Mindy Newell: The Patient Nurse Conversation
I had a good conversation with Mr. Gold on the phone yesterday, as in Mike, editor and columnist here at ComicMix and a columnist over at Michael Davis World, as in Michael Davis who is also a columnist on this site. Did I ever mention that the comics industry can be a bit professionally incestuous?
Back to Mike, the gourmet of invisible doughnuts (here)—oh, and btw, although once in a while I’ve seen patients respond to anesthesia the way Mike did, I’ve never seen or heard of, and no one I spoke to at work has ever seen or heard of, anyone munching down on invisible donuts while in the ICU—I apologized for not warning him about just how miserable shoulder replacement surgery, and its immediate aftermath, can be. “I didn’t want to scare you,” I said. “Especially after seeing the X-ray you sent me. To be perfectly honest, Michael, my professional reaction was, “HOLY SHIT!” (In other words, guys, Mike had no shoulder left.)
Mike, surprisingly, at least to me, said, and with no malice at all, “Why not?” I guess better the devil you know, y’know?
So, in the spirit of that response, I said to my editor and friend, “In that case, I’m warning you now, your physical therapy is going to be ag-o-ny, but if you want the use of that shoulder back, and I mean all the way, you had better just grit your teeth and do whatever the therapist demands. And that means, buddy, doing the exercises at home, too.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
“I mean it, Michael.”
“I know.”
“If you don’t, you’ll be sorry.”
“I know.”
“If you don’t, I might just have to drive up to Connecticut and kick your ass.”
Seriously, Mike, you can do it!
Mike and I also talked about Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370. I wondered about what happened to it. It crashed, he said. Oh, I know that, I said. I mean, I wonder what happened on the plane (which we’ll probably never know). My own story—I am a writer—is that it was a botched hijacking by terrorists, who first killed all those poor passengers and flight attendants in the cabin before breaking into the cockpit. The pilots, rather than being the co-conspirators, fought off the hijackers/terrorists as long as they could, one of them managing to call up a secondary or even tertiary flight plan and putting the plane on autopilot before both were killed. The terrorists were unable to disarm the autopilot, and were trapped on the plane until it simply ran out of fuel and went into the Indian Ocean. (Something like this happened in 1999, when the pilots of a small private jet became unconscious because of sudden decompression, and the jet, on autopilot, continued to fly until its fuel ran out and it crashed.)
Our chat also included our positive opinions about Marvel’s Assembling A Universe, which was on last Tuesday night in Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s time slot. Yes, the hour was basically a commercial for the upcoming Marvel movies soon to hit our screen (Captain America: The Winter Soldier; Avengers: Age Of Ultron; Guardians Of The Galaxy; and Ant-Man) but we agreed that it was a really, really entertaining hour that did its job, whetting the appetite for more, and that Marvel has done such a wonderful job in creating its on-screen franchise. Whereas (no, neither one of us actually used that word) DC just sucks at it—excepting Chris Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy (although I think the last one was weak and almost toppled completely.)
The difference is, im-not-so-ho, is that Disney, which now owns Marvel, is wise enough and smart enough to (1) respect the history and characters of Marvel Comics; and, probably more cynically important, (2) not to mess with a franchise that is extremely, extremely profitable. Whereas DC Comics—excuse me, DC Entertainment—is owned by TimeWarner, which, as everyone knows, not only looks on the history and characters of DC as commodities listed on the New York Stock Exchange, Wal*Mart merchandise, slum properties, but is, im-not-so-ho, slowly and inevitably killing the birthplace of the great American mythology that is the comics industry. In other words, TimeWarner has no vision for the medium. TimeWarner has no respect for the medium. Their attempt at live-action superheroes has been without originality and without understanding and without respect. They’ve changed characters (Superman as Batman) and rehashes. I liked [[[Smallville]]] a lot, but it was Dawson’s Creek with a Kryptonian thrown in, and Arrow is every anti-hero show that ever was with a guy who is great at archery.
There’s just no joy there to enjoy.