Tagged: Martha Thomases

Martin Pasko: City On The Edge of Forgetaboutit

pasko-art-130815-3061498If you follow this column regularly (in which case I apologize for the feelings of loneliness and alienation), you might remember me mentioning that I now reside in Los Angeles, which is the perfect city to move to if you’re really desperate to live in a comic book. It’s so colorful and exciting and full of funny-looking noises. Like when the valet at Jerry’s Deli on Ventura slides that new car you haven’t even started making the payments on yet into a parking space narrower than its wheel base – at 120 mph – because he thinks he’s Batman.

So I am thrilled to report I’m serene, I tell you, serene as I continue to sit around, keyboarding like this. Only now I do it for fun because the keyboard I’m using is the digital one on my smartphone, and it’s now in my lap as I write this, with the vibration intensity on the haptic feedback set to “Maximum.”

Sorry.

I am, however, finding it somewhat more lonely here than I’d anticipated.

Many of my old friends – the kind who keep insisting I refer to them on social media as “not-old-that-way” – don’t get out much. They glide about their palatial homes in motorized tricycles which have to be loaded into their very tiny cars when a group of us goes out to lunch. Whereupon the one who still has enough use of his legs to actually drive a car keeps asking the voice on the GPS to speak louder, so he can hear her replies to his inappropriate comments about how hot she sounds and what time she gets off work.

Meanwhile, the other three beg me to push their motorized tricycles out into freeway traffic while they are still in them, because their fingers are too arthritic to use a trackpad and none of them has mastered SEO well enough to Google for the guy who inherited Jack Kevorkian’s equipment.

Thus I find myself in the rather odd position of actually looking forward to inviting to lunch Stan The Man, who, as you know, lives in Beverly Hills. And is not too busy to see me because there are no animation studios or comic book companies left out here with whom he can jointly announce a project that will be completed after you and I are dead.

 (“Just came back from The Mansion and I’m way stoked, ‘cause Hef an’ I are This Close to launchin’ that whole Spider-Bunny thing.”)

I’ll have to find a way to break it gently to Mr. Man that Mr. Hefner no longer sits around all day in his pajamas and bathrobe because he needs to be ready at a moment’s notice to fuck a smokin’-hot babe, but because sitting around all day in your pajamas and bathrobe is just what you do when you’re 187 years old.

But, of course, as Bill Maher knows how to say with much better fake sincerity than I, I kid Mr. Man. I have every confidence that he really will be with us many years hence. That’s because, as he has helpfully informed us, he has a pacemaker but no need whatsoever for a motorized tricycle. I am, however, inviting Mr. Man to lunch in my home, where absolutely no effort will be made to point out that he’s standing too close to the microwave.

And, in what passes here in Hollywood for truth, Mr. Man has announced a strategic relationship with Archie Comics, for whom he will be writing Just Imagine Stan The Man Asking You To Believe He Actually Wrote This Comic Book Himself About What It Would’ve Been Like If He’d Created That Really Swell, Groovy Homo Kid We Came Up With That’s Putting Us Out Of Business Because It’s Pissing Off All Those Loudmouthed Jesus People Who For Some Reason Are Still Under The Impression That They Can Buy “Age-appropriate” Comic Books At Wal*Mart.

I, for one, am looking forward to chatting Mr. Man up about that book. I may be totally off-base on this, because I haven’t actually seen Mr. Man in the 20 years since the announcement, but I think Archie is a perfectly natural “fit” for him because, at least at that time, the back of Mr. Man’s head was orange, too.

Now, as we come to the conclusion of what I know all you reverential fanboys, with your keenly developed senses of humor, will have understood was meant as Just Jokes rather than the gratuitous and mean-spirited rant you, you hero-worshiping little cretins, you, mistook it for … I leave you with just these humble thoughts:

Apparently, here in The City On The Edge of Forgetaboutit, the way you fight ageism is by making fun of people who are even older than you are. If you can find any.

And so it is that I whistle past Forest Lawn and rage, rage against the dying of the light from my smartphone.

OK, so I’m a little cranky, too.

Some asshole just totaled my motorized tricycle, trying to park it at 120 mph because he thinks he’s Batman.

