Tagged: Martha Thomases

A mother of a week

Friday the 13th done fall on a Sunday this month, so we’re off to celebrate Mom’s Day with family members.  But first, here’s our round-up of regular weekly columns, now including our weekend regulars:

Don’t forget to check out the debut column from Ric Meyers, DVD Xtra #1: The Thai’s have it, and of course our regular weekly podcasts, courtesy of Mellifluous Mike Raub:

Happy Mother’s Day, everybody!

MARTHA THOMASES: Mom’s the word

martha-arthur-1683535Tomorrow is Mothers Day. To some, it’s the most important day of the year. To others, it’s a crass exploitation, using real feelings to sell flowers, brunch, and long-distance calls.

In superhero comics, it’s pretty much a non-event. Good mothers are almost non-existent, if not dead. The good moms send their children away (see Lara) or die in a rain of pearls (Martha Wayne). Living moms are over-bearing control fiends (Phantom Girl’s mom in the 31st Century) or distracted career women (Queen Hippolyta). Recently, the mother in Blue Beetle looks like she has the most realistic relationship with her kids.

Except for Sue Storm, there aren’t any premiere super-hero moms.

The best moms in comics are those who adopt. Martha Kent, Aunt May, even Alfred Pennyworth did fabulously maternal jobs raising children who would grow up to make the world a better place.

Why is this? Some of it may be a remnant from folk tales, where heroes are orphaned so they may have adventures without familial responsibilities or ties to complicate the quest. More to the point, superhero comics are power fantasies, often aimed at adolescents (of all ages) who are extremely frustrated with their bodies. Imagining super-strength, flight, and other extraordinary abilities is comforting and satisfying to someone experiencing growth spurts, hormonal fluctuations and acne.

This is not compatible with feeling like somebody’s baby. And you will always be your mom’s sweet baby.

A mother is an even more uncomfortable reminder of sexuality. Until recently, one couldn’t be a mother without having sex. Children don’t like to think about their parents having sex. (Parents also don’t like thinking about their children having sex, even when their children are grown.) An adoptive mother can be pure and untouched, at least in the mind of her child.

And yet, being a mother is an astonishingly sensual experience. It’s more complicated and more pure than could be easily conveyed in a 22-page story, even by an expert, and almost certainly not by a man. The smell of your child’s head, the smoothness of a baby’s skin, the music of a toddler’s laugh – these are glorious sensations. Beyond this kind of intimate contact, having a child permits a mother to experience the wonders of life all over again. As an adult, you expect to see snow or rain or flowers in the spring, but these are new and awe-inspiring to a child. You know why a fire fighter wears red suspenders, but it’s all new to your kid.

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MARTHA THOMASES: Child is father to the man

  • News
  • April 28, 2007

There is hardly anything more annoying than listening to a bunch of us Baby Boomers talking about the good old days: the music, the sex, the drugs, the sit-ins and be-ins and love-ins, even the comics. We act like we invented rebellion, and we don’t think anyone else will ever care about the world as much as we did, and certainly no one else will make changes as important as the ones we made.

We’re wrong.

A recent article in USA Today describes “Generation Y”, those born since the early 1980s, as one that has endured a lifetime of public tragedies. My generation lived through the Kennedy assassinations and the murder of Martin Luther King, the Kent State shootings, the Viet Nam War and Watergate, and these things were horrible. However, kids today witnessed the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle explosion, the Waco standoff, the Oklahoma City bombing, the attack on the Atlanta Olympics, school attacks on Columbine, the Amish school in Pennsylvania, and the recent Virginia Tech massacre. They’ve seen a tsunami devastate Southeast Asia, and Hurricane Katrina destroy New Orleans. In my day, we watched a half-hour evening news broadcast, while today there is a 24-hour news cycle. They say that Viet Nam was the first war fought on our living room television, but the “Shock and Awe” attacks on Baghdad four years ago had so much advance hype and so many on-the-scene embedded journalists, they practically had official sponsors.

The horrific moments that changed my personal world occurred when my best friend’s brother died in Viet Nam, followed shortly by the Kent State slaughter which was just a few miles from my house. Before that, my feelings, although sincere, were based more on ideas than on events. My son saw the World Trade Center collapse outside his classroom in lower Manhattan, but not before he saw burning bodies falling from the windows.

Just as the Sixties didn’t turn everyone into a protesting hippie peacenik, these events have not shaped a single personality type among today’s twenty-somethings. Most of the mass media would have us believe that the values of this generation establish a new low of shallowness, exalting the likes of Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan. But their taste and values go far beyond American Idol or the Pussycat Dolls.

