Tagged: The Shadow

Primary Sources, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • March 4, 2008

bill_everett-8634197In days of yore – my yore anyway – I briefly wondered if my particular literary backwater, the writing of comic books, would be properly remembered. It seemed to me that young snots such as myself were getting attention – interviews and the like – and the guys who were around at the beginning, the guys who virtually created the form, were pretty much ignored, although many of them were still alive and frisky.

I needn’t have worried and I didn’t, which is good because, even more than most worry, this variety would have been a waste of time.

I do wish there had been more interviews with…oh, to cite the first name that pops into the shopworn old psyche, Bill Everett. And I don’t remember ever reading a Q and A with Carl Burgos: if none exists, too bad. Even Bill Finger doesn’t seem to have left many historical footprints, and some of what we know about him comes from people like me, whose memories are emphatically not to be trusted.

Having said all that: comics are undoubtedly the most documented medium/art form in history. They came to their early maturity just in time to benefit from the explosion of media and distribution, and the belated realization that every art form was pop culture once, and none are prima facie inferior. And guys like Gerry Jones know how to use the information sources available and have the patience and literary skill to put the pieces together.

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Nighty Knight Rider, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • February 19, 2008

Once again, the other day, I found myself wishing I’d spent less of my youth with, as folks might have said back then, my nose buried in some silly book and more time in the company of hammers, saws, wrenches. You know. Manly stuff. Tools. The reason was, something in the bathtub wasn’t working and we had to call the plumber, who is one of the nicest guys I know and might be the best plumber in Rockland County New York, and we had a chat while the water was running to accomplish something arcane and, well, plumberish. If I hadn’t wasted my youth, maybe I could tell you what.

 
Anyway: because he knows what I did and sometimes still do to earn money, we discussed movies and television. He’s of the opinion that nobody in the media has any new ideas.
 
I didn’t argue, and I won’t. With a few reservations, and looking at the evidence, I agree, kind of.
 
Of course, one could assert that there are no new ideas, an assertion borne out by the fact that treatise after treatise has demonstrated that there are only seven plots, or five, or eleven – some very finite number, in any case. But even given that near = truism, there doesn’t seem to be a lot that’s genuinely fresh around these days.
 
For instance: As I type this, I’m about two hours away from experiencing the latest incarnation of Knight Rider. Twenty-plus years ago, this saga of a young man and his talking car launched the career of David Hasselhoff, who later became world-famous as the tanned and buff father figure to a lot of equally tanned and buff, but younger, lifeguards. This is the latest of a seemingly endless catalogue of old films and TV shows revamped for the Twenty First Century. Some I’ve liked; the remake of the old Glenn Ford western, 3:10 to Yuma, was, by any reasonable criterion, a good movie. Others…well…
 

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Lost In ‘Lost’, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • February 15, 2008
[EDITOR’S NOTE: Denny’s column normally runs on Tuesdays, which is great because Denny e-mails it to me on Sundays. For some reason – and for the second or third time – his various e-mail accounts don’t seem to like my various e-mail accounts. We think we’ve straightened it out. Go figure. If computers were cars, we’d all be riding horses.

 

And now, Mr. O’Neil… -MG]

 

While I was sort of half-watching the two Lost specials our pals at ABC television were treating us to recently, I recalled the hot new trend of a couple of years ago. Serialized stories. Nothing resolved until late in the season. They came and they went, those shows, though there are a few survivors, of which my favorite, and apparently the favorite of millions of my fellow citizens (including you?) is the aforementioned Lost.
 
The purpose of the specials, which ran on consecutive evenings, was ostensibly to remind the Faithful of what’s been happening to those funsters on the island, and to clue in the non-Faithful, like me, people who just watch the thing for an hour’s easy amusement, as to what the hell the continuity is. (Another reason for the specials might have been the writer’s strike, now settled; clip shows like these eat up airtime at little cost and need no new material. Or am I being cynical?)
 

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Cut Them Off At The Past, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • January 15, 2008

And the Screen Writers Guild lurches into a tenth week and if there’s any end in sight, I haven’t heard about it.

Last time, I mentioned the Academy of Comic Book Arts and its failure to do any significant negotiating on behalf of its members. ACBA wasn’t the first attempt, though, to organize those glorious mavericks, the comic book community. In the 60s…

Wait! Better issue a warning before I go further. Do not regard anything that follows as gospel. (In fact, you might consider not regarding the Gospel as gospel, but let us not digress.) I have no reason not to believe what I’m about to tell you except one: About a year before he died, Arnold Drake, who was a busy comic book writer at the time we’ll be discussing, told me that the story I had wasn’t the whole story, or even necessarily accurate. I don’t know why I didn’t press him for further information, but I didn’t.

Okay, the story:

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Cartoonists Of The World Unite, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • January 8, 2008
The television and movie Writers Guild strike lurches into its ninth week. If it goes on much longer, we may be doomed to even more staged “reality” and contest shows. Might be a good time to rekindle a book reading habit.
 
I’ve heard grumbling from folk who work that side of the street to the effect that the strike could have been better managed. Although I’m technically a member of the Guild, I don’t have an opinion – about the strike, that is. Two years ago, I was told that since I hadn’t done any United States television work for a decade, I was being put on retired status, which means, I think, that I can still benefit from the Guild’s services, but I don’t have to pay dues or have my mail box filled with notices of seminars and other industry events. 
 
All fine with me.
 
About the Guild, as separate from the strike, I do have an opinion. I think the Guild is a noble organization, one that does exactly what a union should do, and no more. It collectively bargains, it protects members’ rights; it offers education and retirement benefits. And membership costs are more than reasonable. The current disagreement is over whether/how much writers should benefit from ancillary use of their stuff, mostly new media and computer related. I can imagine no sane reason why writers should not get such benefits, but I admit to bias.
 

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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…

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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..

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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.

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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.

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Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • November 6, 2007

Before we get to this week’s official topic, a continuation of our discussion of how superheroes have been evolving, I’d like to remind you all that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. I’m sure all you fans of the late 19th century biologist Ernst Haeckel – and I know you’re legion – remember that this means that the development of an organism exactly mirrors the evolutionary development of the species.

Okay, now that that’s settled…consider any given story genre the organism and storytelling as a whole the species. The first stories, maybe told around campfires, were not long on characterization. According to some anthropologists, they were basically religious, an effort to give an identity to the forces that shaped people’s lives, the forces they were already acknowledging, maybe, with rituals. Not much characterization in these yarns. They were more about what happened – some deity decides to create the world – than the nuances of the protagonists’ personalities. As storytelling evolved, from an element of religion to entertainment, the characters began to have personalities, sort of, until by the time Homer smote ‘is bloomin’ lyre the good guys and bad guys were acting for reasons peculiar to who they were. And by the time of Greek drama, which, again, was part of religious festivals, they were pretty individualized.

Shoot forward about 2,500 years…Along came comic book superheroes (as opposed to all the other kinds of superdoers, who are a bit outside our boundaries, though I’m sure they’re very nice) and…well, they weren’t quite as uncharacterized as those campfire deities. But we do find ontogeny-recapitulating phylogeny, sort of. Clark Kent was, after all, “mild mannered” and Lois Lane was ambitious, but the stories were plot driven – the stuff was more about what the heroes did rather than why they did it. (Batman comes close to being an exception; a few issues into his initial run in Detective Comics, writer Bill Finger actually motivated him. But unless there are a lot of stories I haven’t read, the emphasis on what makes Bruce Wayne tick came later.)

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