FRIDAY: Martha Thomases

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman

 

Martin Pasko: Your Wolverine Claws

pasko-art-130725-3221572Yeah, I know that last week I promised you the third and final part of that earth-shattering rant that, as you know, went hugely viral and made me the new darling of the Internet.

I promised to report on what I’d have learned – evidence that supported or refuted my thesis about Mainstream Comics being unable to escape from the corner they’ve painted themselves into – at the publishers’ booths in the exhibit halls of the 2013 San Diego Comic-Con.

But I made that reckless and foolhardy promise before I’d actually been to the San Diego Comic-Con – or, at least, to what it has metastasized into in recent years. Oh, I’d heard all the stories, of course. But none of them do justice to the actual experience, which taught me that you can’t, in fact, learn anything at the San Diego Comic-Con…because can’t really hear anything over the sound of dozens of Jumbotrons trying to sell you things you don’t want, or see anything for the crush of, uhm, imaginatively-garbed bodies slowly taxiing through the Area 51-like hangar like some flying fortress of presumably human flesh.

Wait. I take that back. There are some things you can learn at Comic-Con. And, because I won’t be able to concentrate well enough to resume the serious business of earth-shattering rants until I can see and hear again – and the anti-depressants kick in three days from now – I’d like instead to share some of them with you.

1. There is a definite limit to the number of times you can tolerate bleeding from the chest because you are being poked by some asshole wearing Wolverine claws.

2. SDCC makes you grateful for word processing apps on smartphones. Mainly because there are so many competing WiFi hotspots in the exhibit halls, you can’t use the phone for anything else. I am, in fact, writing this column on my phone, during my hour-long walk back to my hotel. No prob; I love hour-long walks. Good exercise. Unfortunately, my hotel is only three blocks from the convention center.

3. Best way to deal with being poked in the chest for the third time by some asshole wearing Wolverine claws: Fling a handful of your blood in his face and chant, “Nyah-nyah, I’ve got the Hanta Virus…”

4. Always remember, when tempted to accept an invitation to the Eisner Awards, that they are not merely a new version of the old Inkpot Awards banquet, because they are no longer, in fact, a banquet. And when you are sitting through 30-minute anecdotes from dead artists’ children, reminiscing about how their dad sculpted “Eskimos” from soap bars when they were five, you will really want to be having the dinner you didn’t eat earlier because you thought you were gonna get food.

5. No one presenting or accepting an Eisner Award is as funny as they think they are, and the ones who are supposed to be, aren’t. And Doctor Who cast members who try to be are just FAAABulously embarrassing. However, this rule does not apply to Chip Kidd, who made me believe the Eisners really are the Oscars of the comics industry because now they have their own Bruce Vilanch. But only when Chris Ware wins something.

6. None of the panels or “events” is as entertaining as the looks on the faces of the guys picketing out front with “You’re a crawling piece of shit but Jesus loves you anyway” signs, while people dressed as the entire cast of Supernatural shuffle past them. Especially not the events you can’t get into without coming down with a virus by camping out on the sidewalk all night.

7. The virus you get from camping out on the sidewalk all night is very effective in dealing with getting poked in the chest by assholes wearing Wolverine claws.

8. The Eisner Awards are not, in fact, “the Oscars of the comic book industry.” The Oscars are smart enough to video, in a separate, earlier ceremony – and play back at the main event only in judiciously-edited clips – the awards for Best Translation of A Graphic Novel You Will Never Read About A Subject You Don’t Understand Originally Published In a Language You’ve Never Heard Of Before.

9. In the convention center there is one Starbucks concession for every 10 guests, and by Sunday at noon every Grande Hazelnut Frappuccino® is being spiked by 150-proof Captain Morgan’s, and you are wondering how you can find an asshole wearing Wolverine claws so you can hire him to stab you in the chest.

Please Note: The above are Just Jokes. I actually enjoyed the convention (as a guest) enormously, and the staff is terrific. Still the best show in the business, serious about comics amid all the Hideous Hollywood Hype, and everyone – guests and paid members alike – are treated well. My thanks to all the folk at SDCC for a memorably fun weekend!

FRIDAY: Martha Thomases

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman

Dennis O’Neil: Being “There”

oneil-art-130725-7613148Did you see me there?