The USA Today article quotes social historian William Strauss: “the Millennials’ baby-boomer parents were anxious about political assassinations because that’s what they witnessed growing up. But their children’s fears are different – because they witnessed mass killings of children by peers whose motives nobody can seem to understand.”

He continues, “The fact that this sort of thing can happen calls into question the super-achieving, high-stress life some of them lead.” He says that Generation Y will be less concerned with “having it all” than with having a balance. Unlike many in my generation, who traded in their values for SUVs, private schools and second houses and the long commute to jobs that paid for everything, there is hope that this generation will enjoy every day with their families as well as meaningful work. (more…)

MARTHA THOMASES: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

  • News
  • April 21, 2007

3178_2_001-7722403The horrific events this week at Virginia Tech have elicited the usual pompous political rhetoric about the evils of Hollywood entertainment – violent video games, rap music, movies and television are to blame. “Our kids are being trained to be murderers,” thunder the politicians. “They learn to shoot at their enemies instead of reasoning with them. They become calloused by this violence, which dehumanizes others. Let us regulate this evil, lest our children slaughter us in our beds.”

Except that’s not how it works. If the media were that effective, we would all be effective code crackers, physically fit from our active lifestyles, enjoying out fabulously large New York apartments. That’s what the non-violent media teaches.

I’ve been a non-violent activist since high school, where I regularly risked expulsion by distributing an anti-war magazine. I dropped out of college for 18 months to work with the War Resisters League, and I now serve on the Board of Directors for the A. J. Muste Institute (http://www.ajmuste.org). Doing this work, I’ve met a lot of people who are deeply and thoughtfully concerned about popular culture, and think it degrades people. After decades of rational and reasonable conversation, I need to disagree.

In Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence, author (and sometimes comic book writer) Gerard Jones examines why children enjoy playing at violence, and why it can be a good thing for them. If I may grossly over-simplify an entire book into a few sentences, he says that children play to work out their feelings, including anger, frustration and helplessness. It’s far better to pretend to kill the monsters with rayguns or laser beams than to hit another kid because he’s got better stuff in his lunchbox than you do.

Kids aren’t the only ones who feel this way. As a human being and a New Yorker, I face frustration dozens of times a day. The traffic lights are slow, the tourists don’t know how to walk down a city sidewalk so other people can pass them, my neighbors don’t clean up after their dogs. I think about killing them all the time. Because I’m an adult, and because I understand that actions have consequences, I don’t do these things. Instead, I watch Kill Bill or read Punisher.

I also understand that other people have feelings. This understanding did as much to shape my politics as anything else – I saw people on television, dying in Viet Nam, realized I didn’t want to die, and the people I saw, even the Communists, probably didn’t want to die, either. From there, I could see that the people making the decisions to go to war weren’t the ones fighting, but they and their friends were getting rich. (more…)

DENNIS O’NEIL: No evil lurks this week

  • News
  • April 10, 2007

Okay, okay, I’m sorry. I know I promised, at least implicitly, to deliver Who Knows What Evil Lurks – Part 2 this week. But that will take some time and maybe digging, to write and, honestly, I have the luxury of neither. By the time you read this, I’ll either be at or returning from Juaniata, Pennsylvania, where I’ve been invited to be the guest of Jay Hosler and maybe shoot off my mouth in public a bit. I’ve been busy doodling notes for said mouth-shooting; hence no dissertation on lurking evil.

I thought about just blowing off this whole column thing, or delaying it until I was back here in scenic Upper Nyack, and rested. But… I promised editor Mike Gold and PR goddess Martha Thomases that I would deliver a minimum of 500 words each and every week. And I made the same promise to myself. Sternly, I said to myself that I had to respect the deadline, even if the deadline in question is largely of my own making.

By the way, I don’t hate deadlines the way a lot of writers and artists seem to. Maybe that’s just because I lived with them for so long – for over 40 years, they were a constant part of my life. What can be said against them is that they can be a pain in the ass. What can be said for them is that they can impart focus to a project and they can be an impetus to stop kvetching and worrying about your ability to leave civilization breathlessly in your debt (and maybe sit on David Letterman’s couch) and just, please, get the damn thing done.

A couple of paragraphs back – I’ll wait while you check – I mentioned Jay Hosler. Doctor Hosler teaches biology at Juaniata College, is a proponent of evolution, a comics enthusiast, a writer, and a cartoonist. He’s done two graphic novels which I found educational and very entertaining. You’ll find the titles below.

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MARTHA THOMASES: Why I love the Legion

  • News
  • April 6, 2007

legiona2-3909744

It was in early 1980 when I realized what I geek I had turned into. The night before, I had a dream. My dream was not the inspirational kind like Martin Luther King, Jr., nor the poetic kind that Neil Gaiman would later spin into a career that brings happiness to millions.

