Articles by dennis-oneil
Tue Oct 28, 2008 — by Dennis O'Neil
Everything Changes, By Dennis O'Neil
The Four-Color Answer
When you realize the fact that everything changes and find your composure in it, there you find yourself in nirvana. – Shunryu Suzuki
Because I’m a sorta-kinda Buddhist (without portfolio) and, if that isn’t enough, because I’m an eager believer in evolution, I guess I can’t lament, much, that this is our last visit together. Yeah, sorry, everything does change and eventually go away, and as the Buddha taught, trying to hang on to what’s already disintegrating is a swell way to make yourself miserable.
Had this weekly enterprise continued, we might have discussed how, since modern political campaigns are about touting narratives without regard to whether or not the narratives are true, maybe storytelling is no longer useful to survival; or, with a nod to Ken Wilber, how people get stuck at certain levels of development and how this is pertinent to comics fandom; or why fundamentalism, whether political or religious, always seems allied to violence.
Maybe another time, another place. Or maybe not. (That old man is me, looking for my damn composure, and that lousy nirvana has to be here someplace...)
Final verdict: No regrets. It’s been a pleasurable two years spent in good company and I’m grateful to ComicMix for giving me an opportunity to touch, and be touched by, a world that once meant so much to me.
RECOMMENDED READING: I hereby break one of my own rules – if not now, when? – and recommend two works that I haven’t quite finished reading yet. But I’m close to their ends and feel confident calling them to your attention.
And a final recommendation, not of a book or article but a course: Big History, taught by Professor David Christian and available from The Teaching Company.
Tue Oct 21, 2008 — by Dennis O'Neil
Moustache Wax, by Dennis O'Neil
The Four-Color Answer
My brother had a Sportsman McCain sticker on his car, but I wasn’t worried. The night before, a nice young man in a bookstore, a complete stranger, gave me a big peace button and with that pinned to my vest, I was pretty sure I was safe from the McCain vibes, even though we were in a red state.
I watched Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live a few hours later, and although I thought she handled the comedy okay, and my dirty old man merit badge glowed just a tiny bit, I was and am not tempted to vote for her, no siree, and so I guess the peace button was potent even indoors.
Who might that nice young man have been? Merlin? Galahad? The ghost of Thomas Jefferson? Or, given that I was in St. Louis, land of the mighty arch and my childhood, the ghost of my own naïve, youthful dreams?
Ah well. No matter. What’s important is that the peace button/amulet did its stuff.
As a shield against the dark enchantments of McCain and Palin, it did its stuff. In other areas…not so good. At this moment, our luggage is somewhere between White Plains Airport and Dulles, or between Dulles and Lambert Field, or in a terminal or storage facility in one of those three terminals. This provides me with an absolutely unnecessary reminder of one of several reasons why I hate commercial flying. Or – could it be? – our bags are in a sub-basement of the Republican National Headquarters where Palin herself is squirting my moustache wax from the little tube, seeking the secret of how I resisted her SNL appearance. (Rest easy: she won’t find it. The peace button was in my carryon.)
And what, the inquisitive among you might be asking, has any of this to do with comics, popular culture, or even real politics, for it seems to be less concerned with any of those things than an Andy Rooney kvetch about how expensive goods are nowadays has to do with the Gross National Product. Fair question. Answer? Let me see…Okay, try this.
Tue Oct 14, 2008 — by Dennis O'Neil
Superheroes Come Home, by Dennis O'Neil
The Four-Color Answer
I guess we’ll have to get our superhero fixes from comic books for a while, though I’m not complaining, because isn’t that the way it’s supposed to be? My glances through the various newspapers and magazines that come to this house tell me that there are no superhero movies coming to a theater near me, and the closest thing to a new superhero on television is those can-do wheels on Knight Rider, whose ancestor is the Batman utility belt of the middle-period comics and the early Green Arrow quiver; whatever the situation calls for…well, here it is – just the thing. Some of last season’s superdoers are back, and some of them will be on our living room screen, though the plot(s) of one seem to be unfocused and the future of another, The Sarah Conner Chronicles, seems to be iffy, which saddens me because one of the stars makes my dirty old man merit badge pulsate.
