Tagged: Mike Gold

Sunday go-to-reading day

  • News
  • April 29, 2007

Where has the week gone?  We’re still not recovered from the last few 9to5’s of our day job, so it’s a good thing we have Sunday to peruse all the regular ComicMix columns from this past week:

Okay, we confess, we actually read all of those already.  We even wrote one.  But listening time has been nonexistent, so today’s activity will definitely consist of getting up to speed with Mellifluous Mike Raub‘s last three podcasts:

Now that I’ve switched back to first-person singular and taken care of the review of and visuals from yesterday’s Kids’ Comic Con (see below), I’ll be awaiting the Pittsburgh news from the rest of the crew whilst I spend the rest of the day catching you up on all the items I haven’t had time to write for the past few days…

Down to Earth catch-up

  • News
  • April 22, 2007

Happy Earth Day!  Hope you’re all recycling your comics at your nearest libraries, hospitals, etc.  And speaking of recycling, here are our regular columns from this past week:

I’m going to listen to Mellifluous Mike Raub‘s latest podcasts at my Mom’s house here in the wilds of the Jersey shore area:

Mom may be reading the Sunday paper today but I’ll take Earth-friendly pixels any time; save me them trees!

Sunday reading catch-up

  • News
  • April 15, 2007

You know you’re a geek when you go away-from-keyboard to spend the day with your cousins at a nifty local mall and your first thought upon seeing a Lego keychain display is, "Ooh, Batman and Robin and the Joker, this would make a cute photo for ComicMix!"

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And so it goes (apologies, etc. etc.).  Now for your weekly all-in-one post of our regular columns from this past week:

As for me, I’m going to catch up on Mellifluous Mike Raub‘s latest podcasts:

I’ll also be reading comics.  Have I mentioned today’s a good day to read comics?  Heck, what day isn’t?

ELAYNE RIGGS: Polly wanna press release!

  • News
  • April 11, 2007

elayne200-2304378When I was first offered the position as ComicMix‘s news editor, Mike Gold outlined his vision for how I was to treat press releases. Rather than parroting verbatim everything I read or was sent, I should first determine the release’s newsworthiness, then I should rewrite everything that I felt merited ComicMix‘s attention in my own words wherever possible.

I could not have been more delighted.

I think you readers probably sense how rare this is, particularly in today’s media-saturated and propaganda-laden world. To be fair, the notion of a supposedly free press on bended knee before the people and stories it covers has been spoken of in the U.S. since at least the Reagan era if not before, but the lapdog evolution seems to have accelerated exponentially under the current administration. So, now more than ever, it behooves journalists to try to shoot down that sorry legacy wherever possible.

But hey, this isn’t world-shaking events, it’s pop culture. What’s the big deal?

The big deal for me has to do with the constant conflation of providing actual news with filling the need for websites to have new content on a daily, even hourly basis for fear of losing eyeballs and facing a corresponding drop in ad revenue. And that’s a by-product of, and to be expected in, our hyper-capitalist society. But that’s presumably where the difference between quality and quantity comes to the fore.

At this point I feel I should step back and assure you that I believe press releases have their place, and I don’t blame other pop culture news sites — many of which are run by personal friends — for repeating them verbatim. That’s one reason I don’t feel the need to; so many others have already done that job. I don’t consider my standards to be necessarily higher, just different. This could be due to my ready admission that I’m an opinion writer rather than a trained journalist. (No, not all bloggers are automatically journalists, although there are any number of writers out there who are good at both.) So perhaps I approach press releases differently than someone with more journalistic experience.

For instance, when I read a press release from a big comics company whose entire point is that such-and-such a book has sold out its print run, the first question I ask myself is “What was the print run? How many actually sold?” After all, this information is readily available after the fact from a number of sources (ICV2 comes to mind), so it shouldn’t be any sort of secret. Yet of all the press releases I’ve read in the two months I’ve been at this ComicMix gig, only one has given an approximate number for the press run which sold out, and that was the item I ran because that was actual news. (more…)

Our week in review

  • News
  • April 8, 2007

This is the week ComicMix went interactive, adding our comments feature and Active Conversation/Latest Comments windows at the right.  Rest assured there’s much more to come, but in the meantime here’s your weekly catch-up on our regular columns:

And I think it’s high time I got caught up myself on Mellifluous Mike Raub‘s latest podcasts:

Listen to ’em as you work on your taxes; that’ll take the edge off!

(more…)

What you may have missed

  • News
  • April 2, 2007

I’m back, and on a personal note I would like to thank everyone for their very kind wishes and condolences on the death of my father, more about which on Wednesday if I can manage to make Dad the focus of my next column. 

In the meantime, things here seem a bit — different, don’t they? So let’s get caught up first before we jump into the newer stuff.  Here’s your one-click guide to the regular columns and podcasts from the past two weeks.  First the columns:

Flip through our pages for the past couple weeks to check out contributions from Martha, Robert, Kai, Matt and others in our extended ComicMix family!  And I hope that you’re as eager as I am to catch up on all our podcasts as Mellifluous Mike Raub marches on:

There you go, lots of reading and listening — and all fodder for much commentary from you, we hope!  Feel free to let fly in our brand-new comments section below, coming shortly!

MIKE GOLD: You say you want an evolution…

  • News
  • April 2, 2007

wonder-woman-6594318I like Martha Thomases’ idea of 365, as reported on ComicMix yesterday. A full-length comic book story each and every day for a year. Now that would be an event.

Sadly, most such comic book events aren’t worth the effort, let alone the price. The stories are overblown, their effects on their “universe” temporary – either in the sense that they will be countermanded or, at best, castrated in the next such event.

(Hmmm. There’s a phrase I’ve never written before. “At best, castrated.”)