Where’s there? Oh, come on…The San Diego Comic-Con! Where else? And, as I type this on Monday evening, are you perhaps just getting home. Are you frazzled? Exhausted? And are you happy? Was the adventure all you’d hoped it might be? Do you have, encased in plastic and two slabs of thick cardboard and tucked into your carry-on, that one special issue, the one you’ve sought for years. the one whose absence has left as yawning crater in the middle of your collection – finally, triumphantly yours? Have you met the person of your dreams, wearing, perhaps, an X-Men costume? Or had your picture taken with the celebrity who occupies a god niche in your psyche? (Okay, it cost you what you pay for a week’s groceries, but some treasures are beyond price.)

Hooray. That’s all well and good. But now the important question: Did you see me there?

If you did, I must have had some Dr. Strangey astral projection mojo working, because I haven’t been anywhere near Southern California this year. (Denver is as close as I got.) So – either I astrally projected (while napping?) or you saw some other septuagenarian chrome dome. I didn’t do any disembodied jaunting last week but…I did do something similar.

The late Arthur C. Clarke once said that any sufficiently advanced technology would appear to be magic to primitive people. (Let’s assume that “primitive” is relative.) Well, abra my cadabra, because while sitting upstairs in the dining room I spoke to a group of people in Lima, Peru – gave a talk and then answered questions. Mr. O the bilocated – at once in New York and Peru! Be in awe, you primitives!

The magic was, of course, technology, and not cutting edge technology, either. (Though, come to think of it, maybe this story would be better if it were.) What we were using, the attendees of the Lima Book Fair and I, was Skype, which is surely old news to many of you. Too me – not so old. I’d used it once before, to record something for use on YouTube, but I had the advantage of a tech savvy offspring at my elbow on that occasion. This time, Marifran and I were pretty much on our own, though we did have help from Eduardo, an affable cyberwizard from – where else? – Peru. I won’t say that all proceeded glitchlessly. (Does Dr. Strange ever suffer interference from, say, a snotty kid riding a Hogwarts broomstick?) But the glitches were minor and the event, I’ve been assured, was a success.

And just recently, a book I wrote about a dozen years ago became available as an e-book. So I guess I’m being dragged into the twenty first century, That, or I’ve taken up residence where eldritch forces are manifest. Either way, as the great prophet Bobby told us, the times they are a’changin’, and, there being nothing to do about it, let’s enjoy the ride.

Did you see me at the Con? Are you sure?

THURSDAY AFTERNOON: Martin Pasko and the Big Show

FRIDAY MORNING: Martha Thomases and Sexy Kitties

 

 

 

Martha Thomases on the Zen of Con

thomases-art-130719-7865912You are at the San Diego Comic-Con, the biggest pop-culture event on the planet. And you may feel a little over-whelmed. So many people. So much to see, so much sound and color. So many nay-sayers, such as myself a week ago.

What should you do?

Let me help. I am going to tell you how to have the best time possible.

It’s not a matter of rules (wear comfortable shoes) or tricks (there is a secret passageway between the Hyatt bar and Hall H, known only to the local Masons). It’s a matter of attitude.

Surrender.

You’ve been planning since you got the programming schedule, and you have your weekend planned out like a military assault.

Give it up.

Well, don’t give it up. Just be prepared for things to go wrong.

The best con experiences I’ve had have been great precisely because I could not have planned them. Perhaps I got locked out of a panel I really wanted to see because of an ever crowded floor slowing my progress, but on the way back, I saw a cosplay staging of all the crews of the various Star Trek series.

Or the people I’ve met, standing in line for signings.

Or the great Italian restaurant you got to through a grocery store, where I took out 15 people for not much more than $200, including drinks. Never been able to find it again. I think it’s like Brigadoon.

You are in one of our nation’s most beautiful cities, on the water, with hundreds of thousands of people who share your interests. Don’t get so caught up I what you’re going to do next that you don’t notice what you’re doing now.

Breathe out. Breathe in.

My point is, if your happiness depends on successfully completing your plans, you will fail. If you have goals, but keep yourself open to possibility, you will have stories to tell.

Stories. Ultimately, that’s what the San Diego Comic-Con is all about.