Superheroes and summertime seem to be yoked. As usual, commerce rather than aesthetics seem to be the reason. Until recently, and maybe even now, publishers felt that their comic book audience – kids – had more disposable income and more leisure during the hot months and so they saved their annuals and double-sized issues and important stories – Reed and Sue get married! – for the time when the young’uns lucky or unlucky enough not to have jobs didn’t recite the pledge of allegiance every morning.
(Ah, I can remember – or almost remember – the feel of the cool concrete of a front porch under my prone body as I looked at the funny book and wondered why his shirt was red if his name was Green Lantern and couldn’t his cape at least be green? Was there an editor in the making here?)
Tue Oct 7, 2008 — by Dennis O'Neil
Smoke Gets In Your Brain, by Dennis O'Neil
The Four-Color Answer
Smoke, smoke, smoke that cigarette / Puff, puff, puff until you smoke yourself to death. / Tell St. Peter at the Golden Gate / That you hate to make him wait, / but you just gotta have another cigarette. – Merle Travis
I was getting ready to leave the office and walk over to NBC, where I planned to tape a reply to someone who had accused Batman of being in league with the Big Tobacco. It seems that in one panel Batman is standing on a roof, and in the background, on another roof, there was a billboard with a fragment of what might have been a cigarette ad visible. Our accuser said that putting Batman proximate to a cigarette image amounted to Batman – and his creators – endorsing tobacco products and advocating their use to children.
Well, no. Had I kept my rendezvous with the microphones and cameras, I would have probably observed that we agreed that smoking was bad and none of our characters ever actually smoked – Bruce Wayne abandoned his pipe early in his career – and, in fact, we had just done a pro bono anti-smoking ad for the American Heart Association. I might have taken my screed just a bit further and argued that we had always presented Batman’s turf as a realistic American city and – sorry! – urban areas are full of cigarette ads.
I didn’t have to do any of that. At the last moment, cooler heads prevailed and said that if I went on the air, our accuser would answer my answer and prolong the story’s life, whereas if we simply ignored it, the story would not survive into the next news cycle, which is exactly what happened.
One might ask why I allowed the billboard to appear in the first place. For the sake of realism? Or did I just miss it when I edited the artwork? Or did I see it and decide it wasn’t worth the hassle of a change? Humbling answer to all of the above: I don’t remember.
But this pretty inconsequential incident does raise another question: Where do the obligations of good citizenship and moral behavior end and the obligations to storytelling begin? Some kinds of people smoke and drink and take drugs and they’re not all hideous monsters, and some kids are influenced by what they experience through the media. I’ve heard recovering alcoholics say that the movie images of glamorous, witty sophisticates swilling booze prompted them to emulate the swillers and led, eventually, to badly damaged lives. But people do drink, and in a fictional world that mirrors the real one, shouldn’t drinkers – and smokers and druggies – be presented? Or does the potential harm of these behaviors outweigh aesthetic and narrative considerations?
Sometimes, the coexistence of storytelling and responsible citizenship is painfully troubled, and sometimes I’m glad I no longer sit in an editor’s chair.
RECOMMENDED READING: The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World, By Matthew Stewart.
Dennis O'Neil is an award-winning editor and writer of Batman, The Question, Iron Man, Green Lantern, Green Arrow, and The Shadow– among others – as well as many novels, stories and articles. The Question: Epitaph For A Hero, reprinting the third six issues of his classic series with artists Denys Cowan and Rick Magyar, will be on sale any minute now, and his novelization of the movie The Dark Knight is on sale right now. He’ll be taking another shot at the ol’ Bat in an upcoming story-arc, too.
Artwork by Kim Roberson, from Underworld.
Tue Sep 30, 2008 — by Dennis O'Neil
Dr. Phil and Me, by Dennis O'Neil
The Four-Color Answer
After two 30 minute office visits and a little homework, we listened to the therapist tell us, matter-of-factly and unequivocally, that our relationship was somewhere south of hopeless, we had nothing for each other, the sooner we went back to being merely colleagues, the better for all concerned. I wasn’t surprised, and I don’t think she was either. But I guess I didn’t expect the final pronouncement to come so quickly and definitively.
