MINDY NEWELL: Meow!

Mindy Newell

These days Mindy Newell knows that if she could do it all over again she’d have gone to college for screenwriting and film editing. Instead she became a nurse to please her parents and pleasing your parents was what it was all about for nice Jewish girls who graduated from high school in 1971. But the creative larva was in her soul, and when the cocoon broke and the butterfly emerged, it flew to DC’s New Talent Showcase program. Under the auspices of legendary editors Karen Berger, Len Wein, Julius Schwartz, Paul Levitz, and ComicMix’s own Robert Greenberger, Mindy learned the craft and art of writing comics, including Tales Of The Legion, V, Legionnaires 3, Amethyst, Lois Lane: When It Rains God Is Crying, and numerous other comics, including a Superman story based on a dream Mindy had as a child. She also worked on Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg! and other independent comics. All this time Mindy continued to work as a nurse while being a single mom to her daughter Alixandra, until the late and dear Mark Gruenwald hired her as an assistant editor at Marvel, while writing stories of the Black Widow and Daredevil. She edited NFL Pro Action, a licensed kid’s magazine about football with the NFL until Marvel imploded in 1996. Returning to full-time nursing, she she also co-wrote a story for 2000 A.D. with her then-husband, British artist John Higgins. A few years ago Mike Gold called and asked her to join the team of columnists here at ComicMix, where her topics freely range from comics to pop culture to politics; she even wrote a piece about the great American thoroughbred Secretariat, which caused editor Mike to tell her that she had won the prize for the most off-topic column ever written ComicMix.

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4 Responses

  1. Peter David says:

    I don’t think the Eartha Kitt Catwoman’s lack of interest in Batman had as much to do with her being more adult than it does with the fact that it was the 1960s and a black woman actively pursuing Batman was simply a non-starter. Speaking as a former kid watching the series at the time, I didn’t find Kitt’s presence off-putting because of sophistication or adultness. It annoyed me for the same reason that John Astin being the Riddler rather than Frank Gorshin annoyed me: because there was no in-story explanation as to why Catwoman was suddenly a completely different person (although I will admit her purr was superior to Newmar’s.) The fact that Batman et al addressed her and treated her as Catwoman instead of saying, “Who the hell are you?” annoyed the crap out of me. If events had been exactly reversed, I would have had the same reaction, only backwards: Why is Catwoman suddenly a tall white woman who’s hitting on Batman?

  2. Todd Maxwell says:

    What? No love for Lee Meriwether?

  3. Mindy Newell says:

    Oy ve! Totally forgot about Lee Merriwether!!!!