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman

SUNDAY: John Ostrander

 

Dennis O’Neil: The Obese Lone Ranger

oneil-art-130711-6274068I’m hungry. Gimme a plate. No, a bigger one. Bigger. Bigger! Big as a house, a stadium. Now, lemme eat. Eggs and cheese and pork chops and ice cream and popsicles and pickles and brownies and doughnuts and cake and candy and pies and french fries and hot dogs and hamburgers and cinnamon rolls and marshmallows jelly beans and and and…whatever else you got. Gimme!

urp

…don’t feel so good…

And there he goes galloping off into financial ignominy. We, of course, refer to The Lone Ranger and our first paragraph was what we English majors call a “metaphor” – a very bloated metaphor – for what we think is mainly wrong with the much maligned entertainment of the same name.

It got greedy. It wanted too much.

It wanted to be an action blockbuster and a cowboy picture and a kiddie picture and a comedy and a tale of mythic heroism and a satire and, by making the title character a well-meaning doofus with a cruel streak and his Comanche sidekick the real hero, it wanted to acknowledge the shabby treatment Native Americans have often gotten from our popular culture. Go ahead – try to get all that into one movie, even a long one,

Pertinent digression: Back in the sixties, I read work by a journalist named Gene Marine who used the term “engineering mentality,” by which he meant the conviction that if we can build something, we should build it and piffle on the consequences. So we can put up this dam and let’s not bother ourselves with the fact that there may be other, cheaper ways to accomplish whatever this dam is supposed to accomplish without disrupting the environment for miles in every direction. Give a fella a huge budget and by golly he’ll do something with it.

The Lone Ranger had a huge budget.

It might have benefitted from a smaller one. With less money to spend, the film makers might have been forced to decide on exactly which movie they wanted to make and focused plot and action accordingly. Less might have been more.

urp

A final item for all you conspiracy mavens out there: in the embryonic continuity that The Lone Ranger’s creators were devising way back in the 1930s and 40s, probably with no idea that they were doing so, the Lone Ranger had a descendant, Britt Reid, who rode a big car (instead of a big horse) and had an Asian sidekick (instead of Comanche sidekick) and wore a mask and, yes, fought crime. Now: a couple of years ago there was a Green Hornet movie in which the white dude is the klutz and his non-white partner is the real ass-kicker.

One of the Hornet movie’s production team said there wouldn’t be a sequel because of a disappointing ticket sales and the news media are full of the woeful information that The Lone Ranger bombed big time at the box office. Coincidence? You decide.

And one other thing: urp

THURSDAY AFTERNOON: Martin Pasko

FRIDAY MORNING: Martha Thomases

 

John Ostrander’s Got Nothin’

This is what a deadline looks like on writer’s block.

ostrander-art-130630-7376995

Nothin’. I got nothin’. Lots of stuff has happened this week, lots of stuff happened in the pop arts, there are sure to be lots of topics from which to choose, something must interest me enough to blather about for the length of a column aaaaaaand

. . .nope. Brain’s not interested in any of them.

I finally went to see Man of Steel. There’s sure to be a column in that. What I thought of it, good bad or indifferent. Except that everyone has commented on it. Martha Thomases has commented twice and done it well both times. I’ve been lapped in Superman commentary by Martha Thomases. The film dropped 60% in attendees between the first and second weekends. Everyone who wants to see it already has and have their own opinions. A review on Man of Steel at this point is lame. Superman is dead. Even my brain doesn’t want to go there.

I got nothin’.

Hey, I’m a professional writer. I’ve encountered brain freeze and deadlines before. I know tricks and ways around writer’s block. One is to stop staring at the blank screen and go do something else.

Okay. Did something else. Aaaaaand. . .more nothing.

Distract yourself, John. Go on Facebook. Read what other people are saying, doing with their lives. Share funny things on your wall. Go do that.

Did that. FB bores me. It’s fifteen minutes later and I still have plenty of nothin’. And I’m slipping past deadline now.

I’m tired. That’s what it is. Go take a nap. That’ll do it.

No, it didn’t. A half hour shot and . . .

AAAAARGH! I can’t write I never could write why did I decide to be a writer?! The screen is still blank. Hungry. Demanding. Intimidating. Whatever made me think I could be a writer?