The therapist was the late Dr. Albert Ellis, developer of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, and boy! he didn’t believe in mincing words, nor, I’d say, in ignoring he obvious. I remembered him and this pretty inconsequential bit of autobiography when I was paging through a Book of the Month Club mailing the other day and found that BOMC was offering Real Life, by the gent who bylines himself Dr. Phil McGraw.
Soon after I stopped spending my weekdays in a Manhattan office building and became a lazy slug who could, and sometimes did, watch television at three in the afternoon, I sampled Dr. Phil’s daily offering on Channel 2 and was mildly impressed. Like Ellis, he seemed to be interested in solutions, said what he meant. And although “common sense” is overrated – common sense tells us that the world is flat – it does have its uses and Dr. Phil seemed to be using it well. The approaches of both McGraw, as exhibited in those early broadcasts, and Ellis remind me of Morita therapy, a Japanese treatment championed in this country by David Reynolds. Morita therapy says – my interpretation – that, look, we could talk for years and maybe never find out what damaged you, or when, and if we did, we might not be able to do a repair job. But we can deal with the ways the damage is making your life unmanageable, so let’s do that.
Tue Sep 23, 2008 — by Dennis O'Neil
Power, by Dennis O'Neil
The Four-Color Answer
For a while now, I’ve been thinking that maybe Jonathan Lethem is the best writer of his generation. What prevents me from just coming out with it… Dammit, Lethem is the king! – is that I haven’t read many other writers of Lethem’s (and my son’s) generation. Maybe the Elvis Presley of prosemeisters is lurking out there someplace, with a birthday that puts him somewhere between 40 and 50, and I just haven’t heard of him. So let me be content with stating the obvious, that Lethem does his job well.
He writes novels and essays and, lately, comic books. But what I want to call your attention to and, incidentally, dub this week’s Recommended Reading, is his op-ed piece in last Sunday’s New York Times. It discusses the latest Batman movie and relates the film to what’s happening in our tortured nation. It’s a pretty gloomy bit of superb writing. But how could it not be gloomy? I said it was about what’s happening to the good old U. S. of A., didn’t I? Where could cheer come from? Maybe Johnny Mac’s flacks?
Yeah, the market imploded and some of it received a bailout from the Feds and who will eventually foot the bill? Ol’ tax payin’ you and me, that’s who. But that’s not what’s eating my lunch. I mean… economics! Finance! Who understands that stuff? Certainly not me. (I used to think that those boring old guys in suits, whose job it is to understand that stuff, did, in fact, understand it. Guess not, though.) But what bothers me for the next five minutes, or until I see another newspaper or watch CNN some more, is that according to one poll, 54 percent of the pollees think Sarah Palin is qualified to be president.
This gives me sadness, and a profound feeling of alienation, because nothing in Ms. Palin’s record, nor anything I’m aware she’s said since being anointed Johnny Mac’s running mate, indicates that she is even qualified for the governance jobs she’s already had, much less the biggest of the big leagues, and I wonder what they’re seeing that I’m not, my fellow Americans. Or do they want a leader who apparently believes the First Amendment has no more importance than the slip of paper in a fortune cookie? That denies the validity of evolution? That thinks the current military debacle is a mission from God… ? No point in continuing the catalogue… If my fellows know of these things and they don’t care about them, then the system is broken. If they don’t know… well. how could they not?
Tue Sep 16, 2008 — by Dennis O'Neil
Batman's Comedy of Eros, by Dennis O'Neil
The Four-Color Answer
Way back in the late 80s, or maybe early 90s, an inker working on one of DC’s superhero comics rendered a female form rather more like the Lord made female forms than the mores of the time allowed. The editor dealt with the problem by putting a color hold – a purple one, I think – over what some would have deemed offensive nudity. Sex always wins. The lady’s charms shone clearly though the purple haze and a fuss ensued.
I remembered this anecdote when I saw, in the New York Times, an item about a Batman comic describing “a two page action sequence that is filled with foul language…uttered by (a) heroine…
“A black bar covered the blue words, but it was too transparent and allowed the text to be read.” Sex always wins and maybe “foul language” at least doesn’t fight fair.
