinations of characters, usually Batman with characters that made almost no sense to combine with, like Deadman, Kamandi, Jonah Hex, Sgt. Rock, Adam Strange, Lois Lane, Scalphunter, the Legion of Super-Heroes, the Unknown Soldier, the Guardians of the Universe, the Joker, R’as al Ghul, and the House of Mystery. This tradition has been carried on in the TV series [[[Batman: The Brave And The Bold]]], which has included many of those combinations and added Space Ghost to boot.

But for some, those combinations just aren’t going far enough. For those, we present The Brave And The Bold: The Lost Issues. Now you can find the missing team-ups with Batman and Jack Bauer, Iron Man 2020, Spider-Man 2099, Harvey Birdman, Groo, Galactus, Dirty Harry, Darth Vader, and Adam West.

Not to be outdone, if you delve into the archives you can also find all the missing Marvel Two-In-One issues where the Thing meets Young Justice, Vampirella, Wallace & Gromit, Tintin, the Warlord, Snoopy, the Spirit, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Walking Dead, and Thing #2 and Thing #1.

MARTHA THOMASES: Must The World Have A (Mrs.) Superman?

martha-thomases-1682431The staff at my regular comic shop wants to know what I think about the DC re-launch. I’ve been shopping there for decades, and I buy DC comics every time I go in there. I don’t only buy DC, but I buy almost everything they publish.

That’s the way it’s been for me for more than 50 years. I’ve liked Superman and Batman and Wonder Woman and the Legion of Super-Heroes for that long. As I’ve grown up, I’ve liked other characters, and I’ve learned to follow not just the heroes I like, but also the writers and artists.

So here’s what I tell them when they ask me what I think: “It doesn’t make any difference to me.”

Superman has relaunched once in my lifetime. I can’t count how often Wonder Woman has been rebooted. The Legion is so complicated that I have trouble keeping it straight and I’ve been reading it for 50 years!

I predict that, within five years, everything that’s important will be the same in the DC Universe as it is now, or as it was at some time in the past.

In the meantime, DC’s publicist, David Hyde, is kicking ass with his publicity efforts. I hope that enough people sample the new comics to see if they like them. It’s been a very long time since new readers have been courted so aggressively.

Unfortunately, there is one aspect of this I don’t like. Dan Didio and Jim Lee have described their characters as “brands.” This is the way the MBAs who run Warner Bros. talk about their properties, and I understand how, when one wants to appear savvy to one’s boss, one appropriates the bosses’ jargon.

“Brand” is a marketing term. Tide is a brand. Nike is a brand. It’s a corporate identity that promises consumers something they want, whether that something is reliably clean clothes or athletic shoes that let the wearer perform like a superstar.

super-charleses-5201928Superman is not a brand. He’s a character. He’s a character that changes according to the whims of the creative teams making his stories. He may implicitly promise consumers something they want (truth, justice and the American way), but he keeps them as readers because of his human qualities, the details of his life that fascinate us, amuse us and excite us.

As his publicist, I observed these phenomena in the 1990s. When Clark Kent and Lois Lane got engaged, the world went crazy. They didn’t do this because of branding, but because it was a sweet, human story. It’s always been my opinion that the reason the “Death of Superman” story was such a big deal was not because Superman died (he’s died plenty), but because the public had been following his relationship with Lois, and felt the loss along with her.

I’ve enjoyed Superman’s marriage. I enjoy stories of happy couples, whether they are detectives or ghosts or super-heroes. Millions of people watched Smallville to see Clark and Lois get married.

So I’m disappointed that the marriage will no longer be. That said, I trust Grant Morrison to write great stories.

And I’d bet we see another marriage in my lifetime.

Martha Thomases, Dominoed Daredoll, would also like to see The Dibnys’ back.SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman

Smallville – We Truly Knew Ye

smallville-absolutejustice-wide-2618907

I’ve checked with my cadre of DC contributors, staffers and fans current and past. While it’s impossible to decide on an exact number, the consensus is that in the past ten years the teevee series Smallville painstakingly built a cohesive and linear universe of DC characters while, at the same time, DC Comics reinvented itself in whole or in substance approximately 14 thousand times. Guess which was more entertaining.

And now Smallville’s gone. Pushed out of the way for still another Superman movie that, like the comic books, gets to ignore everything that has gone before it. That’s not entirely bad: Superman Returns was so awful I was thinking of getting rid of the memories by electroshock therapy.

Instead, I watched Smallville. At first I was there out of professional and fanboy curiosity. It was good but not great, and I stuck with it because my wife enjoyed the show. In time, Michael Rosenbaum’s performance as Lex Luthor grabbed me, and when they introduced John Glover as his eviler father, the tension between the two was riveting. When they brought Green Arrow in (using the Grell costume) and started really building their version of the DC universe, I got absorbed.