Oh, that’s right. Mike Gold offered me money. Curse you, money, you evil temptress! Why couldn’t I have remained as I was – an unemployed professional actor working part-time straight jobs to cover the rent? I was happier then.

No, I wasn’t. I’ve obviously gone around the bend. I’m hallucinating about the “good ol’ days” that were never really that good.

I’ll distract myself. Go play with the cats. Here, kitty kitty kitty.

Two minutes later. They’re bored and abandon me to my deadlines. Wretched felines. Can cats smell loser on you?

Play a game online. I often do that to cleanse my mental palate, get my concentration up and the brain cells energized. At least, that’s always been my justification. Yeah, that’s the ticket. Go play a game.

Did that, just came back,  and. . .I got nothin’. It’s just later in the day.

I went and washed dishes. That’s how desperate I am. It might work. Put my mind in zen mode and something will come out.

It didn’t work.

Stupid Computer! You know how I write! Why can’t I bring up an app or something and you write my column?!

Wait. There’s an idea. When musicians reach a certain age and don’t have anything new to do, they put out a Greatest Hits collection. Maybe I could do that. Just go back over some of my past columns and pull out random lines and string them together and see what happens.

Godfather II deepened and expanded on the first film; Godfather III – not so much. Any list of faves, yours, mine, or the guy down the street, says something about us. What I want is something new. As I said, Pamela Lee Anderson starred in the movie and I lingered, waiting to see if she would take off her clothes which is the main reason for any guy to watch a Pamela Lee Anderson movie. Mitt Romney wants to deep fry Big Bird.

Okay, that’s not going to work, either. Maybe interesting as a paragraph but a whole column of that? I don’t think so.

Maaaaybe I could write a column on what it’s like having to write a column when you have writer’s block and the deadline is upon you.

I wonder if I could get away with that?

Hurm.

MONDAY MORNING: Mindy Newell

TUESDAY MORNING: Emily S. Whitten

 

Dennis O’Neil: Superman and Me

oneil-art-130613-7824670Look, up in the sky…It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s…

…a whole lot of really, really numerous photons striking a large, white rectangle.

Or: it’s remembered images and sounds careening around the inside of my skull because, pay attention now, Superman and I go back a long way.

He’s one of the first fictional people I can recall meeting, though whether our first encounter was in one of the comic books Dad bought me after Sunday Mass or as voices emanating from Mom’s kitchen radio…the details of Supes’ and my initial acquaintance I do not remember, and who cares?

I next saw Supes on a movie screen, perhaps smaller and shabbier than the one mentioned in the second paragraph above, but serving pretty much the same purpose and.. Was I outraged? Disillusioned? Shattered? Or mad?

The problem was the flying. The grade-school me was anticipating watching the Man of Steel leave the ground and zip around he sky because… well, that would be an exciting thing to see. Then – the big disappointment. First the Easter Bunny, then Santa Claus, and now…What kind of bushwa was this? Superman goes behind a rock or something and then he flies up, up. and away. Only it wasn’t him flying. No, even to a kid it was obviously some kind of drawing, like the animated cartoons that often appeared before the cowboy pictures Iliked. Movie magic? Or a dirty stinky cheat?

But I wasn’t done with Superman, nor he with me. I won a story-writing contest that was fostered by the Superman-Tim club. Club membership, which cost Mom a dime, consisted of a card, a Superman pin and a monthly magazine that featured contests and jokes and puzzles and stuff. I don’t know how many contestants won prizes – maybe everyone who entered. And the prize wasn’t great: some kind of cheesy board game with cardboard cutouts that got moved. But hey – I’d gotten rewarded for writing a story! Wonder where that might lead!

Next came the Superman television show shown in St. Louis on Sunday morning well after Dad and I returned from church. Not bad. Okay way to kill a little time before the Sunday pot roast.

Then a long hiatus. Bye for now, Superman. Was it to be bye forever?