I had a geek dream.

In my dream, the Ramones tried out for the Legion of Super-Heroes, and were turned down because Legion rules didn’t allow for more than one person to have the same super-power, which, in this case, was being a Ramone. I no longer remember precisely who turned them down, but I do remember Bouncing Boy suggesting they join the Legion of Substitute Heroes. Joey wanted to, but Dee Dee refused.

Then I woke up.

I read my first Legion story in Jamestown, New York, visiting my grandparents in the late 1950s or early 1960s. I had what must have been an Adventure comic, with a story about the adult Legion of Super-Villains fighting Superman, and the adult Legion of Super-Heroes joining in. My grandparents, while lovely people, were very boring, and I dove into that comic as a way of avoiding Lawrence Welk on television. Luckily, this eight-page story had plenty to mesmerize a young girl. Cosmic King versus Cosmic Man! Lightning Lord versus Lightning Man! Saturn Queen versus Saturn Woman! The villains had regal names while the heroes had descriptive names. Clearly, ego and a class system must be what turned people bad.

Over the next several decades, I read as many Legion stories as I could. I loved the variety of powers these kids had (Matter-Eater Lad!), and that they had a meetings where they could gather and sit behind desks, with title cards that explained their abilities, in case they forgot. (“I’m Invisible Kid, but I don’t know what I do. Oh, here it says on my name-plate. I can turn invisible!”)

But mostly, I loved that they had a clubhouse.

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Friends of friends

  • News
  • March 5, 2007

olympus-digital-camera-13The more years we all spend involved in comics, the less able we are to escape our past, especially in the Web 2.0 age.  And that’s actually A Good Thing.  For instance, check out cartoonist Howard Cruse’s blog post where he effusively and rightly pays tribute to ComicMix’s own Martha Thomases, whose family he and his partner Ed Sedarbaum have known for a good long time.  I’m a sucker for "then and now" photos.  Of course, Howard’s not above posting possibly incriminating photos of himself, as you can see by the lovely Esther-and-Vashti ensembles which he and Ed chose to don for their local Purimspiel.

Speaking of past Friends, Leigh Dragoon reports that there will be a forthcoming press release from Friends of Lulu (an organization with which Martha and I both spent many years) regarding their ill-fated Empowerment Fund.  From what she writes, it seems the organization is intent upon correcting past wrongs, which bodes well for its future.  Considering the long journey women in comics still have to undergo before the industry’s playing field is truly level, the continued vitality of organizations dedicated toward that goal is more important than ever.

Ain’t I A Woman?

  • News
  • February 24, 2007

martha200-3734293For as long as there has been a comics’ press, people have been wondering why there aren’t more women reading comics. And often those people wondering are, themselves, women: Maggie Thompson (who in 1960 co-published Harbinger, one of the first comics-themed fanzines back), The Beat‘s Heidi MacDonald, Trina Robbins (whom I’ve loved since the days of underground comix), cat yronwode of Eclipse, among many others.

We stand on the shoulders of giants.

Yet, like these women, I read comics. In my case, I read superhero comics. And I loved them. For all that time, when I was a girl, then a young woman, then a woman, a wife, a mom, I loved them. I still do.

How can this be? Don’t women hate superhero comics? Don’t we hate mindless violence, shallow characterization, demeaning stereotypes? Don’t we crave emotional connection and involving storylines?

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Dennis O’Neil: What Would Green Lantern Do?

  • News
  • February 20, 2007

dennyoneil1006-3309127So do the Guardians of the Universe equip Green Lanterns with bumper stickers that read: My Space Sector, right or wrong?

This question is prompted by something that recently popped up on my screen, a political blog entry forwarded by Martha Thomases, ComicMix’s commnications director and my friend of more than 30 years. The blog was by Matthew Yglesias and it likened the current U.S. foreign policy honchos to the fictional Guardians and their interstellar group of do-bes, the Green Lantern Corps, each of whom is assigned a chunk of the galaxy. Mr. Yglesias describes the gizmos that give the Lanterns their bag of tricks as “the most powerful weapon(s) in the universe,” trinkets that “let bearer(s) generate streams of green energy… (W)hat the ring can do is limited only by the stipulation that it create green stuff and by the user’s combination of will and imagination.” Mr. Yglesias continues: “(A) lot of people seem to think that American military might is like one of these power rings. They seem to think that… we can accomplish absolutely anything in the world through the application of sufficient… force. The only thing limiting us is a lack of willpower.”

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