According to the Times, the print run was destroyed. Having made more than my share of blunders when I sat in an editor’s chair, I know how easily goofs like this can occur and I hope the ensuing fuss doesn’t devolve on the editor, whoever he or she may be. As a certain Secretary of Defense said, stuff happens.
But I’m curious. Did the creative folk always intend the offensive language to be covered? Surely not. Why go to the bother and expense of lettering copy that no one will read? Easier, one imagines, to simply do the black bars in the first place, though as a storytelling strategy, that would be questionable; why pull the reader out of the story while they puzzle over the meaning of the black bars?
Okay, the copy was meant to be seen? Didn’t somebody wonder if such language could cause trouble and…I dunno – ask around?
Maybe someone saw it as a free speech issue. If so, I’d demur.
I think the First Amendment is the crown jewel of the Constitution, and, personally, I can be a potty mouth. Much of my choirboy vocabulary was left on an aircraft carrier and much of whatever was left in the gutters of the East Village, pre-gentrification. But I think the way things are marketed creates expectations, and it’s not playing fair with the customers to thwart those expectations. Anything – and I do mean anything – should be allowed in the public arena, but if one buys a book bylined Henry James, one should not be subjected to a story by Mickey Spillane.
Comics have come a considerable distance in the few years since I left editing. Hell and damn, once verboten seem okay both in comics and on TV, and a few gamier locutions are beginning to pop up. But I don’t believe the medium – comics – has evolved to the point where authentic street lingo is expected.
A final consideration: The question in matters like this is always a simple one. Does it help the narrative? Is the vocabulary the writer is using his way of showing off, or does it serve a larger purpose? Any vocabulary that tells the story is almost certainly the right vocabulary, though I’d expect to get argument on this. In the case of the Batman comic we’ve been discussing, I don’t know, and probably never will.
RECOMMENDED READING: Redemolished, by Alfred Bester
Dennis O'Neil is an award-winning editor and writer of Batman, The Question, Iron Man, Green Lantern, Green Arrow, and The Shadow– among others – as well as many novels, stories and articles. The Question: Epitaph For A Hero, reprinting the third six issues of his classic series with artists Denys Cowan and Rick Magyar, will be on sale in September, and his novelization of the movie The Dark Knight is on sale right now. He’ll be taking another shot at the ol’ Bat in an upcoming story-arc, too.
Tue Sep 9, 2008 — by Dennis O'Neil
Waiting For The Phone To Ring, by Dennis O'Neil
The Four-Color Answer
So here we were, writer/editor Jack C. Harris and myself, caught in a warp of eternity. Had we committed some hideous transgression to be doomed to this Purgatory? Well, no. What we’d done is agree to be guests on a radio call-in program about 30 years ago. Subject, of course: comic books.
We arrived at the small, shadowy studio early, earlier than the host, who breezed in a minute or so before air time and then, without notes, he was speaking into a microphone, introducing Jack and me, urging listeners to ask us questions and giving a phone number they could call if they wanted to speak to one or both of us.
We waited for that ol’ switchboard to light up. And waited. And waited. And waited. It seemed that nobody was interested in comic books, not that night in that city. We waited, and tried to make small talk, which I do not include in my skill set, and waited and waited.
Then there was a call! Hallelujah! Oh joy, oh happiness – a call! For us? Unfortunately, no. Some guy wanted to tout a community event of some sort, and fine, say I – more power to him.
There may have been one or two more calls – as noted, this was 30 years ago and I had no reason to cherish the memories – but basically, Jack, Mr. Radio Man, and I sat in that studio for two hours and then Jack and I left and I got on a train back to New York.
Got on the Amtrak, did I, little knowing that Jack, Radio Man and I were pioneers. What we’d done was fill up airtime without imparting any information, without saying anything anyone wanted or needed to hear
Continue reading Waiting For The Phone To Ring, by Dennis O'Neil ›
Mon Sep 1, 2008 — by Dennis O'Neil
Turning Comics Into Manga, By Dennis O'Neil
The Four-Color Answer
If you’re a student, or a teacher, you may not be reading this when Mike Gold posts it. Unless there’s a glitch he’ll be doing digital voodoo-hoodoo that I don’t understand – me and Johnny Mac, Luddites and proud of it – and making these words available to interested parties, if any, on Tuesday morning. The reason you’re not reading this on Tuesday morning, if you’re a teacher or student, may be that you’re in school and presumably putting your laptop to other uses. (I didn’t say “better.” I said other. Let’s not be judgmental.) Here in Rockland County New York, school begins early this year and unless the unforeseen happens, Marifran is, on the Tuesday-to-come, down the hill, beginning her forty-seventh year of teaching and I’m… oh, eating breakfast. Reading the paper. Sleeping. Something. I hope Mari didn’t wake me when she left.