No. Years later, by then a freelance comic book scripter living in Manhattan, an editor named Julius Schwartz asked me if I’d like to have a go at Superman. I had some misgivings. Superman was… too establishment for me. Too goody-two-shoes. And too powerful. Melodrama turns on conflict. So how do you create conflict for a dude who could tuck all the gods of Olympus into an armpit, his suit apparently lacking pockets, and still have room there for the gods of Egypt and a few sticks of deodorant? Could I do that every month? I had some doubts. But I was a professional with mouths to feed and so I took the gig. Julie agreed to let me dial down the superpowers thing and let me make another change or two and off I went. For a year. I walked away from Superman and I’m not sure why. Just because I wasn’t enjoying it much? A lot of freelancers might consider that a pretty lame reason for dumping a paying gig and I’m not sure I’d disagree with them. But dump it I did and once again, sayonara Superman.

But never say never. I’m going to the movies, probably this weekend.

FRIDAY: Martha Thomases

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman

 

Dennis O’Neil: Zen Denver

oneil-art-130606-4961389Yesterday, just outside Denver, I went through an area I must have gone through long ago. My friend and I were a couple of footloose ramblers with no money in an interstice of time between being in thrall to one authoritarian institution, a Catholic university, and another, the United States Navy. (You wanna salute? Go ahead – salute!) We were hitchhiking back from San Francisco because…well, hey, it was good enough for Jack Kerouac and besides, if you’re not going to do stupid and dangerous things when you’re young, when you gonna do them?

(Parenthetical digression: Hitchhiking was stupid and dangerous back in 1961 and it’s way, way more stupid and dangerous now, and if our luck had veered a bit we could have suffered dreadfully. So don’t do it.)

Where was I? Oh yeah, in Colorado getting busted by a state cop.

But, as it happened, the cop was from Missouri as were we, and so, instead of depositing us in the slammer, he flagged down a Greyhound bus and asked the driver to haul us east. The rest of the adventure went well.

As I looked outside the car window yesterday, nothing seemed familiar except those magnificent mountains in the distance. But why would it? A half century-plus had passed and Colorado, along with everything else, had changed and my memory probably wasn’t reliable when I was 22 and is absolutely not reliable now. (Reality may or may not not be malleable, but the truth? That’s generally open to interpretation.)

We were coming from the Denver Comic Con and a pleasant weekend. We were expecting the show to pull in…I don’t know… a couple-three thousand fans? But there was the energy of over 50,000 attendees percolating through the Colorado Convention Center. Plus a lot of comics guys and a whole lot of dealers. And a full complement of celebrities. This was only the second year the con was held. In its infancy and already a monster.

There was a lot to like, but what most pleased us, both at the con and the Hyatt across the street, where we stayed, was the pervasive atmosphere of courtesy. Everyone was extremely polite and extremely nice. Many of the fans who came for autographs thanked me warmly for, let’s face it, not doing much more than signing my name, a trick most third graders have mastered. They also thanked us for coming to Denver – not necessary, because Denver itself had already taken care of that.

In the airport, I was astonished and delighted to see, in large, bas relief lettering, this quotation from Zen master Thich Naht Hanh: I have arrived. I am home. My destination is in each step. Appropriate, but not what you’d expect in a thriving center of commercial journeying.

Then we went over, and past, the geography I’d traveled long ago and when we arrived at our house everything was in good order. Life can be okay. Just remember that the step you’re taking is your destination.

RECOMMENDED READING: Google something like Thich Naht Hanh quotes. Read a few, or a few dozen. Then you might want to try one of his many books.

FRIDAY: Martha Thomases

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman

 

Dennis O’Neil: Iron Man Grows Up

oneil-art-130516-2774612I think I know what I liked about Tony Stark when I first encountered him back in Cape Girardeau. I was a cheap-seats journalist who was just rediscovering comic books after forgetting about them for more than a decade, spinning the rack at the drug store, scanning the displays in the bus terminal, killing time in a strange town by reading these relics of my childhood. And liking them.

I particularly enjoyed some of the mags that bore the Marvel Comics logo, and among these, staple-to-staple with Spider-Man, The Hulk, The Avengers – the beginnings of Marvel pantheon – was Tales of Suspense, a title that delivered two stories, two heroes. These were Captain America, a super-patriot I dimly remember enjoying when I was six or seven, and a new guy, Iron Man. His other name was Tony Stark.