Then they brought in Erica Durance as Lois Lane. I enjoyed her performance and her character so much I felt like I was betraying my own childhood. More DC characters were introduced, heroes and villains alike. As they moved away from the Kryptonite-villain of the week and developed Zod, Darkseid, and the first interesting Toyman ever, Smallville moved towards the top of my TiVo must-record list. After ten seasons the show had more storylines going on than Soap – but by the time that final episode aired last night, they had resolved or at least tied-up just about everything. It was remarkable; the fact that so many of the actors from earlier seasons returned was even more remarkable.

At its best, Smallville has been about the human drama, and its science-fiction environment rarely mitigated this. It is in this spirit that the two-hour finale was produced. Some might find this to be overbearing; respectfully, I think those people have missed the point. If you take this element out of the story, all you have left is a comic book – in the most clichéd and repellant sense of the term.

The production team also avoided the trap of giving each character their moment to shine. Whereas most had sufficient screen time, this last episode was all about Clark Kent, as it was, by and large, from the very beginning of the series.

This is not to say that there isn’t a kick-ass story here. Two of them, in fact, with enough villains to fill the Justice League’s dance card. Darkseid, Granny Goodness, Lionel Luthor, and of course, his son Lex.

The finale was not flawless. For one thing, everybody showed a lack of respect for how gravity works, not to mention security on Air Force One. The big scene between Lex and Clark was pretty much lifted from The Dark Knight; thankfully, both the characters and the performers make it their own. Technically, this show was at least as proficient as teevee gets. If it were a theatrical movie, it would have been in 3-D, and that would have screwed the pooch.

Teevee is teevee. It’s not comics, and shows come and go all the time. Smallville’s decade was a remarkable achievement, and it set the high-water mark for superhero television.

At the end of the ten-year day, you will believe a man should fly.

 

Smallville Fans can Enjoy Free iTunes Downloads

At long last, CW’s Smallville rings down the curtain tomorrow night with a two-hour finale. As we saw last week, Tom Welling will finally don Brnadon Routh’s cheesy red and blue outfit and fly into the sunset. The incredibly uneven show will see Clark Kent face off against Darkseid, accept his destiny, marry Lois Lane and spar one final time with Lex Luthor. Despite a plethora of costumed heroes now populating that world, I bet we only see Green Arrow at the wedding.

Fans can now relive each heroic moment by downloading the series in HD, now on iTunes.

To celebrate Warner Bros, Digital Distribution is giving fans the chance to get FREE Downloads of all 10 season premieres in HD and discounts on seasons 1-9, now for a limited time on iTunes. Plus, find each episode from Season 10 (The Final Season) now available in HD including the finale after, Friday’s broadcast.

Here’s a clip from the <a href=”

target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>Final Season.

 

Lois Lane, Girl Reporter

  • News
  • March 27, 2011

tumblr_lig8j6hdvu1qa79k34-6033009

This may be one of the best proposals I’ve heard in a while– which of course means that DC will have to be shamed into actually doing it.

Here a pitch for Lois Lane, Girl Reporter illustrated young adult novels written by Dean Trippe, with art by Daniel Krall.

Growing up with two younger sisters, I’ve often found myself attracted to cool female leads whose stories I could share with them (Nancy Drew, Veronica Mars, etc.), but while the superhero industry has always done good by me in providing excellent male heroes (chief among them, Batman and Superman), its treatment of their similarly iconic female heroes like Wonder Woman, Supergirl, and Batgirl has always been mixed at best. Too often these spandex-clad heroines have been marketed towards post-adolescent men rather than to their own gender. There’s room for this in the spectrum of superhero fiction, of course, but without a positive female role model for me to share with my sisters, that they could see themselves in, they both grew up with only a portion of my comics fandom. (Don’t get me wrong, they both still dig Batman!)

But then I found a secret window into the DCU that I don’t think anyone else knows about: Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Lois Lane…at eleven years old.

At eleven years old, Lois has discovered her calling: investigative journalism. She sets out to right wrongs and help out her friends. This series explores Lois’s character, reveals her surprising early influence on the future Man of Steel, and introduces fun new elements into this enduring character’s back story.

In each book, Lois will tackle a problem or mystery affecting the members of the community she finds herself in as she travels around the country. The investigations in this series will not be mystical or supernatural (though some characters may suspect such sources), but real world problems that Lois works to set right.

Read the entire proposal. Then ask why DC isn’t doing this one. Somehow, I don’t think Zack Snyder will find a way to work it into the next movie.

The Point Yes Cap Is Back!

Did Marvel really expect us to be surprised? And what lies in the closet of the man who created SUPERMAN? Plus, how funny is back at the top of the box office for the second week!


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