For comics professionals, these fine, crisp September days are often a lull – an easy interval between the frantic, convention-going days of summer and the rush to finish and get to press the upscale books that publishers hope will be under a whole lot of trees on Christmas morning. Not much happening. The only items of interest that have come to my attention recently are the demise of one of the new comics publishers and Marvel’s announcement that it will tailor its superheroes for the Japanese market.
That market has been something of an enigma. The Japanese are, as a nation, the world’s largest comics consumers and have been for decades. Why? One theory is that experiencing narrative through the medium of pictures is natural to many Asians because their written language is pictorial – it may have begun as actual drawings and has evolved into a series of highly stylized glyphs. Neither a new idea, nor one restricted to comics: the great Russian director and theorist Sergei Eisenstein offered a similar explanation for Asia’s quick adoption of movies.
Continue reading Turning Comics Into Manga, By Dennis O'Neil ›
Tue Aug 26, 2008 — by Dennis O'Neil
Heroic Gloom, by Dennis O'Neil
The Four-Color Answer
Tuesday, August 26: 146 days.
They continue to dwindle down, the days, but maybe not fast enough. If Dennis Kucinich is right in a New York Times interview, Georgie just might launch an attack on Iran sometime between now and the election because…well, we don’t want to switch leadership in the middle of a military crisis and we have to be tough on terrorism, et cetera. And lest we think that this is lefty paranoia from a vegan who is, after all, a friend of Shirley MacLaine’s, just look at the last eight years…
But enough gloom on this fine pre-autumn day, at least enough political gloom. Let’s switch to some nice television gloom. This is not a good week for Okay, I’m gonna bust in here. In case we haven’t met before, I’m Randy Hyper, a fictional character that dweeb O’Neil made up ‘cause he hasn’t got the cojones to tell you about the stuff he’s doing that he wants you to know about. (And if there’s a bigger loser in comics, don’t tell me ‘cause I don’t feel like crying.) Anyway…what el dweebo wants me to tell you is that he’s again teaching a course in writing comics and graphic novels at New York University, beginning next month, September 24, and running until December 3 on Wednesdays from 6:20 till 8:40. Course number is X32.9372. Phone is 212-998-7171. I can tell that he’s looking forward to this gig ‘cause last semester’s group were what he might call “cool” which just goes to prove that even he isn’t wrong all the time. Now back to our regularly scheduled blather. so if you like sports, this is your week. The last gasp of the Olympics, preseason football, the big tennis matches, plus the usual baseball action – lots to keep you sports fans amused. As for the rest of us…not wonderful.
And if you’re a Lois Lane – a superhero lover – the season beyond this week isn’t awfully promising, either. As far as I can tell, there are no new superdoers on the television schedule and one of last year’s, the revamped Bionic Woman, won’t be returning. This despite the fact that the summer movie schedule was pretty superhero-intensive and two of the entries do for this kind of fantasy-melodrama what the films of John Ford, Howard Hawks and maybe John Huston did for westerns: mature them. No longer are the cape-and-tights crowd fit only to provide the airiest of light entertainment; they now have a claim on art, of maybe even Art.
Tue Aug 19, 2008 — by Dennis O'Neil
Oh, by Dennis O'Neil
The Four-Color Answer
Sunday, August 17: 155 days left.
Our man the brush clearer is back in Crawford, taking it easy. Having already set a record for presidential vacation days, he’s obviously trying for a record that no future chief executive can possibly hope to break. This may not be how everyone would like to be remembered.