There was a lot not to like about ol’ shellhead, as he was sometimes called. Let me count the ways… He was an arms dealer and, to a peacenik like I was, arms dealers belonged somewhere deep in hell. He was a capitalist. (Okay, nowhere near as bad as being an arms dealer, but I did not count the Rockefellers among my role models.) He was a technologist and, like a lot of hippie-types, I did not trust technology. (There is evidence that technology has been exacting revenge ever since. Note to technology: I was wrong, okay?) And finally: it was suggested, though maybe not much shown, that our Tony was both a conspicuous consumer and a womanizer. Two more nixes.

A lot not to like.

But he got his powers from a device he invented to deal with a heart damaged by shrapnel. For some reason, that appealed to me. I’m pretty sure that I’d never read the story of the centaur Chiron – Catholic schools in the 50s were not big on “pagan” mythology – and so I didn’t know the tale of the half-man/half-beast who was wounded by a venom-tipped arrow and could never be healed. Chiron was a great teacher but what qualifies him as a possible predecessor of Iron Man is that he later gave up his life to redeem Prometheus and that gives him hero cred. (The other side of the story is that Chiron, being immortal, was doomed to countless eons of agony because of that damned wound and he could have seen the Prometheus situation as a quickhop off the struggle bus. But he never really existed, so mind.) Anyway: even with twisting and tugging of the myth, it’s hard to make a case for a direct connection between Tony and Chiron, and yet Chiron was the closest analogy to Iron Man I could find. Why bother? Because maybe by rummaging around in antiquity, I’ll be able to figure out why I responded favorably to an tin-plated lounge lizard.

Later, Tony redeemed himself and became a good guy I could like without those nagging reservations. But those first meetings…Well, I liked womanizing assassin James Bond, too. Still do.

FRIDAY: Martha Thomases

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman

 

Dennis O’Neil: Much Ado About Iron Man

Iron-Man-II-Tony-StarkMaybe you’ve been on a vision quest in the Himalayas, or maybe you’ve just been in a coma, so I’ll try too negotiate the next few hundred words without dropping any spoilers. The subject is the movie that looks like it will be the summer’s monster, Iron Man 3, and by now, most of you have seen it, or are planning to see it, or have at least read reviews. As a lowly scribe who once wrote the Iron Man comic book – yes, kids, it was a comic book first – I might be expected to have an opinion about it and I do. But I did promise no spoilers and to state what I liked about it would probably constitute a spoiler…

What’s a fellow to do?

Go at the problem from another angle? Okay: What I did not like about the movie was all the kabooms. Lots and lots of fireworks. Big explosions. Then more big explosions. Hey, no elitism here: I understand the entertainment value of pyrotechnics and to complain about explosions in a film designed to be a summer blockbuster is kind of like attending the opera and bitching about all the screechy singing. But maybe a little moderation? I wearied of all the noise and shrapnel and flame coming at my 3D glasses. Enough was enough. Less might have been more. Anything stuffed down your throat will eventually make you gag.

There you have my major kvetch: the explosions.

I guess I could complain that the villain’s motivations could have been more thoroughly explained, but you might not agree. And if we got rid of a few explosions, the movie would have been been a tad shorter and that might have benefitted it. But none of this constitutes major inadequacy. You pay for your ticket and you get what you paid for, that special kind of summer respite that only happens in cool theaters on hot days. It has been significant pleasure in my life for some 40 years and it still is. (You think I’m not going to see The Man of Steel and The Wolverine and even The Lone Ranger when they grace the multiplex in a month or two? Ha!)

But superhero movies are maturing, as did westerns and badge operas and science fiction before them. While still delivering the spectacle and fantastic heroics that characterize the genre, they’re being put to other uses, too. They’re telling the kind of stories that help us define ourselves, which is something stories have always done. First, there was The Batman trilogy, which was, beneath all the swashbuckling, a tale of redemption.  Now, we have the Iron Man movies, which, if you squint a little, also constitute a trilogy and use the character of Tony Stark to…

Whoa! I promised no spoilers. So, if you haven’t already seen it, watch for the scene in which Tony mentions a cocoon and the shot of Tony standing on a cliff. They’ll tell you what I think the movie is really about.

FRIDAY: Martha Thomases

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman

 

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