By the time they’re over, most events turn out to be nothing more than marketing gimmicks, and an endless sea of marketing gimmicks doth not a universe make. As of this writing Captain America is dead but Bucky is alive – something he’d managed to avoid for over 40 years. As Denny O’Neil pointed out in his recent ComicMix column, death has no permanence in comics. As a plot point, it is hackneyed: it may have collectibility, but it has no credibility.

Wonder Woman has been redefined, resurrected, rebooted, and retold differently so many times since 1965 (arguably her first real reboot) that I’m surprised she doesn’t bump into Tony Soprano at her shrink’s office.

Of the two major universes, Marvel’s is the most consistent – but only by comparison to DC, whose universe had to be cobbled together retroactively by combining the efforts of five publishing houses over 70 years: DC, All-American, Quality, Fawcett and Charlton – and maybe Fox, depending how you, ahhh, look at Phantom Lady. But by and large, in the past couple decades Marvel’s change has been evolutionary and not stop-and-start-over. Spider-Man went step by step from being a four-eyed high school wallflower with a secret identity to becoming a publicly known married-to-an-actress superhero and, oh yeah, menace to his nation. Marvel never stopped and said “Oh, now everything you know is wrong; this is the way it is and the way it will be until we need to burrow into your pockets again.”

(more…)

MIKE GOLD: The secret Luddite?

  • News
  • March 26, 2007

mikegold100-6701130Yesterday, I turned on my cell phone for the first time in about two weeks. I was at I-Con in Long Island New York and was waiting to meet up with some friends. I only turn on my cell when I’m out of town or at a convention, and the fact that I didn’t have to have it on in two weeks had made me happy.

First among my 19 voicemails was a message from Harlan Ellison, admonishing me for misspelling Edgar Allan Poe’s name in a ComicMix news story back when. He’s right, and I should have caught it. I’ve been a fan of Poe’s longer than anybody except maybe Jack Kirby. The problem is, when I’m under deadline pressure (and with the Internet that’s 24/7) I over rely upon my spellchecker. Sadly, those suckers ignore words that are misspelled into other real words. I let it do my thinking for me; my bad.

Mr. Ellison often refers to himself as a Luddite, disparaging our computer-communications society. I sympathize. Coincidentally, the very night before my wife and I had watched the first half of a Doctor Who serial, “The Mark of the Rani”, which was set in 1811 at the birthplace of the British Luddite movement. They did a good job of disclosing the reasons behind the movement, except that I don’t think a pair of Gallefreyan Time Lords encouraged the Luddite movement.

For the history-challenged out there, the Luddites were members of a movement of English workers at the dawn of the Industrial Age who destroyed the machinery that they thought was taking their jobs. It is believed the media named the participants after Ned Lud, one of their ilk, although that might be apocryphal.

You can hardly blame them. The ruling classes always instill such fears in their workers as a means of keeping wages low and discipline high. There are always all sorts of odd ramifications to this philosophy – for example, our marijuana laws were imposed under the belief that they would deter Mexican immigration and take jobs away from the “common man.” If this sounds like our current immigration attitudes, well, that’s no coincidence. (more…)

ComicMix week five

  • News
  • March 18, 2007

Time again for your one-stop shopping roundup of this week’s regular columns and podcasts!  Here are the columns:

And here are mellifluous Mike Raub‘s podcasts:

See below for the first regular Above and Beyond column from Glenn Hauman.  And don’t forget to check with us on weekends (and occasionally even during the week) for our special Opinion pieces and feature reports!

Mike Gold: It’s about time

  • News
  • March 12, 2007

mikegold100-4129572I was listening with keen interest to Mike Raub’s interview with my old friend, DC publisher and president Paul Levitz, available on the current (#12) ComicMix Podcast. Back in the days of papyrus scrolls, Mike, Paul and I were in an a.p.a. (amateur press association; a forerunner of the Internet) called Interlac. It was great fun, and if I’m not mistaken it’s still around in the more capable hands of those who still own staplers.

Anyway, Mike asked Paul for his opinion as to the single greatest change in the comics medium in the 35 years since he ran a massively influential fanzine called The Comic Reader. Without dropping a beat, Paul talked about the acceptance of the comic art medium.

A couple hours later I found myself debating which would be the least expensive way to see the movie 300: my AARP card or the first-showing matinee. Linda and I piled into the car and drove up I-95 to watch the carnage. I’m referring to the movie, and not I-95.

Later on TiVo showed us the latest episode of Ebert and Roeper, where 300 lead the discussion. Mind you, I regretted the passing of the show’s original co-host, Gene Siskel. Unbeknownst to much of humanity, Gene was a serious fan of Roy Thomas’s Conan work and at one time had at least three complete collections. But then again, he might have reviewed the movie through the eyes of a comics’ fan. I doubt that, but roll with me for a while longer.

Roeper reviewed the movie and loved it. He commented at length about the evolution of the graphic novel-based movie without once referring to costumes and capes (oddly, 300 had both – but you get my drift) and Frank Miller’s influence on comics, film, and our culture in general. He spoke of Miller’s work the way arts critics speak of Martin Scorsese, John Lennon and Philip Roth. Not a single word was condescending. Not one.

And it’s about time. Paul’s perception is right on the money. In earlier days we would look to the movies as justification for our four-color passions, as if to say “see, somebody else is taking us seriously.” That played a big, big part in our enthusiasm for Richard Donner’s Superman – The Movie. Today, we no longer need to prove anything to anybody.

Previously, I stated in this column that respectability might be the death of us. I still feel that’s a possibility: I’d hate to see the comic art medium be taken as seriously by its fans as those many rock’n’roll enthusiasts who lost their sense of humor and perspective a long time ago.

But if respectability is the death of comics, at least we’ll get a well-written obituary.

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