Back when I occupied the celestial throne that is the sinecure of all those noble beings known – here you may genuflect – as editors … make that Editors – this was the time of year when life got calmer. Big travel was done – no trips to distant cities to attend conventions – and the increased summer publishing load completed. We put out fewer issues in the fall because, conventional wisdom had it, the kids were too busy with school concerns to bother with funny books. The same logic dictated that during the summer we cram the newsstands because, presumably, the nation’s youth had nothing better to do with their long, humid days than to laze around getting massive four-color fixes and, besides, since they didn’t have to buy crayons or switchblades or whatever school kids bought, they had disposable income to spend on our productions. Which, of course, was why late spring and early summer demanded industriousness from editorial types. Those printing presses out there in the Midwest were maws…
All that was probably true once. But because the ways comics are marketed, and to some extent read, I doubt that it is true now. But I don’t know. Any editors – working editors, that is – care to enlighten the old man?
The point is, though I was a comics editor at the two major companies for about 23 years… I don’t know. I have a sense that the business has changed a lot in the seven years since I occupied the celestial throne mentioned three paragraphs ago (seven years already?). My skills might be more-or-less okay (though I’m not even sure of that), but my attitudes and assumptions would need work.
Tue Aug 12, 2008 — by Dennis O'Neil
Is Hillary Clinton Really The Thing? By Dennis O'Neil
The Four-Color Answer
I never talked to either Jack Kirby or Stan Lee about politics, so I don’t really have any idea where they stood on the subject. My guess would be that following their political spoor wouldn’t take you very far west and that they didn’t have much sympathy for the hippie-rebels of the 60s (and here allow me to blush and hide my face). After all, they and their parents (and my parents) fought for a place in the American mainstream because, finally, acceptance meant an increased chance of survival and for those outside the tribe, who suffered the Great Depression, not surviving seemed to be a real possibility. Then here came the snotty kids with their tie-dye and their girly haircuts and their wiseass slogans saying that a place in the tribe was not worth struggling for – in fact, the tribe itself was stinking of corruption.
Both generations were, in their own way, right; both had a piece of the truth.
Stan and Jack were – are – of the first of the two generations and so they were – are – probably politically a bit to the right of me and maybe you (and my parent and most of my siblings.) But events of the past week make me guess that their greatest creations were liberals. I refer to the Fantastic Four who, along with Spider-Man co-launched Marvel Comics, as one or two of you might have heard. True FF aficionados know, and perhaps relish, the tendency of the members of this supergroup to squabble among themselves. Two of the four, The Human Torch and The Thing, seem particularly apt to indulge in petty argumentation.
Remind you of any particular political group?
Yeah, right. Liberals. Witness the recent news: Ms. Hillary Clinton’s die-hard supporters are threatening to vote for John McCain, the Republican candidate, unless Ms. Clinton’s presidential aspirations are accorded full acknowledgement at the Democratic convention, which will be soaking up media time in about two weeks. This despite the fact that Ms. Clinton has already lost the nomination to Barack Obama, whose crew must be thinking harsh and uncharitable thoughts about the Clintonites.
Continue reading Is Hillary Clinton Really The Thing? By Dennis O'Neil ›
Tue Aug 5, 2008 — by Dennis O'Neil
A Billion Dollars Worth Of Respect, by Dennis O'Neil
The Four-Color Answer
You saw the story, posted here on our own beloved website a couple of days ago: comic book movies have earned over a billion United States dollars this summer, despite an iffy economy that may or may not have something to do with those loveable funsters who frolick near the Potomac.
(I’m writing this Sunday evening. A hundred and sixty nine days. Tickticktick… And please excuse the digression.)
So the aspirations of those folk we mentioned last week – to be respectable and accepted and part of the mainstream – has been realized, though only a few of them are still around to enjoy whatever perks this brings.
Check it out. A billion-with-a-B-dollars! Oh sure, we comics guys have not had to hide our shame for quite a while now. There are the postage stamps and gigs at places like the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian and classes taught at major universities and whole sections of bookstores devoted to comics material and if you donate the graphic novels you won’t read again to your local library, they’ll probably be accepted, maybe even with a smile. But in our world, and in most others that I know about, material goods are the emblems of what the citizenry considers success. And that bil will buy a lot of material goods.
Someone – I have no idea who – observed that one of the ways to discern a society’s values is to look at its architecture: in the middle ages, in Europe, the cathedral was the biggest building in the burg. Now? Well, about a mile from where I’m sitting is the biggest, and some would say ugliest, structure in Rockland County and it ain’t a church, amigos, it’s a shopping mall.
Continue reading A Billion Dollars Worth Of Respect, by Dennis O'Neil ›
Tue Jul 29, 2008 — by Dennis O'Neil
Speaking Up, by Dennis O'Neil
The Four-Color Answer
The comic book veteran was smiling as he leaned forward to read the lettering on the button fastened to my lapel: Let’s Legalize Pot. His mood changed instantly, to one of anger. He snatched the pin off my jacket, flung it into a wastebasket, and stalked from the room.
That was in 1965 and before I relate another incident from the same era, let me offer a quick clarification. I don’t like marijuana. Never have. The circumstances of my rather bumpy life have, at times, put me close to it and of course, like William Jefferson Clinton and maybe just one or two other pols, I sampled it and found it usually did little for me. Which is not to say I didn’t have addiction problems. No siree. My love of alcohol cost me a marriage and a job and a lot of dignity and some trips to the hospital. But pot? Usually just made me cough. That button? Well, although the evil reefer was not my drug of choice, I thought that if booze and nicotine were legal, evil reefer should be, too.
This was not conventional wisdom in 1965 (and still isn’t) and, although, as we discussed last week, comics guys like the man I outraged were outsiders, they were not rebels. No, they were outsiders by birth and circumstance, not choice, and their values were pretty much those of mainstream America. They wore suits and ties to work, they paid taxes and owned homes, went to church or temple, voted, behaved themselves. Many had served honorably in the war. They were patriots, they were good citizens. They knew, because they had not learned otherwise, that our nation was menaced by godless Communism, that elected officials were as honorable as they themselves were, that what was good for General Motors was, in fact, good for America, that the atomic bomb was an invaluable part of Liberty’s Arsenal and, oh yeah, that the Devil’s Weed would likely corrupt any youth who got a whiff of it. They were my parents, my relatives, and the folks in my old neighborhood.
Tue Jul 22, 2008 — by Dennis O'Neil
Getting Respect, by Dennis O'Neil
The Four-Color Answer
Well, it is certainly a superheroic weekend here in New York, and maybe where you are, too. The latest Batman flick has already set one box office record and who knows what others it may yet conquer? The second Hellboy movie is still kicking box office butt. And a while ago, I was paging through the Arts and Leisure section of my Sunday New York Times when I saw a familiar face staring up at me from a photo: my old colleague Frank Miller, grim and determined looking. The accompanying story was about Frank’s writing and directing of The Spirit movie, based on work by yet another old friend, the late Will Eisner, produced by yet another old friend, Michael Uslan. (Good heavens! Whom don’t I know?)
Last week, the loyalists among you, if any, will remember that I strongly recommended a book titled The Ten Cent Plague, by David Hajdu. Since then, I’ve recommended it in conversation a couple of times, and may do so again. Damn good book. One of the points Hajdu makes is that comics were the outsider’s medium: the first bunch of creators and promoters were primarily Jewish, guys who had trouble getting work elsewhere. This is one of the reasons the Establishment may have felt threatened by the four-color trash sprouting from the newsstands like crab grass on a lawn; these were not their kind of people and who knows what kind of anarchy these grubbies might promote, given the opportunity? Decent folk practically had an obligation to put them in their place!
When I entered comics, about a quarter century into their history, the field was still dominated by outsiders, or anyway at least ex-outsiders. As for my cohorts… maybe one of the writers who came into comics at about the same time after I slithered in may have been destined for a respectable career in respectable institutions among respectable citizens, but the rest of us were hippie-rebel, anti-establishment types. If that hadn’t been true, why were we there? Comics publishing didn’t have an established career path, there didn’t seem to be really serious money to be made, at least at the editorial level, and Lord knows we weren’t reputable; only a decade or so earlier, our chosen endeavor had been crucified in magazines and on editorial pages and even in congressional hearings. We weren’t exactly bracketed with axe murderers, but you probably wouldn’t want your daughter marrying one of us.
